The Saint in New York

By Leslie Charteris

FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY • NEW YORK

Copyright 1934, 1935 by Leslie Charteris. Published by arrangement with Doubleday and Company, Inc. Printed in U.S.A.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

I couldn't, even if I wanted to, pretend that this novel came of my typewriter yesterday. I am notoriously not a writer of historical stories, except those which have ac­quired that aura simply by being around so long; and the date of this one is implicit from the first pages of the first chapter.

It was conceived, and worked out, during the latter days of Prohibition in America, that Noble Experiment which ended in 1933—which the most simple arithmetic shows to have been a fair while ago. And no revision, even if I wanted to attempt one, could possibly transfer it to a later day.

So I can only hope that all those readers who were not even born when it happened will accept the background, which is actually about as authentic as any fictional back­ground can be. I can vouch for this, because I was there, antique as I am. I don't say that the plot had any factual foundation, as many of my plots have. But the kind of activities, the places, and the people who frequented them, are not nearly as far-fetched as they may seem today. In fact, more than one of them really lived then, and might be recognized by a few old-timers through his thin disguise.

Prologue

The letter was delivered to the Correspondence Bureau in Centre Street. It passed, as a matter of routine, through the Criminal Identification Bureau, the Criminal Alien Investi­gation Bureau, and the Main Office Division. And in the end it was laid on the desk of Police Commissioner Arthur J. Quis­trom himself—it was a remarkable document by any standards, and even the studiously commonplace prose of its author could not make it uninteresting.

METROPOLITAN POLICE, SPECIAL BRANCH,

SCOTLAND HOUSE, LONDON, S.W.I.

Police Commissioner, New York City.

Dear Sir:

We have to inform you that there are reasons to believe that SIMON TEMPLAR, known as "The Saint," is at present in the United States.

No fingerprints are available; but a photograph, descrip­tion, and record are enclosed.

As you will see from the record, we have no grounds on which to institute extradition proceedings; but it would be advisable for you, in your own interests, to observe Templar's activities carefully if you are successful in locating him.

Faithfully yours,

C. E. Teal, Chief Inspector.

The first enclosure came under the same letterhead: SIMON TEMPLAR ("The Saint").

DESCRIPTION: Age 31. Height 6 ft. 2 ins. Weight 175 lbs. Eyes blue. Hair black, brushed straight back. Com­plexion tanned. Bullet scar through upper left shoulder; 8-in. scar right forearm.

SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS: Always immaculately dressed. Luxurious tastes. Lives in most expensive hotels and is connoisseur of food and wine. Carries firearms and is expert knife thrower. Licensed air pilot. Speaks several languages fluently. Known as "The Saint" from habit of leaving drawing of skeleton figure with halo on scenes of crimes (specimen reproduced below).

RECORD:

First came to our attention five years ago as unofficial agent concerned, with recovery of quantity of bullion stolen from Confederate Bank of Chicago and trans­ported to this country. Was successful and claimed reward, leaving arrest of thieves to our own agent, Inspector Carn.

For some time afterwards, with assistance of four accomplices, became self-appointed agent for terrorizing criminals against whom we had been unable to secure evidence justifying arrest. Real identity at this time re­mained a mystery. Activities chiefly directed against vice. Was instrumental in obtaining arrest and conviction of leaders of powerful drug ring. Believed to have instigated murder of Henri Chastel, white slave trafficker, in Athens, at same period. Admitted killing of Golter, an­archist, in frustrating attempted assassination of Crown Prince Rudolf during state visit to London, following year.

Kidnapped Professor K. S. Vargan while War Office was considering purchase of Vargan's "electron cloud." Vargan was later killed by Norman Kent, member of Templar's gang, Kent himself being killed by Dr. Rayt Marius, foreign secret service agent also trying to secure Vargan's invention. Motive, established by Templar's sub­sequent letter published in the press, was alleged to be prevention of use in threatened war of what Templar thought to be inhuman method of slaughter. Both Tem­plar and Marius escaped and left England.

Three months later Templar reappeared in England in connection with second plot organized by Marius to promote war, which was unknown to ourselves. Marius finally escaped again and is now believed to be dead; but intrigue was exposed and Templar received free pardon for frustrating attempt to wreck Royal train.

Subsequently continued campaign of fighting crime by criminal methods. Obtained evidence in several cases and secured arrests; also believed, without proof, to have caused deaths of Francis Lemuel, vice trader, Jack Farn­berg, gunman, Ladek Kuzela, and others. Suspicion also exists in murder of Stephen Weald, alias Waldstein, and disappearance of Lord Essenden, during period when Templar was working to clear reputation of the late Assistant Commissioner Sir Francis Trelawney, under direct authority of present Chief Commissioner Sir Hamilton Dorn.

Activities continued, until he left England again six months ago.

Most of the exploits mentioned above, as well as many others of which for obvious reasons we have no defi­nite knowledge, have also been financially profitable; and Templar's fortune, acquired by these means, has been credibly estimated at £500,000.

Is also well known to police of France and Germany.

The photograph followed; and at the end of the sheaf were clipped on the brief reports of the departments through which the information had already been passed:

BUREAU OF CRIMINAL IDENTIFICATION: No record. Copies of photograph and description for­warded to Albany and Washington.

BUREAU OF CRIMINAL ALIEN INVESTIGATION: Inquiries proceeding.

MAIN OFFICE DIVISION: Inquiries proceeding.

The commissioner put up a hand and scratched his grey head. He read the letter through a second time, with his bushy eyebrows drawn down in a frown that wrinkled the bridge of his nose. His faded grey-blue eyes had flabby pouches under them, like blisters that have been drained without breaking the skin; and his face was lined with the same weari­ness. A grim, embittered soul weariness that was his reward for forty years of the futile battle with lawlessness—a law­lessness that walked arm in arm with those who were supposed to uphold the law.

"You think this may have something to do with the letter that was sent to Irboll?" he said, when he had finished the second reading.

Inspector John Fernack pushed back his battered hat and nodded—a curt, phlegmatic jerk of his head. He stabbed at another paper on the commissioner's desk with a square stubby forefinger.

"I'm guessing that way. See the monicker Scotland Yard says this guy goes under? The Saint, it says. Well, look at this drawing. I'm not much on art, and it looks to me like this guy Templar ain't so hot, either; but the idea's there. See that figger. The sort of thing kids draw when they first get hold of a pencil—just a circle for a head, and a straight line for the body and four more for the arms and legs, but you can see it's meant to be sumpn human. An' another circle floating on top of the head. When I was a kid I got took to a cathedral, once," said Fernack, as if he were confessing some dark blot on bis professional career, an' there were a lot of paintings of people with circles round their heads. They were saints, or sumpn; and those circles was supposed to be haloes." The com­missioner did not smile.

"What's happening about Irboll?" he asked.

"He comes up in the General Sessions Court to get his case adjourned again this afternoon," said Fernack disgustedly. He spat, with a twisted mouth, missing the cuspidor. "You know how it is. I never had much of a head for figgers, but I make it this'll be the thirty-first or maybe the thirty-second time he's been adjourned. Considering it's only two years now since he plugged Ionetzki, we've still got a chance to seeing him on the hot seat before we die of old age. One hell of a chance!"

Fernack's lips thinned into a hard, down-drawn line. He leaned forward across the desk, so that his big clenched fists crushed against the mahogany; and his eyes bored into Quis­trom's with a brightness like the simmer of burning acid.

"There's times when I wish I knew a guy like this Saint was here in New York—doing things like it says in that dos­sier," he said. "There's times when for two cents I'd resign from the force and do 'em myself. I'd sleep better nights if I knew there was things like that going on in this city.

"Ionetzki was my side kick, when I was a lieutenant in the Fifth Precinct—before they pushed me up here to headquar­ters. A square copper—and you know what that means. You've been through the works. You know what it's all about. Harness bull—gumshoe—precinct captain—you've been through it all, like the rest of us. Which makes you about the first commissioner that hasn't had to start learning what kinda uniform a cop wears. Don't get me wrong, Chief. I'm not handin' you any oil. But what I mean, you know how a guy feels—an' what it means to be able to say a guy was a square copper."

Fernack's iron hands opened and closed again on the edge of the desk.

"That's what Ionetski was," he said. "A square copper. Not very bright; but square. An' he walks square into a hold­up, where another copper might've decided to take a walk round the block and not hear anything. An' that yellow rat Irboll shoots him in the guts."

Quistrom did not answer; neither did he move. His tired eyes rested quietly on the tensed face of the man standing over him—rested there with a queer sympathy for that un­expected outburst. But the weariness in the eyes was graven too deep for anything to sweep it away.

"So we pull Irboll in," Fernack said, "and everybody knows he did it. And we beat him up. Yeah, we sweat him all right. But what the hell good does that do? A length of rubber hose ain't the same as a bullet in the guts. It doesn't make you die slowly, with your inside burning and your mouth chewed to rags so you won't scream out loud with the agony of it. It doesn't leave a good woman without her man, an' good kids without a father. But we sweat him. And then what?

"There's some greasy politician bawling out some judge he's got in his pocket. There's a lawyer around with habeas corpus—bail—alibis—anything. There's trials—with a tame judge on the bench, an' a packed jury, an' somebody in the district attorney's office who's taking his cut from the same place as the rest of 'em. There's transfers and objections and extraditions and adjournments an' retrials and appeals. It drags on till nobody can scarcely remember who Ionetzki was or what happened to him. All they know is they're tired of talking about Irboll.

"So maybe they acquit him. And maybe they send him to jail. Well, that suits him. He sits around and smokes cigars and listens to the radio; and after a few months, when the newspapers have got something else to talk about, the gover­nor of the jail slips him a free pardon, or the parole board gets together an' tells him to run along home and be a good boy or else . . . An' presently some other good guy gets a bullet in the guts from a yellow rat—an' who the hell cares?"

Quistrom's gaze turned downwards to the blotter in front of him. The slope of bis broad shoulders was an acquiescence, a grim, tight-lipped acceptance of a set of facts which it was beyond his power to answer for. And Fernack's heavy-boned body bent forward, jutting a rocklike jaw that was in strange contrast to the harsh crack in his voice.

"This guy, the Saint, sends Irboll a letter," Fernack said. "He says that whether the rap sticks or not, he's got a justice of his own that'll work where ours doesn't. He says that if Jack Irboll walks outa that court again this afternoon, with the other yellow rats crowding round him and slapping him on the back and looking sideways at us an' laughing out loud for us to hear—it'll be the last time it happens. That's all. A slug in the guts for another slug in the guts. An' maybe he'll do it. If half of what that letter you've got says is true, he will do it. He'll do just what I'd of done—just what I'd like to do. An' the papers'll scream it all over the sky, and make cracks about us being such bum policemen that we have to let some free-lance vigilante do a job for us that we haven't got the brains or the guts to do. An' then my job'll be to hunt that Saint guy down—take him into the back room of a station house and sweat a confession outa him with a base­ball bat—put him in court an' work like hell to send him to the chair—the guy who only did what you or me would of done if we weren't such lousy, white-livered four-flushers we think more about holding down a paycheck than getting on with the work we're paid to do!"

The commissioner raised his eyes.

"You'd do your duty, Fernack—that's all," he said. "What happens to the case afterwards—that case or any other—isn't your fault."

"Yeah—I'd do my duty," Fernack jeered bitterly. "I'd do it like I've always done it—like we've all been doing it for years. I'd sweep the floor clean again, an' hand the pan right back to the slobs who're waitin' to throw all the dirt back again—and some more with it."

Quistrom picked up the sheaf of papers and stared at them. There was a silence, in which Fernack's last words seemed to hum and strain through the room, building them­selves up like echo heaped on re-echo, till the air throbbed and thundered with their inaudible power. Fernack pulled out a handkerchief suddenly and wiped his face. He looked out of the window, out at the drab flat façade of the Police Academy and the grey haze that veiled the skyscrapers of upper New York. The pulse of the city beat into the room as he looked out, seeming to add itself to the deadened re­verberations of the savage denunciation that had hammered him out of his habitual restraint. The pulse of traffic ticking its way from block to block, the march of twelve million feet, the whirr of wheels and the mighty rhythm of pistons, the titter of lives being made and broken, the struggle and the majesty and the meanness and the splendour and the cor­ruption in which he had his place. . . .

Quistrom cleared his throat. The sound was slight, muted down to a tone that was neither reproof nor concurrence; but it broke the tension as cleanly as a phrased speech. Quistrom spoke a moment afterwards:

"You haven't found Templar yet?"

"No." Fernack's voice was level, rough, prosaic in re­sponse as it had been before; only the wintry shift of bis eyes recalled the things he had been saying. "Kestry and Bonacci have been lookin' for him. They tried most of the big hotels yesterday."

Quistrom nodded.

"Come and see me the minute you get any information."

Fernack went out, down the long bare stone corridor to his own office. At three-thirty that afternoon they fetched him to the courthouse to see how Jack Irboll died.

The Saint had arrived.

Chapter 1

How Simon Templar Cleaned His Gun, and Wallis Nather Perspired

The nun let herself into the tower suite of the Waldorf Astoria with a key which she produced from under the folds of her black robe—which even to the most kindly and broad-minded eye would have seemed somewhat odd. As she closed the door behind her she began to whistle—which even to the most kindly and broad-minded eye would have seemed still odder. And as she went into the sitting room she caught her toe in a rug, stumbled, and said "God damn!" in a distinctly masculine baritone, and laughed cheerfully an instant afterwards—which would doubtless have moved even the most kindly and broad-minded eye to blink rapidly and open itself wide.

But there was no such inquiring and impressionable eye to perform these acrobatics. There was only a square-chinned white-haired man in rimless spectacles, sitting in an easy chair with a book on his lap, who looked up with a nod and a quiet smile as the nun came in.

He closed his book, marking the place methodically, and stood up—a spare, vigorous figure in grey homespun,

"All right?" he queried.

"Fine," said the nun.

She pushed her veil back from a sleek black head, unbuttoned things and unhitched things, and threw off the long, stuffy draperies with a sigh of relief. She was revealed as a tall, wide-shouldered man in a blue silk shirt and the trousers of a light fresco suit—a man with gay blue eyes in a brown, piratical face, whose smile flashed a row of ivory teeth as he slapped his audience blithely on the back and sprawled into an armchair with a swing of lean athletic limbs.

"You took a big chance, Simon," said the older man, look­ing down at him; and Simon Templar laughed softly.

"And I had breakfast this morning," he said. He flipped a cigarette into his mouth, lighted it, and extinguished the match with a gesture of his hand that was an integral part of the smile. "My dear Bill, I've given up recording either of those earth-shaking events in my diary. They're things that we take for granted in this life of sin."

The other shook his head.

"You needn't have made it more dangerous."

"By sending that note?" The Saint grinned. "Bill, that was an act of devotion. A tribute to some great old days. If I hadn't sent it, I'd have been cheating my reputation. I'd have been letting myself down."

The Saint let a streak of smoke drift through his lips and gazed through the window at a square of blue sky.

"It goes back to some grand times—of which you've heard," he said quietly. "The Saint was a law of his own in those days, and that little drawing stood for battle and sudden death and all manner of mayhem. Some of us lived for it—worked for it—fought for it. One of us died for it. ... There was a time when any man who received a note like I sent to Irboll, with that signature, knew that there was nothing more he could do. And since we're out on this picnic, I'd like things to be the same—even if it's only for a little while."

He laughed again, a gentle lilt of a laugh that floated through the room like sunshine with a flicker of steel.

"Hence the bravado," said the Saint. "Of course that note made it more difficult—but that just gave us a chance to demonstrate our surpassing brilliance. And it was so easy. I had the gun under that outfit, and I caught him as he came out. Just once. . . . Then I let out a thrilling scream and rushed towards him. I was urging him to repent and confess his sins while they were looking for me. There was quite a crowd around, and I think nearly all of them were arrested."

He slipped an automatic from his pocket and removed the magazine. His long arm reached out for the cleaning materials on a side table which he had been using before he went out. He slipped a rectangle of flannelette through the loop of a weighted cord and pulled it through the barrel, humming musically to himself.

The white-haired man paced over to the window and stood there with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Kestry and Bonacci were here today," he said.

The Saint's humming continued for a couple of bars. He moistened his cleaning rag with three measured drops of oil.

"Too bad I missed them," he murmured. "I've always wanted to observe a brace of your hard-boiled New York cops being tactful with an innocent suspect."

"You may get your chance soon enough," said the other grimly, and Simon chuckled.

As a matter of fact, it was not surprising that Inspector John Fernack's team had failed to locate the Saint.

Kestry and Bonacci had had an interesting time. Passing dutifully from one hostelry to another, they had trampled under their large and useful feet a collection of expensive carpets that would have realized enough for the pair of them to retire on in great comfort. They had scanned registers until their eyes ached, discovering some highly informative traces of a remarkable family of John Smiths who appeared to spend their time leaping from one hotel to another with the agility of influenza germs, but finding no record of the transit of a certain Simon Templar. Before their official eyes, aggravating the aforesaid ache, had passed a procession of smooth and immaculate young gentlemen technically described as clerks but obviously ambassadors in disguise, who had condescend­ingly surveyed the photograph of their quarry and pityingly disclaimed recognition of any character of such low habits amongst their distinguished clientele. Bellboys in caravanserai after caravanserai had gazed knowingly at the large, useful feet on which the tour was conducted, and had whispered wisely to one another behind their hands. There had been an atmosphere of commiserating sapience about the au­diences of all their interviews which to a couple of seasoned sleuths professedly disguised as ordinary citizens was pecu­liarly distressing.

And it was scarcely to be expected that the chauffeur of a certain William K. Valcross, resident of the Waldorf Astoria, would have swum into their questioning ken. They were look­ing for a tall, dark man of about thirty, described as an addict of the most luxurious hotels; and they had looked for him with commendable doggedness, refusing to be lured into any byways of fantasy. Mr. Valcross being indubitably sixty years old and by no stretch of imagination resembling the photograph with which they had been provided, they passed him over without loss of time—and, with him, his maidservant, his manservant, his ox, his ass, and the stranger within his gates.

"If they do find me," remarked the Saint reflectively, "there will probably be harsh words."

He squinted approvingly down the shining barrel of his gun, secured the safety catch, and patted it affectionately into his pocket. Then he rose and stretched himself and went over to the window where Valcross was standing.

Before them was spread out the ragged panorama of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West. A narrow hump of rock sheltered from the Atlantic by the broad shoulder of Brooklyn, a mere ripple of stone in the ocean's inroads, on which the indomitable cussedness of Man had elected to build a city—and, not contented with the prodigious feat of over­coming such a dimensional difficulty at all, had made monuments of its defiance. Because the city could not expand laterally, it had expanded upwards; but the upward move­ment was a leap sculptured in stone, a flight born of necessity that had soared far beyond the standards of necessity, in a magnificent impulse of levitation that obliterated its own source. Molehills had become mountains in an art begotten of pure artifice. In the shadow of those grey and white pin­nacles had grown up a modern Baghdad where the ends of the earth came together. A greater Italian city than Rome, a greater Irish city than Dublin, a greater German city than Cologne; a city of dazzling wealth whose towers had once looked like peaks of solid gold to hungry eyes reaching be­yond the horizons of the Old World; a place that had sprung up from a lonely frontier to a metropolis, a central city, bow­ing to no other. A place where civilization and savagery had climbed alternately on each other's shoulders and reached their crest together. . . .

"This has always been my home," said Valcross, with a queer softness.

He turned his eyes from east to west in a glance that swept in the whole skyline.

"I know there are other cities; and they say that New York doesn't represent anything but itself. But this is where my life has been lived."

