Saint in New York (15 page)

“Who’s next on the list?” he asked,
and looked at the card
in his hand.

Straight away west on 49th Street, beyond
Seventh Avenue,
the same urgent question was being discussed in the back
room
of Charley’s Place. It was too early in the day for the regular
customers,
and the bar in the front part of the building had a dingy and forsaken aspect
in the dim rays of daylight that
struggled through the heavy green curtains at
the windows.
White-coated, smooth-faced and inscrutable as ever, Toni
Ollinetti
dusted the glass-topped tables and paid no attention to
the murmur
of voices from the back room. He looked neither
fresh nor tired, as he
looked at any hour out of the twenty-
four: no one could have told whether
he had just awoken or
whether he had not slept for a week.

The scene in the back room was livelier. The
lights were
switched on, flooding the session with the peculiarly cold
yel
low colour that electricity has in the daytime. There was a
bottle of
whisky and an array of glasses on the table to stimu
late decision, and the air was full of
tobacco smoke of varying
antiquities.

“De guy is nuts,” Heimie Felder had
proclaimed, more than
once.

His right arm was in a sling, as an
advertisement of the
Saint’s particular brand of nuttiness. He
enjoyed the distinc
tion of being one of the few men who had done battle with
the
Saint and survived to tell of it, and it was a pity that his vo
cabulary
was scarcely adequate to deal with the subject. He
had given much
painful thought to the startling events of the previous night, but he had been
unable to make any notable
advance on his first judgment.

“You ought to of seen him,” said
Heimie. “When we took
him in de udder room, over in de hotel, he was just surly an’
kep’ his mout’ shut like he was an ordinary
welsher. We asks
him, ‘Whereja get
dat dough?’ an’ Pappy gives him a poke in
de kisser, an’ he hauls off
an’ tries to take a sock at Pappy dat
was
so slow Pappy could of gone off an’ played anudder hand
an’ come back
an’ it still wouldn’t of reached him. So Pappy
rings up Judge Nather, an’ Nather says: ‘Yeah, de guy holds
me up an’ takes de dough off of me a coupla hours
ago.’ So
we take him along to Morrie
Ualino, out there on Long Island
where dey got de kid; an’ it seems de
Saint knows about dat,
too. But nobody ain’t
worryin’ about what he knows any
more,
becos we’re all figurin’ dat when he goes out of there he
won’t be
comin’ back unless his funeral procession goes past
de house. De guy is nuts. He stands there an’ starts ribbin’ Morrie about
him bein’ a dude, an’ you know how mad dat
useta make Morrie. You can see Morrie is gettin’ madder ‘n’
madder
every minute, but dis guy just grins an’ goes on kid
ding. I
tell ya, he’s nuts. An’ then he’s got hold of a knife from
somewhere, an’ he cuts my wrist open till I has to let
go; an’ then, zappo, he’s got his knife in
Morrie’s guts an’
broke de electric
light bulb, an’ while we’re chasin’ him he
ducks over de roof somehow an’ gets de kid. He’s gotten a Betsy
from somewhere, an’ he shoots up de jernt an’
gets away in Morrie’s car. De guy is nuts,” explained Heimie, clinching
the matter.

Dutch Kuhlmann poured himself out a
half-tumbler of
whisky and downed it without blinking. He was a huge
fleshy
man with flaxen hair and pale blue eyes; and he looked ex
actly
like an amiable waiter from a Bavarian beer garden. No one, glancing at him in
ignorance, would have suspected that
before the unhonoured demise of the Eighteenth Amendment
he was the man who supplied half the thirsty East
with beer,
reigning in stolid
sovereignty over the greatest czardom of
illicit hops in American history. No one would have suspected
that the brain which guided the hulking flabby
frame had
carved out and
consolidated and maintained that sovereignty
with the ruthlessness of an Attila. His record at police headquarters
was clean: to the opposition, accidents had simply
happened, with nothing to connect them with Dutch
Kuhl
mann beyond their undoubtedly
fortunate coincidence with
the route
of his ambitions: but those who moved in the queer
dark stratum which
touches the highest and the lowest points
in
Manhattan’s geology told their stories, and his trucks ran
unchallenged from Brooklyn to New Orleans.

“Dot is a great shame, about
Morrie,” said Kuhlmann.
“Morrie vass a goot boy.”

He took out a large linen handkerchief, dried
a tear from
the corner of each eye, and blew his nose loudly. The
passing of Morrie Ualino left Dutch Kuhlmann the unquestioned cap
tain of the
coalition whose destinies were guided by the Big
Fellow, but there was
no doubt of the genuineness of his grief.
After he had given
the orders which sent his own cousin and strongest rival in the beer racket on
the long, one-way ride, it was said that Kuhlmann had wept all night.

There was a brief respectful silence in honour
of the defunct
Morrie—several members of the Ualino mob were present,
for
without the initiative or personality to take his place they drifted
automatically into the cohorts of the nearest leader.
And then Kuhlmann
pulled his sprawling bulk together.

“Vot I vant to know,” he said with
remorseless logic, “is,
vot is the Saint gettin’ out of this?”

“He got twenty grand from Nather,”
said Papulos. “Probably he’s collected a reward from Inselheim for
bringing the
kid back. He’s getting plenty!”

