Saint in New York (31 page)

“Okay.” She put a hand on his
shoulder, turning a little to
wards him. “Presently we shall have more time—Simon.”

Her face was lifted towards him, and again
the fragrant per
fume of her was in his nostrils; the amazing amber eyes
were
darkened, the red lips parted, without coquetry, in acquies
cence and
acknowledgment. He kissed her, and there was a fire in his blood and a
delicious languor in his limbs. It was impos
sible to remember
anything else about her, to think of any
thing else. He did not
want to remember, to strive or plot or
aspire; in the
surrender to her physical bewitchment there was
an ultimate rest, an
infinity of sensuous peace, beyond any
thing he had ever
dreamed of.

“Au revoir,”
she said
softly; and somehow he was outside the
car, standing on the
pavement, watching the car slide silently away into the dark, and wondering at
himself, with the fresh
ness of her lips still on his mouth and a
ghost of fear in his
heart.

Presently he awoke again to the throbbing of
his shoulder
and the maddening tiredness of his body. He turned and
walked
slowly across to the private entrance of the Waldorf
apartments.
“Well,” he thought to himself, “before morning
I shall
have met the Big Fellow, and that’ll be the end of it”
But he knew
it would only be the beginning.

He went up in the private elevator, lighting
another ciga
rette. Some of the numbness had loosened up from his right
hand: he moved his fingers, gingerly, to assure himself that
they
worked, but there was little strength left in them. It hurt
him a good
deal to move his arm. On the whole, he supposed
that he could consider
himself lucky to be alive at all, but he
felt the void in
himself which should have been filled by the vitality that he had lost, and was
vaguely angry. He had always
so vigorously despised weariness and lassitude
in all their forms that it was infuriating to him to be disabled—most of all at
such a time. He was hurt as a sick child is hurt, not
knowing why; until
that chance shot of Maxie’s had found its
mark, the Saint had
never seriously imagined that anything could attack him which his resilient
health would not be able
to throw off as lightly as he would have
thrown off the hangover of a heavy party. He told himself that if everything
else
about him had been normal, if he had been overflowing with
his normal
surplus of buoyant energy and confidence, not
even the strange
sorcery of Fay Edwards could have troubled
him. But he knew that
it was not true.

The lights were all on in the apartment when
he let him
self in, and suddenly he realized that he had been away
for a
long time. Valcross must have despaired of seeing him again
alive, he
thought, with a faint grim smile touching his lips; and
then, when
no familiar kindly voice was raised in welcome, he
decided that the old
man must have grown tired in waiting
and dozed off over his book. He
strolled cheerfully through
and pushed open the door of the living room.
The lights were
on there as well, and he had crossed the threshold before
he grasped the fact that neither of the two men who rose to greet
him was
Valcross.

He stopped dead; and then his hand leapt
instinctively towards the electric
^:
light switch. It was not until
then that he
realized fully how tired he was and how much vitality he
had
lost. The response of his muscles was slow and clumsy, and a twinging
stab of pain in his shoulder checked the movement halfway and put the seal on
its failure.

“Better not try that again, son,”
warned the larger of the two
men harshly; and Simon Templar looked down
the barrel of a businesslike Colt and knew that he was never likely to hear a
word of advice which had a more soberly overwhelming claim
to be
obeyed.

Chapter 8

How Fay Edwards Kept Her Word,
and
Simon Templar Surrendered
His Gun

“Well, well, well!” said the Saint
and was surprised at the huskiness of his own voice. “This is a pleasant
surprise.” He frowned at one of the vacant chairs. “But what have you
done with Marx?”

“Who do you mean—Marx?” demanded the
large man
alertly.

The Saint smiled.

“I’m sorry,” he said genially.
“For a moment I thought you
were Hart & Schaffner. Never mind. What’s
in a name?—as the actress said to the bishop when he told her that she re
minded him
of Aspasia. Is there anything I can do for you, or
has the hotel gone
bankrupt and are you just the bailiffs?”

The two men looked at each other for a moment
and found
that they had but a single thought. The smaller man
voiced it,
little knowing that a certain Heimie Felder had beaten him
to
it by a good number of hours.

“It’s a nut,” he affirmed
decisively. “That’s what it is. Let’s
give it the works.”

Simon Templar leaned back against the door
and regarded
them tolerantly. He was stirred to no great animosity by
the
opinion which the smaller man had expressed with such an
admirable
economy of words—he had been hearing it so often recently that he was getting
used to it. And at the back of his
mind he was beginning to wonder if it
might contain a germ
of truth. His entrance into that room had
been one of the most
ridiculously careless manoeuvres he had ever executed, and his
futile attempt to reach the light switch still
made him squirm
slightly to think of. Senile decay, it appeared, was
rapidly over
taking him… .

He studied the two men with grim intentness.
They have
been classified, for immediate convenience, as the larger
and
the smaller man; but in point of fact there was little to choose
between
them—the effect was much the same as establishing the comparative dimensions of
a rhinoceros and a hippopot
amus. The “smaller” man stood about
six feet three in his shoes
and must have weighed approximately three
hundred pounds;
the other, it should be sufficient to say, was a great
deal larger.
Taken as a team, they summed up to one of the most
undesirable deputations of welcome which the Saint could imagine at that
moment.

