Saint in New York (23 page)

“Don’t ask me,” said the Saint.
“If I remember rightly, the
suggestion was yours.”

“I could do a lot for a guy like you. If
you’d come and seen
me first, none of this would have happened. But these
things
you’ve been doing don’t make it easy for us. I don’t say we got
a grudge
against you. Irboll was just a no-account hoodlum,
and Ualino was
getting too big for himself anyway—I guess he
had it coming to him
before long. But you’re trying to go too
fast, and you make too
much noise about it. That sort of
thing don’t go with the public, and
it’s my job to stop it. It’s
Mr. Yeald’s job to stop it—ain’t it,
Mark?”

“Certainly,” said the lawyer’s dry
voice, like the voice of a
parrot repeating a lesson. “These things
have got to be
stopped. They will be stopped.”

Orcread tapped the Saint on the chest.

“That’s it,” he said impressively.
“We have given our word
to the electors that this sort of thing shall
be stamped out,
and we gotta keep our promises. But we don’t want to be
too
hard on you. So I says to Mark: ‘Look here, this Saint must
be a sensible young guy. Let’s
make him an offer.’ “

Simon nodded thoughtfully, but Orcread’s words
only
touched the fringes of his attention. He had been trying to
find a
reason why Orcread and Yeald should ever have en
tered the conference
at all; and in searching for that reason
he had made a
remarkable discovery. For about the first time
in his career he had
grossly underestimated himself. He knew
that his spectacular
advent upon the New York scene had
caused no small stir in certain
circles, as indeed it had been designed to do; but he had not realized that his
modest efforts could have raised so much dust as Orcread’s presence appeared
to
indicate.

And then he began to understand what a small
disturbance
could throw a complicated machine out of gear, when the
machine was
balanced on an unstable foundation of bluff and
apathy and chicane,
and the disturbance was of that one pecu
liar kind. The
newspaper headlines, which he had enjoyed
egotistically flashed
across his mind’s eye with a new meaning.
He had not thought,
until Orcread told him, that the coinci
dence of the right
man and the right moment, coupled with
the mercurial
enthusiasms of the New World, could have flung
the figure of the
Saint almost overnight onto a pinnacle where
the public imagination
would see it as a rallying point and
the banner of a reformation. He had not
thought that his dis
interested attempts to brighten the Manhattan
and Long Island
entertainments could have started a fresh wave of civic am
bition
whose advance ripples had already been felt under the
sensitive thrones of
the political rulers.

He listened to Orcread again with renewed
interest.

“So you see, we’re being pretty
generous. Two hundred
thousand bucks is worth something to any man.
And we get
you out of a tough spot. You get out of here without even
feel
ing uncomfortable—you go to England or anywhere else you like. A young
guy like you could have a good time with two
hundred grand. And
I’m here to tell you that it’s on the up-
and-up.”

Simon Templar looked at him with a slow and
deceptive
smile. The glitter of amusement in the Saint’s eyes was
faint.

“You’re making me feel almost
sentimental, Bob,” he said
gravely. “And what is the trivial
service I have to do to earn
all these benefits?”

Oscread threw his mauled cigar away, and
parked the
thumb thus released in the other armhole of his waistcoat.
He
rocked back on his heels, with his prosperous paunch thrown out, and
beamed heartily.

“Well … nothing,” he said.
“All we want to do is stop
this sort of thing going on. Well, naturally
it wouldn’t be any
good packing you off if things went on just the same. So
all
we’d ask you to do is tell us who it is that’s backing you—
tell us
who the other guys in your mob are—so we can make
them the same sort of
proposition, and that’ll be the end of
it. What d’you say?
Do we call it a deal?”

The Saint shook his head regretfully.

“You may call it.a deal, if you
like,” he said gently, “but I’m
afraid I call it
bushwah. You see, I’m not that sort of a girl.”

“He’s nuts,” said Heimie Felder
doggedly, out of a deep
silence; and Orcread swung round on him
savagely.

“You shut your damn mouth!” he
snarled.

He turned to the Saint again, the benevolent
beam still
hollowly half frozen on his face, as if he had started to
wipe it
off and had forgotten to finish the job, his jaw thrust out and
his flinty eyes narrowed.

“See here,” he growled, “I’m
not kidding, and if you know
what’s good for you, you’ll lay off that
stuff. I’m giving you a
chance to get out of this and save your skin.
What’s funny
. about it?”

“Nothing,” said the Saint blandly,
“except that you’re sit
ting on the wrong flagpole. Nobody’s backing
me, and I
haven’t got a mob—so what can I do about it? I hate to see
these tender impulses of yours running away with you,
but ——
”

A vague anger began to darken Orcread’s face.

“Will you talk English?” he grated.
“You ain’t been run
ning this business by yourself just to pass
the time. What are
you getting out of it, and who’s giving it to you?”

The Saint shrugged wearily.

“I’ve been .trying to tell you,” he
said. “Nobody’s backing
me, and I haven’t got a mob. Ask any of this
beauty chorus
whether they’ve ever seen me with a mob. I, personally, am
the whole works. I am the wheels, the chassis, and the gadget
that
squirts oil into the gudgeon pins. I am the one-man
band. So all you’ve
got to do is to hand me that two hundred
grand and kiss me good-bye.”

