The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (3 page)

“Where is he?”

“It’s just possible,” said the Saint in his slow soft voice, without a shift of his eyes, “that you’ve got some mistaken ideas about what I am and what I’ve come here for. If you had an idea, for instance, that your ugly mug was so terrifying that I’d fold up as soon as I saw it, or that I’d tell you anything until I was ready to tell it—well, we’d better go back to the beginning and start again.”

Luckner glared at him silently for a second, and then he said in a very level tone: “Who the hell are you?”

“I am the Saint.”

The man on the arm of the chair took the toothpick out of his mouth and forgot to close his mouth behind it. The man by the door sucked in his breath with a sharp hiss like a squirt of escaping steam. Only Luckner made no active expression of emotion, but his face went a shade lighter in color and froze into wooden restraint.

Simon allowed the announcement to sink into the brains of his audience at its own good leisure, while he let the smoke of his cigarette trickle through his lips to curl in a faintly mocking feather before Luck-ner’s stony eyes. There was something so serene, something so strong and quietly dangerous about him which coupled with his almost apologetic self-introduction was like the revelation of an unsheathed sword, that none of the men made any move towards him. He looked at Luckner unruffledly with those very clear and faintly bantering blue eyes.

“I am the Saint,” he said. “You should know the name. I know where to find Marty O’Connor. The only question you have to answer is—how much is he worth to you?”

Luckner’s knees bent until he reached the level of the settee. He put the cigar back in his mouth.

“Sit down,” he said. “Let’s talk this over.”

The Saint shook his head.

“Why spend the time, Joe? You ought to know how much Marty’s worth. I hear he used to keep your accounts once, and he could make a great squeal if they got him on the stand. It ‘d put three new lives into the prosecution. Not that I’d lose any sleep if they were going to send you to the chair; but I suppose we can’t put everything right at once. You’ll get what’s coming to you. Sooner or later. But just for the moment, this is more important.” Simon studied his fingernails. “I owe Marty something, but I can’t give it to him myself— that’s one of the disadvantages of the wave of virtue which seems to have come over this great country. But I don’t see why you shouldn’t give him what he deserves.” The Saint’s eyes lifted again suddenly to Luckner’s face with a cold and laconic directness. “I don’t care what you do about Marty so long as I get what I think he’s worth.”

“And what’s that?”

“That is just one hundred grand.”

Luckner stiffened as if a spear had been rammed up his backbone from his sacrum to his scalp.

“How much?”

“One hundred thousand dollars,” said the Saint calmly. “And cheap at the price. After all, that’s less than a third of what you offered the Revenue to get this income-tax case dropped altogether… . You will pay it in twenty-dollar bills, and I shall want it by ten o’clock tonight.”

The dilated incredulity of Luckner’s eyes remained set for a moment, and then they narrowed back to their normal size and remained fixed on the Saint’s face like glittering beads. It was symptomatic of Luckner’s psychology that he made no further attempt to argue. The Saint didn’t have the air of a man who was prepared to devote any time to bargaining, and Luckner knew it. It didn’t even occur to him to question the fundamental fact of whether Simon Templar was really in a position to carry out his share of the transaction. The Saint’s name, and the reputation which Luckner still remembered, was a sufficient guarantee of that. There was only one flimsy quibble that Luckner could see at all, and he had a premonition that even this was hopeless before he tried it.

“Suppose we kept you here without any hundred grand and just saw what we could do about persuading you to tell us where Marty is?”

The Saint smiled rather wearily.

“Of course I’d never have thought of that. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to have somebody waiting outside here who’d start back for New York if I didn’t come out of this room safe and sound in”—he looked at his watch—“just under another three minutes. And I wouldn’t have thought of telling this guy that if he had to beat it back to the city without me he was to get Marty and take him straight along to the D.A.‘s office… . You’re taking an awful lot for granted, Joe, but if you think you can make me talk in two and a half minutes go ahead and try.”

Luckner chewed his cigar deliberately across from one side of his mouth to the other. He was in a corner, and he was capable of facing the fact.

“Where do we make the trade ?”

