Authors: Leslie Charteris
And then, as if in answer, Orcread’s voice
rammed itself into his consciousness again and brought him out of his reverie.
“You’ve heard all we’ve got to say,
Saint. There’s only two
ways out for you—mine or yours. You can think
again if you
like.”
“I’ve done all the thinking I can,”
said the Saint evenly.
“Okay. You’ve had your chance.”
He got up heavily and stood staring at Simon
with the same
worried perplexity; he was not satisfied yet that he had
heard
the truth—it was beyond his comprehension that a menace
which had
attacked the roots of his domination could be so
simple—but the
consensus of opinion had gone against him.
Marcus Yeald twiddled
the locks of his briefcase, stood up,
and fidgeted with his gloves. He
glanced at the door speculatively
, in his peering petulant way, and one of the
men
opened it.
Orcread hitched himself round reluctantly and
nodded to
Kuhlmann.
“Okay, Dutch,” he said and went
out, followed by Yeald.
The door was dosed and locked again, and a
ripple of released
suppression went over the room. The conference, as a con
ference,
was over… .
“Come here, Saint,” said Kuhlmann
gutturally.
After that single scuffle of movement which
followed Orcread’s exit an electric tension had settled on the room—
a tension
that was subtly different from that which had just
been broken.
Kuhlmann’s unemotional accents did not relieve
it. Rather, they
seemed to key on the tautness another notch;
but the Saint did not
appear to feel it. Cool, relaxed, serene
as if he had been in
a gathering of intimate friends, he sauntered forward a couple of steps and
stood in front of the rack
eteer.
He knew that there was nothing he could do
there. The
odds were impossible. But he stood smiling quietly while
Kuhlmann
looked up into his face.
“You’re a goot boy,” Kuhlmann said.
“You give us a liddle
bit of trouble, und that is bad. But we cannot
finish our talk here. So I think”—he swallowed a lump in his throat, and
his voice broke—“I think you go outside und vait for us for a
minute.”
Quick hands grabbed the Saint’s wrists and
twisted him
round, but he did not struggle. He was led to the door;
and
as he went out, Kuhlmann nodded, blinking, to two of the
men who
stood along the wall.
“You, Joe, und you, Maxie—give him der
business. Und
meet
me here again aftervards.”
Without a flicker of expression the two men
detached themselves from the wall and followed the Saint out, their hands
automatically feeling in their pockets. The door closed behind
the
cortege, and for a moment nobody moved.
And then Dutch Kuhlmann dragged out his large
white
handkerchief and dabbed with it at his eyes. A distinct sob
sounded in
the room; and the remaining gunmen glanced
at each other with
almost sheepish grins. Dutch Kuhlmann
was crying.
*
*
*
The moon which had shed its light over the
earlier hours
of the evening, and which had germinated the romance of
Mr.
Bungstatter of Brooklyn, had disappeared. Clouds hung
low between the earth
and the stars, and the night nestled
blackly over the city. A single booming
note from the Metro
politan Tower announced the passing of an hour after mid
night.
On the fringe of the town, sleep claimed
honest men. In the
Bronx and the nearest portions of Long Island, in Hoboken,
Peekskill, and Poughkeepsie, families slept peacefully. In Brooklyn, Mr.
Theodore Bungstatter slept in ecstatic bliss—
and, it must be
confessed, snored. And with the hard nozzle of Maxie’s automatic grinding deep into
his ribs Simon
Templar was hurried across the pavement outside Charley’s
Place and
into a waiting car.
Joe piled in on the other side, and a third
man took the
wheel. The muzzle of another gun stabbed into the Saint’s
other side,
and there was a cold tenseness in the eyes of the
escort which
indicated that their fingers were taut on the trig
gers. On this ride
they were taking no chances.
Simon looked out of the windows while the
driver jammed his foot down on the starter. The few pedestrians who passed
scarcely
glanced aside. If they had glanced aside, they would
have seen nothing
extraordinary; and if they had seen any
thing extraordinary,
the Saint reflected with a wry grin, they would have run for their lives. He
had taken a hand in a game
where he had to play alone, and there would
be no help
from anyone but himself… . But even as he looked back,
he saw the slim figure of Fay Edwards framed in the dark door
way
through which he had been brought; and the old ques
tions leapt to his
mind again.
The brim of her hat cast a shadow over her
eyes, and he
could not even tell whether she was looking in his
direction.
He had no reason to think that she would. Throughout his
interview
with Orcread she had sat like an inattentive specta
tor, smoking, and thinking
her own thoughts. When Kuhlmann’s
sentence had been passed upon him she
had been lighting another cigarette: she had not even looked up, and
her hand
had not shaken. When he was turned and hustled
out of the room she
had been raising her eyes to look at him
again, with a calm
impersonal regard that told him no more
than her present pose.
“Better take a good look,” advised
Maxie.
There was no derision, no bitterness in his
voice—it simply
uttered a grim reminder of the fact that Simon Templar was
doomed to have few more attractive things to look at.
The Saint smiled and saw the girl start off to
cross the road
behind the car, without looking round, before Joe reached
forward and drew the curtains.
“She’s worth a look,” Simon murmured
and slanted an eyebrow at the closed draperies which shut out his view on
either
side. “This wagon looks like a hearse already.”
