Leslie Charteris - Catch the Saint

Simon decided that Brad Ryner’s condition was more crucial than chasing down the men who had been beating him. He had a sickening feeling that he might already have been too late to save the policeman. The punishment he had been taking when the Saint arrived at the alley had looked more like a sadistic way of finishing him off permanently than just a rough lesson in the wages of spying.

The detective seemed lifeless when the Saint knelt beside him; his face and clothing were sticky with blood. But Simon could detect breath and a pulse-beat. He would have preferred not to move the man alone, risking worse damage, but he could not leave him there while he went for help. He picked him up in his arms as gently as he could and carried him to the street.

As he came out of the alley onto the sidewalk, stepping slowly and heavily under the weight of his burden, he saw a sight that even under the circumstances struck him as almost comically ironic: Parked in front of his own car in the no-parking zone was a police patrol car, and a uniformed officer was standing in the rain, busily writing out a ticket.

Another patrolman, less engrossed, spotted Simon first, jumped out of the police car, and strode towards him.

“Whaddaya think you’re doing?” he interrogated brilliantly.

Simon, still trudging forward with his bloodstained load, told him: “Carrying coals to Newcastle, maybe. Your department probably knows about this chap. He’s an under-cover agent from California named Brad Ryner. He was getting beaten up in that alley when I came along.”

The policeman looked at the crimson mess that had been Ryner’s face.

“God damn!” he breathed.

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t recognise him right now even if you knew him,” Simon said.

“Who are you?” the other patrolman asked.

“The good Samaritan. Don’t you think we’d better get this man to a hospital before we fill out a report in triplicate?”

The first policeman helped Simon deposit Ryner in the patrol car. The second pointed: “Is that your car?”

“I confess,” Simon replied. “When I saw somebody getting killed in that alley I didn’t take time to hunt up a parking lot.”

The officer ripped up the ticket he had been writing and dropped the fragments in the gutter, under a lamp-post sign warning about the penalties for depositing litter.

“What did you say his name is? !’

“Ryner.” Simon spelled it. “Brad Ryner. I knew him slightly on the Coast, and I spotted him in Sammy’s boozer more than an hour ago.”

“You better come along with us,” the patrolman said, which was no more and no less than the Saint could have expected.

A moment later, siren howling, they were racing through the rain-swept streets.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning before Brad Ryner was able to talk to him. Even before Ryner had regained consciousness, just after daybreak, a tired but conscientious detective lieutenant had been called from his bed to oversee developments at the hospital, while a uniformed guard had been assigned to the door of Ryner’s room. Simon, meanwhile, after being thoroughly identified, had returned to his hotel at about four in the morning, on his own condition that he be phoned as soon as Ryner could talk. The call came at 10:15, and he was at the hospital twenty minutes later.

Brad Ryner was propped up in his bed, half sitting, one eye and half his face covered with bandages, when Simon entered the room.

“I almost hope you don’t remember me,” said the Saint grimly. “I wish I hadn’t remembered you. Calling your name was the stupidest thing I’ve done for a hundred years.”

The exposed half of Ryner’s face was heavily bruised; even so, the corner of his broad mouth managed a trace of a smile.

“Just the breaks of the game,” he said in a voice that sounded as if it came through a wad of cotton. “Don’t blame yourself, Simon.”

“I won’t waste time blaming myself. I’d rather know what I can do to make up for it.”

“You already made up for it,” Ryner said indistinctly. “You saved my life. Another minute or two and those bastards would have killed me.”

“That’s like thanking a man who’s stabbed you for pulling the knife out,” Simon said ruefully.

“You’re exaggerating,” said a new voice, and a tall, slender, prematurely grey-haired man who had been standing by the side of the bed stepped forward to shake Simon’s hand. “I’m Stacey, detective lieutenant. I was responsible for getting Brad here for this job in the first place.”

From there Lieutenant Stacey went on to say how pleased and intrigued he was to meet the famous Saint.

“Apparently nobody’s identity is safe round here,” Simon responded. “But now that you’ve seen an example of my genius in action you’ll understand how I got to be so notorious. The only excuse I can think of for blabbing Brad’s name is that I was under the spell of a beautiful young lady at the time.”

“You’re not kidding,” said Ryner.

“But just mentioning his name shouldn’t have blown the whole thing,” Lieutenant Stacey said. “Those hoods couldn’t know that somebody named Brad Ryner was a police officer out in California, and you didn’t press the point, did you?”

Simon shook his head.

“I hopped away like a flea off a hot griddle.”

“So why didn’t they just accept it as a case of mistaken identity? You don’t go out and kill one of your pool buddies just because some stranger thinks he’s somebody he used to know by another name.”

“They might have been suspicious already,” Simon suggested.

“I don’t know,” Brad Ryner said. “I didn’t realise it if they were, but of course they wouldn’t have told me if they smelled a rat, since I was the rat.”

“There’s no point wasting time theorising about that,” Stacey said. “What’s done is done. It’s a rotten shame, though, even if it was nobody’s fault.”

“Yeah,” said Ryner, shifting painfully in his bed. “I’m on the sidelines permanently as far as this game is concerned, and there’s nobody else on our side playing.”

“You mean playing under-cover?” Simon asked.

“Right,” Ryner croaked. “The lieutenant here already had one New York man disappear on this job; that’s why he called me in.”

“Sounds tough,” Simon said with growing interest. “What’s the game exactly?”

Lieutenant Stacey looked questioningly at Ryner. Ryner attempted a nod of approval.

“Have a chair,” Stacey said to the Saint, and the two men sat down beside the bed.

“It’s tough all right,” Stacey said. “We’re on the trail of a guy who’s getting all the organised crime in these parts sewn up. He makes the Mafia look like the Dead End Kids. When he gets finished, the only thing he won’t run in this state will be the clocks.”

“I suppose it would be superfluous to ask why you don’t arrest him,” Simon said. “No hard evidence?”

“Not only that,” Lieutenant Stacey said with a helpless gesture, “we don’t even know who he is.”

“That does make it difficult.”

“Evidence?” Ryner put in weakly. “There’s evidence all over the place, but it never leads to the top.”

“We’ve made arrests,” Stacey said. “Even got a few convictions — which isn’t easy, considering this guy seems to have half the judges in his pocket, and the witnesses have a way of vanishing or forgetting everything but their own names. But even the thugs who carry out his orders don’t know who the boss is. They call him the Supremo. We’ve found out that much.”

“Big deal,” Ryner said. “They could call him Sitting Bull, for all the good it does us.”

“And we know a few other fairly useless facts,” Stacey went on. “Such as the fact that some of the Supremo’s muscle men hang out at Sammy’s Booze & Billiards.”