Saint in New York (19 page)

He had no very definite plan in mind; but the
penultimate
revelation of the late Mr. Papulos was impressed deeply on
his memory. He thought it over through the afternoon, till
the day
faded and New York donned her electric jewels and
came to life.

The only decision he came to was that if
anything was go
ing to happen during the next twenty-four hours it would
be
likely to happen at night; and it was well after dark when he
set out in
the long underslung roadster that Valcross had
provided. After the
day had gone, and the worker had re
turned to his fireside, Broadway came
into its own: the under
world and its allies, to whom the sunset was
the dawn, and
who had a very lukewarm appreciation of firesides, came
forth from
their hiding places to play and plot new ventures;
and if Mr. Ezekiel
Inselheim and his seed were still the target,
they would be likely to waste no time.

It was, as a matter of fact, one of those
soft and balmy nights
on which a fireside has a purely symbolical appeal. Overhead, a
full moon tossed her beams extravagantly over an
unappreciative
city. A cool breeze
swept across the Hudson, whipping
the
heat from the granite of the mighty metropolis. Over in
Brooklyn, a certain Mr. Theodore Bungstatter was
so moved
by the magic of the night
that he proposed marriage to his
cook,
and swooned when he was accepted; and the Saint sent
his car roaring through the twinkling canyons of
New York
with a sublime faith that
this evening could not be less produc
tive
of entertainment than any which had gone before.

As a matter of fact, the expedition was not
embarked on
quite so blindly as it might have appeared. The
information
supplied by the late Mr. Papulos had started a train of
thought,
and the more Simon followed it the more he became
convinced that it
ought dutifully to lead somewhere. Any
such racket as
Papulos had described depended for its effec
tiveness almost
entirely upon fear—an almost superstitious
fear of the
omnipotence and infallibility of the menacing
party. By the failure
of the previous night’s kidnapping
that atmosphere had suffered a distinct
setback, and only a
prompt and decisive counter-attack would restore the
damage.
On an expert and comprehensive estimate, the odds seemed
about two
hundred to one that the tribulations of Mr. Inselheim
were only just
beginning; but it must be confessed that
Simon Templar was not
expecting quite such a rapid vindica
tion of his arithmetic as he received.

As he turned into Sutton Place he saw an
expensive lim
ousine standing outside the building where Mr.
Inselheim’s
apartment was. He marked it down mechanically, along with
the burly
lounger who was energetically idling in the vicinity.
Simon flicked his
gear lever into neutral and coasted slowly
along, contemplating
the geography of the locale and weigh
ing up strategic sites for his own
encampment; and he had
scarcely settled on a spot when a dark plump
figure emerged
from the building and paused for a moment beside the burly
lounger on the sidewalk.

The roadster stopped abruptly, and the Saint’s
keen eyes
strained through the night. He saw that the dark plump
figure
carried a bulky brown-paper package under its arm; and
as the brief
conversation with the lounger concluded, the
figure turned towards
the limousine and the rays of a street
lamp fell full across
the pronounced and unforgettable fea
tures of Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim.

Simon raised his eyebrows and regarded
himself solemnly
in the driving mirror.

“Oho,” he remarked to his
reflection. “Likewise aha. As
Mr. Templar arrives, Mr. Inselheim
departs. We seem to have arrived in the nick of time.”

At any rate, the reason for the burly
lounger’s presence was
disposed of, and it was not what the Saint
had thought at first.
He realized immediately that after the
stirring events of the
last twenty-four hours the police, with their
inspired efficiency
in locking the stable door after the horse was stolen, would
have naturally posted a guard at the Inselheim residence;
and the
large-booted idler was acquitted of any sinister in
tentions.

The guilelessness of Mr. Inselheim was less
clearly estab
lished, and Simon was frowning thoughtfully as he slipped
the roadster back into gear and watched Inselheim entering
the
limousine. For a few moments, while the limousine’s engine was warming up, he
debated whether it might not have
been a more astute tactical move to
remain on the spot where
Mr. Inselheim’s offspring might provide a
centre of more
urgent disturbances. And then, as the limousine pulled out
from the curb, he flicked an imaginary coin in his mind, and
it came
down on the memory of a peculiar brown-paper pack
age. With a slight
shrug he pulled out a cigarette case and
juggled it deftly with
one hand as he stepped on the gas.

“The hell with it,” said the Saint
to his attractive reflection.
“Ezekiel is following his nose, and
there may be worse landmarks.”

The limousine’s taillight was receding
northwards, and
Simon closed up until he was less than twenty yards
behind, trailing after it through the traffic as steadily as if the two cars
had been
linked by invisible ropes.