Simon said nothing. He was three thousand miles from his own home; but as he stood there at the window he saw what the older man was seeing, and he could feel what the other felt. He had been there long enough to sense the spell that New York could lay on a man who looked at it with a mind not too tired for wonder—the pride and amazement at which cynical sophisticates laughed, which could still move the heart of a man who was not ashamed to sink below the sur­face and touch the common humanity that is the builder of cities. And because Simon could understand, he knew what was in the other's mind before it was spoken.

"I have to send for you," Valcross said, "because there are other people, more powerful than I am, who don't feel like that. The people to whom it isn't a home, but a battle-field to be looted. That is why you have to come here, from the other side of the world, to help an old man with a job that's too big for him."

He turned suddenly and looked at the Saint again, taking him in from the sweep of his smoothly brushed hair to the stance of his tailored shoes—the rakish lines of the dark, reck­less face, the level mockery of the clear blue eyes, the rounded poise of muscular shoulders and the curve of the chest under the thin, jaunty shirt, the steady strength of one brown half-raised hand with the cigarette clipped lightly be­tween the first two fingers, the lean fighter's hips and the reach of long, immaculate legs. No man whom he had ever known could have been so elegantly at ease and at the same time so alert and dangerous—and he had known many men. No other man he had known could ever have measured up in his judgment to the stature of devil-may-care confidence that he had demanded in his own mind and set out to find—. and Valcross called himself a judge of men.

His hands fell on the Saint's shoulders; and they had to reach up to do it. He felt the slight, supple stir of the firm sinews and smiled.

"You might do it, son," he said. "You might clean up this rotten mess of crooks and grafters that's organizing itself to become the biggest thing this city of mine has ever had to fight. If you can't do it, I'll let myself be told for the first time that it's impossible. Just be a little bit careful. Don't swagger yourself into a jail or a shower of bullets before you've had a chance to do any good. I've seen those things happen before. Other fellows have tried—bigger men than you, son—stronger men than you, braver men than you, cleverer men than you——"

The Saint smiled back.

"Admitting for the moment that they ever lived," he re­marked amiably, "you never saw anyone luckier than me."

But his mind went back to the afternoon in Madrid when Valcross had sat next to him in the Plaza de Toros and had struck up a conversation which had resulted in them spending the evening together. It went back to a moment much later that night, after they had dined together off the indescribable suckling pig at Botin's, when they sat over whiskies and sodas in Valcross's room at the Ritz; when Valcross had admitted that he had spent three weeks chasing him around Europe solely to bring about that casual encounter, and had told him why. He could hear the old man's quiet voice as it had spoken to him that night

"They found him a couple of weeks later—I don't want to go into details. They aren't nice to think about, even now. . . . Two or three dozen men were pulled in and questioned. But maybe you don't know how things are done over there. These men kept their mouths shut. Some of them were let out. Some of them went up for trial. Maybe you think that means something.

"It doesn't. This business is giving work to all the gang­sters and gunmen it needs—all the rats and killers who found themselves falling out of the big money when there was nothing more to be made out of liquor. It's tied up by the same leaders, protected by the same crooked politicians—and it pays more. It's beating the same police system, for the same reason the old order beat it—because it's hooked up with the same political system that appoints police commis­sioners to do as they're told.

"There wasn't any doubt that these men they had were guilty. Fernack admitted it himself. He told me their records —everything that was known about them. But he couldn't do anything. They were bailed out, adjourned, extradited, postponed—all the legal tricks. In the end they were ac­quitted. I saw them walk out of the court grinning. If I'd had a gun with me I'd have tried to kill them then.

"But I'm an old man, and I wasn't trained for that sort of thing. I take it that you were. That's why I looked for you. I know some of the things you've done, and now I've met you in the flesh. I think it's the kind of job you might like. It may be the last job you'll ever attempt. But it's a job that only an outlaw can do.

"I've got plenty of money, and I'm expecting to spend it You can have anything you need to help you that money will buy. The one thing it won't buy is safety. You may find your­self in prison. You're even more likely to find yourself dead. I needn't try to fool you about that

"But if you can do your justice on these men who kid­napped and killed my son, I'll pay you one million dollars. I want to know whether you think it's worth your while—to­night."

And the Saint could feel the twitch of his own smile again, and hear himself saying: "I'd do it for nothing. When do we go?"

These things came back to him while Valcross's hands still rested on his shoulders; and it was the first time since that night in Madrid that he had given any thought to the mag­nitude of the task he had undertaken.

* * *

Simon Templar had been in New York before; but that was in the more spacious and leisurely days when only 8.04 of the gin was amateur bathtub brew, before the Woolworth Building was ranked as a bungalow, when lawbreakers were prosecuted for breaking the law more frequently than for having falsified their income-tax returns. Times Square and 42nd Street were running a shabby second to the boardwalk at Coney Island; the smart shops had moved off the Avenue one block east to Park; and the ever-swinging doors of the gilded saloons that had formerly decorated every street corner had gone down before that historic wave of righteousness which dyed the Statue of Liberty its present bilious shade of green.

But there was one place, one institution, that the Saint could have found in spite of far more sweeping changes in the geography of the city. Lexington Avenue could still be followed south to 45th Street; and on 45th Street Chris Cellini should still be entertaining his friends unless a tidal wave had removed him catastrophically from the trade he loved. And the Saint had heard no news of any tidal wave of suf­ficient dimensions for that.

In the circumstances, he had less than no right to be pay­ing calls at all; in a city even at that moment filled with angry and vigilant men who were still searching for him, he should have stayed hidden and been grateful for having any place to hide; but it would have taken more than the com­bined dudgeon of a dozen underworlds and police forces to keep him away. He had to eat; and in all the world there are no steaks like the steaks that Chris Cellini broils over an open fire with his own hands. The Saint walked with an easy, swinging stride, his hands tucked in his trouser pockets, and the brim of his hat tilted at a reckless angle over his eyes. The lean brown face under the brim of the hat was open for all the world to see; the blue eyes in it were as gay and careless as if he had been a favoured member of the Four Hundred sauntering forth towards an exclusive cocktail party; only the slight tingling in his superb lithe muscles was his reward for that light-hearted defiance of the laws of chance. If he were interfered with on his way—that would be just too bad. The Saint was prepared to raise merry hell that night; and he was sublimely indifferent to the details of where and how the fun broke loose.

But nobody interfered with him on that passage. He turned in, almost disappointed by the tameness of the evening, be­fore the basement entrance of a three-story brownstone house and pressed the bell at the side of the iron-barred door. After a moment the inner door opened, and the silhouette of a stocky shirt-sleeved man came out against the light.

"Hullo, Chris," drawled the Saint.

For a second or two he was not recognized; and then the man within let out an exclamation:

"Buon Dio! And where have you been for so many years?"

A bolt was drawn, and the portal was swung inwards. The Saint's hand was taken in an iron grip; another hand was slap­ping him on the back; his ears throbbed to a rich, jovial laughter.

"Where have you been, eh? Why do you stay away so long? Why didn't you tell me you were coming, so I could tell the boys to come along?"

"They aren't here tonight?" asked the Saint, spinning his hat dexterously onto a peg.

Chris shook his head.

"You ought to of telephoned, Simon."

"I'm just as glad they aren't here," said the Saint looking at him; and Chris was serious suddenly.

"I'm sorry—I forgot. . . . Well, you know you will be all right here." He smiled, and his rich voice brightened again. "You are always my friend, whatever happens."

He led the Saint down the passage towards the kitchen, with a brawny arm around his shoulders. The kitchen was the supplement to the one small dining-room that the place boasted—it was the sanctum sanctorum, a rendezvous that was more like a club than anything else, where those who were privileged to enter found a boisterous hospitality un­dreamed of in the starched expensive restaurants, where the diners are merely so many intruders, to be fed at a price and bowed stiffly out again. Although there were no familiar faces seated round the big communal table, the Saint felt the reawakening of an old happiness as he stepped into the brightly lighted room, with the smell of tobacco and wine and steaming vegetables and the clatter of plates and pans. It took him back at one leap to the ambrosial nights of drinking and endless argument, when all philosophies had been probed and all the world's problems settled, that he had known in that homely place.

"You'll have some sherry, eh?"

Simon nodded.

"And one of your steaks," he said.

He sat back and sipped the drink that Chris brought him, watching the room through half-closed eyes. The flash of jest and repartee, the crescendo of discussion and the ring of laughter, came to his ears like the echo of an unforgettable song. It was the same as it had always been—the same hu­morous camaraderie presided over and kept vigorously alive by Chris's own unchanging geniality. Why were there not more places like that in the world, he began to wonder— places where a host was more than a shopkeeper, and men threw off their cares and talked and laughed openly together, without fear or suspicion, expanding cleanly and fruitfully in the glow of wine and fellowship?

But he could only take that in a passing thought; for he had work to do that night. The steak came—thick, tender, succulent, melting in the mouth like butter; and he devoted himself to it with the wholehearted concentration which it deserved. Then, with his appetite assuaged, he leaned back with the remains of his wine and a fresh cigarette to pon­der the happenings of the day.

At all events he had made a good beginning. Irboll was very definitely gone; and the Saint inhaled with deep con­tentment as he recalled the manner of his going. He had no regrets for the foolhardy impulse that had made him attach his own personal signature uncompromisingly to the deed. Some of the terror that had once gone with those grotesque little drawings still clung to them in the memories of men who had feared them in the old days; and with a little adroit manipulation much of that terror could be built up again. It was good criminal psychology, and Simon was a great believer in the science. Curiously enough, that theatrical touch would mean more to a brazen underworld than anyone but an expert would have realized; for it is a fact that the hard-boiled gangster constitutes a large proportion of the dime novelette's most devoted public.

At any rate, it was a beginning. The matter of Irboll had been disposed of; but Irboll was quite a minor fish in the aquarium. Valcross had been explicit on that point. The small fry were all right in their appointed place: they could be neatly dismembered, drenched in ketchup and tabasco, exquisitely iced, and served up for a cocktail—on the way. But one million dollars of anybody's money was the price of the leaders of the shoal; and apart from the simple sport of rod and line, Simon Templar had a nebulous idea that he might be able to use a million dollars. Thinking it over, he had some difficulty in remembering a time when he could not have used a million dollars.

"If you offered me a glass of brandy," he murmured, as Chris passed the table, "I could drink a glass of brandy."

There was a late edition of the World-Telegram abandoned on the chair beside him, and Simon picked it up and cast an eye over the black banner of type spread across the front page. To his mild surprise he found that he was already a celebrity. An enthusiastic feature writer had launched him­self on the subject with justifiable zeal; and even the Saint was tempted to blush at the extravagant attributes with which his modest personality had been adorned. He read the story through with a quizzical eye and the faintest suspicion of a smile on his lips.

And then the smile disappeared. It slid away quite quietly, without any fuss. Only the lazy blue gaze that scanned the sheet steadied itself imperceptibly, focusing on a name that had cropped up once too often.

He had been waiting for that—searching, in a detached and comprehensive way, for an inspiration that would lead him to a renewal of the action—and the lavish detail splurged upon the circumstances of his latest sin by that enthusiastic feature writer had obliged. It was, at least, a suggestion.

The smile came back as he stood up, draining the glass that had been set in front of him. People who knew him said that the Saint was most dangerous when he smiled. He turned away and clapped Chris on the shoulder.

"I'm on my way," he announced; and Chris's face fell.

"What, so soon?"

Simon nodded. He dropped a bill on the sideboard.

"You still broil the best steaks in the world, Chris," he said with a smile. "I'll be back for another."

He went down the hall, humming a little tune. On his way he stopped by the telephone and picked up the directory. His finger ran down a long column of N's and came to rest below the name in the newspaper story that had held so much interest for him. He made a mental note of the address, patted the side pocket of his coat for the reassuring bulge of his automatic, and strolled on into the street

The clock in the ornate tower of the old Jefferson Market Court was striking nine when his cab deposited him on the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich. He stood at the curb and watched the taxi disappear round the next corner; and then he settled his hat and walked a few steps west on Tenth Street to pick up the number of the nearest house.

His destination was farther on. Still humming the same gentle breath of a tune, he continued his westward stroll with his hands in his pockets and a cigarette slanting up between his lips, with the same lithe, easy stride as he had gone down Lexington Avenue to his dinner — and with precisely the same philosophy. Only on this journey his feeling of pleasant exhilaration had quickened itself by the exact voltage of the difference between a gesture of bravado and a definite mis­sion. He had no plan of action, but neither had the Saint any reverence for plans. He went forth, as he had done so often in the past, with nothing but a sublime faith that the gods of all good buccaneers would provide. And there was the loaded automatic in his pocket, and the ivory-hilted throwing knife strapped to his left forearm under his sleeve, ready to his hand in case the gods should overdo their generosity. . . .

In a few minutes he had found the number he wanted. The house was of the Dutch colonial type, with its roots planted firmly in the late Victorian age. Its broad flat façade of red brick trimmed in white was unassuming enough; but it had a smug solidity reminiscent of the ancient Dutch burghers who had first shown their business acumen in the New World by purchasing the island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars and a jug of corn whisky — Simon had sometimes wondered how the local apostles of Temperance had ever brought themselves to inhabit a city that was tainted from its earliest conception with the Devil's Brew. It was an interesting metaphysical speculation which had nothing what­soever to do with the point of his presence there, and he abandoned it reluctantly in favour of the appealing potentialities of a narrow alley which he spotted on one side of the building.

His leisurely stroll past the house had given him plenty of time to assimilate a few other important details. Lights showed from the heavily curtained windows on the second floor, and the gloom at the far end of the alley was broken by a haze of diffused light. Knowing something about the particular style of architecture in question, Simon felt reason-ably sure that the last-mentioned light came from the library of the house. The illuminations indicated that someone was at home; and from the black sedan parked at the curb, with a low number on its license plate and the official city seal af­fixed above it, the Saint was entitled to deduce that the home lover was the gentleman with whom he was seeking earnest converse.

He turned back from the corner and retraced his tracks; and although to a casual eye his gait would have seemed just as lazy and nonchalant as before, there was a more elastic spring to his tread, a fettered swiftness to his movements, a razor-edged awareness in the blue eyes that scanned the side­walks, which had not been there when he first set out.

The legend painted in neat white letters at the opening of the alley proclaimed it the Trade Entrance; but Simon felt democratic. He turned into it without hesitation. The passage was barely three feet wide, bounded at one side by the wall of the building and at the other by a high board fence. As the Saint advanced, the light from the rear became brighter. He pressed himself dose to the darker shadows along the wall of the house and went on.

A blacker oblong of shadow in the wall ahead of him in­dicated a doorway. He passed it in one long stride and pulled up short at the end of the alley against an ornamental picket fence. For a moment he paused there, silent and motionless as a statue. His muscles were relaxed and calm; but every nerve was alert, linked up in an uncanny half-animal coor­dination of his senses which seemed to bend every faculty of his being to the aid of the one he was using. To his listening ears came the purling of water; and as a faint breeze stirred the foliage ahead of him it wafted to his arched nostrils the faint, delicate odour of lilacs.

A garden beyond, deduced the Saint. The dim light which he had seen from the street came from directly above him now, shining out of a tier of windows at the rear of the house. He watched the irregular rectangles of light printed on the grass beyond and saw them move, shifting their pattern with every breath of thin air. "Draperies at open windows," he added to his deductions and smiled invisibly in the darkness.

He swung a long, immaculately trousered leg over the picket fence, and a second later planted its mate beside it. His eyes had long since accustomed themselves to the gloom like a cat's, and the light from the windows above was more than sufficient to give him his bearings. In one swift survey he took in the enclosed garden plot, made out the fountain and arbour at the far end, and saw that the high board fence, after encircling the yard, terminated flush against the far side of the house. The geography couldn't have suited him better if it had been laid out to his own specifications.

He listened again, for one brief second, glanced at the case­ment above him, and padded across the garden to the far fence wall. The top was innocent of broken glass or other similar discouragements for the amateur housebreaker. Flex­ing the muscles of his thighs, Simon leaped upwards, and with a masterly blend of the techniques of a second-story man and a tight-rope walker gained the top of the fence.

From this precarious perch he surveyed the situation. again and found no fault with it. Its simplicity was almost puerile. The open windows through which the light shone were long French casements reaching down to within a foot of the fence level; and from where he stood it was an easy step across to the nearest sill. Simon took the step with blithe agility and an unclouded conscience.

* * *

It is possible that even in these disillusioned days there may survive a sprinkling of guileless souls whose visions of the private life of a Tammany judge have not been tainted by the cynicism of their time—a few virginal, unsullied minds that would have pictured the dispenser of their justice at this hour poring dutifully over one of the legal tomes that lined the walls of his library, or, possibly, in lighter mood, gambolling affectionately on the floor with his small curly-headed son.

Simon Templar, it must be confessed, was not one of these. The pristine luminance of his childhood faith had suffered too many shocks since the last day when he believed that the problems of overpopulation could be solved by a scientific extermination of storks. But it must also be admitted that he had never in his most optimistic hours expected to wedge him­self straight into an orchestra stall for a scene of domestic recreation like the one which confronted him.

Barely two yards away from him, Judge Wallis Nather, in the by no means meagre flesh, was engaged in thumbing over a voluptuous roll of golden-backed bills whose dimension made even Simon Templar stare.

The tally evidently proving satisfactory, His Honour placed the pile of bills on the glass-topped desk before him and patted it lovingly into a thick, orderly oblong. Then he re­trieved a sheet of paper from beneath a jade paperweight and glanced over the few lines written on it. With an ex­halation of breath that could almost be described as a snort, he crumpled the slip of paper into a ball and dropped it into the wastebasket beside him; and then he picked up the pile of bills again and ruffled the edges with his thumb, watching them as if their crisp rustle transmuted itself in his ears into the strains of some supernal symphony.

Taken by and large, it was a performance to which Simon Templar raised his hat. It had the tremendous simplicity of true greatness. In a deceitful, hypocritical world, where all the active population was scrambling frantically for all the dough it could get its hands on, and at the same time smugly proclaiming that money could not buy happiness, it burned like a bright candle of sincerity. Not for Wallis Nather were any of those pettifogging affectations. He had his dough; and if he believed that it could not buy happiness, he faced his melancholy destiny with dauntless courage.

Simon was almost apologetic about butting in. Nothing but stern necessity could have forced him to intrude the anti­climax of his presence into such a moment. But since he had to intrude, he saw no reason why the conventions should not be observed.

"Good-evening, Judge," he murmured politely.

He would always maintain that he did everything in his power to soften the blow—that he could not have introduced himself with any softer sympathy. And he could only sigh when he perceived that all his good intentions had misfired.

Nather did three things simultaneously. He dropped the sheaf of bills, spun round in his swivel chair as if it's axle had suddenly got tangled up in a high-speed power belt, and made a tentative pass for a side drawer of the desk. It was the last of these movements which never came to completion. He found himself staring into the levelled menace of a blue steel automatic, gaping into a pair of the most mocking blue eyes that he had ever seen. They were eyes that made something cringe at the back of his brain, eyes with a debonair gaze like the flick of a rapier thrust—eyes that held a greater terror for the Honourable Judge than the steady shape of the automatic.

He sat there, leaning slightly forward in his chair, with his heavy body stiffening and his fleshy nostrils dilating, for a space of ten terrific seconds. The only sound was the thud of his own heart and the suddenly abnormally loud tick of the clock that stood on his desk. And then, with an effort which brought the sweat out in beads on his forehead, he tried to shake off the supernatural fear that was winding its icy grip around his chest.

He started to heave himself forward, but he got no further than that brief convulsive start. With a faint, flippant smile, the Saint whirled the automatic once around his forefinger by the trigger guard and came on into the room. After that one derisive gesture the butt of the gun settled into his hand again, as smoothly and surely as if there were a socket there for it.

