Authors: Leslie Charteris
Simon dropped the automatic into the side
pocket of his
coat and relaxed into the whole-hearted enjoyment of his
smoke. There was no disturbing doubt in his mind that he
could rely absolutely on the
truce. They rode on under the blazing lights and turned into Central Park by
the wide en
trance at Columbus Circle.
A few hundred yards on, Fernack pulled in to
the side of the road and killed the engine. He switched on his shortwave radio
receiver
and lighted his cigar deliberately before he turned.
The glow of the tip
as he inhaled revealed his rugged face set
in a contour of
phlegmatic inquiry.
“Well,” he said, “what’s the
game?” Simon shrugged.
“The same as yours, more or less. You
work within the law,
and I work without it. We’re travelling
different roads, but
they both go the same way. On the whole, my road seems to
get places quicker than yours—as witness the late
Mr. Irboll.”
Fernack stared ahead over his dimmed lights.
“That’s why I’m here, Saint. I told the
commissioner this
morning that I could love any man who rubbed out that
rat.
But you can’t get away with it.”
“I’ve been getting away with it pretty
handsomely for a
number of years,” answered the Saint coolly.
“It’s my job to take you in, sweat a confession out of you,
and send you up for a session in the hot squat.
Tomorrow I may be doing it. You’re slick. I’ll hand it to you. You’re the
only
man who ever took me for a ride twice in one hour, and
made me like it. But to me you’re a crook—a killer. The un
derworld has a big enough edge in this town,
without giving
it any more.
Officially, it’s my job to put you away. That’s
how the cards are stacked.”
“Fair enough. You couldn’t come any
cleaner with me than that. But I’ve got my own job, Fernack. I came here to do
a bit
of cleaning up in this town of yours, and you know how it
needs it.
But it’s your business to see that I don’t get anywhere.
You’re
hired to see that all the thugs and racketeers in
this
town put
on their goloshes when it rains, and tuck them up
in their mufflers and
make sure they don’t catch cold. The
citizens of New York pay you to make
sure that the only killing
is done by the guys with political connections—”
“So what?”
“So maybe, off the record, you’d answer
a couple of ques
tions while there isn’t an audience.”
Fernack chewed the cigar round to the other
corner of his
mouth, took it out, and spat expertly over the side of the
car. He put the cigar back and watched a traffic light turn from
green to
red.
“Keep on asking.”
“What is this Big Fellow?”
The tip of Fernack’s cigar reddened and died
down, and he
put one elbow on the wheel.
“I should like to know. Ordinarily, it’s
just a name that
some of these big-time racketeers get called. They called
Al
Capone ‘the Big Fellow.’ All these rats have got egos a mile
wide. ‘The
Big Boy’—‘the Big Shot’—it’s the same thing. It used to make ‘em feel more
important to have a handle like
that tacked onto ‘em, and it gave the small
rats something to
flatter ‘em with.”
“Used to?”
“Yeah.” The detective’s cigar moved
through an arc at the
end of his arm as he flicked ash into the
road. “Nowadays
things are kind of different. Nowadays when
we talk about the
Big Fellow we mean the guy nobody knows: the man who’s
behind
Morrie Ualino and Dutch Kuhlmann and Red McGuire and all the rest of ‘em and
bigger than any of them
ever were. The guy who’s made himself the
secret king of the
biggest underworld empire that ever happened… . Where
did you hear of
him?” Fernack asked.
The Saint smiled.
“I was eavesdropping—it’s one of my bad
habits.”
“At Nather’s?”
“Draw your own conclusions.”
Fernack turned in his seat, his massive body
cramped by
the wheel; and the grey eyes under his down-drawn shaggy
brows
reflected the reddish light of his cigar end.
“Get this,” he said harshly.
“Everything you say about me and the rest of the force may be true. I’m
not arguing. That’s
the way this town’s run, and it’s been like that ever
since I was
pounding
a beat. But I’m telling you that some day I’m gonna
pin a rap on that mug, judge or no judge—an’ make it stick!
If that line you shot at me was said to Nather, it
means there’s
something dirty brewing
around here tonight; and if there’s
any
way of tying Nather in with it, I’ll nail him. And I’ll see
that he gets the works all the way up the
line!”
“Why should it mean that?”
“Because Nather is just another stooge
of the Big Fellow’s, the same as Irboll was. Listen: If that bunch is going out
to
night, there’s always the chance something may go blooey. One
or two of
‘em may get taken in by the cops. That means they’ll
get beaten up. Don’t
kid yourself. When we get those guys in
the station house we
don’t pat them with paper streamers. Mostly the only punishment they ever get
is what we give
them in the back room. An’ they don’t like it. You can
be as
tough as you like and never let out a peep, but a strong-arm
dick with
a yard of rubber hose can still hurt you. So when a
bunch is smart, they
have a lawyer ready to dash in with writs
of habeas corpus
before we can even get started on ‘em—and
those writs have to
be signed by a judge. One day a law will
be passed to allow
racketeers to make out the writs themselves an’ save everyone a lot of expense,
but at present you still gotta
find a judge at home.”
“I see,” said the Saint gently.
Fernack grunted, and his fingers hardened on
the cigar.
