Saint in New York (21 page)

“Hullo, Zeke,” said the Saint.

At the sound of that voice the pathetic
mustering of anger
drained
out of Inselheim as if a stopcock had been opened,
leaving nothing but a horrible blank void. Upstairs was his
child—sleeping… . And suddenly he was only a
frightened
old man again, staring with
fear-widened eyes at the revival
of
the menace which was tearing his self-respect into shreds.

“I’ve paid up!” he gasped
hysterically. “What do you want?
I’ve paid! Why don’t you leave me
alone——
”

The Saint swung his other leg into the room
and hitched
himself nonchalantly off the sill.

“Oh, no, you haven’t,” he said gravely.
“You haven’t paid
up at all, brother.”

“But I have paid!” The broker’s
voice was wild, the words tumbling over each other in the ghastly incoherence
of panic.
“Something must have gone wrong. I paid—I paid
tonight, just as you told me to. There must be some mistake. It isn’t
my fault.
I paid
 
——
”

Simon’s hands went to his pockets. From the
breast pocket
of his coat, the side pockets, the pockets of his
trousers, he
produced bundle after bundle of neatly stacked
fifty-dollar
bills, tossing them one by one onto the desk in an
apparently
inexhaustible succession, like a conjuror producing
rabbits
out of a
hat.

“There’s your money, Zeke,” he
remarked cheerfully.
“Ninety thousand bucks, if you want to
count it. I allotted
myself a small reward of ten thousand, which
I’m sure you’ll
agree is a very modest commission. So you see you haven’t
paid up at
all.”

Inselheim gaped at the heaps of money on the
desk with
a thrill of horror. He made no attempt to touch it.
Instead,
he stared at the Saint, and there was a numbness of stark
terror
in his eyes.

“Where—where did you get this?”

“You dropped it, I think,”
explained the Saint easily. “For
tunately I was behind you. I picked it
up. You mustn’t mind
my blowing in by the fire escape—I’m just fond of a little
variety now and again. Luckily for you,”
said the Saint vir
tuously, “I
am an honest man, and money never tempts me
—much. But I’m afraid you
must have a lot more dough than is good for you, Zeke, if the only way you can
think of to get
rid of it is to go chucking
scads of it around the scenery like
that.”

Inselheim swallowed hard. His face had gone
chalk white.

“You mean you—you picked this up where I
dropped it?”

Simon nodded.

“That was the impression I meant to
convey. Perhaps I didn’t make myself very clear. When I saw you heaving
buckets of
potatoes over the horizon in that absent-minded
sort of way——
”

“You fool!” Inselheim said, with
quivering lips. “You’ve
killed me—that’s what you’ve done. You’ve
killed my daugh
ter!” His voice rose in a hoarse tightening of
dread. “If they
don’t get this money—they’ll kill!”

Simon raised his eyebrows. He sat on the arm
of a chair.

“Really?” he asked, with faint
interest.

“My God!” groaned the man. “Why
did you have to inter
fere? What’s this to you, anyway? Who are you?”

The Saint smiled.

“I’m the little dicky bird,” he
said, “who brought your
daughter back last time.”

Inselheim sat bolt upright

“The Saint!”

Simon bowed his acknowledgment. He stretched
out a long
arm, pulled open the drawer of the desk in which long ex
perience
had taught him that cigars were most often to be
found, and helped
himself.

“You hit it, Zeke. The bell rings, and
great strength returns
the penny. This is quite an occasion, isn’t
it?” He pierced the
rounded end of the cigar with a deftly wielded
matchstick, reversed the match, and scraped fire from it with his thumb
nail,
ignoring the reactions of his astounded host. “In the cir
cumstances,
it may begin to dawn on you presently why I
have that eccentric
partiality to fire escapes.” He blew smoke
towards the ceiling
and smiled again. “I guess you owe me
quite a lot, Zeke; and
if you’ve got a spot of good Bourbon to
go with this I
wouldn’t mind writing it off your account.”

Inselheim stared at him for a long moment in
silence. The
cumulative shocks which had struck him seemed to have
dead
ened and irised down the entrances of his mind, so that the
thoughts
that seethed in the anterooms of consciousness could
only pass through one
by one. But one idea came through
more strongly and persistently than any
other.

“I know,” he said, with a dull
effort. “I’m sorry. I—I guess
I owe you—plenty. I won’t forget it.
But—you don’t under
stand. If you want to help me, you must get out. I’ve got
to
think. You can’t stay here. If they found you were here—
they’d kill
us both.”

“Not both,” said the Saint mildly.

He looked at Inselheim steadily, with a
faintly humorous
interest, like a hardened dramatic critic watching with ap
proval the
presentation of a melodrama, yet realizing with a
trace of self-mockery
that he had seen it all before. But it was
the candid
appraisement in his gaze which stabbed mercilessly
into some lacerated
nerve that was throbbing painfully away
down in the depths of
the Jew’s crushed and battered fibre—
a swelling nerve of contempt for his
own weakness and in
adequacy, the same nerve whose mute and inarticulate
reactions
had been clenching his soft hands into those piti
fully helpless fists before the Saint
came. The clear blue light of
those reckless
bantering eyes seemed to illumine the profundi
ties of Inselheim’s very soul; but the light was too sudden and strong,
and his own vision was still too blurred, for him to be
able to see plainly what the light showed.

