Saint in New York (13 page)

“Yeah,” said the Saint. “I’ve
heard of it. Are you getting it
ready for Viola Inselheim?”

Again that appalling silence fell over the
room. For a full
ten seconds nobody moved except Ualino, whose manicured
hand kept
up that steady mechanical smoothing of his hair.

“So you know about that, too,” he
purred at last.

The Saint nodded. His face was expressionless;
but he had heard the last word of confirmation that he wanted. His in
spiration
had been right—his simple stratagem had achieved
everything that he
had asked of it. By letting himself be taken
to Ualino as a
helpless prisoner, already doomed, he had been shown a hideout that he could
never otherwise have found, for which Fernack and his officers could search for
weeks in vain.

“Sure I know,” said the Saint.
“Why else do you think I
should have let your tame gorillas fetch me
along here? There
isn’t any other attraction about the place—except that
chat
about
complexion creams that you and I were going to have.”

“He’s nuts,” explained one of the
guards vaguely, as if seek
ing comfort for his own reeling sanity.

Simon smiled to himself and looked towards
the open window. Through it he could see the edge of the roof hanging low over
the oblong of blackness, the curved metal of the gutter
catching a
gleam of light from the bulb over the table. From the sill, it should be within
easy reach; and the rest lay with
the capricious gods of adventure.
…
And he
found his gaze
wandering back with detached curiosity, even in that
terrific
moment,
to the girl who must be Fay Edwards. He could see
her over Ualino’s shoulder, watching him steadily; but he
could read nothing in her amber eyes.

Ualino took the hand down from caressing his
hair and
stuck the
thumb in his vest pocket. He seemed to be playing
with a vial of sadistic malignance as a child might play with a
ball, for the last time.

“What did you think you’d do when you
got here?” he asked;
and the Saint’s level gaze returned to his
face with the chill of
antarctic ice still in it.

“I’m here to kill you, Ualino,”
Simon said quietly.

One of the pinochle players moved his leg, and
a card
slipped off the sofa and hit the floor with a tiny scuff that was as
loud as a drumbeat in the soundless void. A stifling silence blanketed the air
that was like no silence which had gone before. It was a stillness that
reached out beyond the deadest in
finities of disbelief, an
unfathomable immobility in which even
incredulity was punch-drunk and
paralyzed. It rose out of the
waning vibrations of the Saint’s gentle voice
and throbbed
back and forth between the walls like a charge of static
elec
tricity; and the Saint’s blue eyes gazed through it in an in
clement
mockery of bitter steel. It could not last for more than
a second
or two—the fierce tension of it was too intolerable—
but for that space of time no one could
have interrupted. And
that quiet, gentle
voice went on, with a terrible softness and
simplicity, holding them with a sheer ruthless power that they
could not begin to understand:

“I am the Saint; and I have my justice.
This afternoon Jack
Irboll died, as I promised. I am more than the law,
Ualino,
and I have no corrupt judges. Tonight you die.”

Ualino stood up. His tawny eyes stared into
the Saint’s with
a greenish glow.

“You’re pretty smart,” he said
venomously; and then his fist
lashed at Simon’s face.

The Saint’s head rolled coolly sideways, and
Ualino’s sleeve
actually brushed his cheek as the blow went by. A moment
later the Saint’s right hand touched the hilt of his knife and
slid it up
in its sheath—with both his arms twisted up behind
his back it was
hardly more difficult than it would have been if
his hand and wrist had
come together in front of him. Ualino’s
eyes blazed with sudden raw fury as he
felt his clenched fist zip
through into
unresisting air. He drew his arm back and
smashed again; and then a miracle seemed to happen.

The man on the Saint’s right felt a stab of
fire lance across
the tendons of his wrist, and all the strength went out
of his
fingers. He stared stupidly at the gush of blood that broke from
the
severed arteries; and while he stared, something flashed
across his
vision like a streak of quicksilver, and he heard
Ualino cry out.

That was about as much as anybody saw or
understood.
Somehow, without a struggle, the Saint was free; and a
steel
blade flashed in his hand. It swept upwards in front of him in
a terrible
arc; and Ualino clutched at his stomach and sank
down, with his knees
buckling under him and a ghastly crim
son tide bursting between his fingers.
… Nobody else had
time to move. The sheer astounding speed of
it numbed even
the
most instinctive processes of thought—they might as easily
have met and parried a flash of lightning… .
And then the
knife swept on upwards,
and the hilt of it struck the electric light bulb over the table and brought
utter darkness with an
explosion like a gun.

Simon leapt for the window.

A hand touched his arm, and his knife drew
back again for
a vicious thrust. And then, with a sudden effort, he
checked
it in mid-flight… .

For the hand did not tighten its grip.
Halting in the black
dark, with the shouts and blunderings of
infuriated men roaring around him, his nostrils caught a faint breath of
perfume.
Something cold and metallic touched his hand, and instinc
tively his
fingers closed round it and recognized it for the butt
of an automatic. And
then the light touch on his sleeve was gone; and with the trigger guard between
his teeth he sprang
to the windowsill and reached upwards and outwards into
space.