“Who gave that order?” he grated.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,”
said the Saint untruthfully. He sympathized with Fernack, but it was too late
in his career to overcome an ingrained objection to letting any detective get
ahead of
him. “The speech came over the phone, and that’s
all there was.”
“What did you go to Nather’s for?”
“I asked you the same question, but I
don’t have to repeat
it. I stayed right under the window and
listened.”
Fernack’s cigar fell out of his mouth and
struck his knee
with a fountain of sparks.
“You what?”
“Just in case you’d decided to follow
me,” explained the
Saint blandly. “This business of haring
for the tall timber in front of squads of infuriated policemen is all right for
Charlie
Chaplin, but it’s a bit undignified for me.” He grinned reminiscently
. “I
admired your vocabulary,” he said.
The detective groped elaborately for his
fallen weed.
“I had to do it,” he growled.
“That son of a——
pulled just
one too many when he
acquitted Irboll. I may be transferred
for it, but I couldn’t
of stayed away if I’d been told beforehand
that I was going to
wake up tomorrow pounding a two-mile
beat out on Staten Island.”
Simon put his head back and gazed up at the
low roof of the sedan. “What’s the line-up?”
Fernack leaned on the wheel and smoked,
staring straight
ahead again. Taxis and cars thrummed past them in
conflicting
streams, and up in a tree over their heads a night bird
bragged
about what he was going to do to his wife when she came
home.
The traffic lights changed twice before he answered.
“Up at the top of this city,” he
said slowly, “there’s a po
litical organization called Tammany Hall.
They’re the boys
who fill all the public offices, and before you were born
they’d
made electioneering into such an exact science that they just
don’t even
think about it any more. They turn out their voters
like an army parade,
their hired hoodlums guard the polls, and
their employees count
the votes. The boss of Tammany Hall
is a man called Robert Orcread, and the
nickname he gave
himself is Honest Bob. Outside the City Hall there’s a
fine
bit of a statue called Civic Virtue, and inside there’s the biggest
collection of crooks and grafters that ever ran a city.
“There’s a district attorney named Marcus
Yeald who’s so
crooked you could use him to pull corks with; and his
cases
come up before a row of judges like Nather. Things are different here
from what they are in your country. Over here our
judges get elected;
and every time a case comes up before
them they have to sit down and figure
out what the guy’s po
litical pull is, or maybe somebody higher up
just tells ‘em so
they won’t make any mistake, because if a judge sends a
guy
up the river who’s got a big political drag there’s going to be
somebody
else sittin’ in his chair when the next election comes
round.
“The politicians appoint the police
commissioner, and he
does what they say and lays off when they say
lay off. The first
mistake they ever made was when they put Quistrom in. He
takes
orders from nobody; and somehow he’s gotten himself
so well liked and
respected by the decent element in this city
that even the
politicians daren’t try and chisel him out now—
it’d make too much
noise. But it all comes to the same thing
in the end. If we
send a guy up for trial, he’s still got to be
prosecuted by Marcus Yeald or one of
Yeald’s assistants, and
a judge like Nather
sits on the case an’ sees that everything is nice and friendly.
“There’s a bunch of rats an’ killers in this town that stops
nowhere, and they play ball with the politicians, and the politicians play
ball with them. We’ve had kidnapping and mur
der
and extortion, and we’re goin’ to have more. That’s the
Big Fellow’s
game, and it’s the perfect racket. There’s more money in it than there ever was
in liquor—and there’s less of
an answer to
it. Look at it yourself. If it was your son, or your
wife, or your
brother, or your sister, that was bein’ held for
ransom, and you knew that the rats who were holding ‘em
were as soft-hearted as a lot of rattlesnakes—wouldn’t
you
pay?”
The Saint nodded silently. Fernack’s slow,
dispassionate
summary
added little enough to what he already knew, but it
filled in and coloured the picture for him. He had some new
names to think about; and that realization brought
him back
to the question in his mind
that he had tactfully postponed.
“Who is Papulos?” he asked; and
Fernack grinned wryly.
“You’ve been getting around. He’s
pay-off man for Morrie
Ualino.”
“Pay-off man for Ualino, eh?” Simon
might have guessed the
answer, but he gave no sign. “And what do you know about
Morrie?”
“He’s one of the big shots I mentioned
just now. One of
these black-haired, shiny guys, as good-lookin’ as
Rudolf Valen
tino if you happen to like those kind of looks—lives like
a
swell, acts an’
talks like a gent, rides around in an armoured
sedan, and has two trigger men always walking in his shadow.”
“What’s he do for a living?”
“Runs one of the biggest travelling
poker games on Broadway. He’s slick—and poison. I’ve taken him to Ossining once,
an’ Dannemora once, myself, but he never stayed there long enough to wear
through a pair of socks.” Fernack’s cigar spun
through the darkness in a glowing parabola
and hit the road
with a splutter of fire.
“Go get him, son, if you want him. I’ve told you all I can.”
“Where do I find him?”
Fernack jerked his head round and stared. The
question
had been put as casually as if the Saint had been asking
for
the address of a candy shop; but Simon’s face was quite seri
ous.
Fernack turned his eyes back to the road; and
after a while
he said: “Down on 49th Street, between Seventh and
Eighth
Avenues, there’s a joint called Charley’s Place. It might be
worth
paying a visit—if you can get in. There’s a girl called
Fay
Edwards who might——
”