Orcread stared at him for a moment longer and
then turned
away abruptly. He walked across the room and plumped
himself
into a chair between Yeald and Kuhlmann. In the
voiceless pause that
followed, the lips of Heimie Felder could
be seen framing
tireless dogmas about nuts.

The Saint smiled to himself and bummed a
cigarette from
the nearest member of the audience. He was obliged dispassionately.
Inhaling the smoke dreamily, he glanced around
at the hard,
emotionless faces under the lights and realized
quite calmly that any
amusement which he derived from the
situation originated entirely in his
own irresponsible sense of humour.

Not that he was averse to tight corners and
dangerous games
—his whole history, in fact, was composed of a long
series of
them. But it occurred to him that the profitable and
amusing
phase of the soiree, if there had ever been one, was now def
initely
over. He had established beyond question the fact that
Orcread and the
district attorney were in the racket up to
their necks, but the
importance of that confirmation was almost entirely academic. More important
than that was the
concrete revelation of their surprisingly urgent interest
in
his own activities. Judged solely on its merits, the hippopotamoid
diplomacy of Honest Bob Orcread earned nothing
but a sustained
horselaugh—Simon had not once been
under the delusion that any of the
gentlemen present would
have allowed him to be handed two hundred
thousand dollars; under their noses, or that after the ceremony they would have
escorted him to the next outward liner with mutual expres
sions of
philanthropy and good will—but the fact that the offer
had been made at all,
and that Orcread had thought it worth
while lending his own rhetorical genius to it, wanted some
thinking over. And most certainly there were
places in New
York more conducive to
calm and philosophic thought than
the
spot in which he was at present In short, he saw no
good point in further dalliance at Charley’s Place,
and the
real difficulty was how he could
best take his leave.

From the fragments of conversation that reached him from
the table, he gathered that altruistic efforts were
being made
to solve his problem for
him. The booming voice of Honest Bob Orcread, even when lowered to what its
owner believed to be an airy whisper, was penetrating enough to carry the
general theme of the discussion to the Saint’s
ears.

“How do we know it ain’t a stall?”
he could be heard reiter
ating. “A guy couldn’t do all that by
himself.”

The district attorney pursed his lips, and his answer rustled
dustily like dry leaves.

“Personally, I believe he is telling the
truth. I was watching
him all the time. And nobody has seen anybody
else with
him.”

“Dot’s right,” Kuhlmann agreed.
“It’s chust von man mit a
lot of luck, taking everybody by surprise. I
can look after
him.”

Orcread was worried, in a heavy and
struggling way.

“I hope you’re right. But that don’t
settle anything. We
gotta do something that’ll satisfy the public. If you
make a
martyr of
him it’ll only make things worse. Now, if we could
get him in court an’ make a monkey out of him, we could
say:
“Well, we done our duty. We caught the guy that was making all the
trouble. And now look at him. We could fix
things
so he didn’t get any sympathy.”

“I doubt it,” Yeald said.
“Once he was in court it would
be difficult to stop him talking. I
wouldn’t dare to hold the
trial in camera; and all the reporters would be wanting inter
views. You couldn’t keep them away.”

“Well, I think we oughta make an
example. How would
it be if …”

The rumbling and the rustling went on, and the
Saint
smoked his cigarette with no outward signs of concern. But
not for a
moment had he ceased to be aware that the old gen
tleman with the
scythe, of whom he had undertaken to
make an ally, was very close to him
that night. Yet his smile
was undimmed, and his eyes had the stillness
of frozen sea water as he idly watched the whispering men who were de
bating how
the processes of justice could best be turned to
meet their own ends.
And within him was a colder, deadlier
contempt than anything he had felt
since the beginning of
that adventure.

In the room before him were more than a dozen
men whose
lives were dedicated to plunder and killing, mercenaries
of
the most amazing legion of crime that modern civilization had
ever known;
but it was not against their that he felt the dead
liest chill of that
cold anger. It was against the men who
made their looting
possible—the men who held positions of
trust, whom a blind
public had permitted to seize office, whose
wages were paid over
and over again out of the pockets of ordinary honest citizens, whose
cooperation allowed robbery
and murder to go unpunished and even
commended. The
law meant nothing; except when it was an expedient instru
ment to
remove an obstacle to further pillage.

Outside, beyond that room, lay a great city, a
monument
in brick arid granite to the ingenuity of man; and in
that city
seven million people paid tribute to a lawless handful.
The
Saint had never been given to glorifying himself into any kind
of
knightly hero; in the end he was a mercenary himself,
hired by Valcross to
do an outlaw’s work; but if he had had
any doubts of the
justice of his cause, they would have been swept away that night. Whether he
acknowledged it or not, whether they knew it or not, he was the champion of
seven million, facing sentence in that hushed room for a thing that
perhaps
none of the seven million could have put into
words; and it had
never seemed more vital that he should come
out alive to carry
the battle on… .