"Don't disturb yourself, comrade," purred the Saint. "I know the book of rules says that a host should always rise when receiving a guest, but just for once we'll forget the for­malities. Sit down, Your Honour—and keep on making your­self at home."

The judge shifted his frozen gaze from the automatic to the Saint's face. The cadences of that gentle, mocking voice drummed eerily on through his memory. It was a voice that matched the eyes and the debonair stance of the intruder— a voice that for some strange reason reawakened the clammy terror that he had known when he first looked up and met that cavalier blue gaze. The last of the colour drained out of his sallow cheeks, and twin pulses beat violently in his throat.

"What is the meaning of this infernal farce?" he demanded, and did not recognize the raw jaggedness of his own voice.

"If you sit down I'll tell you all about it," murmured the Saint. "If you don't—well, I noticed a slap-up funeral parlour right around the corner, with some jolly-looking coffins at bargain prices. And this is supposed to be a lucky month to die in."

The eyes of the two men clashed in an almost physical en­counter, like the blades of two duellists engaging; but the Saint's smile did not change. And presently Judge Nather sank back heavily in his chair, with his face a pasty white and the dew of perspiration on his upper lip.

"Thanks a lot," said the Saint.

He relaxed imperceptibly, loosening the crook of his finger fractionally from the trigger. With unaltered elegance he moved himself sideways to the door and turned the key in the lock with a flick of his wrist. Then he strolled unhurriedly back across the deep-piled rug towards His Honour.

He hitched his left hip up onto the corner of the mahogany desk and settled himself there, with one polished shoe swing­ing negligently back and forth. One challenging blue eye slid over the fallen heap of bills that lay between himself and his host, and his brows tilted speculatively.

He poked at the nest egg with the nozzle of his gun, scatter­ing the bills across the table in a golden cascade.

"Must be quite a cozy little total, Algernon," he remarked. "Almost enough to make me forget my principles."

"So it's robbery, eh?" grated Nather; and the Saint thought he could detect a note of relief in the words.

He shook his head rather sadly, turning wide innocent eyes on his victim.

"My dear Judge—you wrong me, I merely mentioned that I was struggling against temptation. This really started to be just a sociable interview. I want to know where you were born and why, and what penitentiary you graduated from, and what you think about disarmament, and whether your face was always so repulsive or if somebody trod on it. I wasn't thinking of stealing anything."

His gaze reverted to the sheaf of bills, meditatively, as though the thought was nevertheless penetrating slowly into his mind, against his will; and the judge moistened his dry lips.

"What is all this nonsense?" he croaked.

"Just a little friendly call." Simon poked at the bills again, wistfully. It was clear that the idea which Nather had dragged in was gaining ground. "You and your packet of berries— me and my little effort at housebreaking. On second thoughts," said the Saint, reaching a decision with apparent reluctance, "I am afraid I shall have to borrow these. Just sitting and looking at them like this is getting me all worked up."

Nather stiffened up in his chair, his flabby hands curling up into lumpish fists; but the gun in the Saint's hand never wavered from the even keel that held it centred on the help­less judge like a finger of fate. Nather's small eyes flickered like burning agates as the Saint gathered up the stack of notes with a sweeping gesture and dropped them into his pocket; but he did not try to challenge the threat of the .38 Colt that hovered a scanty yard from his midriff. His impotent wrath exploded in a staccato clip of words that rasped gropingly through the stillness.

"Damn you—I'll see that you don't get away with this!"

"I believe you would," agreed Simon amiably. "I admit that it isn't particularly tactful of me to do things like this to you, especially in this man's city. It's a pity you don't feel sociable. We might have had a lovely evening together, and then if I ever got caught and brought up in your court you'd burst into tears and direct the jury to acquit me—just like you'd have done with Jack Irboll eventually, if he hadn't had such a tragic accident. But I suppose one can't have everything. . . . . Never mind. Tell me how much I've borrowed and I'll give you a receipt."

The pallor was gone from Nather's cheeks, giving place to a savage flush. A globule of perspiration trickled down his cheek and hung quivering at the side of his jaw.

"There were twenty thousand dollars there," he stated hoarsely.

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

"Not so bad," he drawled quietly, "for blood money."

Nather's head snapped up, and a fleeting panic widened the irises of his eyes; but he said nothing. And the Saint smiled again.

"Pardon me. In the excitement of the moment, and all that sort of thing, I forgot to introduce myself. I'm afraid I've had you at a disadvantage. My name is Templar— Simon Templar"—he caught the flash of stark hypnotic fear that blanched the big man's lips, and grinned even more gently. "You may have heard of me. I am the Saint."

A tremor went over the man's throat, as he swallowed me­chanically out of a parched mouth. He spoke between twitch­ing lips.

"You're the man who sent Irboll that note."

"And killed him," said the Saint quietly. The lilt of banter was lingering only in the deepest undertones of his voice— the surface of it was as smooth and cold as a shaft of polished ice. "Don't forget that, Nather. You let him out—and I killed him."

The judge stirred in his chair, a movement that was no more than the uncontrollable reaction of nerves strained be­yond the limits of their strength. His mouth shaped an almost inaudible sentence.

"What do you want?"

"Well, I thought we might have a little chat." Simon's foot swung again, in that easy, untroubled pendulum. "I thought you might know things. You seem to have been quite a pal of Jack's. According to the paper I was reading tonight, you were the man who signed his permit to carry the gun that killed Ionetzki. You were the guy who signed the writ of habeas corpus to get Irboll out when they first pulled him in. You were the guy who adjourned him the last time he was brought up. And three years ago, it seems, you were the guy who acquitted our same friend Irboll along with four others who were tried for the murder of a kid named Billie Valcross. One way and another; Algernon, it looks like you must be quite a useful sort of friend for a bloke to have."

Chapter 2

How Simon Templar Eavesdropped to Some Advantage, and Inspector Fernack Went for a Ride

Nather did not try to answer. His body was sunk deep into his chair, and his eyes glared venomously up at the Saint out of a face that was contorted into a mask of hate and fury; but Simon had passed under glares like that before.

"Just before I came in," Simon remarked conversationally, "you were reading a scrap of paper that seemed to have some connection with those twenty grand I borrowed."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said the judge.

"No?" Simon's voice was honeyed, but none of the chill had gone out of his blue eyes. "Let me remind you. You screwed it up and plugged it into the wastebasket. It's there still—and I'd like to see it."

Nather's eyelids flickered.

"Why don't you get it?"

"Because I'd hate to give you the chance to catch me bend­ing—my tail's tender today. Fetch out that paper!"

His voice crisped up like the flick of a whiplash, and Wallis Nather jerked under the sting of it. But he made no move to obey.

A throbbing stillness settled over the room. The air was surcharged with the electric tension of it. The smile had faded from the Saint's lips when his voice tightened on that one curt command; and it had not come back. There was no vari­ation in the graceful ease with which he held his precarious perch on the edge of the desk, but the gentle rocking of his free foot had died away like the pendulum of a clock that had run down. And a thin pin-prickling temblor frisked up the Saint's spine as he realized that Nather did not mean to obey.

Instead, he realized that the judge was marshalling the last fragments of his strength and courage to make one desperate lunge for the automatic that held him crucified in his chair. It was fantastic, incredible; but there could be no mistake. The intuitive certainty had flashed through his mind at the same instant as it was born in the brain of the man before him. And Simon knew, with the same certainty, that just as surely as that desperate lunge was made, his own finger would constrict on the trigger, ending the argument beyond all human revision, without hesitation and without remorse.

"You wouldn't dare to shoot," said Nather throatily.

He said it more as if he were trying to convince himself; and the Saint's eyes held him on needle points of blue ice.

"The word isn't in my dictionary—and you ought to know it! This isn't a country where men carry guns for ornament, and I'm just getting acclimatized. . . ."

But even while Simon spoke, his brain was racing ahead to explore the reasons for the insane resolution that was whiten­ing the knuckles of the judge's twitching hands.

He felt convinced that such a man as Wallis Nather would not go up against that gaping automatic on account of a mere twenty thousand dollars. That was a sum of money which any man might legitimately be grieved to lose, but it was not large enough to tempt anyone but a starving desperado to the gam­ble that Nather was steeling himself to make.

There could be only one other motive—the words scrawled on that scrap of paper in the wastebasket. Something that was written on that crumpled slip of milled rag held dynamite enough to raise the ghostly hand of Nemesis itself. Something was recorded there that had the power to drive Nather forward inch by inch in his chair into the face of almost certain death. . . .

With fascinated eyes Simon watched the slight, nerve-tin­gling movements of the judge's body as Nather edged himself up for that suicidal assault on the gun. For the first time in his long and checkered career he felt himself a blind instru­ment in the working out of an inexorable fate. There was nothing more that he could do. The one metallic warning that he had delivered had passed unheeded. Only two things remained. In another few seconds Nather would lunge; and in that instant the automatic would bark its riposte of death. . . .

Simon was vaguely conscious of the quickening of his pulse. His mind reeled away to those trivial details that sometimes slip through the voids of an intolerable suspense—there must be servants somewhere in the place—but it would only take him three swift movements, before they could possibly reach the door, to scrawl his sign manual on the blotter, snatch the crumple of paper from the wastebasket, and vanish through the open windows into the darkness. ...

And then a bell exploded in the oppressive atmosphere of the room like a bomb. A telephone bell.

Its rhythmic double beat sheared through the silence like a guillotine, cleaving the overstrained chord of the spell with the blade of its familiar commonplaceness; and Nather's effort collapsed as if the same cleavage had snapped the support of his spine. He shuddered once and slouched back limply in his chair, passing a trembling hand across his eyes.

Simon smiled again. His shoe resumed its gentle swinging, and he swept a gay, mocking eye over the desk. There were two telephones on it—one of them clearly a house phone. On a small table to the right of the desk stood a third telephone, obviously a Siamese twin of the second, linked to the same out­side wire and intended for His Honour's secretary. The Saint reached out a long arm and brought it over onto his knee.

"Answer the call, brother," he suggested persuasively.

A wave of his automatic added its imponderable weight to the suggestion; but the fight had already been drained out of the judge's veins. With a grey drawn face he dragged one of the telephones towards him; and as he lifted the receiver Si­mon matched the movement on the extension line and slanted his gun over in a relentless arc to cover the other's heart. Def­initely it was not Mr. Wallis Nather's evening, but the Saint could not afford to be sentimental.

"Judge Nather speaking."

The duplicate receiver at the Saint's ear clicked to the vibra­tions of a clear feminine voice.

"This is Fay." The speech was crisp and incisive, but it had a rich pleasantness of music that very few feminine voices can maintain over the telephone—there was a rare quality in the sound that moved the Saint's blood with a queer, delightful expectation for which he could have given no account. It was just one of those voices. "The Big Fellow says you'd better stay home tonight," stated the voice. "He may want you."

Nather's eyes seemed to glaze over; then they switched to the Saint's face. Simon moved his gun under the desk lamp and edged it a little forward, and his gaze was as steady as the steel. Nather swallowed.

"I—I'll be here," he stammered.

"See that you are," came the terse conclusion, in the same voice of bewitching overtones; and then the wire went dead.

Watching Nather, the Saint knew that at least half the audi­ence had understood that cryptic conversation perfectly. The judge was staring vacantly ahead into space with the lifeless receiver still clapped to his ear and his mouth hung half open.

"Very interesting," said the Saint softly.

Nather's mouth closed jerkily. He replaced the receiver slowly on its hook and looked up.

"A client of mine," he said casually; but he was not casual enough.

"That's interesting, too," said the Saint. "I didn't know judges were supposed to have clients. I thought they were un­attached and impartial. . . . And she must be very beautiful, with a voice like that. Can it be, Algernon, that you are hiding something from me?"

Nather glowered up at him.

"How much longer are you going on with this preposterous performance?"

"Until it bores me. I'm easily amused," said the Saint, "and up to now I haven't yawned once. So far as I can see, the in­terview is progressing from good to better. All kinds of things are bobbing up every minute. This Big Fellow of yours, now: let's hear some more about him. I'm inquisitive."

Nather's eyes flinched wildly.

"I'm damned if I'll talk to you any more!"

"You're damned if you won't."

"You can go to hell."

"And the same applies," said the Saint equably.

He stood up and came round the desk, poising himself on straddled feet a pace in front of the judge, lean and dynam­ically balanced as a panther.

"You're very dense, Algernon," he remarked calmly. "You don't seem to get the idea at all. Maybe our little interlude of song and badinage has led you up the wrong tree. You can make a good guess why I'm here. You know that I didn't drop in just for the pleasure of admiring your classic profile. You know who I am. I don't care what you pick on, but you can tell me something. Any of your maidenly secrets ought to be worth listening to. Come through, Nather—or else . . ."

"Or else what?"

The Saint's gun moved forward until it pressed deep into the judge's flabby navel.

"Or else find out what Ionetzki and Jack Irboll know!"

Nather's heavy, sullen lips twisted back from yellowed teeth. And Simon jabbed the gun a notch further into the judge's stomach.

"And don't lie," said the Saint caressingly; "because I'm friendly to undertakers and that funeral parlour looked as if it could do with some business."

Nather passed a fevered tongue over hot dry lips. He had not lived through thirty years of intermittent contacts with the underworld without learning to recognize that queer bitter fibre in a man that makes him capable of murder. And the terrific inward struggle of that last moment before the telephone bell rang had blunted his vitality. The strength was not in him to screw himself to that desperate pitch again. He knew, beyond all question, that if he refused to talk, if he at­tempted to lie, that bantering tiger of a man who was squeez­ing the gun ever deeper into his vitals would destroy him as ruthlessly as he would have crushed an ant. Nather's larynx heaved twice, convulsively; and then, before he could speak, a muffled tread sounded beyond the locked door.

The Saint tautened, listening. From the ponderous, flat-footed measure of the stride he guessed it to belong to the butler. Nather looked up with a sudden gleam of hope; but the steady pressure of the gun muzzle in his yielding flesh did not vary by a milligram. The Saint's light whisper floated to his ears in an airy breath.

"Heroes die young," it murmured pithily.

A knock sounded on the door—a discreet knock that could only have been made by a servant. Nather, with his vengeful eyes frozen on the Saint, lip-read the order rather than heard it. "Ask him what he wants."

"Well?" Nather growled out.

"Inspector Fernack is downstairs, sir. He says it's impor­tant."

Nather stared at the Saint And the Saint smiled. Once again his reckless fighting lips shaped an almost inaudible command.

"Tell him to come up," Nather repeated after him, and could not believe that he was obeying an order.

He sat silent and rigid as the butler's footsteps receded and died away; and at last Simon withdrew the gun barrel which had for so long been boring insidiously into the judge's ab­domen.

"Better and better," said the Saint amazingly, flipping a cigarette into his lips. "I was wanting to meet Fernack."

Nather gaped at him incredulously. The situation was gro­tesque, unbelievable; and yet it had occurred. The automatic had been eased out of his belly—it was even then circling around the Saint's forefinger in one of those carelessly con­fident gyrations—which it certainly would not have been if any of the Saint's instructions had been disobeyed. The thing was beyond Nather's understanding. The glacial recklessness of it was subtly disquieting, in a colder and more deadly way than the menace of the gun had ever been: it argued a self-assurance that was frightening, and with that fear went the crawling question of whether the Saint's mind had leapt to some strat­egy of lightning cunning that Nather could not see.

"You'll get your chance," said the judge gruffly, searching for comprehension through a kind of fog.

Simon rasped the head of a match with his left thumbnail, applied the spluttering flame to the tip of his cigarette, and inhaled luxuriously. With a drift of smoke trailing back through his lips, he lounged towards a large tapestried Morris chair that stood between the French windows by which he had entered, and swung the chair around with his foot so that its heavily padded side was presented to the door through which the detective would enter.

He came back, overturned the wastebasket with an adroit twist of his toe, and picked up the crumpled scrap of paper and dropped it into his pocket in one smooth swoop that frus­trated the judge's flash of fight even before the idea was con­ceived. He pulled open the drawer to which Nather's hand had jumped at the first sound of his voice, and transferred the revolver from it to his hip. And then, with the scene set to his satisfaction, he walked back to his chosen chair and settled himself comfortably in it with his right leg draped gracefully over the arm.

He flicked a quarter inch of ash from his cigarette onto the expensive carpet.

"When your man announces Fernack," he directed, "open the door and let him in. And come back yourself. Under­stand?"

Nather did not understand. His brain was still fumbling dazedly for the catch that he could not find. On the face of it, it seemed like the answer to a prayer. With Fernack on the scene, there must be the chance of a way out for him—a way to retrieve that scrap of paper buried in Templar's pocket and to dispose of the Saint himself. But something told him that the calm smiling man in the chair was not legislating foe any such dénouement.

Simon read his thoughts.

"The gun won't be in evidence for a while, Nather. But it'll be handy. And at this range I'm a real sniper. I shouldn't want you to get excited over any notions of ganging up on me with Fernack. Somebody might get hurt."

Nather's gaze rested on him venomously.

"Some day," said the judge slowly, "I hope we shall meet again."

"In Sing Sing," suggested the Saint breezily. "Let's call it a date."

He drew on his cigarette again and listened to the returning footsteps of the butler, accompanied by a heavier, more de­termined tread. As a matter of fact, he was innocent of all sub­terfuge. There was nothing more behind his decision than ap­peared on the face of it. Fernack was there, and the Saint saw no reason why they should not meet. His whole evening had started off in the same spirit of open-minded expectation, and it had turned out very profitably. He waited the addition to his growing circle of acquaintances with no less kindly in­terest.

The butler's knuckles touched the door again.

"Inspector Fernack, sir."

Simon waved the judge on, and Nather crossed the room slowly. Every foot of the distance he was conscious of the con­cealed automatic that was aiming into his back. He snapped the key over in the lock and opened the door; and Inspector Fernack shouldered his brawny bulk across the threshold.

* * *

"Why the locked door, Judge?" Fernack inquired sourly. "Getting nervous?"

Nather closed the door without answering, and Simon de­cided to oblige.

"I did it," he explained. Fernack, who had not noticed him, whirled round in surprise; and Simon went on: "Would you mind locking it again, Judge—just as I told you?"

Nather hesitated for a second and then obeyed. Fernack stared blankly at the figure lounging in the armchair and then turned with puzzled eyes to the judge. He pushed back his battered fedora and pulled reflectively at the lobe of his left ear.

"What the hell is this?" he demanded; and Nather shrugged.

"A nut," he said tersely.

Simon ignored the insult, studying the man who had come in. On the whole, Fernack conformed closely enough to the pattern in his mind of what a New York police inspector was likely to be; but the reality went a little beyond that. Simon liked the belligerent honesty of the frosted grey eyes, the strength and courage of the iron jaw. He realized that, what­ever else Fernack might be, a good or bad detective, he fell straight and clean-cut into the narrow outline of that rarest thing in a country of corrupted law—a square dick. There were qualities in that mountain of toughened flesh that Simon Templar could have appreciated at any time; and he smiled at the man with an unaffected friendliness which he never expected to see returned.

"What ho, Inspector," he murmured affably. "You disap­point me. I was hoping to be recognized."

Fernack's eyes hardened in perplexity as he studied the Saint's tanned features. He shook his head.

"I seem to know your face, but I'm damned if I can place you."

"Maybe it was a bad photograph," conceded the Saint regretfully. "Those photographs usually are. All the same, seeing it was only this afternoon that you were handing out copies of it to the reporters ——"

Illumination hit Fernack like a blow.

His eyes flamed wide, and his jaw closed with a snap as he took three long strides across the room.

"By God—it's the Saint!"