“What did you come here for?”
Inselheim asked; and Simon
blew one smoke ring and put another through
the centre of
it.

“To return your potatoes—as you see. To
have a cigar, and
that drink which you’re so very inhospitably hesitating,
to
provide. And to see if you might be able to help me.”

“How could I help you? If it’s money you want——”

“I could have helped myself.” The
Saint glanced at the
stacks of money on the desk with one eyebrow
cocked and a
glimmer of pure enjoyment in his eye. “I seem to be
getting
a lot of chances like that these days. Thanks all the same, but
I’ve got
one millionaire grubstaking me already, and his
bank hasn’t failed
yet. No—what I might be able to use from
you, Zeke, is a few
heart-to-heart confidences.”

Inselheim shook his head slowly, a movement
that seemed
to be a more of an automatic than a deliberate refusal.

“I can’t tell you anything.”

Simon glanced at his wrist watch.

“A rather hasty decision,” he
murmured. “Not to say flatter
ing. For all you know, I may be ploughing
through life in a
state of abysmal ignorance. However, you’ve got plenty of
time to
change your mind… .”

The Saint rose lazily from his chair and
stood looking
downwards at his host, without a variation in the genial
leisureliness
of his movements or the cool suaveness of his voice; but
it was a lazy leisureliness, a cool geniality, that
was more impressive than any noisy
dominance.

“You know, Zeke,” he rambled on
affably, “to change one’s
mind is the mark of a liberal man. It indicates that one has
assimilated wisdom and experience. It indicates
that one is
free from stubbornness
and pride and pimples and other deadly sins. Even scientists aren’t dogmatic
any more—
they’re always ready to
admit they were wrong and start all
over
again. A splendid attitude, Zeke—splendid… .”

He was standing at his full height, carelessly
dynamic like
a cat
stretching itself; but he had made no threatening move
ment, said nothing menacing … nothing.

“I’m sure you see the point, Zeke,” he said; and for
some
reason that had no outward physical
manifestation, Inselheim
knew that the
gangsters whom he feared and hated could
never be more ruthless than
this mild-mannered young man
with the
mocking blue eyes who had clambered through his
window such a short while ago.

“What could I tell you?” Inselheim
asked tremulously.

Simon sat on the edge of the desk. There was
neither
triumph nor self-satisfaction in his air—nothing to indicate
that he
had ever even contemplated any other ultimate re
sponse. His gentleness
was almost that of a psycho-analyst
extracting confessions from a nervous
patient; and once
again
Inselheim felt that queer light illuminating hidden cor
ners of himself which he had not asked to see.

“Tell me all, Zeke,” said the
Saint

“What is there you don’t know?”
Inselheim protested
weakly. “They kidnapped Viola because I refused to
pay the
protection money——
”

“The protection money,” Simon
repeated idly. “Yes, I knew about that. But at least we’ve got started.
Carry on, Uncle.”

“We’ve all got to pay for protection.
There’s no way out.
You brought Viola back, but that hasn’t saved her. If I
don’t
pay now—they’ll kill. You know that. I told you. What else
is there——
”

“Who are
they?”
asked the
Saint.

“I don’t know.”

Simon regarded him quizzically.

“Possibly not.” Under the patient
survey of those unillusioned
eyes, the light in Inselheim’s
subconsciousness was
very bright. “But you must have some
ideas. At some time or another, there must have been some kind of contact. A
voice
didn’t speak out of the ceiling and tell you to pay. And
even a
bloke with as many potatoes as you have doesn’t go
scattering a hundred
grand across the countryside just because
some maniac he’s
never heard of calls up on the phone and
tells him to. That’s
only one of the things I’m trying to get at.
I take it that you
don’t want to go on paying out hundreds of
thousands of dollars
to this unknown voice till the next new
moon. I take it that
you don’t want to spend the rest of
your life wondering from day to day
what the next demand is
going to be—and wondering what they’ll do to
your daughter
to enforce it. I take it that you want a little peace and
quiet—
and that even beyond that you might like to see some things
in this
city changed. I take it that you have some manhood that
goes deeper
than merely wearing trousers, and I’m asking you
to give it a
chance.”

Inselheim swallowed hard. The light within
him was blinding, hurting his eyes. It terrified him. He rose as if in sheer
nervousness
and paced the room.

Simon watched him curiously. He knew the
struggle that
went on inside the man, and after a fashion he
sympathized.
… And then, as Inselheim reached the far wall, his
hand
shot out and pressed a button. He turned and faced the Saint
defiantly.

“Now,” he said, with a strange
thickness in his voice, “get
out! That bell calls one of my guards.
I don’t wish you any
harm—I owe you everything—for a while. But I
can’t—I can’t
sign my own death warrant—or Viola’s… .”

“No,” said the Saint softly.
“Of course not.”

He hitched himself unhurriedly off the desk
and walked to
the window. There, he threw a long leg across the sill;
and his
unchanged azure eyes turned back to fix themselves on
Inselheim.