Authors: Leslie Charteris
The Saint saw no easy approach to Maxie from
that angle;
but he said: “She’s good to look at, all right, but
I can’t see
anything else she’s got that you could use. I wouldn’t
let any
girls sit in on my business—you can never trust ‘em.”
Maxie regarded him pityingly.
“Say, why don’t ya get wise? That dame
has got it here.”
He tapped the area where his brain might be
presumed to
reside. “She’s got more of it than you or anybody
else like ya.”
Simon shrugged dubiously.
“You ought to know. But I wouldn’t do it.
The cleverer a dame is, the more she’s dangerous. You can’t ever be sure of
‘em. They
ride along with you for a while, and then the first
thing you know
they’ve fallen for some other guy and they’re
working like hell to
double-cross you.”
“What, her?” Maxie’s stare deepened
with indignation as
well as scorn. “I guess Heimie was right—you must
be nuts.
Who’s she going to double-cross? She’s the Big Fellow’s
mouth
piece.”
The Saint’s face was expressionless.
“Mouthpiece?” he repeated slowly.
“Yeah. She talks for him. If he’s got something to say, she
says it. If we got anything to say, she takes it back. She’s the only one in
the mob who knows everything that’s going on.”
Simon did not move. He sat perfectly still,
watching the
lights along the riverside begin to slide across the
darkness
as the
ferry pulled out from the pier. The urgency of his predicament dropped out of
his mind as if a trapdoor had fallen
open,
leaving a sensation of emptiness through which weaved
an eerie squirm of excitement Maxie’s frank
expansiveness
fairly took his breath
away.
It was about the last thing he had expected
to develop from
that ride. And then, in another moment, he realized how it
came about. The callous confidence of his executioners was an attitude which
worked two ways; the utter, irrevocable
finality of it was
sufficient to make conversations possible
which could never have happened otherwise.
In a different
setting, threats and torture
and even the menace of certain
death
would have received no response but a stony, iron-
jawed silence, according to that stoical gangland
code of
which the late Mr. Papulos
had been such a faithless ex
ponent;
but to a condemned prisoner on the road to execu
tion a gunman could legitimately talk, and might even de
rive some pleasure from the dilation of his ego
and the proof of
his own omniscience
and importance in so doing—death
loomed
so inevitably ahead, and dead men told no tales. It
gave the Saint a
queer feeling of fatality to realize that he had
to come to the end of his usefulness before he could make any
headway in his quest, but even if dissolution had
been a bare
yard away he could never have separated himself from the
instinct to learn all that he could while
knowledge was being
offered. And
even at that stage he had not lost hope.
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet this Big
Fellow,” he remarked, with
out a variation in his even tone of casual
conversation. “He
must be worth knowing.”
“You got too near as it was,” Joe
said matter-of-factly. “You
shouldn’t of tried it, pal.”
“He sounds an exclusive sort of
bird,” Simon admitted;
and Maxie took the cigarette out of his mouth
to grin widely.
“You ain’t said nuth’n yet. Exclusive
ain’t the word for it.
Say, you don’t know how good we’re bein’ to
ya. You’re
lucky to of got away from Morrie Ualino—Morrie ‘d ‘ve had
ya in the hot box for sure.”
As if he felt a glow of conscious pride at
this discovery of
his own share in such an uncustomary humaneness, he
pulled
out his crumpled pack of Chesterfields and offered them again.
Simon took
one and accepted a light, the procedure being
governed by exactly
the same courtesy and caution as before.
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully,
“your Big Fellow must be the wrong kind of bloke to buck.”
“You’re learning late,” Maxie
agreed laconically.
“All the same,” pursued the Saint,
with an air of vague puzzlement, “I can’t quite see what makes you and
the rest of the
mob take your orders from a fellow who isn’t in the racket
—a bird you haven’t ever even seen. I mean, what have you
got to
gain by it?”
Maxie hitched himself round and tapped a
nicotine-stained forefinger on his brain pan again, in that occult gesture
which
appeared to be his synonym for a salute to intelligence.
“Say, that guy has got what it takes. An’
if a guy has got
what it takes, an’ shoots square an’ can find the dough,
I’ll
take orders from him. And that goes for Joe an’ Heimie an’
Dutch and
the rest of the mob, too. The dough ain’t been so
easy since they made
liquor legal, see?”
The Saint frowned with inviting perplexity;
and Maxie,
not at all reluctant, endeavoured to clarify his point.
“When we had prohibition, a bootlegger
an’ his mob were
all right, see? They were breaking the law, but it wasn’t
a
law that anybody cared about. Everybody, even respectable citizens, guys
on Park Avenue an’ everything, useta know
bootleggers and ring
‘em up and talk to ‘em an’ be proud to know them. Why, guys would boast about
their bootleggers
like they would about their doctors or their lawyers, and
get
into arguments and fights with other guys about whose boot
legger was
the best. They paid us our dough an’ didn’t grum
ble, because they
knew we had to take risks to get the stuff
they wanted; and the
cops was sort of enemies of the public
because they tried to
stop us getting the stuff—sometimes.
Ya couldn’t get a guy to testify
against a guy that was getting
him his liquor, in favour of another guy who
was trying to
stop the liquor comin’ through, see?”