Chapter 4

How Simon Templar Read
Newspapers,
and Mr. Papulos Hit
the Skids

He lay out on the tiles at a perilous
downward angle of
forty-five
degrees, as he had swung himself straight up from
the windowsill, with his feet stretched towards the sky and
only
the grip of his hands in the gutter holding him. from an
imminent nosedive to squishy death. Directly
below him he
could see the torsos and bullet heads of two gorillas
illumi
nated in the light of a match held by
a third, as they leaned
out from the
window and raked the dark ground below with
straining, startled eyes. Their voices floated up to him like the
music of checked hounds to a fox that has crossed
its own
scent.

“He must of gone that way.”

“Better get down an’ see he don’t take
the car.”

“Take the car hell—I got the keys
here.”

The craning bodies heaved up again and vanished
back
into the
room. He heard the quick thumping of their feet and
the crash of the door; and then for a space another silence
settled
on the Long Island night.

Simon shifted the weight on his aching
shoulders and
grinned
gently under the stars. In its unassuming way it had
been a tense moment, but the advantage of the unexpected was
still with him. The minds of most men run on
well-charted
rails, and perhaps the mind of the professional killer in
times
of sudden death has fewer sidetracks
than any other. To the
four raging
and bewildered thugs who were even then pound
ing down the stairs to guard their precious car and comb the
surrounding
meadows, it was as inconceivable as it had been
to Inspector Fernack that any man in the Saint’s position,
with the untrammelled use of his limbs, should be
interested
in any other diversion than that of boring a hole through the
horizon with the utmost assiduousness and dispatch. But like
Inspector Fernack, the four public enemies who
fell into this grievous error were enjoying their first encounter with that
dazzling recklessness which made Simon Templar an
incalcu
lable variant in any
equation.

With infinite caution the Saint began to manoeuvre
himself
sideways along the roof.

It was a gymnastic exercise for which no
rules had been de
vised in any manual of the art. He had circled up to the
roof
in that position because it was quicker than any other; and,
once he was
up there, it was practically impossible to reverse it. Nor would he have gained
anything if he had by some in
credible contortions managed to get his feet
down to the gutter
and his head up to its proper elevation, for his only
means of
telling when he had reached his destination was by
peering
down over the gutter at the windows underneath. And that
destination
was the room outside which the scrawny-necked
individual had been
lounging when he arrived.

Once a loose section of metal gave him the
most nerve-
racking two-yard journey of his life; more than once, when
one of the men who were searching for him prowled under
the house,
he had to remain motionless, with all his weight
on the heels of his
hands, till the muscles of his arms and
shoulders cracked
under the strain. It was a task which should
have taken the
concentration of every fibre of his being, but the truth is that he was
thinking about Fay Edwards for
seven-eighths of the way.

What was she doing now? What was she doing at
any time in that bloodthirsty half-world? Simon realized that even now
he had not
heard her speak—his assumption that she was the
girl of Nather’s
telephone was purely intuitive. But he had
seen her face an
instant after his knife had laid Ualino open from groin to breastbone, and
there had been neither fear nor
horror in it. Just for that instant the amber
eyes had seemed
to blaze with a savage light which he could not
understand;
and then he had smashed the electric bulb and was on his
way. He might have thought that the whole thing was a moment’s hallucination,
but there was the metal of the automatic still between his teeth to be
explained. His brain tangled with that
ultimate amazing
mystery while he warped himself along the edge of yawning nothingness; and he
was no nearer a solution when the window that he was aiming for came vertically
under
his eyes.

At least there was nothing intangible or
mysterious about that; and he knew that there was no prospect of the general
tempo of
whoopee and carnival slackening off before he got
home to bed. With one searching
glance over the ground be
low to make sure that there was no lurking
sentinel waiting to
catch him in midair, the Saint slid himself forward head
first
into space, neatly reversed his hands, and curled over into the
precarious
dark.

He hung at the full stretch of his arms,
facing the window of
his objective. It was closed; but a
stealthily inquiring pressure
of one toe told him that it was fastened only
by a single catch
in the centre.

There was no further opportunity for caution.
The rest of
his evening had to be taken on the run, and he knew it.
Taking a deep breath, he swung himself backwards and outwards; and
as his body
swung in again towards the house on the returning
pendulum he raised
his legs and drove his feet squarely into
the junction of the
casements.

The flimsy fastening tore away like tissue
paper under the
impact, and the casements burst inwards and smacked
against
the inside wall with a crash of breaking glass. A treble wail of
fright came
out to him as he swung back again; then he came
forward a second time
and arched his back with a supple twist
as his hands let go
the gutter. He went through the window
neatly, skidded on a
loose rug, and fetched up against the bed.

The room was in darkness, but his eyes were
accustomed to
the dark. A small white-clad shape with dark curly hair
stared back at him, big eyes dilated with terror, whimpering softly.
From the
floor below came the thud of heavy feet and the
sound of hoarse
voices, but the Saint might have had all the
time in the world. He
took the gun from between his teeth
and pushed down the safety catch with
his right hand; his left
hand patted the girl’s shoulder.