Saint in New York (29 page)

“I haven’t finished,” he said
grimly.

She regarded him inscrutably; her mind was a
thousand
miles beyond his horizon, but the fresh sweetness of her
body
was too close for comfort.

“What did you come here to do?”

“I had a commission,” he said.

He put his hand in his breast pocket, took out
bis wallet,
and opened it on his knee. She leaned towards him, looking
over his shoulder at the scrap of paper that was exposed. His
forefinger
slid down the list of names written on it

“I came here to kill six men. I’ve
killed three—Jack Irboll,
Morrie Ualino, and Eddie Voelsang. Leaving
three.”

“Hunk is dead,” she said, touching
the list. “That was Jen
son—the man who drove this car tonight.”

“Leaving two,” he amended quietly.

She nodded.

“I wouldn’t know where to find Curly
Ippolino. The last I
heard of him, he was in Pittsburgh.” Her
golden-yellow eyes
turned towards him impassively. ”But Dutch Kuhlmann is
next.”

The Saint forced himself to look at her.
There was nothing
else to be done. It had to be faced; and he was
spellbound by
a tremendous curiosity.

“What will you do? He’s one of your
friends, isn’t he?”

“I have no
…
friends,” she said; and again he was dis
turbed by that queer
haunting music in her voice. “I’ll take
you there. He’ll just
about be tired of waiting for Joe and
Maxie by the time we arrive. You’ll
see him as he comes out.”

Simon looked at the lighted panel of
instruments on the
dash. He didn’t see them, but they were something to
which he
could turn his eyes. If they went back to find Dutch Kuhlmann
, her
challenge to himself would be in abeyance for a while longer. He might still
escape. And his work remained:
he had made a promise, and he had never yet
failed to keep
his
word. He was certain that she was not leading him into a
trap—it would have been fantastic to imagine any
such com
plicated plan, when nothing could have been simpler than to
allow Maxie to complete the job he had begun so
well. On the
other hand, she had
offered the Saint no explanation of why
she should help him, had asked him to give no reasons for his own grim
mission. He felt that she would have had no interest
in reasons. Hate, jealousy, revenge, a wager,
even justice—any
reasons that logic
or ingenuity might devise would be only
words to her. She was waiting,
with her hand on the starting
switch, for
anything he cared to say.

The Saint bowed bis head slowly.

“I meant to go back to Charley’s
Place,” he said.

A little more than one hour later Dutch
Kuhlmann gulped
down the dregs of his last drink, up-ended his glass,
pulled
out his large old-fashioned gold watch, yawned with Teutonic
thoroughness,
and shoved his high stool back from the bar.

“I’m goin’ home,” he said.
“Hey, Toni—when Joe an’ Maxie
get here, you tell them to come und see
me at my apartment”

The barman nodded, mechanically wiping invisible stains
from the spotless mahogany.

“Very good, Mr. Kuhlmann.”

Kuhlmann stood up and glanced towards the
two sleek
sphinx-faced young men who sat patiently at a strategic
table.
They finished their drinks hurriedly and rose to follow him
like
well-trained dogs as he waddled towards the door, exchang
ing gruff
good-nights with friends and acquaintances as he
went. In the foyer he waited for them to
catch up with him.
They passed him and stood
between him and the door while it
was
opened. Also they went out first and inspected the street
carefully before they nodded to him to follow.
Kuhlmann
came out and stood between
them on the sidewalk—he was as
thorough
and methodical in his personal precautions as he was
in everything else,
which was one reason why his czardom had s
urvived
so long. He relighted his cigar and flicked the match
sportively at one
of his equerries.

“Go und start der car, Fritzie,” he
said.

One of the sphinz-faced young men detached
himself from
the little group and went and climbed into the driving
seat of
Kuhlmann’s Packard, which was parked a little distance up
the road.
He was paid handsomely for his special duty, but the post was no sinecure. His
predecessor in office, as a matter of
fact, had lasted only three
weeks—until a bomb planted un
der the scuttle by some malicious citizen had
exploded when
the turning of the ignition key had completed the
necessary
electrical
circuit.

Kuhlmann’s benign but restless eyes roved over
the scene
while the engine was being warmed up for him, and so he
was
the first to recognize the black sedan which swept down the street from
the west. He nudged the escort who had remained
with him.

“Chust in time, here is Joe and Maxie
comin’ back.”

He went forward towards the approaching car
as it drew
closer to the curb. He was less than two yards from it
when he
saw the ghost—too late for him to turn back or even cry out.
He saw the
face of the man whom he had sent away to execu
tion, a pale ghost
with stony lips and blue eyes cold and hard
like burnished
sapphires, and knew in that instant that the
sands had run out at
last. The sharp crack of a single shot
crashed down the
echoing channel of the street, and the black
sedan was roaring
away to the east before his body touched the
pavement.

*
   
*
   
*

The police sirens were still moaning around
like forlorn
banshees in the distances of the surrounding night when
Fay
Edwards stopped the car again in Central Park. Simon had a sudden vivid
memory of the night when he had sat in exactly
the same spot, in
another car, with Inspector Fernack; it was
considerably less than thirty-six hours
ago, and yet so much had
happened that it
might as well have been thirty-six years. He wondered what had happened to Fernack,
and what that grim-
visaged,
massive-boned detective was thinking about the vol
cano of panic and killing which had flamed out in
the under
world since they had had
that strange, irregular conversation.
Probably
Fernack was scouring the city for him at that mo
ment, harried to superhuman efforts by the savage anxiety of
commissioners
and politicians and their satellites; their next
conversation, if they ever had one, would probably be much
less
friendly and tolerant. But that also seemed as far away as
if it belonged in another century. Fay Edwards
was waiting.