"Himself. I didn't know you were a pal of Algernon's, but since you arrived I thought I might as well stay."

Fernack's shoulders were hunched, his pugnacious chin. jut­ting dangerously. In that instant shock of surprise, he had not paused to wonder why the Saint should be offering himself like an eager victim.

"I want you, young fellow," he grated.

He lunged forward, with his hand diving for his hip.

And then he pulled up short, a yard from the chair. His hand was poised in the air, barely two inches from the butt of his gun, but it made no attempt to travel further. The Saint did not seem to have moved, and his free foot was still swing­ing gently back and forth; but somehow the blue-black shape of an automatic had come into his right hand, and the round black snout of it was aimed accurately into the detective's breastbone.

"I'm sorry," said the Saint; and he meant it. "I hate being arrested, as you should have gathered from my biography. It's just one of those things that doesn't happen. My dear chap, you didn't really think I stayed on so you could take me home with you as a souvenir!"

Fernack glared at the gun speechlessly for a moment and shifted his gaze back to the Saint For a moment Simon was afraid—with a chin like that, it was an even chance that the detective might not be stopped; and Simon would have hated to shoot. But Fernack was not foolhardy. He had been bred and reared in a world where foolhardiness went down under an elemental law of the survival of the wisest; and Fernack faced facts. At that range the Saint could not miss, and the honour of the New York police would gain a purely temporary glow from the heroic suicide of an inspector.

Fernack grunted and straightened up with a shrug.

"What the hell is this?" he repeated.

"Just a social evening. Sit down and get the spirit of the party. Maybe you know some smoke-room stories, too."

Fernack pulled out a chair and sat down facing the Saint. After the first stupefaction of surprise was gone he accepted the situation with homely matter-of-factness. Since the initia­tive had been temporarily taken out of his hands, he could do no harm by listening.

"What are you doing here?" he asked; and there was the be­ginning of a grim respect in his voice.

Simon swung his gun around towards Nather and waved the judge back to his swivel chair.

"I might ask the same question," he remarked.

Fernack glanced at the judge thoughtfully; and Simon's quick eyes caught the distaste in his gaze, and realized that Nather saw it, too.

"You do your own asking," Fernack said dryly.

Simon surveyed the two men humorously.

"The two arms of the law," he commented reverently. "The guardian of the peace and the dispenser of justice. You could pose for a tableau. The pea-green incorruptibles."

Fernack frowned, and the judge squirmed slightly in his chair. There was a strained silence in the room, broken by the inspector's rough voice:

"Know any more fairy tales?"

"Plenty," said the Saint. "Once upon a time there was a great city, the richest city in the world. Its towers went up through the clouds, and its streets were paved with golden-backed Treasury notes, which were just as good as the old-fashioned fairy-tale paving stones and much easier to carry around. And all the people in it should have been very happy, what with Macy's Basement and Grover Whalen and a cathe­dral called Minsky's. But under the city there was a greedy octopus whose tentacles reached from the highest to the lowest places—and even outside the city, to the village greens of Canarsie and North Hoosick and a place called Far Rockaway where the Scottish citizens lived. And this octopus prospered and grew fat on a diet of blood and gold and the honour of men."

Fernack's bitter voice broke in on the recitation:

"That's too true to be funny."

"It wasn't meant to be—particularly. Fernack, you know why I'm here. I did a job for you this afternoon—one of those little jobs that Brother Nather is supposed to do and never seems to get around to. Ionetzki was quite a friend of yours, wasn't he?"

"You know a lot" The detective's fists knotted at his sides. "What next?"

"And Nather seems to have been quite a friend of Jack Irboll's. I'm doing your thinking for you. On account of this orgy of devotion, I blew along to see Nather; and I haven't been here half an hour before you blow in yourself. Well, a little while back I asked you why you were here, and I wasn't changing the subject"

Fernack's mouth tightened. His eyes swerved around to the judge; but Nather's blotchy face was as inexpressive as a slab of lard, except for the high-lights of perspiration on his flushed cheekbones. Fernack looked at the Saint again.

"You want a lot of questions answered for you," he stated flatly.

"I'll try another." Simon drew on his cigarette and looked at the detective through a haze of outgoing smoke. "Maybe you can translate something for me. Translate it into words of one syllable—and try to make me understand."

"What?"

"The Big Fellow says you'd better stay home tonight. He may want you!"

Simon flipped the quotation back hopefully enough, with­out a pause. It leapt across the air like the twang of a broken fiddle string, without giving the audience a half-second's grace in which to brace themselves or rehearse their reactions. But not even in his moments of most malicious optimism had the Saint expected the results which rewarded him.

He might have touched off a charge of blasting powder at their feet Nather caught his breath in a gasping hiccough like a man shot in the stomach. Fernack rose an inch from his chair on tautened thighs: his grey eyes bulged, then narrowed to glinting slits.

"Say that again!" he rasped.

"You don't get the idea." The Saint smiled, but his sapphire gaze was as quiet as the levelled gun. "I was just asking you to translate something. Can you tell me what it means?"

"Who wants to know?"

Nather scrambled up from his chair, his fists clenched and Ms face working. His face was putting in a big day.

"This is intolerable!" he barked hoarsely. "Isn't there anything you can do, Fernack, instead of sitting there listening to this—this maniac?"

Fernack glanced at him.

"Sure," he said briefly. "You take his gun away, and I'll do it."

"I'll report you to the commissioner!" Nather half screamed. "By God, I'll have you thrown out of the force! What do we have laws for when an armed hoodlum can hold me up in my own house under your very nose ——"

"And gangsters can shoot cops in broad daylight and get ac­quitted," added the Saint brightly. "Let's make it an indigna­tion meeting. I don't know what the country's coming to."

Nather choked; and the Saint stood up. There was something in the air which told him that the interview might more profit­ably be adjourned—and the judge's blustering outburst had nothing to do with it. With that intuitive certainty in his mind, he acted on it in cool disregard of dramatic sequence. That was the way he liked best to work, along his own paths, following a trail without any attempt to dictate the way it should go. But his evening had only just begun.

He strolled to the desk and lifted the lid of a bronze humi­dor. Selecting a cigar, he crackled it at his ear and sniffed it appreciatively.

"You know good tobacco if you don't know anything else good, Algernon," he murmured.

He discarded the stub of his cigarette and stuck the Corona-Corona at a jaunty angle between his teeth. As an after­thought, he tipped over the humidor and helped himself to a bonus handful of the same crop.

"Well, boys," he said, "you mustn't mind if I leave you. I never overstay my welcomes, and maybe you have some secrets to whisper in each other's ears." He backed strategically to the window and paused there to button his coat. "By the way," he said, "you needn't bother to rush up this window and wave me good-bye. These farewells always make me feel nervous." He spun the automatic around his finger for the last time and hefted it in his hand significantly. "I'd hate there to be any accidents at the last minute," said the Saint; and was gone.

Fernack stared at the rectangle of empty blackness and emp­tied his lungs in a long sigh. After some seconds he got up. He walked without haste to the open casements and stood there looking silently out into the dark; then he turned back to the room.

"That's a guy I could like," he said thoughtfully.

Nather squinted at him.

"You'd better get out, too," snarled the judge. "You'll hear more about this later ——"

"You'll hear more about it now," Fernack said coldly; and there was something in his voice which made Nather listen.

What the detective had to say did not take long. Fernack on business was not a man to expand himself wordily at any time, and any euphemistic phrases which he might have revolved in his mind had been driven out of it entirely. He stowed his kid gloves high up on the shelves of his disgust, and pro­pounded his assessment of the facts with a profane brutality that left Nather white and shaking.

Three minutes after Simon Templar's departure, Inspector Fernack was also barging out of the room, but by a more or­thodox route. He thundered down the stairs and shouldered aside the obsequious butler who made to open the door for him, and flung himself in behind the wheel of his prowl car with a short-winded violence that could not be accounted for solely by an ardent desire to remove himself from those pur­lieus. But his evening was not finished, either; though he did not know this at that moment.

He slammed the door, switched on the ignition, and un­locked the steering column; and then something hard probed its way gently but firmly into his ribs, and the soft voice of the Saint wafted into his right ear.

"Hold on, Inspector. You and I are going for a little joy ride!"

* * *

Inspector Fernack's jaw sagged.

Under the stress of his unrelieved emotions, he had not no­ticed the Saint's arrival or the noiseless opening of the other door. There was no reason on earth why he should have looked for either. According to his upbringing, it was so baldly axi­omatic that the Saint would by that time be skating through the traffic three or four miles away that he had not even given the subject a thought. The situation in which he found himself for the second time was so deliriously unexpected that he was temporarily paralyzed. And in that space of time Simon slid in onto the cushions beside him and closed the door.

Fernack's jaw closed, and he looked into the level blue eyes behind the gun.

"What's your idea?"

"We'll go places. I'd like to talk to you, and it's just possible you might like to talk to me. We'll go anywhere you like, bar Centre Street"

The granite lines of the detective's face twitched. There were limits to his capacity for boiling indignation, a point where the soaring curve of his wrath curled over and fell down a pre­cipitous switchback—and the gay audacity of the man at his side had boosted him to that point in two terrific jumps. For a second the detective's temper seemed to teeter breathlessly on the pinnacle like a trolley stalling on a scenic railway; and then it slipped down the gradient on the other side. . . .

"We'll try the park," Fernack said.

A heavy blucher tramped on the starter, and the gears meshed. They turned out of Tenth Street and swung north up Seventh Avenue. Simon leaned comfortably back and used the lighter on the dashboard for his cigar; nothing more was said until they were threading the tangle of traffic at Times Square.

"You know," said the Saint calmly, "I'm getting a bit tired of throwing this gun around. Couldn't we dispense with it and call this conference off the record?"

"Okay by me," rumbled Fernack, without taking his eyes from the road.

Simon dropped the automatic into the side pocket of his coat and relaxed into the whole-hearted enjoyment of his smoke. There was no disturbing doubt in his mind that he could rely absolutely on the truce. They rode on under the blazing lights and turned into Central Park by the wide en­trance at Columbus Circle.

A few hundred yards on, Fernack pulled in to the side of the road and killed the engine. He switched on his shortwave radio receiver and lighted his cigar deliberately before he turned. The glow of the tip as he inhaled revealed his rugged face set in a contour of phlegmatic inquiry.

"Well," he said, "what's the game?" Simon shrugged.

"The same as yours, more or less. You work within the law, and I work without it. We're travelling different roads, but they both go the same way. On the whole, my road seems to get places quicker than yours—as witness the late Mr. Irboll."

Fernack stared ahead over his dimmed lights.

"That's why I'm here, Saint. I told the commissioner this morning that I could love any man who rubbed out that rat. But you can't get away with it."

"I've been getting away with it pretty handsomely for a number of years," answered the Saint coolly.

"It's my job to take you in, sweat a confession out of you, and send you up for a session in the hot squat. Tomorrow I may be doing it. You're slick. I'll hand it to you. You're the only man who ever took me for a ride twice in one hour, and made me like it. But to me you're a crook—a killer. The un­derworld has a big enough edge in this town, without giving it any more. Officially, it's my job to put you away. That's how the cards are stacked."

"Fair enough. You couldn't come any cleaner with me than that. But I've got my own job, Fernack. I came here to do a bit of cleaning up in this town of yours, and you know how it needs it. But it's your business to see that I don't get anywhere. You're hired to see that all the thugs and racketeers in this town put on their goloshes when it rains, and tuck them up in their mufflers and make sure they don't catch cold. The citizens of New York pay you to make sure that the only killing is done by the guys with political connections—"

"So what?"

"So maybe, off the record, you'd answer a couple of ques­tions while there isn't an audience."

Fernack chewed the cigar round to the other corner of his mouth, took it out, and spat expertly over the side of the car. He put the cigar back and watched a traffic light turn from green to red.

"Keep on asking."

"What is this Big Fellow?"

The tip of Fernack's cigar reddened and died down, and he put one elbow on the wheel.

"I should like to know. Ordinarily, it's just a name that some of these big-time racketeers get called. They called Al Capone 'the Big Fellow.' All these rats have got egos a mile wide. 'The Big Boy'—'the Big Shot'—it's the same thing. It used to make 'em feel more important to have a handle like that tacked onto 'em, and it gave the small rats something to flatter 'em with."

"Used to?"

"Yeah." The detective's cigar moved through an arc at the end of his arm as he flicked ash into the road. "Nowadays things are kind of different. Nowadays when we talk about the Big Fellow we mean the guy nobody knows: the man who's behind Morrie Ualino and Dutch Kuhlmann and Red Mc­Guire and all the rest of 'em ­­and bigger than any of them ever were. The guy who's made himself the secret king of the biggest underworld empire that ever happened. . . . Where did you hear of him?" Fernack asked.

The Saint smiled.

"I was eavesdropping—it's one of my bad habits."

"At Nather's?"

"Draw your own conclusions."

Fernack turned in his seat, his massive body cramped by the wheel; and the grey eyes under his down-drawn shaggy brows reflected the reddish light of his cigar end.

"Get this," he said harshly. "Everything you say about me and the rest of the force may be true. I'm not arguing. That's the way this town's run, and it's been like that ever since I was pounding a beat. But I'm telling you that some day I'm gonna pin a rap on that mug, judge or no judge—an' make it stick! If that line you shot at me was said to Nather, it means there's something dirty brewing around here tonight; and if there's any way of tying Nather in with it, I'll nail him. And I'll see that he gets the works all the way up the line!"

"Why should it mean that?"

"Because Nather is just another stooge of the Big Fellow's, the same as Irboll was. Listen: If that bunch is going out to­night, there's always the chance something may go blooey. One or two of 'em may get taken in by the cops. That means they'll get beaten up. Don't kid yourself. When we get those guys in the station house we don't pat them with paper streamers. Mostly the only punishment they ever get is what we give them in the back room. An' they don't like it. You can be as tough as you like and never let out a peep, but a strong-arm dick with a yard of rubber hose can still hurt you. So when a bunch is smart, they have a lawyer ready to dash in with writs of habeas corpus before we can even get started on 'em—and those writs have to be signed by a judge. One day a law will be passed to allow racketeers to make out the writs themselves an' save everyone a lot of expense, but at present you still gotta find a judge at home."

"I see," said the Saint gently.

Fernack grunted, and his fingers hardened on the cigar.

"Who gave that order?" he grated.

"I haven't the faintest idea," said the Saint untruthfully. He sympathized with Fernack, but it was too late in his career to overcome an ingrained objection to letting any detective get ahead of him. "The speech came over the phone, and that's all there was."

"What did you go to Nather's for?"

"I asked you the same question, but I don't have to repeat it. I stayed right under the window and listened."

Fernack's cigar fell out of his mouth and struck his knee with a fountain of sparks.

"You what?"

"Just in case you'd decided to follow me," explained the Saint blandly. "This business of haring for the tall timber in front of squads of infuriated policemen is all right for Charlie Chaplin, but it's a bit undignified for me." He grinned rem­iniscently. "I admired your vocabulary," he said.

The detective groped elaborately for his fallen weed.

"I had to do it," he growled. "That son of a——pulled just one too many when he acquitted Irboll. I may be transferred for it, but I couldn't of stayed away if I'd been told beforehand that I was going to wake up tomorrow pounding a two-mile beat out on Staten Island."

Simon put his head back and gazed up at the low roof of the sedan. "What's the line-up?"

Fernack leaned on the wheel and smoked, staring straight ahead again. Taxis and cars thrummed past them in conflicting streams, and up in a tree over their heads a night bird bragged about what he was going to do to his wife when she came home.

The traffic lights changed twice before he answered.

"Up at the top of this city," he said slowly, "there's a po­litical organization called Tammany Hall. They're the boys who fill all the public offices, and before you were born they'd made electioneering into such an exact science that they just don't even think about it any more. They turn out their voters like an army parade, their hired hoodlums guard the polls, and their employees count the votes. The boss of Tammany Hall is a man called Robert Orcread, and the nickname he gave himself is Honest Bob. Outside the City Hall there's a fine bit of a statue called Civic Virtue, and inside there's the biggest collection of crooks and grafters that ever ran a city.

"There's a district attorney named Marcus Yeald who's so crooked you could use him to pull corks with; and his cases come up before a row of judges like Nather. Things are dif­ferent here from what they are in your country. Over here our judges get elected; and every time a case comes up before them they have to sit down and figure out what the guy's po­litical pull is, or maybe somebody higher up just tells 'em so they won't make any mistake, because if a judge sends a guy up the river who's got a big political drag there's going to be somebody else sittin' in his chair when the next election comes round.

"The politicians appoint the police commissioner, and he does what they say and lays off when they say lay off. The first mistake they ever made was when they put Quistrom in. He takes orders from nobody; and somehow he's gotten himself so well liked and respected by the decent element in this city that even the politicians daren't try and chisel him out now— it'd make too much noise. But it all comes to the same thing in the end. If we send a guy up for trial, he's still got to be prosecuted by Marcus Yeald or one of Yeald's assistants, and a judge like Nather sits on the case an' sees that everything is nice and friendly.

"There's a bunch of rats an' killers in this town that stops nowhere, and they play ball with the politicians, and the pol­iticians play ball with them. We've had kidnapping and mur­der and extortion, and we're goin' to have more. That's the Big Fellow's game, and it's the perfect racket. There's more money in it than there ever was in liquor—and there's less of an answer to it. Look at it yourself. If it was your son, or your wife, or your brother, or your sister, that was bein' held for ransom, and you knew that the rats who were holding 'em were as soft-hearted as a lot of rattlesnakes—wouldn't you pay?"

The Saint nodded silently. Fernack's slow, dispassionate summary added little enough to what he already knew, but it filled in and coloured the picture for him. He had some new names to think about; and that realization brought him back to the question in his mind that he had tactfully postponed.

"Who is Papulos?" he asked; and Fernack grinned wryly.

"You've been getting around. He's pay-off man for Morrie Ualino."

"Pay-off man for Ualino, eh?" Simon might have guessed the answer, but he gave no sign. "And what do you know about Morrie?"

"He's one of the big shots I mentioned just now. One of these black-haired, shiny guys, as good-lookin' as Rudolf Valen­tino if you happen to like those kind of looks—lives like a swell, acts an' talks like a gent, rides around in an armoured sedan, and has two trigger men always walking in his shadow."

"What's he do for a living?"

"Runs one of the biggest travelling poker games on Broad­way. He's slick—and poison. I've taken him to Ossining once, an' Dannemora once, myself, but he never stayed there long enough to wear through a pair of socks." Fernack's cigar spun through the darkness in a glowing parabola and hit the road with a splutter of fire. "Go get him, son, if you want him. I've told you all I can."

"Where do I find him?"

Fernack jerked his head round and stared. The question had been put as casually as if the Saint had been asking for the address of a candy shop; but Simon's face was quite seri­ous.

Fernack turned his eyes back to the road; and after a while he said: "Down on 49th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, there's a joint called Charley's Place. It might be worth paying a visit—if you can get in. There's a girl called Fay Edwards who might——"

The inspector broke off short. A third voice had cut eerily into the conversation—an impersonal metallic voice that came from the radio under the dashboard:

"Calling all cars. Calling all cars. Viola Inselheim, age six, kidnapped from home in Sutton Place . . ."

Fernack snapped upright, and the lights of a passing car showed his face graven in lines of iron.

"Good God!" he said. "It's happened!"

He was switching on the ignition even while the metallic voice droned on.

". . . Kidnappers escaped in maroon sedan. New York li­cense plate. First three serial numbers 5F 3 or 5 F 8. Inspector Fernack call dispatcher. Inspector Fernack call dispatcher. Calling all cars ..."

The engine surged to life with a staccato roar of power, and Simon abruptly decided to be on his way.

