Leslie Charteris - The Saint in New York

"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.

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.