She had switched off the engine, and she was
lighting a cig
arette. He saw the calm, almost waxen beauty of her face
in
the flicker of
the match she was holding, the untroubled quiet
of her eyes, and had to make an effort to remember that she had killed
one man that night and helped him to kill another.

“Was that all right?” she asked.

“It was all right,” he said.

“I saw your list,” she said
reflectively. “You had my name on
it. What have I done?
I suppose you want something with me.
I’m here—now.”

He shook his head.

“There should have been a question mark
after it. I put you
down for a mystery. I was listening in when you spoke to
Nather—that
was the first time I heard your voice. I was watch
ing you with Morrie
Ualino. You gave me the gun that got me
out of there. I
wanted to know who you were—what you had
been—why you were in
the racket. Just curiosity.”

She shrugged.

“Now you know the answer.”

“Do I?” The response was automatic,
and at once he wished
he had checked it. He felt her eyes turning
to look at him, and
added
quickly: “When you came and told Maxie tonight that
the Big Fellow said he was to let me go—that
wasn’t the truth.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I’m guessing. But I’ll bet on it.”

She drew on her cigarette placidly. The smoke
drifted out
and floated down the beam of the lights.

“Of course it wasn’t true. The Big
Fellow was on your list as well, wasn’t he?” she said inconsequently.
“Do you want
him, too?”

“Most of all.”

“I see. You’re very determined—very
single-minded, aren’t
you?”

“I have to be,” said the Saint.
“And I want to finish this job.
I want to write ‘The End’ to it and start something else.
I’m a
bit tired.”

She was smoking thoughtfully, a very faint
frown of concen
tration
cutting one tiny etched line between her brows—the
only wrinkle in the soft perfection of her skin. She might have
been alone in her room preparing to go out,
choosing be
tween one dress and another.
It meant nothing to her,emotions
that
the only thing they shared in their acquaintance were kill
ings, that the Saint’s mission was set down in an
unalterable groove of battle and sudden death, that all the paths they had
taken together were laid to the same grim goal. He
had an
eerie feeling that death and
killings were the things she under
stood
best—that perhaps there was nothing else she really un
derstood.

“I think I could find the Big
Fellow,” she said; and he tried
to appear as casual and unconcerned as she was.

“You know him, don’t you?”

“I’m the only one who knows him.”

It was indescribably weird to be sitting there
with her,
wounded and tired, and to be discussing with her the
greatest
mystery that the annals of New York crime had ever known,
waiting on the threshold of unthinkable revelations, where
otherwise
he would have been faced with the same illimitable
blank wall as had
confronted him from the beginning. In his
wildest day-dreams he
had never imagined that the climax of
his quest would be reached like that,
and the thought made
him feel unwontedly humble.

“He’s a great mystery, isn’t he?”
said the Saint meditatively.
“How long have you known him?”

“I met him nearly three years ago, before
he was the Big
Fellow at all—before anyone had ever heard of him. He
picked
me up when I was down and out.” She was as casual about it
as if she
had been discussing an ephemeral scandal of nine
days’ importance, as
if nothing of great interest to anyone
hung on what she said.
“He told me about his idea. It was a
good one. I was able
to help him because I knew how to contact the sort of people he had to get
hold of. I’ve been his
mouthpiece ever since—until tonight.”

“D’you mean you—parted company?”

“Oh, no. I just changed my mind.”

“He must be a remarkable fellow,”
said the Saint.

“He is. When I started, I didn’t think
he’d last a week, even
though his ideas were good. It takes
something more than good
ideas to hold your own in the racket. And he couldn’t
use per
sonality—direct contact—of any kind. He was determined to
be
absolutely unknown to anyone from beginning to end. As
a matter of fact, he
hasn’t got much personality—certainly not of that kind. Perhaps he knows it.
That may be why he did
everything through me—he wouldn’t even speak
to any of
the mob over the telephone. Probably he’s one of those men
who are Napoleons in their dreams, but who never do anything
because
directly they meet anyone face to face it all goes out of
them. The Big Fellow found a
way to beat that. He never met
anyone face
to face—except me, and somehow I didn’t scare
him. He just kept on dreaming, all by himself.”

A light was starting to glimmer in the depths
of Simon
Templar’s
understanding. It wasn’t much of a light, little more than a faint nimbus of
luminance in the caverns of an illim
itable
obscurity; but it seemed to be brightening, growing infinitesimally
larger with the crawling of time, as if a man
walked with a candle in the infinities of a
tremendous cave.
He had an uncanny
illogical premonition that perhaps after
all the threads were not so widely scattered—that perhaps the
wall might not be so blank as he had thought. Some
unreasonable standard of the rightness of things demanded it; anything
else would have been out of tune with the rest of
his life, a
sharp discord in a smooth
flow of harmony; but he did not
know
why he should have that faith in such a fantastic law of
coincidence.