"Hold it!" he called, as the car slipped forward. "That's your party."

Fernack's reply was lost in the song of the motor as it picked up speed. Simon opened the door and climbed out onto the running board. "Thanks for the ride," he said and dropped nimbly to the receding asphalt.

He stood under a tree and listened to the distancing wail of the car's imperative siren, and a slight smile came to his lips. The impulse that had led him back to Fernack had borne fruit beyond his highest hopes.

Beyond Nather was Papulos, beyond Papulos was Morrie Ualino, beyond Ualino was the Big Fellow. And crumpled into the Saint's side pocket, beside his gun, was the slip of paper that had accompanied a gift of twenty thousand dollars which Nather had made such an unsuccessful effort to defend. The inscription on the paper—as Simon had read it while he waited for Fernack under the library window—said, quite simply: "Thanks. Papulos."

It seemed logical to take the rungs of the ladder in their nat­ural sequence. And if Simon remembered that this process should also lead him towards the mysterious Fay Edwards, he was only human.

Chapter 3

How Simon Templar Took a Gander at Mr. Papulos, and Morrie Ualino Took a Sock at the Saint

Valcross was waiting for him when he got back to the Waldorf Astoria, reaching the tower suite by the private eleva­tor as before. The old man stood up with a quick smile.

"I'm glad you're back, Simon," he said. "For a little while I was wondering if even you were finding things too difficult."

The Saint laughed, spiralling his hat dexterously across the room to the chifferobe. He busied himself with a glass, a bottle, some cracked ice, and a siphon.

"I was longer than I expected to be," he explained. "You see, I had to take Inspector Fernack for a ride."

His eyes twinkled at Valcross tantalizingly over the rim of his glass. Valcross waited patiently for the exposition that had to come, humouring the Saint with the air of flabbergasted perplexity that was expected of him. Simon carried his drink to an armchair, relaxed into it, lighted a cigarette, and inhaled luxuriously, all in a theatrical silence.

"Thank God the humble Players' can be bought here for twenty cents," he remarked at length. "Your American concoctions are a sin against nicotine, Bill. I always thought the Spaniards smoked the worst cigarettes in the world; but I had to come here to find out that tobacco could be toasted, boiled, fried, impregnated with menthol, ground into a loose powder, enclosed in a tube of blotting paper, and still unloaded on an unsuspecting public."

Valcross smiled.

"If that's all you mean to tell me, I'll go back to my book," he said; and Simon relented.

"I was thinking it over on my way home," he concluded, at the end of his story, "and I'm coming to the conclusion that there must be something in this riding business. In fact, I'm going to be taken for a ride myself."

Valcross shook his head.

"I shouldn't advise it," he said. "The experience is often fatal."

"Not to me," said the Saint. "I shall tell you more about that presently, Bill—the more I think about it, the more it seems like the most promising avenue at this moment. But while you're pouring me out another drink, I wish you'd think of a reason why anyone should be so heartless as to kidnap a child who was already suffering more than her share of the world's woes with a name like Viola Inselheim."

Valcross picked up a telephone directory and scratched his head over it.

"Sutton Place, you said?" He looked through the book, found a place, and deposited the open volume on Simon's knee. Simon glanced over the Inselheims and located a certain Ezekiel of that tribe whose address was in Sutton Place. "I wondered if that would be the man," Valcross said.

The name meant nothing in Simon Templar's hierarchy.

"Who is he?"

"Zeke Inselheim? He's one of the richest brokers in New York City."

Simon closed the book.

"So that's why Nather is staying home tonight!"

He took the glass that Valcross refilled for him, and smoked in silence. The reason for the all-car call, and Fernack's pertur­bation, became plainer. And the idea of carrying on the night in the same spirit as he had begun it appealed to him with in­creasing voluptuousness. Presently he finished his drink and stood up.

"Would you like to order me some coffee? I think I'll be going out again soon."

Valcross looked at him steadily.

"You've done a lot today. Couldn't you take a rest?"

"Would you have taken a rest if you were Zeke Inselheim?" Simon asked. "I'd rather like to be taken for that ride tonight."

He was back in the living room in ten minutes, fresh and spruce from a cold shower, with his dark hair smoothly brushed and his gay blue eyes as bright and clear as a summer morning. His shirt was open at the neck as he had slipped it on when he emerged from the bathroom, and the left sleeve was rolled up to the elbow. He was adjusting the straps of a curious kind of sheath that lay snugly along his left forearm: the exquisitely carved ivory hilt of the knife it carried lay close to his wrist, where his sleeve would just cover it when it was rolled down.

Valcross poured the coffee and watched him. There was a dynamic power in that sinewy frame, a sense of magnificent recklessness and vital pride, that was flamboyantly inspiring.

"If I were twenty years younger," Valcross said quietly, "I'd be going with you."

Simon laughed.

"If there were four more of you, it wouldn't make any dif­ference." He turned his arm over, displaying the sheathed knife for a moment before he rolled down his sleeve. "Belle and I will do all that has to be done on this journey."

In ten minutes more he was in a taxi, riding westwards through the ravines of the city. The vast office buildings of Fifth Avenue, abandoned for the night to cleaners and care­takers, reared their geometrical patterns of lighted windows against the dark sky like huge illuminated honeycombs. The cab crossed Broadway and Seventh Avenue, plunging through the drenched luminance of massed theatre and cinema and cabaret signs like a swimmer diving through a wave, and floated out on the other side in the calmer channel of faintly odorous gloom in which a red neon tube spelt out the legend: "Charley's Place."

The house was an indeterminate, rather dingy structure of the kind that flattens out the skyline westwards of Seventh Avenue, where the orgy of futuristic building which gave birth to Chrysler's Needle has yet to spread. It shared with its neigh­bours the depressing suggestion of belonging to a community of nondescript persons who had once resolved to attain some sort of individuality, and who had achieved their ambition by adopting various distinctive ways of being nondescript. The windows on the ground level were covered by greenish cur­tains which acquired a phosphorescent kind of luminousness from the lights behind them.

Simon rang the bell, and in a few moments a grille in the heavy oak door opened. It was a situation where nothing could be done without bluff; and the bluff had to be made on a blind chance.

"My name's Simon," said "the Saint. "Fay Edwards sent me."

The man inside shook his head.

"Fay ain't come in yet. Want to wait for her?"

"Maybe I can get a drink while I'm waiting," Simon shrugged.

His manner was without concern or eagerness—it struck ex­actly the right note of harmless nonchalance. If the Saint had been as innocent as he looked he could have done it no better; and the doorkeeper peered up and down the street and un­latched the door.

Simon went through and hooked his hat on a peg. Beyond the tiny hall was a spacious bar which seemed to occupy the remainder of the front part of the building. The tables were fairly well filled with young-old men of the smoothly blue-chinned type, tailored into the tight-fitting kind of coat which displays to such advantage the bulges of muscle on the biceps and the upper back. Their faces, as they glanced up in auto­matic silence at the Saint's entrance, had a uniform air of fro­zen impassivity, particularly about the eyes, like fish that have been in cold storage for many years. Scattered among their company was a sprinkling of the amply curved pudding-faced blondes who may be recognized anywhere as belonging to the genus known as "gangsters' molls"—it is a curious fact that few of the men who shoot their way through amazing wealth to sophistication in almost all their appetites ever acquire a sophisticated taste in femininity.

Simon gave the occupants no more than a casual first glance, absorbing the general background in one broad survey. He walked across to the bar and hitched himself onto a high stool. One of the white-coated bartenders set up a glass of ice water and waited.

"Make it a rye highball," said the Saint

By the time the drink had been prepared the mutter of con­versation in the room had resumed its normal pitch. Simon took a sip from his glass and stopped the bartender before he could move away.

"Just a minute," said the Saint. "What's your name?"

The man had an oval, olive-hued, expressionless face, with beautifully lashed brown eyes and glossily waved black hair that made his age difficult to determine.

"My name is Toni," he stated.

"Congratulations," said the Saint. "My name is Simon. From Detroit."

The man nodded unemotionally, with his soft dark eyes fixed on the Saint's face.

"From Detroit," he repeated, as if memorizing a message.

"They call me Aces Simon," said the Saint evenly. The bar­tender's unwrinkled face responded as much as a wooden im­age might have done. "I'm told there are some players in this city who know what big money looks like."

"What do you want?"

"I thought I might get a game somewhere." Simon's blue gaze held the bartender's as steadily as the other was watching him. "I want to play with Morrie Ualino."

The man wiped his cloth slowly across the bar, drying off invisible specks of moisture.

"I don't know anything. I have to ask the boss."

He turned and went through a curtain at the back of the bar; and while he was gone Simon finished his drink. The bluff and the gamble went on. If anything went wrong at this stage it would be highly unfortunate—what might happen later on was another matter. But the Saint's nerves were like ice. After some minutes the man came back.

"Morrie Ualino don't play tonight. Papulos is playing. You want a game?"

Simon did not move a muscle. Through Papulos the trail went to Ualino, and he had never expected to get near Ualino in the first jump. But if Ualino were not playing that night— if he were engaged elsewhere—it was an added chance that the radio message which Fernack had received might supply a reason. The azure steel came and went in the Saint's eyes, but all the bartender saw was a disappointed shrug.

"I didn't come here to cut for pennies. Who is this guy Papulos?"

Toni's soft brown eyes held an imperceptible glint of con­temptuous humour.

"If you want to play big, I think he will give you all you want. Afterwards you can meet Ualino. You want to go?"

"Well, it might give me some practice. I haven't anything else to do."

Toni emptied an ashtray and wiped it out. From a distance of a few yards he would have seemed simply to be filling up the time until another customer wanted him, without talking to anyone at all.

"They're at the Graylands Hotel—just up the street on the other side. Suite 1713. Tell them Charley Quain sent you."

"Okay." Simon stood up, spreading a bill on the counter. "And thanks."

"Good luck," said Toni and watched him go with eyes as gentle as a deer's.

The Graylands Hotel lay just off Seventh Avenue. It was one of those caravanserais which are always full and yet always seem to be deserted, with the few guests who were visible hustling furtively between the sanctity of their private rooms and the anonymity of the street. Business executives detained at the office might well have stayed there, but none of them would ever have given it as his address. It had an air of rather forlorn splendour, like a blowzy woman in gold brocade, and in spite of the emptiness of its public rooms there was a sup­pressed atmosphere of clandestine and irregular life teeming in the uncharted cubicles above.

The gilded elevator, operated by a pimply youth with a precociously salacious air of being privy to all the irregulari­ties that had ever ridden in it, whisked Simon to the seven­teenth floor and decanted him into a dimly lighted corridor. He found Suite 1713 and knocked. After a brief pause a key clicked over and the portal opened eight inches. A pair of cold dispassionate eyes surveyed him slowly.

"My name's Simon," said the Saint He began to feel that he was admitting a lot of undesirable people to an easy familiar­ity that evening, but the alias seemed as good as any, and cer­tainly preferable to such a fictitious name as, for instance, Wigglesnoot. Charley Quain sent me around."

The eyes that studied him received the information as en­thusiastically as two glass beads.

"Simon, eh? From Denver?"

"Detroit," said the Saint. "They call me Aces."

The guard's head dropped through a passionless half-inch which might have been taken for a nod. He allowed the door to open wider.

"Okay, Aces. We heard you were on your way. If you're lookin' for action I guess you can get it here."

The Saint smiled and sauntered through. He found himself in a rather large foyer, formally furnished. At the far end, two rooms gave off it on either side, and from the closed door on the right came the mutter of an occasional curt voice, the crisp clicking of chips, and the insidious rustle and lisp of cards. It appeared to Simon that he was definitely on his way. Some­where beyond that door Mr. Papulos was in session, and the Saint figured it was high time he took a gander at this Mr. Papulos.

* * *

The guard threw open the second door, and Simon went on in. He saw that the place had originally been intended for a sitting room; but all the normal furniture had been pushed back against the walls, leaving plenty of space for the large round table covered with a green baize cloth which now occu­pied the centre of the floor. Fringing the circle of men seated around the board were a few hard, lean-faced gentry whose air of hawk-eyed detachment immediately removed any suspicion that they might be there to minister to the sick in case one of the players was taken sick. A single brilliant light fix­ture blazed overhead, flooding a cone of white luminance over the ring of players. As the Saint came in, every face turned towards him.

"Aces Simon, of Detroit," announced the guard. As a cynical afterthought he added: "He's lookin' for some action, gents."

The lean-faced watchers in the outer shadows relaxed and crossed their legs again; the players acknowledged the intro­duction with curt nods and returned immediately to their game.

Simon strolled across to the table and pulled out a vacant chair opposite the dealer. One casual glance around the board was enough to show him that the guard had had reason to be cynical—the play was sufficiently high to clean out any small­time gambler in one deal. He lighted a cigarette and studied the faces of the players. They were a variegated crew, ranging from the elite of the underworld to the tawdrier satellites of the upper. On his right was a stout gentleman whose faded eyes held the unmistakable buccaneering gleam of a prominent rotarian from Grand Rapids out on a tear in the big city.

The stout gentleman leaned over confidentially, exhaling a powerful aroma of young Bourbon.

"Lookin' for action, eh?" he wheezed. "Well, this is the place for it Eh? Eh?"

"Eh?" asked the Saint, momentarily infected by the spirit of the thing.

"I said, this is the place for action, isn't it, eh?" repeated the devotee of rotation with laborious good will; and a thin little smile edged the Saint's mouth.

"Brother," he assented with conviction, "you don't know the half of it."

His eyes were fixed on the dealer, who, from the stacks of chips and neat wads of bills before him, appeared to be also the organizer of the game; and as the seconds went by it be­came plainer and plainer to the Saint that there was at least one man at that table who would never be asked to pose for the central nymph in a picture to be entitled Came the Dawn. The swarthy pockmarked face seemed to have been developed from the bald side of a roughly cubical head. Two small black eyes, affectionately close together, nested high up under the eaves of a pair of prominent frontal bones; and the nose be­tween them had lost any pretensions to classic symmetry which it might once have had in some ancient argument with a beer bottle. A thick neck creased with rolls of fat linked this pellucid window of the soul with a gross bulk of body which apparently completed the wodge of mortal clay known to the world as Papulos. It was not an aesthetic spectacle by any standards; but the Saint had come there to take a gander at Mr. Papulos, and he was taking it. And while he looked, the black beady eyes switched up to meet his gaze.

"Well, Mr. Simon, how much is it to be? The whites are Cs, the reds are finifs, and the blues are G.'s."

The voice was harshly nasal, with a habitual sneer lurking in it. It was the kind of voice which no healthy outlaw could have heard without being moved to pleasant thoughts of murder; but the Saint smiled and blew a smoke ring.

"I'll take twenty grand—and you can keep it in the blues."

There was a sudden quiet in the room. The other players hitched up closer in their chairs; and the lean-faced watchers in the outer shadows eased their right hips instinctively away from obstructing objects. Without the twitch of an eyebrow Papulos counted out two stacks of chips and spilled them in the centre of the table.

"Twenty grand," he said laconically. "Let's see your dough." His eyes levelled opaquely across the table. "Or is it on the cuff?"

"No," answered the Saint coolly. "It's in the pants."

"Let's see it."

The rotarian from Grand Rapids took a gulp at the drink beside him and stared owlishly at the table; and the Saint reached into his trouser pocket. He felt the roll of bills there; felt something else—the crumpled slip of paper that had orig­inally accompanied them. Securing this telltale bit of evidence with his little finger, he pulled the bills from his pocket and counted them out onto the board.

It was an admirable performance, as the Saint's little cameos of legerdemain always were. Under the Greek's watchful eyes he was measuring out twenty thousand dollars, and the scrap of paper had apparently slipped in somewhere among the notes. Halfway through the count it fell out, face upwards. Simon stopped counting; then he made a very clumsy grab for it. The grab was so slow and clumsy that it was easy for Papulos to catch his wrist.

"Wait a minute." The Greek's voice was a sudden rasp of menace in the stillness.

He flicked the scrap of paper towards him with one finger and stared at it for a moment. Then he shifted his gaze to the banknotes. He looked up slowly, with two spots of colour flam­ing in his swarthy cheeks.

"Where did you get that money?"

He was still holding the Saint's right wrist, and his grip had tightened rather than relaxed. Simon glowered at him guiltily.

"What's the matter with it?" he flung back. "It ought to be good—you passed it out yourself."

"I know," said Papulos coldly. "But not to you."

He made an infinitesimal motion with his head; and Simon knew, without looking round, that two of the hard-faced watch­ers had closed in behind his chair. Nobody else moved; and the heavy breathing of the rotarian from Grand Rapids who was seeing Life was the loudest sound in the room.

Papulos got to his feet.

"Get up," he said. "I want to speak to you in the other room."

A hand fastened on Simon's shoulder and jerked him up, but he had no idea of protesting at that stage—quite apart from the fact that any protest would have been futile. He turned obediently between the two guards and followed the broad back of Papulos out of the room.

They crossed the hall and entered the bedroom of the suite, and the door was closed and locked behind them. Simon was roughly searched and then backed up against a wall. Papulos confronted him, while the two gorillas ranged themselves on either side. The Greek's beady eyes were narrowed to black pin points.

"Where did you get that twenty grand?"

The Saint glared at him sullenly.

"It's none of your damned business."

With a movement surprisingly fast and accurate for one of his fleshy bulk, Papulos drew back one hand and whipped hard knuckles across the Saint's mouth.

"Where did you get that twenty grand?"

For an instant the Saint's muscles leapt as if a flame had touched them; but he held himself in check. It was all part of the game he was playing, and the score against Papulos could wait for some future date. When he lunged back at the Greek's jaw it was with a wild amateurish swing that never had a hope of reaching its mark; and he came up short with two heavy automatics grinding into his ribs.

Papulos sneered.

"Either you're a fool, punk, or you're nuts! Once more I'm asking you—decent and civil—where did you get that twenty G?"

"I found it," said the Saint, "growing on a gooseberry bush."

"He's nuts," decided one of the guards.

Papulos raised his hand again and then let it go with a twisted grin.

"Okay, wise guy. I'll find out soon enough. And if you got it where I think you did, it's going to be just too bad."

He plumped himself on one of the beds and picked up the telephone. The guards stood by phlegmatically, waiting for the connection to go through. One of them gazed sourly at a cigar that had gone out, and picked up a box of matches. The fizz of a match splashed through the silence; and then the Greek was talking.

"Hullo, Judge. This is Papulos. Listen, I got a monkey down here who just flashed a twenty-grand roll in C notes, and a certain slip of paper. . . ."

The Saint saw him stiffen and grind the receiver harder into his ear. The guard with the relighted cigar blew out a cloud of malodorous smoke and drew patterns on the carpet with a pointed toe. The receiver clacked and spattered into the still­ness, and Simon flexed his forearm for the reassuring pressure of the knife sheathed inside his sleeve.

Papulos dropped the instrument back in its bracket with an ominous click and turned slowly back to the Saint. He got to his feet, with his flattened face jutting forward on his shoul­ders, and stared at Simon, with his eyes bright and glistening.

"Mr. Simon, eh?" he rasped.

The Saint smiled engagingly.

"Simon Templar is the full name," he said, "but I thought you might feel I was going upstage on you if I insisted on it all."

Papulos nodded.

"So you're the Saint!" His voice was venomous, but deeper still there was a vibration of the hate that can only be born of fear. "You're the rat who plugged Irboll this afternoon. You're the guy who's going to clean up New York." He laughed abruptly, but there was no humour in the sound. "Well, punk—you're through!"

He turned on his heel and issued a series of sharp orders to the two guards.