“Mmm,” conceded the Saint
doubtfully, more for punctua
tion than anything else.
“Well, when prohibition went out, that
changed every
thing, see? A bootlegger wasn’t any guy’s friend any
more.
He was just
a racketeer that was trying to stick something on
the prices of stuff that any guy could go and buy legitimate, an’ the
cop was a guy that was trying to put the racketeer out
of business an’ keep the prices down; and
everybody suddenly
forgot everything
we’d done for ‘em in the dry years, an’
turned right round on us.”
Maxie scowled mournfully at the
flimsiness
of human gratitude. “Well, we hadda do something,
hadn’t we? A guy’s gotta live.”
“I suppose so,” said the Saint.
“Which guy is this?”
Maxie wrinkled his nose.
“A lotta guys got in trouble about that time,” he said
reminiscently
. “We had a sort of
reform drive, an’ got hunted about a lot. It got worse all the time. A lotta
guys couldn’t get it into
their
coconuts that it wasn’t going to be easy money any more,
an’ it was too
bad about them. You had to have it here.” He thumbed his forehead again
mysteriously. “Business wasn’t
good, so
we hadn’t got the money to pay the cops; an’ the
cops not getting money started going after us again an’ makin’
things worse.” Maxie sighed reminiscently.
“But then the Big
Fellow came
along,” he said cheering up, “an’ everything was jake again.”
“Why?” Simon asked, with the same ingenuously puzzled
air.
“Well, he put us in the big dough
again, see?”
“With the same old rackets?”
“Yeah. But he’s got brains. An’
information. He’s got every
thing taped out. When he says: “The
layout is like this and
that, we gotta fix it this way and that
way,’ we know it’s going
to be just like he says. So we don’t make no
mistakes.”
The lights of the waterside had ceased to
move, and there
was
a general stir of voyagers gathering themselves to continue on their way. The
driver climbed back into the car and
settled
himself, waiting for their turn to pull out in the line of
disembarking traffic.
Keeping their place decorously in the
procession, they
climbed the winding road that leads upwards from the
Jersey shore, and in a short time they were speeding across the Jersey meadows.
The drive became a monotonous race through un
familiar
country—straight lines of highway which might have
been laid across the
face of the moon for all the landmarks
that Simon could pick
out, straggling lights of unidentifiable
small towns, blazing headlights of other
cars which leapt up
out of the blackness and
roared by in an instant of noise, to
be
swallowed up in the gulf of dark behind. The powerful
sedan, guided by
the expert hands of the silent driver, flashed
at a reckless pace through the countryside, slowed smoothly
down from time to time to keep well within the
prescribed
speed limits of a village, then leapt ahead down another long
stretch of open road. Despite the speed at
which they were travelling, the journey seemed interminable: the sense of utter
isolation, of being shut away from the whole world in that
mass-produced projectile whirling through the
uncharted
night, would have had an
overwhelmingly soporific effect if it had not been for the doom to which they
were driving.
The Saint had no means of knowing how far ahead that
destination lay, and a cold fatalism would not let
him ask.
He knew that it could not be
very far away—knew that his
time must
be getting short and his need more desperately
urgent—but still he had
had no opportunity to save himself.
The
vigilance of his companions had never relaxed, and if he
made the slightest threatening move it would
hardly incon
venience them at all to shoot him where he sat and fling
his
body out of the car without slackening
speed.
They could have done that anyhow, might even be prepar
ing to do it. He did not know why he had assumed
that he was being taken to a definite place of execution, to be slain there
according to a crude gangland ritual; but it was
on that ex
pectation that he had
based his only hopes of escape.
He stole a glance at Maxie. The gunman was
lounging non
chalantly in his corner, the backward tilt of his hat
serving
to emphasize the squat impassivity of his features, twirling an
unlighted
cigar in one side of his thick mouth. To say that
he was totally
unimpressed by the enormity of the thing he
was there to do would
convey only the surface of his attitude. He was, if anything, rather bored.
Simon fought to maintain his outward calm. The length of
the journey, the forced inaction under the strain
of such a
deadly suspense, was slowly wearing down his nerves; but at
all costs he had to remain master of himself. His
chance
would be thin enough even if
it ever came, he knew; and
the faintest
twitch of panic, the very slightest disordering of
the swift, cold precision and coordination of
brain and arm,
would eliminate that
chance to vanishing point. And all the
time
another aloof and wholly dissociated threat in his
mind, akin to the phlegmatic
detachment of a scientist who
notes his own
symptoms on his deathbed, was weaving the fact
that Maxie might still go on talking to a man whom he be
lieved to be helpless. …
The Saint cleared his throat and tried to
resume the con
versation in the same tone of innocent puzzlement as
before
—as if it had never been broken off. He had to go on trying
to learn
those things which he might never be able to turn to
advantage, had to do
something to occupy his mind and
ease the strain on his aching self-control.
“How do you mean, the Big Fellow came
along?” he said.
“If he wasn’t even in the racket, if
you’d never heard of him
before and haven’t even seen him yet—how did
you know
you could trust him? How did you know he’d be any use to
you?”