Leslie Charteris - The Saint in New York

"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.

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.