Leslie Charteris - The Saint in New York

But there was no such inquiring and impressionable eye to perform these acrobatics. There was only a square-chinned white-haired man in rimless spectacles, sitting in an easy chair with a book on his lap, who looked up with a nod and a quiet smile as the nun came in.

He closed his book, marking the place methodically, and stood up — a spare, vigorous figure in grey homespun.

"All right?" he queried.

"Fine," said the nun.

She pushed her veil back from a sleek black head, unbuttoned things and unhitched things, and threw off the long, stuffy draperies with a sigh of relief. She was revealed as a tall, wide-shouldered man in a blue silk shirt and the trousers of a light fresco suit — a man with gay blue eyes in a brown, piratical face, whose smile flashed a row of ivory teeth as he slapped his audience blithely on the back and sprawled into an armchair with a swing of lean athletic limbs.

"You took a big chance, Simon," said the older man, looking down at him; and Simon Templar laughed softly.

"And I had breakfast this morning," he said. He flipped a cigarette into his mouth, lighted it, and extinguished the match with a gesture of his hand that was an integral part of the smile. "My dear Bill, I've given up recording either of those earth-shaking events in my diary. They're things that we take for granted in this life of sin."

The other shook his head.

"You needn't have made it more dangerous."

"By sending that note?" The Saint grinned. "Bill, that was an act of devotion. A tribute to some great old days. If I hadn't sent it, I'd have been cheating my reputation. I'd have been letting myself down."

The Saint let a streak of smoke drift through his lips and gazed through the window at a square of blue sky.

"It goes back to some grand times — of which you've heard," he said quietly. "The Saint was a law of his own in those days, and that little drawing stood for battle and sudden death and all manner of mayhem. Some of us lived for it — worked for it — fought for it. One of us died for it… There was a time when any man who received a note like I sent to Irboll, with that signature, knew that there was nothing more he could do. And since we're out on this picnic, I'd like things to be the same — even if it's only for a little while."

He laughed again, a gentle lilt of a laugh that floated through the room like sunshine with a flicker of steel.

"Hence the bravado," said the Saint. "Of course that note made it more difficult — but that just gave us a chance to demonstrate our surpassing brilliance. And it was so easy. I had the gun under that outfit, and I caught him as he came out. Just once… Then I let out a thrilling scream and rushed towards him. I was urging him to repent and confess his sins while they were looking for me. There was quite a crowd around, and I think nearly all of them were arrested."

He slipped an automatic from his pocket and removed the magazine. His long arm reached out for the cleaning materials on a side table which he had been using before he went out. He slipped a rectangle of flannelette through the loop of a weighted cord and pulled it through the barrel, humming musically to himself.

The white-haired man paced over to the window and stood there with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Kestry and Bonacci were here today," he said.

The Saint's humming continued for a couple of bars. He moistened his cleaning rag with three measured drops of oil.

"Too bad I missed them," he murmured. "I've always wanted to observe a brace of your hard-boiled New York cops being tactful with an innocent suspect."

"You may get your chance soon enough," said the other grimly, and Simon chuckled.

As a matter of fact, it was not surprising that Inspector John Fernack's team had failed to locate the Saint.

Kestry and Bonacci had had an interesting time. Passing dutifully from one hostelry to another, they had trampled under their large and useful feet a collection of expensive carpets that would have realized enough for the pair of them to retire on in great comfort. They had scanned registers until their eyes ached, discovering some highly informative traces of a remarkable family of John Smiths who appeared to spend their time leaping from one hotel to another with the agility of influenza germs, but finding no record of the transit of a certain Simon Templar. Before their official eyes, aggravating the aforesaid ache, had passed a procession of smooth and immaculate young gentlemen technically described as clerks but obviously ambassadors in disguise, who had condescendingly surveyed the photograph of their quarry and pityingly disclaimed recognition of any character of such low habits amongst their distinguished clientele. Bellboys in caravanserai after caravanserai had gazed knowingly at the large, useful feet on which the tour was conducted, and had whispered wisely to one another behind their hands. There had been an atmosphere of commiserating sapience about the audiences of all their interviews which to a couple of seasoned sleuths professedly disguised as ordinary citizens was peculiarly distressing.

And it was scarcely to be expected that the chauffeur of a certain William K. Valcross, resident of the Waldorf Astoria, would have swum into their questioning ken. They were looking for a tall, dark man of about thirty, described as an addict of the most luxurious hotels; and they had looked for him with commendable doggedness, refusing to be lured into any byways of fantasy. Mr. Valcross being indubitably sixty years old and by no stretch of imagination resembling the photograph with which they had been provided, they passed him over without loss of time — and, with him, his maidservant, his manservant, his ox, his ass, and the stranger within his gates.

"If they do find me," remarked the Saint reflectively, "there will probably be harsh words."

He squinted approvingly down the shining barrel of his gun, secured the safety catch, and patted it affectionately into his pocket. Then he rose and stretched himself and went over to the window where Valcross was standing.

Before them was spread out the ragged panorama of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West. A narrow hump of rock sheltered from the Atlantic by the broad shoulder of Brooklyn, a mere ripple of stone in the ocean's inroads, on which the indomitable cussedness of Man had elected to build a city — and, not contented with the prodigious feat of overcoming such a dimensional difficulty at all, had made monuments of its defiance. Because the city could not expand laterally, it had expanded upwards; but the upward movement was a leap sculptured in stone, a flight born of necessity that had soared far beyond the standards of necessity, in a magnificent impulse of levitation that obliterated its own source. Molehills had become mountains in an art begotten of pure artifice. In the shadow of those grey and white pinnacles had grown up a modern Baghdad where the ends of the earth came together. A greater Italian city than Rome, a greater Irish city than Dublin, a greater German city than Cologne; a city of dazzling wealth whose towers had once looked like peaks of solid gold to hungry eyes reaching beyond the horizons of the Old World; a place that had sprung up from a lonely frontier to a metropolis, a central city, bowing to no other. A place where civilization and savagery had climbed alternately on each other's shoulders and reached their crest together…

"This has always been my home," said Valcross, with a queer softness.

He turned his eyes from east to west in a glance that swept in the whole skyline.

"I know there are other cities; and they say that New York doesn't represent anything but itself. But this is where my life has been lived."

Simon said nothing. He was three thousand miles from his own home; but as he stood there at the window he saw what the older man was seeing, and he could feel what the other felt. He had been there long enough to sense the spell that New York could lay on a man who looked at it with a mind not too tired for wonder — the pride and amazement at which cynical sophisticates laughed, which could still move the heart of a man who was not ashamed to sink below the surface and touch the common humanity that is the builder of cities. And because Simon could understand, he knew what was in the other's mind before it was spoken.