Leslie Charteris - The Saint in New York

Kuhlmann's benign but restless eyes roved over the scene while the engine was being warmed up for him, and so he was the first to recognize the black sedan which swept down the street from the west. He nudged the escort who had remained with him.

"Chust in time, here is Joe and Maxie comin' back."

He went forward towards the approaching car as it drew closer to the curb. He was less than two yards from it when he saw the ghost — too late for him to turn back or even cry out. He saw the face of the man whom he had sent away to execution, a pale ghost with stony lips and blue eyes cold and hard like burnished sapphires, and knew in that instant that the sands had run out at last. The sharp crack of a single shot crashed down the echoing channel of the street, and the black sedan was roaring away to the east before his body touched the pavement.

The police sirens were still moaning around like forlorn banshees in the distances of the surrounding night when Fay Edwards stopped the car again in Central Park. Simon had a sudden vivid memory of the night when he had sat in exactly the same spot, in another car, with Inspector Fernack; it was considerably less than thirty-six hours ago, and yet so much had happened that it might as well have been thirty-six years. He wondered what had happened to Fernack, and what that grim-visaged, massive-boned detective was thinking about the volcano of panic and killing which had flamed out in the underworld since they had had that strange, irregular conversation. Probably Fernack was scouring the city for him at that moment, harried to superhuman efforts by the savage anxiety of commissioners and politicians and their satellites; their next conversation, if they ever had one, would probably be much less friendly and tolerant. But that also seemed as far away as if it belonged in another century. Fay Edwards was waiting.

She had switched off the engine, and she was lighting a cigarette. He saw the calm, almost waxen beauty of her face in the flicker of the match she was holding, the untroubled quiet of her eyes, and had to make an effort to remember that she had killed one man that night and helped him to kill another.

"Was that all right?" she asked.

"It was all right," he said.

"I saw your list," she said reflectively. "You had my name on it. What have I done? I suppose you want something with me. I'm here — now."

He shook his head.

"There should have been a question mark after it. I put you down for a mystery. I was listening in when you spoke to Nather — that was the first time I heard your voice. I was watching you with Morrie Ualino. You gave me the gun that got me out of there. I wanted to know who you were — what you had been — why you were in the racket. Just curiosity."

She shrugged.

"Now you know the answer."

"Do I?" The response was automatic, and at once he wished he had checked it. He felt her eyes turning to look at him, and added quickly: "When you came and told Maxie tonight that the Big Fellow said he was to let me go — that wasn't the truth."

"What makes you think so?"

"I'm guessing. But I'll bet on it."

She drew on her cigarette placidly. The smoke drifted out and floated down the beam of the lights.

"Of course it wasn't true. The Big Fellow was on your list as well, wasn't he?" she said inconsequently. "Do you want him, too?"

"Most of all."

"I see. You're very determined — very single-minded, aren't you?"

"I have to be," said the Saint. "And I want to finish this job. I want to write 'The End' to it and start something else. I'm a bit tired."

She was smoking thoughtfully, a very faint frown of concentration cutting one tiny etched line between her brows — the only wrinkle in the soft perfection of her skin. She might have been alone in her room preparing to go out, choosing between one dress and another. It meant nothing to her,emotions that the only thing they shared in their acquaintance were killings, that the Saint's mission was set down in an unalterable groove of battle and sudden death, that all the paths they had taken together were laid to the same grim goal. He had an eerie feeling that death and killings were the things she understood best — that perhaps there was nothing else she really understood.

"I think I could find the Big Fellow," she said; and he tried to appear as casual and unconcerned as she was.

"You know him, don't you?"

"I'm the only one who knows him."

It was indescribably weird to be sitting there with her, wounded and tired, and to be discussing with her the greatest mystery that the annals of New York crime had ever known, waiting on the threshold of unthinkable revelations, where otherwise he would have been faced with the same illimitable blank wall as had confronted him from the beginning. In his wildest day-dreams he had never imagined that the climax of his quest would be reached like that, and the thought made him feel unwontedly humble.

"He's a great mystery, isn't he?" said the Saint meditatively. "How long have you known him?"

"I met him nearly three years ago, before he was the Big Fellow at all — before anyone had ever heard of him. He picked me up when I was down and out." She was as casual about it as if she had been discussing an ephemeral scandal of nine days' importance, as if nothing of great interest to anyone hung on what she said. "He told me about his idea. It was a good one. I was able to help him because I knew how to contact the sort of people he had to get hold of. I've been his mouthpiece ever since — until tonight."

"D'you mean you — parted company?"

"Oh, no. I just changed my mind."

"He must be a remarkable fellow," said the Saint.

"He is. When I started, I didn't think he'd last a week, even though his ideas were good. It takes something more than good ideas to hold your own in the racket. And he couldn't use personality — direct contact — of any kind. He was determined to be absolutely unknown to anyone from beginning to end. As a matter of fact, he hasn't got much personality — certainly not of that kind. Perhaps he knows it. That may be why he did everything through me — he wouldn't even speak to any of the mob over the telephone. Probably he's one of those men who are Napoleons in their dreams, but who never do anything because directly they meet anyone face to face it all goes out of them. The Big Fellow found a way to beat that. He never met anyone face to face — except me, and somehow I didn't scare him. He just kept on dreaming, all by himself."

A light was starting to glimmer in the depths of Simon Templar's understanding. It wasn't much of a light, little more than a faint nimbus of luminance in the caverns of an illimitable obscurity; but it seemed to be brightening, growing infinitesimally larger with the crawling of time, as if a man walked with a candle in the infinities of a tremendous cave. He had an uncanny illogical premonition that perhaps after all the threads were not so widely scattered — that perhaps the wall might not be so blank as he had thought. Some unreasonable standard of the rightness of things demanded it; anything else would have been out of tune with the rest of his life, a sharp discord in a smooth flow of harmony; but he did not know why he should have that faith in such a fantastic law of coincidence.

"Were his ideas very clever?" he asked.

"He had ways for us to communicate that nobody ever found out," she replied simply. "Morrie Ualino tried to find out who he was — so did Kuhlmann. They tried every trick and trap they could think of, but there was never any risk. I call that clever. He had a way of handling ransom money, between the man who picked it up and the time when he eventually got his share himself, which took the dicks into a blind alley every time. You know the trouble with ransom money — it's nearly always fixed so that it can be traced. The Big Fellow never ran the slightest risk there, either, at any time. That was only the beginning. Yes, he's clever."