Saint in New York (8 page)

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint; and he
meant it. “I hate being
arrested, as you should have gathered from my
biography. It’s
just one of those things that doesn’t happen. My dear
chap,
you didn’t really think I stayed on so you could take me home
with you
as a souvenir!”

Fernack glared at the gun speechlessly for a
moment and shifted his gaze back to the Saint For a moment Simon was
afraid—with a chin like that, it was an even chance that the
detective might not be stopped;
and Simon would have hated
to shoot. But
Fernack was not foolhardy. He had been bred and reared in a world where
foolhardiness went down under
an
elemental law of the survival of the wisest; and Fernack
faced facts. At that range the Saint could not
miss, and the
honour of the New York
police would gain a purely temporary
glow
from the heroic suicide of an inspector.

Fernack grunted and straightened up with a
shrug.

“What the hell is this?” he
repeated.

“Just a social evening. Sit down and get
the spirit of the
party.
Maybe you know some smoke-room stories, too.”

Fernack pulled out a chair and sat down
facing the Saint. After the first stupefaction of surprise was gone he accepted
the situation with homely matter-of-factness. Since the initia
tive had
been temporarily taken out of his hands, he could do
no harm by
listening.

“What are you doing here?” he asked;
and there was the be
ginning of a grim respect in his voice.

Simon swung his gun around towards Nather and
waved the
judge
back to his swivel chair.

“I might ask the same question,” he
remarked.

Fernack glanced at the judge thoughtfully;
and Simon’s
quick eyes caught the distaste in his gaze, and realized
that
Nather saw it, too.

“You do your own asking,” Fernack said dryly.

Simon surveyed the two men humorously.

“The two arms of the law,” he
commented reverently. “The guardian of the peace and the dispenser of
justice. You could pose for a tableau. The pea-green incorruptibles.”

Fernack frowned, and the judge squirmed
slightly in his
chair. There was a strained silence in the room, broken
by the
inspector’s
rough voice:

“Know any more fairy tales?”

“Plenty,” said the Saint.
“Once upon a time there was a
great city, the richest city in the
world. Its towers went up through the clouds, and its streets were paved with
golden-
backed Treasury notes, which were just as good as the old-
fashioned
fairy-tale paving stones and much easier to carry around. And all the people in
it should have been very happy, what with Macy’s Basement and Grover Whalen and
a cathedral called Minsky’s. But under the city there was a greedy
octopus whose tentacles reached
from the highest to the lowest
places—and
even outside the city, to the village greens of
Canarsie and North Hoosick and a place called Far Rockaway
where the Scottish citizens lived. And this
octopus prospered
and grew fat on a
diet of blood and gold and the honour of
men.”

Fernack’s bitter voice broke in on the
recitation:

“That’s too true to be funny.”

“It wasn’t meant to be—particularly.
Fernack, you know
why I’m here. I did a job for you this afternoon—one of
those
little jobs that Brother Nather is supposed to do and never
seems to
get around to. Ionetzki was quite a friend of yours,
wasn’t he?”

“You know a lot” The detective’s fists knotted at his
sides.
“What next?”

“And Nather seems to have been quite a
friend of Jack
Irboll’s. I’m doing your thinking for you. On account of
this
orgy of devotion, I blew along to see Nather; and I haven’t
been here
half an hour before you blow in yourself. Well, a
little while back I
asked you why you were here, and I wasn’t
changing the subject”

Fernack’s mouth tightened. His eyes swerved
around to the
judge;
but Nather’s blotchy face was as inexpressive as a slab
of lard, except for the high-lights of perspiration on his
flushed cheekbones. Fernack looked at the Saint
again.

“You want a lot of questions answered
for you,” he stated
flatly.

“I’ll try another.” Simon drew on
his cigarette and looked at the detective through a haze of outgoing smoke.
“Maybe you
can
translate something for me. Translate it into words of one
syllable—and try to make me understand.”

“What?”

“The Big Fellow says you’d better stay
home tonight. He may
want you!”

Simon flipped the quotation back hopefully enough, without a
pause. It leapt across the air like the twang of a broken
fiddle string, without giving the audience a
half-second’s grace
in which to brace themselves or rehearse their
reactions. But
not even in his moments of
most malicious optimism had the
Saint
expected the results which rewarded him.

He might have touched off a charge of blasting powder at their
feet Nather caught his breath in a gasping hiccough like
a man shot in the stomach. Fernack rose an inch
from his chair
on tautened thighs: his grey eyes bulged, then narrowed
to
glinting slits.

“Say that again!” he rasped.

“You don’t get the idea.” The
Saint smiled, but his sapphire
gaze was as quiet as the levelled gun.
“I was just asking you to
translate something. Can you tell me what it
means?”

“Who wants to know?”

Nather scrambled up from his chair, his fists clenched and
Ms face working. His face was putting in a big
day.

“This is intolerable!” he barked
hoarsely. “Isn’t there any
thing you can do, Fernack, instead of sitting
there listening to
this—this maniac?”

Fernack glanced at him.

