Saint in New York (36 page)

But he knew that he lied.

She knew, too. She shook her head, so that the
golden curls
danced.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she said.
“I’m comfortable here.”

She was nestling in the crook of his arm,
like a tired child.
The towers and canyons of New York whirled round the win
dows, but
she did not see them. She went her way as she had
lived, without fear or
pity or remorse, out of the unknown
past into the unknown future. Perhaps
even then she had
never looked back, or looked ahead. All of her was in the
present.
She belonged neither to times nor seasons. In some
strange freak of
creation all times and seasons had been
mingled in her, were
fused in the confines of that flawless in
carnation; the
eternal coordinates of the ageless earth, death
and desire. She sighed once.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I
suppose it wasn’t meant to hap
pen—this time.”

He could not speak.

“Kiss me again, Simon,” she said quietly.

He kissed her. Why had she seemed
unapproachable? She was himself. It was his own lawless scorn of life and death
which had conquered her, which had brought her twice to
save his
life and taken her own life in the end. If the whole
world had condemned
her, he could not have cast a stone. He did not care. They moved in the same
places, the wide sierras
of outlawry where there were no laws.

She slipped back, gazing into his face as if
she were trying
to remember every line of it for a hundred years. She was
smiling, and there was a light in her darkening amber eyes
which he
would never understand. He could see her take
breath to speak.

“Au revoir,
Simon,” she
said; and as she had lived with
death, so she died.

He let her go gently and turned away. Strange
tears were
stinging his eyes so that he could not see. The taxi
lurched
round a corner with its engine growling. The noises of the city
ebbed and
swelled like the beat of a tidal sea.

He became aware that Valcross was tugging at
his arm, whining in a horrible mouthy incoherence of terror. The
yammering
words came dully through into his brain:

“Can’t you do something? I don’t want to
die. I’ve been
good to you. I didn’t mean to cheat you out of your
million dollars. I’ll do anything you say. I don’t want to die. You shot
me. You’ve
got to take me to a doctor. I’ve got money. You can
have anything you
like. I’ve got millions. You can have all of them. I don’t want them. Take what
you want——
”

“Be quiet,” said the Saint in a
dreadful voice.

“Millions of dollars—in the bank—they’re all yours——”

Simon struck him on the mouth.

“You fool,” he said. “All the
money in the world couldn’t
pay for what you’ve done.”

The man shrank away from him, and his babbling
rose to
a scream.

“What is it you want with me, then? I can
give you any
thing. If it isn’t money, what do you want? Damn you,
what
is your racket?”

Then the Saint turned towards him, and even
Valcross was
silent when he saw the look on the Saint’s face. His
mouth
worked mutely, but the words would not leave his throat. His
trembling
hands went up as if to shield himself from the stare
of those devilish blue eyes.

“Death,” said the Saint, in a voice
of terrible softness.
“Death is my racket.”

They turned into Washington Square from the
south. Simon
had never noticed what route they took to shake off
pursuit,
but the wail of sirens had ceased. The muttering thunder
of
the city had swallowed it up. The taxi was slowing down to a more normal
pace. Buses rumbled ponderously by; the endless
stream of cars and
vans and taxis flowed along, as it would
flow day and night
while the city stood, one of a myriad im
personal rivers on
which human activities took their brief
bustling voyages,
coming and going without trace. A newsboy
ran down the
sidewalk, bawling his ephemeral sensation. In a
microscopic corner of
one infinitesimal speck of dust floating through the black abysses of infinity,
inconsiderable atoms of
human life hurried and fumed and fretted and
were broken
and triumphant in the trivial affairs of their brief
instant in
eternity. Lives began and lives ended, but the primordial
ac
cident of life went on.

The cab stopped, and the driver looked round.

“Dis is it,” he announced.
“What next?”

“Wait here a minute,” said the
Saint; and then he saw
Fernack standing on the steps of his house.

He got out and walked slowly towards the
detective, and
Fernack stood and watched him come. The strong, square-
jawed face
did not relax; only the flinty grey eyes under the
shaggy brows had any
expression.

Simon drew out the pearl-handled gun,
reversed it, and held
it out as if he were surrendering a sword.

“I’ve kept my word,” he said.
“That’s the end of my parole.”

Fernack took the revolver and slid it into his
hip pocket.

“Didn’t you find the Big Fellow?”

“He’s in the taxi.”

A glimmer of immeasurable content passed
across Fernack’s
eyes, and he looked over the Saint’s shoulder, down
towards
the waiting cab. Then, without a word, he went past the Saint,
across the
pavement, and opened the door. Valcross half fell
towards him. Fernack
caught him with one hand and hauled
the slobbering man out and upright.
Then he saw something
else in the taxi, and stood very still.

“Who’s this?” he said.

There was no answer. Fernack turned round and
looked up
and down the street. Simon Templar was gone.