Joe grunted meaninglessly, and the car pulled
away from
the curb and circled the block. The blaze of Broadway
showed
ahead for a moment, like the reflection of a fire in the sky;
then they
were turned around and driving west, and the Saint
settled down and made himself as
comfortable as he could.
The situation had no natural facilities for
comfort. There
was something so businesslike, so final and confident, in
the
manner of his captors, that despite himself an icy finger of
doubt
traced its chill course down the Saint’s spine. Except
for the fact that no
invisible but far-reaching hand of the Law
sanctioned this
strange execution, it had a disturbing similar
ity to the
remorseless ritual of lawful punishment.
Before that he had been in tight corners from
which the
Law might have saved him if he had called for help; but
he
had never called. There was something about the dull, ponderous
interventions of the Law which had never appealed to
him, and in this
particular case their potentialities appealed
to him least of all.
Intervention, even if it succeeded, meant arrest and trial; and his brief
acquaintance with Orcread and
Yeald had been sufficient to show him how
much justice he
could expect from that. Not that the matter of justice was
very
vital in his case. The most incorruptible court in the world,
he had to
admit, could do nothing else but sentence him to
about forty years’
imprisonment even if it didn’t go so far as
ordering execution,
and on the whole he preferred his
chances with the illicit sentence. It
would not be the first time
that he had sat in a game of life and death
and played the
cards out with a steady hand no matter how the luck ran;
and
now he would do it again, though at that precise moment he
hadn’t the
faintest idea what method he would use. Yet for the
first time in many
years he wondered if he had not taken on
too much.
But no hint of what passed in his mind showed
on his face. He leaned back, calm-eyed and nonchalant, as if he were one
of a party
of friends on their way home; and even when they
stopped at the
driveway of a ferry he did not move. He cocked
one quizzical blue
eye at Maxie.
“So it’s to be Jersey this time, is it?”
“Yeah,” said the gunman, with a
callous twist of humour.
“We thought ye might like a change.”
An efficient-looking blue-coated patrolman
stood no more than four yards away; but no sixth sense, no clairvoyant flash
of
prescience, warned him to single out the gleaming black
sedan from
the line of other vehicles which were waiting their
turn to go on board.
He dreamed his dreams of an inspector
ship in a division well populated with
citizens who would be
unselfishly eager to dissuade him with cash
and credit from
the obvious perils of overworking himself at his job; and
the
Saint made no attempt to interrupt him. The driver paid their
fares, and
they settled into their place on the ferry to wait until
it chose
to sail.
Simon gazed out at the inky waters of the
Hudson and wondered idly why it should be that the departure of a ferry was
always accompanied by twice as much fuss and anxiety as the
sailing of
an ocean liner; and he derived a rather morbid ex
hilaration even from
that vivid detail of his experience. He
had heard much, and
speculated more, about that effective
American method of removing an
appointed victim; but in
spite of his flippant remarks to Valcross he
had not expected that he would have this unique opportunity of learning at
first
hand the sensations of the man who played the leading role
in the
drama. He felt that in this instance the country, which
had
adopted the “ride” as a native sport for wet week-ends
was rather
overdoing itself in its eagerness to show him the
works so quickly and
comprehensively, but the tightness of
his corner was not capable of damping a
keen professional
interest in the proceedings. And yet, all the time, he
missed
the reassuring pressure of the knife blade that should have
been
cuddling snugly along his forearm; and his eyes were very
cold and
bright as he flicked his cigarette end through the
open front window and
watched it spring like a red tracer
bullet across the dark… .
Maxie rummaged in his pockets with his free
hand, drew
forth a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and extended it
politely.
“Have another?”
“A last smoke for the condemned man,
eh?”
Equally courteous and unruffled, the Saint
thumbed a
Chesterfield from the package and carefully straightened
it
out. Maxie passed him the cigar lighter from the arm rest and
then
lighted a smoke for himself; but in none of the motions
of this
studious observance of the rules of etiquette was there
an opening
for a surprise attack from the victim. Simon felt
Joe’s automatic
harden against his side almost imperceptibly while the exchange of courtesies
was going on, and knew that
his companions had explored all the
possibilities of such situations before they began to shave. He signed and
leaned back
again,
exhaling twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.
“What is that girl Fay?” he asked
casually, taking up a
natural train of thought from the gunman’s
penultimate re
mark.
Maxie tilted back his hat.
“Whaddaya mean, what is she? She’s a doll.”
Simon reviewed the difficulties of reaching Maxie’s intellect
with the argument that was occupying his own mind.
He knew better than anyone else that the glamorous woman of mystery
whose feminine charms rule hard-boiled desperadoes
as with
a rod of iron, and whose
brilliant brain outwits criminals and
detectives
with equal ease, belonged only in the pages of
highly spiced fictional romance, and that in the underworld
of New York she was the most singular curiosity of
all. To the
American hoodlum and
racketeer the female of the species
has
only one function, reserved for his hours of relaxation,
and requiring neither intelligence nor outstanding
personality. When he calls her a “doll,” his vocabulary is an
accurate
psychological revelation.
She is a toy for his diversion, on
which
he can squander his easily won dollars to the advertise
ment of his own wealth, to whom he can boast and in
boasting
expand his own ego and feel
himself a great guy; but she has
no
place in the machinery of his profession except as a spy,
a stringer of suckers, or a dumb instrument for
putting a rival
on the spot, and she
has no place in his councils at all.