*
   
*
   
*

After a while the dense buildings of the city
thinned out
to the quieter, evenly spaced dwellings of the suburbs.
There
the moon seemed to shine even more brightly; the stars were
chips of
ice from which a cool radiance came down to
freshen the summer
evening; and the Saint sighed gently. In
him was a certain
strain of the same temperament which
blessed our Mr. Theodore Bungstatter of
Brooklyn: a night
like that filled him with a sense of peace and
tranquillity that
was utterly alien to his ordinary self. He decided that in
a
really well-organized world there would have been much better things
for him to do on such an evening than to go trailing
after a bloke who
boasted the name of Inselheim and looked
like it. It would
have been a very different matter if the mys
terious and beautiful
Fay Edwards, who had twice passed with
such surprising
effect across the horizons of that New
York venture, had
been driving the limousine ahead… .

He thrust a second cigarette between his lips
and struck a
match. The light revealed his face for one flashing
instant,
striking a rather cold blue light from thoughtfully
reckless eyes
—a glimpse of character that might have interested Dutch
Kuhlmann not a little if that sentimentally ruthless Teuton
had been
there to see it. The Saint had his romantic regrets,
but they subtracted
nothing from the concentration with which
he was following the
job in hand.

His hand waved the match to extinction, and in his next
movement he reached forward and switched out all
the
lights in the car. In the closer
traffic of the city there was no
reason
why he should not legitimately be following on the
same route as the
limousine, but out on the less populated thoroughfares his leech-like devotion
might cause a nervous man some inquisitive agitation which Simon Templar had no
wish to arouse. His left arm swung languidly over the side as
the roadster ripped round a turn in the road at an
even sixty
and roared on to the
northwest.

The road was a level strip of concrete laid out like a silver
tape under the sinking moon. He steered on in the
wake of
the limousine’s headlight,
soothing his ears with the even purr
of tires swishing over the macadam,
his nerves relaxed and resting. Above the hum of the engines rose a faint and
not
unmelodious sound. Simon Templar was
serenading the stars… .

The song ended abruptly.

Something flashed in the corner of his
eye—something
jerky
and illuminating like an electric torch. It flashed three
times, with the precision of a lighthouse; and
then the dark
ness settled down
again.

Simon’s hands steadied on the wheel, and he shut off the
engine and declutched with two swift simultaneous
move
ments. His foot shifted to the
brake and brought the roadster
to a
standstill as quickly as it could be done without giving his
tires a chance to scream a protest.

In the last mile or two, out on the open
road, he had fallen
behind a bit, and now he was glad that he had done so. The
red taillight of the limousine leapt into redder brilliance as
Inselheim
jammed on the brakes, pulling it over to the side
of the road as it
slowed down. Then, right at its side, the
flashlight beamed
again.

From a safe distance, Simon saw a dark object leave the window at
the side of the limousine, trace an arc through the
air, and vanish into the bushes at the side of the highway.
Then the limousine took off like a startled hare
and shot
away into the night as if it
had seen a ghost; but by that time
the
Saint was out of his car, racing up the road without a
sound.

The package which Inselheim had thrown out
remained by
the roadside where it had fallen, and Simon recognized it
at
once as the parcel which the millionaire had carried under
his arm
when he left his apartment. That alone made it inter
esting enough, and
the manner of its delivery established it
as something which had
to be investigated without delay— although Simon could make a shrewd grim guess
at what it
contained. But his habitual caution slowed up his steps
before
he reached it, and he merged himself into the blackness be
neath a
tree with no more sound than an errant shadow. And
for a short time there
was silence, broken only by the soft
rustle of leaves in the night wind.

The package lay in a patch of moonlight,
solitary and for
lorn as a beer bottle on a Boy Scout picnic ground. The
Saint’s
eyes were fixed on it unwinkingly, and his right hand slipped the gun
out of his pocket and noiselessly thumbed the safety
catch out of gear. A
gloved hand moved out of the darkness, reaching for the parcel, and Simon spoke
quietly.

“I don’t think I’d touch that,
Ferdinand,” he said.

There was a gasp from the darkness. By rights
there should
have been no answer but a shot, or the sounds of a speedy
and determined retreat; but the circumstances were somewhat
exceptional.

The leaves stirred, and a cap appeared above
the greenery. The cap was followed by a face, the face by a pair of shoulders,
the shoulders by a chest and an abdomen. The appear
ance of this human
form rising gradually out of the black
ness as if raised on
some concealed elevator had an amazingly
spooky effect which
was marred only by the physiognomy of
the spectre and the pattern of its
clothes. Simon could not
quite accept an astral body with such a
flamboyant choice of
worsteds, but he gazed at the apparition
admiringly enough.

“Well, well, well!” he remarked.
“If it isn’t my old college chum, wearing his old school tie. Can you do
any more tricks
like that, Heimie?—it’s fun to be fooled, but it’s more
fun to
know!”

Heimie Felder goggled at him dumbly. The
developments
of the past twenty-four hours had been no small strain on
his limited intellect, and the stress and surprise of them had
robbed him
of much of his natural elasticity and
joie-de-vivre.
Standing
waist-high in the moonlight, his face reflected a
greenish pallor which was not entirely due
to the lunar rays.

“Migawd,” he said, expressing his
emotions in the mildest
possible terms.