One word out of the arrangements for his disposal was enough for Simon Templar's ears. His strategy had worked ex­actly as he had psychologized it from the beginning. By per­mitting himself to be trapped by Papulos he had taken one more step up the ladder. He was being passed on to the man higher up for the final disposition of his fate; and that man was Morrie Ualino. And where Ualino was, the Saint felt sure, there was a good sporting chance that the heiress of all the Inselheims might also be.

"March," ordered the first guard.

"But what about my twenty grand?" protested Simon ag­grievedly.

The second guard grinned.

"Where you're going, buddy, they use asbestos money," he said. "Shove off."

Papulos unlocked the door. The twenty thousand dollars was in the side pocket of his coat, just as he had stuffed it away when he rose from the poker table; and Simon Templar never took prophecies of his eventual destination too seriously. He figured that a nation which had Samuel Insull in its midst would not be unduly impoverished by the loss of twenty thou­sand berries; and as he reached the door he stopped to lay a hand on the Greek's shoulder with a friendliness which he did not feel.

"Remember, little buttercup," said the Saint outrageously, "whatever you do, we shall always be sweethearts——"

Then one of the guards pushed him on; and Simon stowed twenty thousand dollars unobtrusively away in his pocket as they went through the hall.

Simon rode beside the first torpedo, while the other drove the sedan north and east. If anything, the pressure of the gun that bored suggestively into his side had the pleasantly famil­iar touch of an old friend. It was a gentle reminder of danger, a solid emblem of battle and sudden death; and there were a few dozen men in hell who would attest to the fact that he was a stranger to neither.

They rolled smoothly across the Queensborough Bridge, which spans the East River at 59th Street, and the car picked up speed as they blared their way through the semideserted streets of Astoria. Then the broad open highways of Long Island stretched before them; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and turned his brain into a perfectly functioning machine that charted every yard of the route on a memory like a photo­graphic plate.

The outlying suburbs of New York flashed by in quick suc­cession—Flushing, Garden City, Hempstead. They had trav­elled some miles beyond Springdale when the car slowed down and turned abruptly into a bumpy unfinished driveway that terminated a hundred yards farther on in front of a sombre and shuttered two-story house, where another car was already parked.

One of the guards nudged him out, and the three of them mounted the short flight of steps to the porch in single file. The inevitable face peered through a grille, recognized the leading guard, and said, "Hi, Joe." The bolts were drawn, and they went in.

The hall was lighted by a single heavily frosted orange bulb which did very little more than relieve the blackest shades of darkness. On the right, an open door gave a glimpse of a tiny room containing a small zinc-topped bar; on the left, a larger room was framed between dingy hangings. The larger room had a bare floor with small booths built around the walls, each containing a table covered with a grubby cloth. There was an electric piano in one corner, a dingy growth of artificial vines straggling over the tops of the booths and tacking themselves along the low ceiling, and a half-dozen more of the same feeble orange bulbs shedding their watery glimmer onto the scene. It was a typical gangster's dive, of a pattern more common in New Jersey than on Long Island, and the atmosphere was in­tended to inspire romance and relaxation, but it was one of the most depressing places in which Simon Templar had ever been.

"Upstairs?" queried the gorilla who had been recognized as Joe; and the man who had opened the door nodded.

"Yeah—waitin' for ya." He inspected the Saint curiously. "Is dis de guy?"

The two guards made simultaneous grunting noises designed to affirm that dis was de guy, and one of them took the Saint's arm and moved him on towards the stairway at the back of the hall. They mounted through a curve of darkness and came up into another dim glow of light on the floor above. The stairs turned them into a narrow corridor that ran the length of the house; Simon was hurried along past one door before which a scrawny-necked individual lounged negligently, blink­ing at them, as they went by, with heavy-lidded eyes like an alligator's; they passed another door and stopped before the third and last. One of his escorts hammered on it, and it was yanked open. There was a sudden burst of brighter light from within; and the Saint went on into the lion's den with an easy, unhurried stride.

Simon had seen better dens. Except for the brighter illu­mination, the room in which he found himself was no better than the social quarters on the ground floor. The boards under­foot were uncarpeted, the once dazzlingly patterned wall­paper was yellowed and moulting. There was a couch under the window where two shirt-sleeved hoodlums sat side-saddle over a game of pinochle; they glanced up when the Saint came in, and returned to their play without comment. In the centre of the room was a table on which stood the remains of a meal; and at the table, facing the door, sat Ualino.

Simon identified him easily from Fernack's description. But he saw the man only for one fleeting second; and after that his gaze was held by the girl who also sat at the table.

There was no logical reason why he should have guessed that she was the girl Fay who had spoken to Nather on the telephone—the Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had begun to speak. In a house like that there were likely to be numbers of girls, coming and going; and there was no evidence that Mor­rie Ualino was an ascetic. But there was something to this girl that might quite naturally have spoken with a voice like the one which Simon had heard. In that stark shabby room her presence was even more incongruous than the immaculate Ualino's. She was slender and fair, with eyes like amber, and her mouth was a soft curve of amazingly innocent tempta­tion. Perhaps she was twenty-three or twenty-four, old enough to have the quiet confidence which adolescence never has; but still she was young in an ageless, enduring way that the years do not change. And once again that queer intuitive throb of expectation went through the Saint, as it had, done when he first heard the voice on Nather's telephone; the stirring of a chord in his mind whose note rang too deep for reason. . . .

It was to her, rather than to Ualino, that he spoke.

"Good-evening," said the Saint.

No one in the room answered. Ualino dipped a brush into a tiny bottle and stroked an even film of liquid polish on the nail of his little finger. A diamond the size of a bean flashed from his ring as he inspected his handiwork under the light. He corked the bottle and fluttered his graceful hand back and forth to dry off the polish, and his tawny eyes returned at lei­sure to the Saint.

"I wanted to have a look at you." Simon smiled at him.

"That makes us both happy. I wanted to have a look at you. I heard you were the Belle of New York, and I wanted to see how you did it." The ingenuousness of the Saintly smile was blinding. "You must give me the address of the man who waves your hair one day, Morrie—but are you sure they got all the mud pack off last time your face had a treatment?"

There was a hideous clammy stillness in the room, a still­ness that sprawled out of sheer open-mouthed incredulity. Not within the memory of anyone present had such a thing as that happened. In that airlessly expanding quiet, the slightest touch of fever in the imagination would have made audible the thin whisper of eardrums waving soggily to and fro, like wet palm fronds in a breeze, as they tried dazedly to recapture the unbelievable vibrations that had numbed them. The faces of the two pinochle players revolved slowly, wearing the blank expressions of two men who had been unexpectedly slugged with blunt instruments and who were still wondering what had hit them.

"What did you say?" asked Ualino pallidly.

"I was just looking for some beauty hints," said the Saint amiably. "You know, you remind me of Papulos quite a lot, only he hasn't got the trick of those Dietrich eyebrows like you have."

Ualino stroked down a thread of hair at one side of his head.

"Come over here," he said.

There was no actual question of whether the Saint would obey. As if answering an implied command, each of the two gorillas on either side of the Saint seized hold of his wrists. His arms were twisted up behind his back, and he was dragged round the table; and Ualino turned his chair round and looked up at him.

"Did you ever hear of the hot box?" Ualino asked gently.

In spite of himself, the Saint felt an instant's uncanny chill. For he had heard of the hot box, that last and most horrible product of gangland's warped ingenuity. Al Capone himself is credited with the invention of it: it was his answer to the three amazing musketeers who pioneered the kidnapping racket in the days when other racketeers, who had no come­back in the law, were practically the only victims; and Red McLaughlin, who led that historic foray into the heart of Cook County—who extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom from Capone's lieutenants and came within an ace of kidnapping the Scarface himself—died by that terrible death. A cold finger seemed to touch the Saint's spine for one brief second; and then it was gone, leaving its icy trace only in the blue of his eyes.

"Yeah," said the Saint. "I've heard of it. Are you getting it ready for Viola Inselheim?"

Again that appalling silence fell over the room. For a full ten seconds nobody moved except Ualino, whose manicured hand kept up that steady mechanical smoothing of his hair.

"So you know about that, too," he purred at last.

The Saint nodded. His face was expressionless; but he had heard the last word of confirmation that he wanted. His in­spiration had been right—his simple stratagem had achieved everything that he had asked of it. By letting himself be taken to Ualino as a helpless prisoner, already doomed, he had been shown a hideout that he could never otherwise have found, for which Fernack and his officers could search for weeks in vain.

"Sure I know," said the Saint. "Why else do you think I should have let your tame gorillas fetch me along here? There isn't any other attraction about the place—except that chat about complexion creams that you and I were going to have."

"He's nuts," explained one of the guards vaguely, as if seek­ing comfort for his own reeling sanity.

Simon smiled to himself and looked towards the open win­dow. Through it he could see the edge of the roof hanging low over the oblong of blackness, the curved metal of the gutter catching a gleam of light from the bulb over the table. From the sill, it should be within easy reach; and the rest lay with the capricious gods of adventure. ... And he found his gaze wandering back with detached curiosity, even in that terrific moment, to the girl who must be Fay Edwards. He could see her over Ualino's shoulder, watching him steadily; but he could read nothing in her amber eyes.

Ualino took the hand down from caressing his hair and stuck the thumb in his vest pocket. He seemed to be playing with a vial of sadistic malignance as a child might play with a ball, for the last time.

"What did you think you'd do when you got here?" he asked; and the Saint's level gaze returned to his face with the chill of antarctic ice still in it.

"I'm here to kill you, Ualino," Simon said quietly.

One of the pinochle players moved his leg, and a card slipped off the sofa and hit the floor with a tiny scuff that was as loud as a drumbeat in the soundless void. A stifling silence blanketed the air that was like no silence which had gone be­fore. It was a stillness that reached out beyond the deadest in­finities of disbelief, an unfathomable immobility in which even incredulity was punch-drunk and paralyzed. It rose out of the waning vibrations of the Saint's gentle voice and throbbed back and forth between the walls like a charge of static electricity; and the Saint's blue eyes gazed through it in an in­clement mockery of bitter steel. It could not last for more than a second or two—the fierce tension of it was too intolerable— but for that space of time no one could have interrupted. And that quiet, gentle voice went on, with a terrible softness and simplicity, holding them with a sheer ruthless power that they could not begin to understand:

"I am the Saint; and I have my justice. This afternoon Jack Irboll died, as I promised. I am more than the law, Ualino, and I have no corrupt judges. Tonight you die."

Ualino stood up. His tawny eyes stared into the Saint's with a greenish glow.

"You're pretty smart," he said venomously; and then his fist lashed at Simon's face.

The Saint's head rolled coolly sideways, and Ualino's sleeve actually brushed his cheek as the blow went by. A moment later the Saint's right hand touched the hilt of his knife and slid it up in its sheath—with both his arms twisted up behind his back it was hardly more difficult than it would have been if his hand and wrist had come together in front of him. Ualino's eyes blazed with sudden raw fury as he felt his clenched fist zip through into unresisting air. He drew his arm back and smashed again; and then a miracle seemed to happen.

The man on the Saint's right felt a stab of fire lance across the tendons of his wrist, and all the strength went out of his fingers. He stared stupidly at the gush of blood that broke from the severed arteries; and while he stared, something flashed across his vision like a streak of quicksilver, and he heard Ualino cry out.

That was about as much as anybody saw or understood. Somehow, without a struggle, the Saint was free; and a steel blade flashed in his hand. It swept upwards in front of him in a terrible arc; and Ualino clutched at his stomach and sank down, with his knees buckling under him and a ghastly crim­son tide bursting between his fingers. . . . Nobody else had time to move. The sheer astounding speed of it numbed even the most instinctive processes of thought—they might as easily have met and parried a flash of lightning. . . . And then the knife swept on upwards, and the hilt of it struck the electric light bulb over the table and brought utter darkness with an explosion like a gun.

Simon leapt for the window.

A hand touched his arm, and his knife drew back again for a vicious thrust. And then, with a sudden effort, he checked it in mid-flight. . . .

For the hand did not tighten its grip. Halting in the black dark, with the shouts and blunderings of infuriated men roar­ing around him, his nostrils caught a faint breath of perfume. Something cold and metallic touched his hand, and instinc­tively his fingers closed round it and recognized it for the butt of an automatic. And then the light touch on his sleeve was gone; and with the trigger guard between his teeth he sprang to the windowsill and reached upwards and outwards into space.

Chapter 4

How Simon Templar Read Newspapers, and Mr. Papulos Hit the Skids

He lay out on the tiles at a perilous downward angle of forty-five degrees, as he had swung himself straight up from the windowsill, with his feet stretched towards the sky and only the grip of his hands in the gutter holding him. from an imminent nosedive to squishy death. Directly below him he could see the torsos and bullet heads of two gorillas illumi­nated in the light of a match held by a third, as they leaned out from the window and raked the dark ground below with straining, startled eyes. Their voices floated up to him like the music of checked hounds to a fox that has crossed its own scent.

"He must of gone that way."

"Better get down an' see he don't take the car."

"Take the car hell—I got the keys here."

The craning bodies heaved up again and vanished back into the room. He heard the quick thumping of their feet and the crash of the door; and then for a space another silence settled on the Long Island night.

Simon shifted the weight on his aching shoulders and grinned gently under the stars. In its unassuming way it had been a tense moment, but the advantage of the unexpected was still with him. The minds of most men run on well-charted rails, and perhaps the mind of the professional killer in times of sudden death has fewer sidetracks than any other. To the four raging and bewildered thugs who were even then pound­ing down the stairs to guard their precious car and comb the surrounding meadows, it was as inconceivable as it had been to Inspector Fernack that any man in the Saint's position, with the untrammelled use of his limbs, should be interested in any other diversion than that of boring a hole through the horizon with the utmost assiduousness and dispatch. But like Inspector Fernack, the four public enemies who fell into this grievous error were enjoying their first encounter with that dazzling recklessness which made Simon Templar an incalcu­lable variant in any equation.

With infinite caution the Saint began to manoeuvre himself sideways along the roof.

It was a gymnastic exercise for which no rules had been de­vised in any manual of the art. He had circled up to the roof in that position because it was quicker than any other; and, once he was up there, it was practically impossible to reverse it. Nor would he have gained anything if he had by some in­credible contortions managed to get his feet down to the gutter and his head up to its proper elevation, for his only means of telling when he had reached his destination was by peering down over the gutter at the windows underneath. And that destination was the room outside which the scrawny-necked individual had been lounging when he arrived.

Once a loose section of metal gave him the most nerve-racking two-yard journey of his life; more than once, when one of the men who were searching for him prowled under the house, he had to remain motionless, with all his weight on the heels of his hands, till the muscles of his arms and shoulders cracked under the strain. It was a task which should have taken the concentration of every fibre of his being, but the truth is that he was thinking about Fay Edwards for seven-eighths of the way.

What was she doing now? What was she doing at any time in that bloodthirsty half-world? Simon realized that even now he had not heard her speak—his assumption that she was the girl of Nather's telephone was purely intuitive. But he had seen her face an instant after his knife had laid Ualino open from groin to breastbone, and there had been neither fear nor horror in it. Just for that instant the amber eyes had seemed to blaze with a savage light which he could not understand; and then he had smashed the electric bulb and was on his way. He might have thought that the whole thing was a moment's hallucination, but there was the metal of the automatic still between his teeth to be explained. His brain tangled with that ultimate amazing mystery while he warped himself along the edge of yawning nothingness; and he was no nearer a solution when the window that he was aiming for came vertically under his eyes.

At least there was nothing intangible or mysterious about that; and he knew that there was no prospect of the general tempo of whoopee and carnival slackening off before he got home to bed. With one searching glance over the ground be­low to make sure that there was no lurking sentinel waiting to catch him in midair, the Saint slid himself forward head first into space, neatly reversed his hands, and curled over into the precarious dark.

He hung at the full stretch of his arms, facing the window of his objective. It was closed; but a stealthily inquiring pressure of one toe told him that it was fastened only by a single catch in the centre.

There was no further opportunity for caution. The rest of his evening had to be taken on the run, and he knew it. Taking a deep breath, he swung himself backwards and outwards; and as his body swung in again towards the house on the returning pendulum he raised his legs and drove his feet squarely into the junction of the casements.

The flimsy fastening tore away like tissue paper under the impact, and the casements burst inwards and smacked against the inside wall with a crash of breaking glass. A treble wail of fright came out to him as he swung back again; then he came forward a second time and arched his back with a supple twist as his hands let go the gutter. He went through the window neatly, skidded on a loose rug, and fetched up against the bed.

The room was in darkness, but his eyes were accustomed to the dark. A small white-clad shape with dark curly hair stared back at him, big eyes dilated with terror, whimpering softly. From the floor below came the thud of heavy feet and the sound of hoarse voices, but the Saint might have had all the time in the world. He took the gun from between his teeth and pushed down the safety catch with his right hand; his left hand patted the girl's shoulder.

"Poor kid," he said. "I've come to take you home."

There was a surprising tenderness in his voice, and all at once the child's whimpering died down.

"You want to go home, don't you?" asked the Saint.

She nodded violently; and with a soft comforting laugh he swung her up in the crook of his arm and crossed the room. The door was locked, as he had expected. Simon held her a little tighter.

"We're going to make some big bangs, Viola," he said. "You aren't frightened of big bangs, are you? Big bangs like fire­works? And every time we make a big bang we'll kill one of the wicked men who took you away." She shook her head.

"I like big bangs," she declared; and the Saint laughed again and put the muzzle of his gun against the lock.

The shot rocked the room like thunder, and a heavy thud sounded in the corridor. Simon flung open the door. It was the scrawny-necked individual on guard outside who had caused the thud: he was sprawled against the opposite wall in a gro­tesque huddle, and nothing was more certain than that he would never stand guard anywhere again. Apparently he had been peering through the keyhole, looking for an explanation of the disturbance, when the Saint shot out the lock; and what remained of his face was not pleasant to look at. The child in Simon's arms crowed gleefully.

"Make more bangs," she commanded; and the Saint smiled.

"Shall we? I'll see what can be done."

He raced down the passage to the stairs. The men below were on their way up but he gained the half-landing before them with one flying leap. The leading attacker died in his tracks and never knew it, and his lifeless body reared over backwards and went bumping down to the floor below. The others scuttled for cover; and Simon drew a calm bead on the single frosted bulb in the hall and left only the dim glow from the bar and the dance room for light.

A tongue of orange fire spat out of the dark, and the bullet spilled a shower of plaster from the wall a yard over the Saint's head. Simon grinned and swung his legs over the banisters. Curiously enough, the average gangster has standards of marks­manship that would make the old-time bad man weep in his grave: most of his pistol practice is done from a range of not more than three feet, and for any greater distances than that he gets out his sub-machine-gun and sprays a couple of thou­sand rounds over the surrounding county on the assumption that one of them must hit something. The opposition was dan­gerous, but it was not certain death. One of the men poked an eye warily round the door of the bar and leapt back hur­riedly as the Saint's shot splintered the frame an inch from his nose; and the Saint let go the handrail and dropped down to the floor like a cat.

The front door was open, as the men had left it when they rushed back into the house. Simon made a rapid calculation. There were four men left, so far as he knew; and of their num­ber one was certainly watching the windows at the back, and another was probably guarding the parked cars. That left two to be taken on the way; and the time to take them was at once, while their morale was still shaken by the divers preposterous calamities that they had seen.

He put the girl down and turned her towards the doorway. She was moaning a little now, but fear would lend wings to her feet

"Run!" he shouted suddenly. "Run for the door!"