Kuhlmann’s pale eyes turned slowly onto the
speaker, and under their placid scrutiny Papulos felt something inside him
self
turning cold. For, if you liked to look at it in a certain
way, Morrie
Ualino had died only because Papulos had passed
the Saint along to
him—with that terrible knife which had
somehow escaped their
search. And the men around him,
Papulos knew, were given to looking at such
things in a cer
tain way. The subtleties of motive and accident were too
great
a strain on their limited mentalities: they regarded only ul
timate
results and the baldly stated means by which those re
sults had eventuated.
Papulos knew that he walked on the
thinnest of ice; and he splashed
whisky into his glass and met Kuhlmann’s gaze with a confidence which he did
not feel.

“Yeah, dot is true,” Kuhlmann said
at length. “He gets
plenty money—plenty enough to split
t’ree-four ways.” There
was a superfluous elaboration of the theme in
that last phrase
which Papulos did not like. “But dot ain’t all of
it. You hear vot Heimie says. Ven they got him in the house he says to
Morrie: ‘I
came here to kill you.’ An’ he talks about justice.
Vot is dot for?”

“De guy is nuts” explained Heimie
peevishly, as if the con
tinued inability of his audience to accept
and be content with
that obvious solution were beginning to bother him.

Kuhlmann glanced at him and shrugged his
great shoulders.

“Der guy is not nuts vot can shoot
Irboll right in the court
house und get avay,” he exploded
mightily. “Der guy is not
nuts vot can find out in one hour dot Morrie
has kidnapped
Viola Inselheim, und vot can get some fool to take him
straight
to the house vhere Morrie has der kid. Der guy is not
nuts vot
can pull out a knife in dot room und kill Morrie, und vot
can pull
out a gun from nowhere und shoot Eddie Voelsang
and shoot his vay
past four-five men out of the house mit the
kid!”

There was a chorus of sycophantic agreement;
and Heimie
Felder muttered sulkily under his breath. “I heard
him
talkin’,” he protested to his injured soul. “De guy is——
”

“Nuts!” snarled an unsympathetic
listener; and Kuhlmann’s
big fist crashed on the table, making the
glasses dance.

“This is no time for your squabbling!” he roared
suddenly.
“It is you dot is nuts—all of
you! In von day der Saint has
killed
Irboll and Morrie and Eddie Voelsang und taken twenty
t’ousand dollars of our money. Und you sit there,
all of you
fools, and argue of
vether he is nuts, vhen you should be ask
ing who is it dot he kills next?”

A fresh silence settled on the room as the
truth of his words
sank home; a silence that prickled with the distorted
terrors
of the
Unknown. And in that silence a knock sounded on the
door.

“Come in!” shouted Kuhlmann and reached again for the
bottle.

The door opened, and the face of the guard
whose post was
behind the grille of the street door appeared. His
features
were
white and pasty, and the hand which held a scrap of
pasteboard at his side trembled.

“Vot it is?” Kuhlmann demanded
irritably.

The man held out the card.

“Just now the bell rang,” he
babbled. “I opened the grille,
an’ all I can see is a hand, holdin’
this. I had to take it, an’
while I’m starin’ at it the hand disappears.
When I saw what
it was I got the door open quick, but all I can see
outside is the
usual sort of people walkin’ past. I thought you better
see
what he gave me, Dutch.”

There was a whine of pleading in the
doorkeeper’s voice;
but Kuhlmann did not answer at once.

He was staring, with pale blue eyes gone
flat and frozen, at
the
card he had snatched from the man’s shaking hand. On it
was a childishly sketched figure surmounted by a symbolical
halo;
and underneath it was written, as if in direct answer to
the question he had been asking:
“Dutch
Kuhlmann is next.”

*
   
*
   
*

Presently he returned his gaze to the
doorkeeper’s face and
only the keenest study would have discovered
any change in its
bleak placidity. He threw the card down on the table for
the
others to crowd over, and hitched a cigar from the row which
protruded
from his upper vest pocket. He bit the end from
the cigar and spat it
out, without changing the direction of his
eyes.

“Come here, Joe,” he said almost
affectionately; and the
man took an uneasy step forward. “You
vas a goot boy, Joe.”

The doorkeeper licked his lips and grinned
sheepishly; and Kuhlmann lighted a match.

“It vas you dot lets der Saint in here
last night, vasn’t it?”

“Well, Dutch, it was like this. This guy
rings the bell an’ asks
for Fay, an’ I tells him Fay ain’t arrived
yet but he can wait
for
her if he wants to ——”

“Und so you lets him in to vait inside,
isn’t it?”

“Well, Dutch, it was like this. The guy
says maybe he can
get a drink while he’s waiting, an’ he looks okay to me,
anyone
can see he ain’t a dick, an’ somehow I ain’t thinkin’ about the
Saint——
”

“So vot are you thinking about,
Joe?” asked Kuhlmann gen
ially.

The doorkeeper shifted his feet.

“Well, Dutch, I’m thinkin’ maybe this
guy is some sucker
that Fay is stringin’ along. Say, all I do is stand at
that door
an’ let people in an’ out, an’ I don’t know everything
that goes
on. So I figures, well, there’s plenty of the boys
inside, an’ this
guy couldn’t do nothing even if he does get tough, an’ if
he is
a sucker that they’re stringin’ along it won’t be so good for me
if I shut
the door an’ send him away——
”

“Und so you lets him in, eh?”

“Yeah, I lets him in. You see——
”

“Und so you lets him in, even after you
been told all der
time dot nobody don’t get let in here vot you don’t know,
unless he comes mit one or two of the boys. Isn’t dot so?”

“Well, Dutch—-“

Kuhlmann puffed at his cigar till the tip was
a circle of solid
red.