“Sure,” he said briefly. “You
take his gun away, and I’ll do it.”

“I’ll report you to the
commissioner!” Nather half screamed.
“By God, I’ll
have you thrown out of the force! What do we
have laws for when an
armed hoodlum can hold me up in my
own house under your very nose ——”

“And gangsters can shoot cops in broad
daylight and get ac
quitted,” added the Saint brightly. “Let’s make
it an indigna
tion meeting. I don’t know what the country’s coming
to.”

Nather choked; and the Saint stood up. There
was something in the air which told him that the interview might more profit
ably be
adjourned—and the judge’s blustering outburst had nothing to do with it. With
that intuitive certainty in his mind,
he acted on it in cool disregard of
dramatic sequence. That was
the way he liked best to work, along his own
paths, following
a trail without any attempt to dictate the way it should
go. But
his evening had only just begun.

He strolled to the desk and lifted the lid of
a bronze humi
dor. Selecting a cigar, he crackled it at his ear and
sniffed it
appreciatively.

“You know good tobacco if you don’t know
anything else
good, Algernon,” he murmured.

He discarded the stub of his cigarette and
stuck the Corona-
Corona at a jaunty angle between his teeth. As an after
thought,
he tipped over the humidor and helped himself to a
bonus handful of the
same crop.

“Well, boys,” he said, “you
mustn’t mind if I leave you. I
never overstay my welcomes, and maybe you have some secrets
to whisper in each other’s ears.” He backed
strategically to
the window and paused
there to button his coat. “By the way,”
he said, “you needn’t bother to rush up this
window and wave
me good-bye. These
farewells always make me feel nervous.”
He spun the automatic around his finger for the last time and hefted it
in his hand significantly. “I’d hate there to be any
accidents at the last minute,” said the
Saint; and was gone.

Fernack stared at the rectangle of empty
blackness and emptied his lungs in a long sigh. After some seconds he got up.
He
walked without haste to the open casements and stood there
looking
silently out into the dark; then he turned back to the
room.

“That’s a guy I could like,” he said
thoughtfully.

Nather squinted at him.

“You’d better get out, too,”
snarled the judge. “You’ll hear
more about this later ——
”

“You’ll hear more about it now,”
Fernack said coldly; and
there was something in his voice which made
Nather listen.

What the detective had to say did not take
long. Fernack on
business was not a man to expand himself wordily at any
time,
and any euphemistic phrases which he might have revolved
in his
mind had been driven out of it entirely. He stowed his kid gloves high up on
the shelves of his disgust, and propounded his assessment of the facts with a
profane brutality
that left Nather white and shaking.

Three minutes after Simon Templar’s
departure, Inspector
Fernack was also barging out of the room, but by a more or
thodox route. He thundered down the stairs and
shouldered
aside the obsequious butler
who made to open the door for
him, and flung himself in behind the wheel
of his prowl car
with a short-winded
violence that could not be accounted for solely by an ardent desire to remove
himself from those pur
lieus. But his evening was not finished, either;
though he did
not know this at that moment.

He slammed the door, switched on the
ignition, and un
locked
the steering column; and then something hard probed
its way gently but firmly into his ribs, and the soft voice of
the Saint wafted into his right ear.

“Hold on, Inspector. You and I are going
for a little joy
ride!”

*
  
*
  
*

Inspector Fernack’s jaw sagged.

Under the stress of his unrelieved emotions,
he had not no
ticed the Saint’s arrival or the noiseless opening of
the other
door. There was no reason on earth why he should have
looked
for either. According to his upbringing, it was so baldly axi
omatic
that the Saint would by that time be skating through
the traffic three or
four miles away that he had not even given the subject a thought. The situation
in which he found himself
for the second time was so deliriously
unexpected that he was
temporarily paralyzed. And in that space of
time Simon slid
in onto the cushions beside him and closed the door.

Fernack’s jaw closed, and he looked into the
level blue eyes
behind the gun.

“What’s your idea?”

“We’ll go places. I’d like to talk to
you, and it’s just possible you might like to talk to me. We’ll go anywhere you
like, bar
Centre Street”

The granite lines of the detective’s face
twitched. There were
limits to his capacity for boiling
indignation, a point where
the soaring curve of his wrath curled over
and fell down a pre
cipitous
switchback—and the gay audacity of the man at his
side had boosted him to that point in two terrific jumps. For a
second the detective’s temper seemed to teeter
breathlessly
on the pinnacle like a
trolley stalling on a scenic railway; and
then it slipped down the gradient on the other side… .

“We’ll try the park,” Fernack said.

A heavy blucher tramped on the starter, and
the gears
meshed.
They turned out of Tenth Street and swung north up
Seventh Avenue. Simon leaned comfortably back and used the
lighter on the dashboard for his cigar; nothing
more was said
until they were
threading the tangle of traffic at Times Square.

“You know,” said the Saint calmly,
“I’m getting a bit tired
of throwing this gun around. Couldn’t we
dispense with it and
call this conference off the record?”

“Okay by me,” rumbled Fernack,
without taking his eyes
from the road.