Her shrill voice crying out in terror, the child fled. A man sprang up from his knees behind the hangings in the dance-room entrance; Simon fired once, and he went down with a yell. Another bullet from the Saint's gun went crashing down a row of bottles in the bar; then he was outside, hurdling the porch rail and landing nimbly on his toes. He could see the girl's white dress flying through the darkness in front of him. A man rose up out of the gloom ahead of her and lunged, and she screamed once as his outstretched fingers clawed at her frock. Simon's gun belched flame, and the clutching hand fell limp as a soft-nosed slug tore through the fleshy part of the man's forearm. The gorilla spun round and dropped his gun, bellowing like a bull, and Simon sprinted after the terrified child. An automatic banged twice behind him, but the shots went wide. The girl shrieked as he came up with her, but he caught her into his left arm and held her close.

"All right, kiddo," he said gently. "It's all over. Now we're going home."

He ducked in between the parked cars. He already knew that the one in which he had arrived was locked: if Ualino's car was also locked there would still be difficulties. He threw open the door and sighed his relief—the key was in its socket. What was it Fernack had said? "He rides around in an ar­moured sedan." Morrie Ualino seemed to have been a thoughtful bird all round, and the Saint was smiling appreciatively as he climbed in.

A scattered fusillade drummed on the coachwork as he swung the car through a tight arc in reverse, and the bullet­proof glass starred but did not break. As the car lurched for­ward again he actually slowed up to wind down an inch of window.

"So long, boys," he called back. "Thanks for the ride!" And then the car was swinging out into the road, whirling away into the night with a smooth rush of power, with the horn hooting a derisively syncopated farewell into the wind,

Simon stopped the car a block from Sutton Place and looked down at the sleepy figure beside him.

"Do you know your way home from here?" he asked her.

She nodded vigorously. Her hysterical sobbing had stopped long ago—in a few days she would scarcely remember.

He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and made a little drawing on it. It was a skeleton figure adorned with a large and rakishly slanted halo.

"Give this to your daddy," he said, "and tell him the Saint brought you home. Do you understand? The Saint brought you back."

She nodded again, and he crumpled the paper into her tiny fist and opened the door. The last he saw of her was her white-frocked shape trotting round the next corner; and then he let in the clutch and drove on. Fifteen minutes later he was back at the Waldorf Astoria, and Morrie Ualino's armour-plated sedan was abandoned six blocks away.

Valcross in pyjamas and dressing gown, was dozing in the living room. He roused to find the Saint smiling down at him a little tiredly, but in complete contentment.

"Viola Inselheim is home," said the Saint. "I went for a lovely ride."

He was wiping the blade of his knife on a silk handkerchief; and Valcross looked at him curiously.

"Did you meet Ualino?" he asked; and Simon Templar nodded.

"Tradition would have it that Morrie sleeps with his fa­thers," he said, very gently; "but one can't be sure that he knows who they were."

He opened the bureau and took out a plain white card. On it were written six names. One of them—Jack Irboll's—was already scratched out. With his fountain pen he drew a single straight line through the next two; and then, at the bottom of the list, he wrote another. It was The Big Fellow. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote an eighth, lower down, and drew a neat panel round it: Fay Edwards.

"Who is she?" inquired Valcross, looking over his shoulder; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and pushed back his hair.

"That's what I'd like to know. All I can tell you is that her gun saved me a great deal of trouble, and was a whole lot of grief to some of the ungodly. . . . This is a pretty passable beginning, Bill—you ought to enjoy the headlines tomorrow morning."

His prophecy of the reactions of the press to his exploits would have been no great strain on anyone's clairvoyant gen­ius. In the morning he had more opportunities to read about himself than any respectably self-effacing citizen would have desired.

Modesty was not one of Simon Templar's virtues. He sat at breakfast with a selection of the New York dailies strewn around him, and the general tenor of their leading pages was very satisfactory. It is true that the Times and the Herald Tribune, following a traditional policy of treating New York's annual average of six hundred homicides as regrettable faux pas which have no proper place in a sober chronicle of the passing days, relegated the Saint to a secondary position; but any aloofness on their part was more than compensated by the enthusiasm of the Mirror and the News. SAINT RESCUES VIOLA, they howled, in black letters two and a half inches high. UALINO SLAIN. RACKET ROMEO'S LAST RIDE. UALINO, VOELSANG, DIE. SAINT SLAYS TWO, WOUNDS THREE. LONG ISLAND MASSACRE. SAINT BATTLES KIDNAPPERS. There were photographs of the rescued Viola Inselheim with her stout papa, photographs of the house where she had been held, gory photographs of the dead. There was a photograph of the Saint himself; and Simon was pleased to see that it was a good one.

At the end of his meal, he pushed the heap of vociferous newsprint aside and poured himself out a second cup of coffee. If there had ever been any lurking doubts of his authenticity —if any of the perspiring brains at police headquarters down on Centre Street, or any of the sizzling intellects of the underworld, had cherished any shy reluctant dreams that the Saint was merely the product of a sensational journalist's overheated imagination—those doubts and dreams must have suffered a last devastating smack on the schnozzola with the publication of that morning's tabloids. For no sensational journalist's im­agination, overheated to anything below melting point, could ever have created such a story out of unsubstantial air. Simon lighted a cigarette and stared at the ceiling through a haze of smoke with very clear and gay blue eyes, feeling the deep thrill of other and older days in his veins. It was very good that such things could still come to pass in a tamed and supine world, better still that he himself should be their self-appointed spokesman. He saw the kindly grey head of William Valcross nodding at him across the room.

"Just now you have the advantage," Valcross was saying. "You're mysterious and deadly. How long will it last?"

"Long enough to cost you a million dollars," said the Saint lightly.

He went over to the bureau and took out the card on which the main points of his undertaking were written down, and carried it across to the open windows. It was one of those spring mornings on which New York is the most brilliant city in the world, when the air comes off the Atlantic with a heady tang like frosted wine, and the white pinnacles of its towers stand up in a sky from which every particle of impurity seems to have been washed by magic; one of those mornings when all the vitality and impetuous aspiration that is New York in­sinuates itself as the only manner of life. He filled his lungs with the cool, clean alpine air and looked down at the specks of traffic crawling between the mechanical stops on Park Ave­nue; the distant mutter of it came up to him as if from another world into which he could plunge himself at will, like a god going down to earth; and on that morning he understood the cruelty and magnificence of the city, and how a man could sit there in his self-made Olympus and be drunk with faith in his own power. . . . And then the Saint laughed softly at the beauty of the morning and at himself, for instead of being a god enthroned he was a brigand looking down from his eyrie and planning new forays on the plain; and perhaps that was even better.

"Who's next on the list?" he asked, and looked at the card in his hand.

Straight away west on 49th Street, beyond Seventh Avenue, the same urgent question was being discussed in the back room of Charley's Place. It was too early in the day for the regular customers, and the bar in the front part of the building had a dingy and forsaken aspect in the dim rays of daylight that struggled through the heavy green curtains at the windows. White-coated, smooth-faced and inscrutable as ever, Toni Ol­linetti dusted the glass-topped tables and paid no attention to the murmur of voices from the back room. He looked neither fresh nor tired, as he looked at any hour out of the twenty-four: no one could have told whether he had just awoken or whether he had not slept for a week.

The scene in the back room was livelier. The lights were switched on, flooding the session with the peculiarly cold yel­low colour that electricity has in the daytime. There was a bottle of whisky and an array of glasses on the table to stimu­late decision, and the air was full of tobacco smoke of varying antiquities.

"De guy is nuts," Heimie Felder had proclaimed, more than once.

His right arm was in a sling, as an advertisement of the Saint's particular brand of nuttiness. He enjoyed the distinc­tion of being one of the few men who had done battle with the Saint and survived to tell of it, and it was a pity that his vo­cabulary was scarcely adequate to deal with the subject. He had given much painful thought to the startling events of the previous night, but he had been unable to make any notable advance on his first judgment.

"You ought to of seen him," said Heimie. "When we took him in de udder room, over in de hotel, he was just surly an' kep' his mout' shut like he was an ordinary welsher. We asks him, 'Whereja get dat dough?' an' Pappy gives him a poke in de kisser, an' he hauls off an' tries to take a sock at Pappy dat was so slow Pappy could of gone off an' played anudder hand an' come back an' it still wouldn't of reached him. So Pappy rings up Judge Nather, an' Nather says: 'Yeah, de guy holds me up an' takes de dough off of me a coupla hours ago.' So we take him along to Morrie Ualino, out there on Long Island where dey got de kid; an' it seems de Saint knows about dat, too. But nobody ain't worryin' about what he knows any more, becos we're all figurin' dat when he goes out of there he won't be comin' back unless his funeral procession goes past de house. De guy is nuts. He stands there an' starts ribbin' Morrie about him bein' a dude, an' you know how mad dat useta make Morrie. You can see Morrie is gettin' madder 'n' madder every minute, but dis guy just grins an' goes on kid­ding. I tell ya, he's nuts. An' then he's got hold of a knife from somewhere, an' he cuts my wrist open till I has to let go; an' then, zappo, he's got his knife in Morrie's guts an' broke de electric light bulb, an' while we're chasin' him he ducks over de roof somehow an' gets de kid. He's gotten a Betsy from somewhere, an' he shoots up de jernt an' gets away in Morrie's car. De guy is nuts," explained Heimie, clinching the matter.

Dutch Kuhlmann poured himself out a half-tumbler of whisky and downed it without blinking. He was a huge fleshy man with flaxen hair and pale blue eyes; and he looked ex­actly like an amiable waiter from a Bavarian beer garden. No one, glancing at him in ignorance, would have suspected that before the unhonoured demise of the Eighteenth Amendment he was the man who supplied half the thirsty East with beer, reigning in stolid sovereignty over the greatest czardom of illicit hops in American history. No one would have suspected that the brain which guided the hulking flabby frame had carved out and consolidated and maintained that sovereignty with the ruthlessness of an Attila. His record at police head­quarters was clean: to the opposition, accidents had simply happened, with nothing to connect them with Dutch Kuhl­mann beyond their undoubtedly fortunate coincidence with the route of his ambitions: but those who moved in the queer dark stratum which touches the highest and the lowest points in Manhattan's geology told their stories, and his trucks ran unchallenged from Brooklyn to New Orleans.

"Dot is a great shame, about Morrie," said Kuhlmann. "Morrie vass a goot boy."

He took out a large linen handkerchief, dried a tear from the corner of each eye, and blew his nose loudly. The passing of Morrie Ualino left Dutch Kuhlmann the unquestioned cap­tain of the coalition whose destinies were guided by the Big Fellow, but there was no doubt of the genuineness of his grief. After he had given the orders which sent his own cousin and strongest rival in the beer racket on the long, one-way ride, it was said that Kuhlmann had wept all night.

There was a brief respectful silence in honour of the defunct Morrie—several members of the Ualino mob were present, for without the initiative or personality to take his place they drifted automatically into the cohorts of the nearest leader. And then Kuhlmann pulled his sprawling bulk together.

"Vot I vant to know," he said with remorseless logic, "is, vot is the Saint gettin' out of this?"

"He got twenty grand from Nather," said Papulos. "Prob­ably he's collected a reward from Inselheim for bringing the kid back. He's getting plenty!"

Kuhlmann's pale eyes turned slowly onto the speaker, and under their placid scrutiny Papulos felt something inside him­self turning cold. For, if you liked to look at it in a certain way, Morrie Ualino had died only because Papulos had passed the Saint along to him—with that terrible knife which had somehow escaped their search. And the men around him, Papulos knew, were given to looking at such things in a cer­tain way. The subtleties of motive and accident were too great a strain on their limited mentalities: they regarded only ul­timate results and the baldly stated means by which those re­sults had eventuated. Papulos knew that he walked on the thinnest of ice; and he splashed whisky into his glass and met Kuhlmann's gaze with a confidence which he did not feel.

"Yeah, dot is true," Kuhlmann said at length. "He gets plenty money—plenty enough to split t'ree-four ways." There was a superfluous elaboration of the theme in that last phrase which Papulos did not like. "But dot ain't all of it. You hear vot Heimie says. Ven they got him in the house he says to Morrie: 'I came here to kill you.' An' he talks about justice. Vot is dot for?"

"De guy is nuts" explained Heimie peevishly, as if the con­tinued inability of his audience to accept and be content with that obvious solution were beginning to bother him.

Kuhlmann glanced at him and shrugged his great shoulders.

"Der guy is not nuts vot can shoot Irboll right in the court house und get avay," he exploded mightily. "Der guy is not nuts vot can find out in one hour dot Morrie has kidnapped Viola Inselheim, und vot can get some fool to take him straight to the house vhere Morrie has der kid. Der guy is not nuts vot can pull out a knife in dot room und kill Morrie, und vot can pull out a gun from nowhere und shoot Eddie Voelsang and shoot his vay past four-five men out of the house mit the kid!"

There was a chorus of sycophantic agreement; and Heimie Felder muttered sulkily under his breath. "I heard him talkin'," he protested to his injured soul. "De guy is——"

"Nuts!" snarled an unsympathetic listener; and Kuhlmann's big fist crashed on the table, making the glasses dance.

"This is no time for your squabbling!" he roared suddenly. "It is you dot is nuts—all of you! In von day der Saint has killed Irboll and Morrie and Eddie Voelsang und taken twenty t'ousand dollars of our money. Und you sit there, all of you fools, and argue of vether he is nuts, vhen you should be ask­ing who is it dot he kills next?"

A fresh silence settled on the room as the truth of his words sank home; a silence that prickled with the distorted terrors of the Unknown. And in that silence a knock sounded on the door.

"Come in!" shouted Kuhlmann and reached again for the bottle.

The door opened, and the face of the guard whose post was behind the grille of the street door appeared. His features were white and pasty, and the hand which held a scrap of pasteboard at his side trembled.

"Vot it is?" Kuhlmann demanded irritably.

The man held out the card.

"Just now the bell rang," he babbled. "I opened the grille, an' all I can see is a hand, holdin' this. I had to take it, an' while I'm starin' at it the hand disappears. When I saw what it was I got the door open quick, but all I can see outside is the usual sort of people walkin' past. I thought you better see what he gave me, Dutch."

There was a whine of pleading in the doorkeeper's voice; but Kuhlmann did not answer at once.

He was staring, with pale blue eyes gone flat and frozen, at the card he had snatched from the man's shaking hand. On it was a childishly sketched figure surmounted by a symbolical halo; and underneath it was written, as if in direct answer to the question he had been asking: "Dutch Kuhlmann is next."

* * *

Presently he returned his gaze to the doorkeeper's face and only the keenest study would have discovered any change in its bleak placidity. He threw the card down on the table for the others to crowd over, and hitched a cigar from the row which protruded from his upper vest pocket. He bit the end from the cigar and spat it out, without changing the direction of his eyes.

"Come here, Joe," he said almost affectionately; and the man took an uneasy step forward. "You vas a goot boy, Joe."

The doorkeeper licked his lips and grinned sheepishly; and Kuhlmann lighted a match.

"It vas you dot lets der Saint in here last night, vasn't it?"

"Well, Dutch, it was like this. This guy rings the bell an' asks for Fay, an' I tells him Fay ain't arrived yet but he can wait for her if he wants to ­——"

"Und so you lets him in to vait inside, isn't it?"

"Well, Dutch, it was like this. The guy says maybe he can get a drink while he's waiting, an' he looks okay to me, anyone can see he ain't a dick, an' somehow I ain't thinkin' about the Saint——"

"So vot are you thinking about, Joe?" asked Kuhlmann gen­ially.

The doorkeeper shifted his feet.

"Well, Dutch, I'm thinkin' maybe this guy is some sucker that Fay is stringin' along. Say, all I do is stand at that door an' let people in an' out, an' I don't know everything that goes on. So I figures, well, there's plenty of the boys inside, an' this guy couldn't do nothing even if he does get tough, an' if he is a sucker that they're stringin' along it won't be so good for me if I shut the door an' send him away——"

"Und so you lets him in, eh?"

"Yeah, I lets him in. You see——"

"Und so you lets him in, even after you been told all der time dot nobody don't get let in here vot you don't know, unless he comes mit one or two of the boys. Isn't dot so?"

"Well, Dutch—-"

Kuhlmann puffed at his cigar till the tip was a circle of solid red.

"How much does he give you, Joe?" he asked jovially, as if he were sharing a ripe joke with a bosom friend.

The man gulped and swallowed. His mouth was half open, and a sudden horrible understanding dilated the pupils of his eyes as he stared at the beaming mountain of fat in the chair.

"That's a lie!" he screamed suddenly. "You can't frame me like that! He didn't give me anything—I never saw him before——"

"Come here, Joe," said Kuhlmann soothingly.

He reached out and grasped the man's wrist, drawing him towards his chair rather like an elderly uncle with a reluctant schoolboy. His right hand moved suddenly; and the door­keeper jerked in his grasp with a choking yell as the red-hot tip of Kuhlmann's cigar ground into his cheek.

Nobody else moved. Kuhlmann released the man and laughed richly, brushing a few flakes of ash from his knee. He inspected his cigar, struck a match, and relighted it.

"You're a goot boy, Joe," he said heartily. "Go and vait out­side till I send for you."

The man backed slowly to the door, one hand pressed to his scorched cheek. There was a wide dumb horror in his eyes, but he said nothing. None of the others looked at him—they might have been a thousand miles away, ignoring his very existence on the same planet as themselves. The door closed after him; and Kuhlmann glanced round the other faces at the table.

"I'm afraid we are going to lose Joe," he said; and a sudden lump of pure grief caught in his throat as he realized, appar­ently for the first time, what that implied.

Papulos fingered his glass nervously. His fingers trembled, and a little of the amber fluid spilled over the rim of the glass and ran down over his thumb. He stared straight ahead at Kuhlmann, realizing at that moment what a narrow margin separated him from the same attention as the doorkeeper had received.

"Wait a minute, Dutch," he said abruptly. Every other eye in the room veered suddenly towards him, and under their cold scrutiny he had to make an effort to steady his voice. He plunged on in a spurt of unaccountable panic. "They's no use rubbin' out a guy for a mistake. If he tried to cross us it'd be a different thing, but we don't know that it wasn't just like he said. What the hell, anyone's liable to slip up——"

Papulos knew he had made a mistake. Kuhlmann's faded blue gaze turned towards him almost introspectively.

"What's it matter whether he crossed us or made a mistake?" demanded another member of the conference, somewhere on Papulos's left. "The result's the same. He screwed up the deal. We can't afford to let a guy get away with that. We can't take a chance on him."

Papulos did not look round. Neither did Kuhlmann; but Kuhlmann nodded slowly, thoughtfully, staring at Papulos all the time. Thoughts that Papulos had frantically tried to turn aside were germinating, growing up, in that slow, methodical Teutonic brain; Papulos could watch them creeping up to the surface of speech, inexorably as a rising flood, and felt a sick emptiness in his stomach. His own words had shifted the focus to himself; but he knew that even without that rash interven­tion he could not have been passed over.

He picked up his glass, trying to control his hand. A blob of whisky fell from it and formed a shining pool on the table—to his fear-poisoned mind the spilt liquid was suddenly crimson, like a drop of blood from a bullet-torn chest

"Dot is right," Kuhlmann was saying deliberately. "You're a goot boy too, Pappy. Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay to see Morrie?"

Papulos caught his breath sharply. With a swift movement he tossed the drink down his throat and heard the other's soft-spoken words hammering into his brain like bullets.

"Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay to see Morrie, as if he had been searched, und let him take a knife and a gun mit him?"

"You're crazy!" Papulos blurted harshly. "Of course I sent him to Morrie—I knew Morrie wanted to see him. He didn't have a knife an' a gun when he left me. Heimie'll tell you that. Heimie searched him——"

Felder started up.