Epilogue

Mr. Theodore Bungstatter, of Brooklyn,
espoused his
cook on the eleventh day of June in that year of grace,
having
finally convinced her that his inability to repeat his devotion
coherently
on a certain night was due to nothing more unregenerate than a touch of
influenza. They spent their honey
moon at Niagara Falls, and on the
third day of it she induced him to sign the pledge; but in spite of this
concession to her
prejudices she never cooked for him again, and the rest
of their
wedded
bliss was backgrounded by a procession of disgruntled
substitutes who brought Mr. Bungstatter to the direst agonies
of dyspepsia.

Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim paced his library and
said to a depu
tation of reporters: “It is the duty of all
public-spirited citi
zens to resist racketeering and extortion even
at the risk of
their own lives or the lives of those who are nearest and
dearest to them. The welfare of the state must override all con
siderations
of personal safety. We are fighting a war to the
death with crime, and the same code of
self-sacrifice must guide
every one of us as
if we were at war with a foreign power. It is
the only way in which this vile cancer in our midst can be
rooted out.” And while he spoke he remembered
the cold
appraising eyes of the outlaw
who had faced him in that same room, and behind the pompous phrasing of his
words was the
pride of a belief that
if he himself were tried again he would
not be found wanting.

Mr. Heimie Felder, wrestling in argument with
a circle of
boon companions in Charley’s Place, said: “Whaddya
mean, de guy was nuts? Coujja say a guy dat bumped off Morrie Ualino an’ Dutch
Kuhlmann was nuts? Say, listen, I’m tellin’
ya ….

”
Mr. Chris Cellini laid a
magnificent juicy steak, two inches
thick,
tenderly on the bars of his grill. His sleeves were rolled
up to the elbows, his strong hands moved with the
deft sure
ness and delight of an
artist. The smell of food and wine and
tobacco
was perfume in his nostrils, the babel of human fellowship was music in his
ears. His rich laugh rang jovially through
his beloved kitchen. “No, I ain’t seen the Saint a long while.
Say, he was a wild fellow, that boy. I’ll tell you
a story about
him one day.”

Mr. Sebastian Lipski said to an enraptured
audience in his
favourite restaurant at Columbus Circle: “Say, dijja
never
hear about de time when me an’ de Saint snatched off de Big
Fellow? De
time when we took de Vandrick National Bank
wit’ two guns? Chees,
youse guys ain’t hoid nut’n’ yet!”

Mr. Toni Ollinetti wiped invisible stains
from the shining
mahogany of his bar, mechanically, with a spotless white
napkin. His
smooth face was expressionless, his brown eyes
carried their own
thoughts. Whenever anything was ordered, he served it promptly, unobtrusively,
and well; his flashing
smile acknowledged every word that was
addressed to him
with the most perfect allotment of politeness, but the
smile
went no further than the gleam of his white teeth. It was im
possible to
tell whether he was tired—he might have just
come on duty, or he
might have had no sleep for a week. The
life of Broadway and
the bright lights passed before him, new
faces appearing, old
faces dropping out, the whole endlessly shifting pageant of the half-world. He
saw everything, heard everything, and said nothing.

Inspector John Fernack caught a train down
from Ossining twenty minutes after the Big Fellow went to the chair. He was
a busy man,
and he could not afford to linger over ancient
cases. In his spare
time he was still trying to catch up with
Euripides; but he had
very little spare time. There had been
a change of regime at
the last municipal election. Tammany
Hall was in the background, organizing
its forces for the next move to the polls; Orcread was taking a world cruise
for his
health, Marcus Yeald was no longer district attorney; but
Quistrom
was still police commissioner, and a lot of old ac
counts were being
settled. There was the routine copy of a
letter on his desk:

METROPOLITAN POLICE, SPECIAL BRANCH,

SCOTLAND HOUSE, LONDON, S.W.I.

Police
Commissioner, New York City.

Dear Sir:

RE:
SIMON
TEMPLAR
(“The Saint”)

Referring
to our previous letter to you on the subject, we
have to
inform you that this man, to our knowledge, has re
turned to
England, and therefore that we shall not need to
request
further assistance from you for the time being.

Faithfully
yours,

C. E.
Teal, Chief Inspector.

Fernack looked at the calendar on the wall,
where he had
made marks against certain dates. Teal’s letter brought no
surprising news to him. In three days, to his knowledge, the
Saint had
come and gone, having done his work; and the last
word on that case
which entered Fernack’s official horizon had
just been said at
Ossining. But his hand went round to his
hip, where the butt of
his pearl-handled revolver lay, and the
touch of it brought
back memories.

Perhaps that was one reason why, at the close
of his talk
to the senior students of the Police Academy that night,
when the dry, stern, ruthless facts had been dealt with in their text
book order,
the stalwart young men who listened to him saw
him put away his
notes and straighten up to look them over
empty-handed—a
towering giant whose straight shoulders
would have matched
those of any man thirty years younger, whose face and hair were marked with the
iron and granite of
his grim work, whose flinty grey eyes went over them with
a strange softening of pride and affection.