The larger man bulked ponderously round the
intervening
table and advanced towards him. With the businesslike Colt
jabbing into the Saint’s middle, he made a quick and efficient search of
Simon’s pockets and found the gun which had be
longed to the late
lamented Joe. He tossed it back to his com
panion and put his own
weapon away.

“Now, you,” he rasped, “what’s
your name?”

“They call me Daffodil,” said the
Saint exquisitely. “And
what’s yours?”

The big man’s eyebrows drew together, and his
eyes hard
ened
malevolently.

“Listen, sucker,” he snarled,
“you know who we are.”

“I don’t,” said the Saint calmly.
“We haven’t been intro
duced. I tried a guess, but apparently I was
wrong. You might
like to tell me.”

“My name’s Kestry,” said the big
man grudgingly, “and
that’s Detective Bonacci. We’re from
headquarters. Satisfied?”

Simon nodded. He was more than satisfied. He
had been
thinking along those lines ever since he had looked down
the barrel of the big man’s gun and it had failed to belch death at
him
instantly and unceremoniously, as it would probably have
done if
any of the Kuhlmann or Ualino mobs had been behind it. The established size of
the men, the weight of their shoes,
and the dominant way they carried
themselves had helped him
to the conclusion; but he liked to be sure.

“It’s nice of you to drop in,” he
said slowly. “I suppose you
got my message.”

“What message?”

“The message I sent asking you to drop
in.”

Kestry’s eyes narrowed.

“You
sent that message?”

“Surely. I was rather busy at the time
myself, but I got a.
bloke to do it for me.”

The detective expanded his huge chest.

“That’s interesting, ain’t it? And what
did you want to see
me about?”

The Saint had been thinking fast. So a
message had actually
been received—his play for time had revealed
that much. He
wondered who could have given him away. Fay Edwards? She
knew nothing.
The taxi driver who had been so interested in
him on the day when
Papulos died? He didn’t see how he
could have been followed——

“What did you want to see me about?”
Kestry was repeating.

“I thought you might like to hear some
news about the Big
Fellow.”

“Did you?” said the detective,
almost benignly; and then his
expression changed as if a hand had smudged
over a clay
model. “Then, you lousy liar,” he roared
suddenly, “why did
the guy that was phoning for you say:
“This is the Big Fellow
—you’ll find the Saint in the tower suite of
the Waldorf Astoria
belonging to a Mr. Valcross—he’s been treading on my toes
a
damn sight too long’?”

Simon Templar breathed in and out in a long
sigh.

“I can’t imagine,” he said.
“Maybe he’d had too much to
drink. Now I come to think of it, he was a bit
cock-eyed——
”

“You’re damn right you can’t imagine
it,” Kestry bit out
with pugnacious satisfaction. He had been
studying” the Saint’s
face closely, and Simon saw suspicion and
confirmation pass
in procession through his mind. “I know who you
are,” Kestry
said.
“You
are
the Saint!”

Simon bowed. If he had had a chance to
inspect himself in
a mirror and discover the ravages which the night’s ordeal
had
worked on his appearance, he might have been less surprised
that the
detective had taken so long to identify him.

“Congratulations, brother,” he
murmured. “A very pretty
job of work. I suppose you’re just practising
tracking people
down. Let’s see—is there anything else I can give you to
play
with? … We used to have a couple of fairly well-preserved clues in
the bathroom, but they slipped down the waste pipe
last Saturday night——
”

“Listen again, sucker,” the
detective cut in grittily. “You’ve
had your gag, and the
rest of the jokes are with me. If you
play dumb, I’ll soon slap it out of
you. The best thing you can
do is to come clean before I get rough.
Understand?”

The Saint indicated that he understood. His
eyes were still
bright, his demeanour was as cool and debonair as it had
al
ways been; but a sense of ultimate defeat hung over him like a pall. Was
this, then, the end of the adventure and the finish of the Saint? Was he
destined after all to be ignominiously carted
off to a cell at
last, and left there like a caged tiger while on four continents the men who
had feared his outlawry read of his downfall and gloated over their own
salvation? He could
not believe that it would end like that; but he realized
that for
the last few hours he had been playing a losing game. Yet
there
was not a hint of despair or weakness in his voice when he
spoke again.

“You don’t want much, do you?” he
remarked gently.

“I want plenty with you,” Kestry
shot back. “Where’s this
guy Valcross?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said
the Saint honestly.

Before he realized what was happening,
Kestry’s great fist had knotted, drawn back, and lashed out at bis face. The
blow
slammed him back against the door and left his brain rocking.

“Where do I find Valcross?”

“I don’t know,” said the Saint,
with splinters of steel glitter
ing in his eyes. “The last tune I saw
him, he was occupying a
private cage in the monkey house at the Bronx
Zoo, disguised
as a retired detective.”