"Why you——"

"Sit down!" Papulos snarled. For one wild moment he saw hope opening out before him, and his voice rose: "I'm sayin" nothing about you. I'm sayin' Dutch is crazy. He'll want to put you on the spot next. An' how d'you know he'll stop there? He'll be calling every guy who's ever been near the Saint a double-crosser—he'll be trying to put the finger on the rest of you before he's through——"

His voice broke off on one high, rasping note; and he sat with his mouth half open, saying nothing more.

He looked into the muzzle of Dutch Kuhlmann's gun, lev­elled at him across the table; and the warmth of the whisky he had drunk evaporated on the cold weight in his stomach.

"You talk too much, Pappy," said Kuhlmann amiably. "It's a goot job you don't mean everything you say."

The other essayed a smile.

"Don't get me wrong, Dutch," he pleaded weakly. "What I mean is, if we got to knock somebody off, why not knock off the Saint?"

"Dat's right," chimed in Heimie Felder. "We'll knock off de Saint. Why didn't any of youse mugs t'ink of dat before? I'll knock him off myself, poissonal."

Dutch Kuhlmann smiled, without moving his gun.

"Dot is right," he said. "Ve'll knock off der Saint, und not have nobody making any more mistakes. You're a goot boy, Pappy. Go outside and vait for us, Pappy—we have a little business to talk about."

The thumping died down in the Greek's chest, and suddenly he was quite still and strengthless. He sighed wearily, knowing all too well the futility of further argument. Too often he had heard Kuhlmann pronouncing sentence of death in those very words, smiling blandly and genially as he spoke: "You're a goot boy. Go outside and vait for us. . . ."

He stood up, with a feeble attempt to muster the stoical jauntiness that was expected of him.

"Okay, Dutch," he said. "Be seein' ya."

There was an utter silence while he left the room; and as he closed the door behind him his brief display of poise drained out of him. Simon Templar would scarcely have recognized him as the same sleek, self-possessed bully that he had encoun­tered twelve hours ago.

The doorkeeper sat in a far corner, turning the pages of a tabloid. He looked up with a start as Papulos came through but the Greek ignored him. Under sentence of death himself, probably to die on the same one-way ride, a crude pride held him aloof. He walked up to the bar and rapped on the coun­ter, and Toni came up with his smooth expressionless face.

"Brandy," said Papulos.

Toni served him without a word, without even an inquisi­tive glance. Outside of that back room from which Papulos had just emerged, no one knew what had taken place; the world went on without a change. No one could have told what Toni thought or guessed. His olive-skinned features seemed to possess no register of emotion. The finger might be on him, too: he had served the Saint, and directed him to the Graylands Hotel, at the beginning of all the trouble—he might have received his own sentence in the back room, three hours ago. But he said nothing and turned away as Papulos drank.

There was a swelling emptiness below the Greek's breast­bone which two shots of cognac did nothing to fill. Even while he drank, he was a dead man, knowing perfectly well that there was no Appellate Division in the underworld to find a reversible error which might give him a chance for life. He knew that in a few useless' hours death would claim him as certainly as if it had been inscribed in the book of Fate ten thousand years ago. He knew that there was no one who would join him in a challenge to Kuhlmann's authority—no one who could help him, no one who could rescue him from the venge­ance of the gang. ...

And then suddenly the flash of a wild idea illumined some dark recess of his memory.

In his mind he saw the face of a man. A bronzed reckless face with cavalier blue eyes that seemed to hold a light of mocking laughter. The lean hard-muscled figure of a man whose poise held no fear for the vengeance of all the legions of the underworld. A man who was called the Saint. . . .

And in that instant Papulos realized that there was one man who might do what all the police of New York could not do— who might stand between him and the crackling death that waited for him.

He pushed his glass forward wordlessly, watched it refilled, and drained it again. For the first time that morning his stom­ach felt the warmth of the raw spirit. The doorkeeper knew nothing; Toni Ollinetti knew nothing—could not possibly know anything. If Kuhlmann came out and found him gone the mob would trail him down like bloodhounds and inev­itably find him even though he fled to the uttermost ends of the continent; but then it might be too late.

Papulos flung a bill on the counter and turned away with­out waiting for change. His movements were those of an au­tomaton, divorced from any effort of will or deliberation, im­pelled by nothing but an instinctive surging rebellion against the blind march of death. He waved an abrupt, careless hand. "Be seein' ya," he said; and Toni nodded and smiled, without expression. The doomed doorkeeper looked up as he went by, with a glaze of despair in his dulled eyes: Papulos could feel what was in the man's mind, the dumb resentful envy of a condemned man seeing his fellow walking out into the sweet freedom of life: but the Greek walked by without a glance at him.

The bright morning air struck into his senses with its in­tolerable reminder of the brief beauty of life, quickening his steps as he came out to the street. His movements had the desperate power of a drowning man. If an army had appeared to bar his way, he would have drawn his gun and gone down fighting to break through them.

His car stood at the curb. He climbed in and stamped on the self-starter. Before the engine had settled down to smooth running he was flogging it to drag him down the street, away from the doom that waited in Charley's Place. He had no plan in his mind. He had no idea how he would find the Saint, where all the police organizations of the city had failed. He only knew that the Saint was his one hope of reprieve, and that the inaction of waiting for execution like a bullock in a slaughter line would have snapped his reason. If he had to die, he would rather die on the run, struggling towards life, than wait for extinction like a trapped rat. But he looked in the driving mirror as he turned into Seventh Avenue, and saw no one following him.

But he saw something else.

It was a hand that came up out of the back of the car—a lean brown hand that grasped the back of his seat close to his shoulder and dragged up a man from the floor. His heart leapt into his throat, and the car swerved dizzily under his twitching hands. Then he saw the face of the man, and a racing trip hammer started up under his ribs.

The man squeezed himself adroitly over into the vacant front seat and calmly proceeded to search the dashboard for a lighter to kindle his cigarette.

"What ho, Pappy," said the Saint.

Chapter 5

How Mr. Papulos Was Taken off, and Heimie Felder Met with Further Misfortunes

Papulos steadied the car clumsily and flashed it under the indignant eyes of a traffic cop who was deliberating the richest terms in which he could describe a coupla mugs who seemed to think they had a P.D. plate in front of 'em, and who deliberated a second too long. The trip hammer inside his ribs slowed up to a heavy, rhythmical pounding.

"I'm glad to see you," he said, in a voice that croaked oddly in his throat. "I was goin' out lookin' for you."

With the glowing lighter at the end of his cigarette, Simon half turned to glance at him.

"Were you, Pappy?" he murmured pleasantly. "What a coincidence! It seems as if we must be soul mates, drifting through life with our hearts singing in tune. Tell me some more bedtime stories, brother—I like them."

Papulos swallowed. The Saint's almost miraculous appear­ance had caught him before he had even had time to con­sider a possible line of approach; and for the first time since he had plunged out of Charley's Place on that mad quest he became aware of the hopeless obstacles that didn't even begin to crop up until he had found his quarry. Now, unasked and uninvited, his quarry had obligingly found him; and he was experiencing some of the almost hysterical paralysis that would seize an ardent huntsman if a fox walked up to him and rolled over on its back, expectantly wagging its tail. The difference in this case was that the quarry was much larger and more cunning and more dangerous than any fox; it had a wick­edly mocking gleam in its steel-blue eyes; and under the ban­tering surveillance of that clear and glittering gaze Mr. Papulos recalled, in a most unwelcomely apt twist of reminis­cence, that on the last occasion when he had seen the quarry face to face, and there were a considerable number of armed and husky hoodlums within call, he, Mr. Papulos, had been misguided enough to poke the said quarry in the kisser. The prospects of establishing a rapid and brotherly entente seemed a shade less bright than they had appeared in his first exuber­ant enthusiasm for the idea.

"Yeah—I was lookin' for you," he repeated jerkily. "I thought you and me might have a talk."

"One gathers that you were in no small hurry to exercise your jaw," Simon remarked. "You nearly left the back part of the bus behind when you started off. What's after you?"

Something inside the Greek rasped through to the surface under the pressure of that gentle bantering voice. His breath grated in his throat.

"If you want to know what's after me," he blurted, "it's a bullet. A whole raft of bullets."

"Do they travel on rafts?" asked the Saint interestedly. "I didn't know you were joining the navy."

Papulos gulped.

"I'm not kidding," he got out desperately. "The finger's on me—on account of you. I sent you to Morrie, with that knife on you, an' they're saying I double-crossed 'em. You gotta listen to me, Saint—I'm on the spot!"

The Saint's eyebrows lifted.

"So you figure that if you go out and bring my head back in an Oshkosh they may forgive you—is that it?" he drawled. "Well, well, well, Pappy, I'm not saying it wasn't a grand idea; but I've got a morbid sort of ambition to be buried all in one piece——"

"I tell you I'm not kidding!" Papulos pleaded wildly. "I gotta talk to you. I'll talk turkey. Maybe we can make a bargain——"

"How much credit do you reckon to get on that sock you gave me last night?" inquired the Saint.

Papulos swallowed again and found difficulty in doing it. His eyes, mechanically picking a route through the traffic, were reddened and frantic.

"For God's sake," he gasped, "I'm talkin' turkey. I'm tryin' to make a deal——"

"Not for sanctuary?"

"Yeah—if that's the word for it."

The Saint's eyes narrowed. His smile suddenly acquired a tremendous skepticism.

"That sounds like an awful lot of fun," he murmured. "How do we play this game?"

"Any way you like. I'm on the level, Saint! I wouldn't double-cross you. I'm shootin' square with you, Saint. The mob's after me. They're putting me on the spot—an' you're the only guy in the world who might get me off of it. ... Yeah, I took that sock at you last night—but that was different. You can take a sock back at me any time—you can take twenty! I wouldn't stop you. But what the hell, you wouldn't see a guy rubbed out just because he took a sock at you—"

Simon pondered gently; but beneath his benign exterior it was apparent that he regarded the Greek with undiminished suspicion and distaste.

"I don't know, Pappy," he said reflectively. "Blokes have been rubbed out for less—much less."

"I was just nervous, Saint. It didn't mean a thing. I guess you might of done the same yourself. Lookit, I could help you a lot if you forgot last night an' helped me ——"

"In exchange for what?" asked the Saint, and his voice was even less reassuring than before.

Papulos licked his lips.

"I could tell you things. Say, I ain't the only guy in the racket. I know you were waitin' to take me for this ride when I came out, but ——"

For the first time since he had been there the Saint laughed. There was no comfort for Papulos in that laugh, no more than there had been in his soft voice or his pleasant smile; but he laughed.

"You flatter yourself, Pappy," he said. "You aren't nearly so important as that. We step on things like you on our way, wherever they happen to wriggle out—we don't make special appointments for 'em. I thought this car belonged to Dutch. But since you happen to be here, Pappy, I'm afraid you'll have to do. As you kindly reminded me, we have one or two slight arguments to settle—"

"You want Dutch, don't you? You want Dutch more'n you want me—ain't that right? Well, I could help you to get Dutch. I can tell you everything he does, an' when he does it, an' where he goes, an' how he's protected. I could help you to get the whole mob, if you want 'em. Listen, Saint, you gotta let me talk!"

Simon smiled pleasantly. His face was tolerant and kindly, but Papulos did not see that. Papulos saw only the cold blue steel in his eyes—and a vision of death that had come to Irboll and Voelsang and Ualino. Papulos heard the hard ring be­hind the gentle tones of his voice and knew that he had yet to convince the Saint of his terrible sincerity.

The Saint gazed at him through a wreathing screen of smoke; and his left hand did not stir from his coat pocket, where it had rested ever since he had been in sight.

A checkered and perilous career had done much to harden that tender trustfulness in which Simon Templar's blue eyes had first looked out upon the light of day. Regretfully, he admitted that the gross disillusionments of life had left their mark. It is given to human faith to survive just so much and no more; and a man who in his time has been scarred to the core by the bitter truth about fairies and Santa Claus cannot be blamed if a certain doubt, a certain cynicism, begins in later life to taint the virgin freshness of his innocence. Simon had met Papulos before and had taken his measure. He did not believe that Papulos was a man who could be driven by the fear of death to betray the unwritten code of his kind.

What he forgot was the fact that most men live in frightful fear of death—frightful fear of that black oblivion which will snatch their lusts and their enjoyments from them in a single tortured instant. He forgot that though a man like Papulos would fight in the battles of gangland like a maniac, though he would stand up brutally unafraid under the hails of hot death that come whistling through the open streets, he might become nothing but a cringing coward in the threat of cold­blooded unanswerable obliteration. Even the stark panic that showed in the Greek's eyes did not convince him.

"I wouldn't lie to you," Papulos was babbling hoarsely. "This is on the level. I got nothin' to gain. You don't have to promise me nothin'. You gotta believe me."

"Why?" asked the Saint callously.

Papulos swung the car round Columbus Circle and headed blindly to the east. His face was haggard with utter despair.

"You think this is a stall—you don't believe I'm on the level?"

"Yes," said the Saint, "and no."

"What d'ya mean?"

"Yes, brother," said the Saint explicitly, "I do think it's a stall. No, brother, I don't believe you're on the level. ... By the way, Pappy, which cemetery are you heading for? It'd save a lot of expense if we did the job right on the premises. You can take your own choice, of course, but I've always thought the Gates of Heaven Cemetery, Valhalla, N. Y., was the best address of its kind I ever heard."

Papulos looked into the implacable blue eyes and felt closer to death than he had ever been.

"You gotta listen," he said, almost in a whisper. "I'm shootin' the works. I'll talk first, an' you can decide whether I'm tellin' the truth afterwards. Just gimme a break, Saint.. I'm shootin' square with you."

Simon shrugged.

"There's lots of time between here and Valhalla," he pointed out affably. "Shoot away."

Papulos caught at the breath that would not seem to fill the void in his lungs. The sweat was running down his sides like a trickle of icicles, and his mouth had stiffened so that he had to labour over the formation of each individual word.

"This is straight," he said. "Puttin' the snatch on that kid was an accident. That ain't the racket any more—it's too risky, an' there ain't any need for it. Protection's the racket, see? You say to a guy like Inselheim: 'You pay us so much dough, or it'll be too bad about your kid, see?' Well, Insel­heim stuck in his toes over the last payment. He said he wouldn't pay any more; so we put the arm on the kid. You didn't do him no good, takin' her back."

"You don't tell me," said the Saint lightly; but his voice was grim and watchful.

Papulos babbled on. He had spent long enough getting a hearing; now that he had it, the words came in a flood like a breaking dam. In a matter of mere minutes, it might be too late.

"You didn't do no good. Inselheim got his daughter back, but he's still gotta pay. We won't be snatching her again. Next time, she gets the works. We phoned him first thing this morning: 'Pay us that dough, or you won't have no daugh­ter for the Saint to rescue.' Even a guy like you can't bring a kid back when she's dead."

"Very interesting," observed the Saint, "not to say blood­thirsty. But I can't somehow see that even a story like that, Pappy, is going to keep you out of the Gates of Heaven. You'll have to talk much faster than this if we're going to fall on each other's shoulders and let bygones be bygones."

The Greek's hands clenched on the wheel.

"I'll tell you anything you want to know!" he gabbled wildly. "Ask me anything you like—I'll tell you. Just gimme a break——"

"You could only tell me one thing that might be worth a trade for your unsavoury life, you horrible specimen," said the Saint coldly. "And that is—who is the Big Fellow?"

Papulos turned, white-faced, staring.

"You can't ask me to tell you that——"

"Really?"

"It ain't possible! I'd tell you if I could—but I can't. There ain't nobody in the mob could tell you that, except the Big Fellow himself, Ualino didn't know. Kuhlmann don't know. There's only one way we talk to him, an' that's by telephone. An' only one guy has the number."

Simon drew the last puff from his cigarette and pitched it through the window.

"Then it seems just too bad if you aren't the guy, Pappy," he said sympathetically; and Papulos shrank away into the farthest corner of the seat at the ruthless quietness of his voice.

"But I can tell you who it is, Saint! I'm coming clean. Wait a minute—you gotta let me talk——"

His voice rose suddenly into a shrill scream—a scream whose sheer crazed terror made the Saint's head whip round with narrowed eyes stung to a knife-edged alertness. .

In one split second he saw what Papulos had seen.

A car had drawn abreast of them on the outside—a big, powerful sedan that had crept up without either of them no­ticing it, that had manoeuvred into position with deadly skill. There were three men in it. The windows were open, and through them protruded the gleaming black barrels of sub­machine-guns. Simon grasped the scene in one vivid flash and flung himself down into the body of the car. In another instant the staccato stammer of the guns was rattling in his ears, and the steel was drumming round him like a storm of death.

* * *

The window on his right shattered in the blast and spilled fragments of glass over him; but he was unhurt. He was aware that the car was swerving dizzily; and a moment later there was a terrific crashing impact that flung him into a bruised heap under the dashboard, with his head singing as if a dozen vicious mosquitoes were imprisoned inside his skull. And after that there was silence.

Some seconds passed before other sounds reached him as if they came out of a fog. He heard the rumble of invisible traffic and the screeching of brakes, the shrilling of a police whistle and the scream of a woman close by. It took another second or two for his battered brain to grasp the fundamental reason for that strange impression of stillness: the ear-splitting crackle of the machine guns had stopped. It was as if a tropical squall had struck a small boat, smashed it in one savage in­stant, and whirled on.

The Saint struggled up. The car was listing over to star­board, and he saw that the front of it was inextricably entangled with a lamppost at the edge of the sidewalk. A crowd was already beginning to gather; and the woman who had screamed before screamed again when she saw him move. The car which had attacked them had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

He looked for Papulos. After that one abruptly strangled shriek the man had not made a sound. In another moment Simon understood why. The impact had hurled the Greek halfway through the windscreen: he lay sprawled over the scuttle with one arm limply spread out, but it was quite clear that he had been dead long before that happened. And the Saint gazed at him for an instant in silence.

"I was wrong, my lad," he said softly. "Maybe they were after you."

There was scarcely room for any further apologies to the deceased. In the far distance Simon could see a blue-clad figure lumbering towards him, blowing its whistle as it ran; and the crowd was swelling. They were on 57th Street, near the corner of Fifth Avenue, and there was plenty of material around to develop an audience far larger than the Saint would have desired. A rapid departure from those regions struck him as being one of the most immediate requirements of the day.

He got the nearest door open and stepped out. The crowd hesitated: most of them had been reading newspapers long enough to gather that standing in the way of escaping gun­men is a pastime that is severely frowned upon by the major­ity of insurance companies: and the Saint dropped a hand to his coat pocket in the hope of reminding them of the fact. The gesture had its desired effect. The crowd melted away before him; and he raced round the corner and sprinted southwards down Fifth Avenue without a soul attempting to hinder him.

A cruising taxi went by, and he leapt onto the running board and opened the door before the driver could accelerate. In another second the partition behind the driver was open, and the unmistakable cold circle of a gun-muzzle pressed gently into the back of the man's neck.

"Keep right on your way, Sebastian," advised the Saint, coolly reading the chauffeur's name off the license card in­side, "and nothing will happen to you."

The driver kept right on his way. He had been driving taxis in New York for a considerable number of years and had de­veloped a fatalistic philosophy.

"Where to, buddy?" he inquired stolidly.

"Grand Central," ordered Simon. "And don't worry about the lights."

They cut away to the left on 50th Street under the very nose of a speeding limousine; and the chauffeur half turned his head.

"You're de Saint, aintcha, pal?" he said.

"How did you know?" Simon answered carefully.

"I t'ought I reckernized ya," said the driver, with some satis­faction. "I seen pictures of ya in de papers."

Simon steadied his gun.

"So what?" he prompted caressingly.

"So nut'n. I'm pleased ta meetcha, dat's all. Say, dat job ya pulled on Long Island last night was a honey!"

The Saint smiled.