Leslie Charteris - The Saint in New York

"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.