Leslie Charteris - Call for the Saint

“I wouldn’t dream of telling a soul,” Mrs Wingate protested. “I just wish I weren’t so curious!”

Elliott’s attention remained on the Saint.

“In fact,” he said, “I’m not at all sure that it’s wise for you to go on with this project, even now. From what little I have heard, the King of the Beggars protects his absolute sovereignty as ruthlessly as any despot. I have a great admiration for your exploits, and I should hate to see anything happen to you.”

“Thank you ,” Simon said. “I’ve a great admiration for yours.”

Elliott hesitated, staring.

“Scarcely in the same category—”

“I mean your charities. The Elliott Hotel, for example.”

The philanthropist nodded.

“I am trying to follow a plan,” he said, a slightly fanatical glaze coming into his eyes. “I’ll admit that the several rooming-houses I own in Chicago aren’t in the same class as the Palmer House, but I think all told, I have more guests in my various establishments than any single Chicago hotel. The greatest good for the greatest number of the needy automatically means that one must supply bread, not éclairs.”

“Also,” said the Saint, holding his gaze directly, “the dispenser of bread can hardly stand by while some racketeer taxes the needy for the privilege of receiving it.”

“I can only work within my limitations and in my own way—”

Mrs Wingate was off on a tangent, figuratively clutching Elliott’s coat-tails and riding along.

“There must be roses, too,” she remarked, and everyone looked at her blankly.

Finally Simon said, “ Chacun à son goût ” in such a significant manner that Mrs Wingate nodded several times with intense solemnity, as if she had heard the Pope affirm a historic dogma.

“Man does not live by bread alone,” she said. “Stephen is concerned with the bodies of the poor. My interest is in their souls. The unfortunates do have souls, you know. I try to bring something more than bread into their dark, narrow lives. You should see... Stephen! Do you think—”

“What, Laura?”

“I’m sure you’d be willing to help us, Mr Templar. You’re notorious for your charities—”

Elliott said, “Notorious is perhaps the wrong word, Laura. And, if I may say so, the Saint’s charities are not exactly in line with what we’re trying to do.”

Mrs Wingate plunged on excitedly, as if she had not even heard him.

“And you, Miss Varing — of course. You see, we try to make the unfortunates realise something of the higher things. It gives them incentive. We arrange to put on little entertainments for them sometimes. Now tomorrow night there’s one at the Elliott Hotel—”

“In the boiler-room,” Elliott said with dry humour. “You mustn’t give the impression that it’s like the Drake.”

“But it’s an enormous room,” Mrs Wingate went on, no whit dashed. “There’ll be songs and coffee and... and... speeches, and it would be simply wonderful if you both could drop in for just a few moments. If you could do a reading, Miss Varing, and Mr Templar, if you, could... ah...”

“Now, just what could I do?” Simon asked thoughtfully. “A lecture on safe-cracking would hardly be quite the thing.”

“A speech, perhaps, showing that crime does not pay?” Elliott seemed in earnest, but the Saint could not be sure.

Mrs Wingate clasped her hands in front of her bust.

“At eight-thirty? We would so appreciate it!”

“I’m afraid eight-thirty is my curtain time,” Monica said, with an excellent air of regret. “Otherwise I’d have loved it.”

Mrs Wingate blinked.

“Oh, of course. I’d forgotten. I’m so sorry. Thank you, my dear.” She forgot Monica completely as she turned back to the Saint. “But you’ll be able to make it, won’t you, Mr Templar?”

Simon only hesitated a moment.

“I’d be delighted,” he said. “I don’t think I can get much heart into the speech till I work myself into the right mood, but I’ll do my best. You see,” he added, beaming at Elliott, “it’s been my experience that crime pays very well indeed. But, as I said before—”

“Chacun à son goût?” Elliott suggested unsmilingly.

“How true,” Mrs Wingate said vaguely. “Another cocktail, perhaps?”

Simon left Monica at the theatre and went back to his hotel to receive a purely negative report from a discouraged Hoppy Uniatz. Hoppy had spent the afternoon circulating among various pool halls and saloons where he had old acquaintances, and where Sammy the Leg was also known. That his peregrinations had done little to satisfy his chronic thirst for bourbon was understandable; the distilling industry had been trying in vain to cope with that prodigious appetite for years. But that his thirst for information had been unslaked by as much as one drop of news was a more baffling phenomenon.

Sammy the Leg had been seen in none of his usual haunts, and none of his dearest cronies had heard either of or from him. Nor had rumour any theories to advance. He had not been reported dead, sick, drunk, in love, in hiding, or departed from town. He had simply dropped out of the local scene, without a word or a hint to anyone.

“I don’t get it, boss,” Mr Uniatz summed up, confirming his earlier conclusion.

Simon rescued the bottle from which Hoppy was endeavouring to fill some of the vacua which had defied the best efforts of Chicago’s bar-tenders, and poured himself a modest portion.

“We now have,” he said, “a certain problem.”

“Dat’s right, boss,” Hoppy agreed.

He waited hopefully for the solution, experience having taught him that it was no use trying to compete with the Saint in such flights of speculation. A man without intellectual vanity, he was content to leave such scintillations to nimbler minds. Also this saved overloading his own brain, a sensitive organ under its osseous overcoat.

“The question is, who knows how much about what?” said the Saint. ‘‘If anyone at that cocktail party is connected with the King of the Beggars, I might as well walk barefooted into a den of rattlesnakes as show up to claim my reservation at the Elliott Hotel. But by the same token, if I don’t show up, I’m announcing that I have reasons not to — which may be premature.”

“Yeah,” Hoppy concurred, with the first symptoms of headache grooving his brow.

“On the other hand,” Simon answered himself, “if the ungodly are expecting me tomorrow, they won’t be expecting me tonight, and this might be a chance to keep them off balance while I case the joint.”

“I give up,” said Mr Uniatz sympathetically.

The Saint paced the room with long, restless strides. He was at a crossroads before which far more subtle strategists than Mr Uniatz might well have been bewildered, with the signpost spinning over them like a windmill. Simon even felt his own cool judgment growing dizzy with its own contortions. He was in a labyrinth of ifs and buts to which there seemed to be no key...

Mr Uniatz pinged BBs monotonously through his teeth at the electric light, drawing from it the clear, sharp notes of repeated bull’s-eyes.

“I get better at dis all de time, boss,” he remarked, as if in consolation. “Dis afternoon I stop in a boilicue an’ get in de toid row. Dey is a stripper on who is but lousy — she should stood home wit’ her grandchildren. Well, I start practisin’ on her wit’ my BBs. I keep hittin’ her just where I’m aimin’, and she can’t figure where dey come from. It breaks up de act—”

The Saint halted in the middle of a step and swung around.

“Hoppy,” he said, “I never expected to see you cut Gordian knots, but I think you’ve done it.”