“You can send a couple of guys with the money down the Bronx River Parkway tonight. I’ll be waiting in a car one mile south of a sign on the right which says City of Yonkers. If the dough is okay I’ll tell them where to find Marty, and they can have him in five minutes. What they do when they see him is none of my business.” The Saint’s blue eyes rested on Luckner again with the same quiet and deadly implication. “Is that all quite clear?”

Luckner’s head remained poised for a moment before it jerked briefly downwards.

“The dough will be okay,” he said, and the Saint smiled again.

“They didn’t know how lucky you were going to be when they gave you your nickname, Joe,” he said.

For some time after he had gone, Luckner sat in the same position, with his hands on his spread knees, chewing his cigar and staring impassively in front of him. The man with the toothpick continued his endless foraging. The man who had guarded the door lighted a cigarette and gazed vacantly out of the window.

The situation was perfectly clear, and Luckner had enough cold-blooded detachment to review it with his eyes open. After a while he spoke.

“You better go, Luigi,” he said. “You and Karlatta. Take a coupla typewriters, and don’t waste any time.”

Toscelli nodded phlegmatically and garaged his toothpick in his vest pocket.

“Do we take the dough?”

“You’re damn right you take the dough. You heard what he said? You give him the dough an’ he tells you where to find Marty. I’ll write some checks and you can go to New York this afternoon and collect it. An’ don’t kid yourselves. If there are any tricks, that son of a bitch has thought of them all. You know how he took off Morrie Ualino an’ Dutch Kuhlmann?”

“It’s a lot of dough, Lucky,” said Mr Toscelli gloomily.

Joe Luckner’s jaw hardened.

“A life on Alcatraz is a lot of years,” he said stolidly. “Never mind the dough. Just see that Marty keeps his mouth shut. Maybe we can do something about the dough afterwards.”

Even then he kept his belief in his lucky star, although the benefit it had conferred on him was somewhat ambiguous. A more captious man might have quibbled that a price ticket of one hundred thousand dollars was an expensive present, but to Luckner it represented fair value. Nor did he feel any compunction about the use to which he proposed to put the gift.

In this respect, at least, Toscelli was able to agree with him without placing any strain on his principles. The chief load on his mind was the responsibility of the cargo of twenty-dollar bills which he had collected from various places during the afternoon; and he felt a certain amount of relief when ke arrived at the rendezvous and found a closed car parked by the roadside and waiting for him exactly as the Saint had promised that it would be. Even so, he kept one hand on his gun while the Saint received the heavy packages of currency through the window.

Simon examined each packet carefully under the dashboard light and satisfied himself that there was no deception.

“A very nice little haul,” he murmured. “You must be sorry to see it go, Luigi. … By the way, you can let go your gun—I’ve got you covered from here, and you’re a much better target than I am.”

Toscelli wavered, peering at him sombrely out of the gloom. It was true that it grieved him to see so much hard cash taken out of his hands; but he remembered Luckner’s warning, and he had heard of the Saint’s reputation himself.

“Where do we go?” he growled.

The shiny barrel of the Saint’s automatic, resting on the edge of the window, moved in a briefly indicative arc towards the north.

“Straight on up the Parkway for exactly three miles. Park your wagon there and wait for results. He’ll be travelling south, looking for a car parked exactly where you’re going to be—but he won’t expect you to be in it. You won’t make any mistake, because I’ve marked his car: the near-side headlight has a cross of adhesive tape on the lens, and I hope it will give you pious ideas. On your way, brother… .”

Simon drove slowly south. In about half a mile he pulled in to the side of the road again and stopped there. He flicked his headlights two or three times before he finally switched them out, and he was completing the task of distributing a measured half of Toscelli’s hundred-thousand-dollar payment over his various pockets when a subdued voice hailed him cautiously from the shadows at the roadside.

The Saint grinned and opened the door.

“Hullo there, Marty.” He settled his pockets, buttoned his coat and slipped out. “Are you ready to travel?”

“If there’s nothing to stop us.”

“There isn’t.” Simon punched him gently in the stomach and their hands met. “The car is yours, and you’ll find about fifty thousand bucks lying about in it. The earth is yours between here and the Canadian border; but if I were you I’d strike east from here and go up through White Plains. And any time I’m in Canada I’ll drop by your garage for some gas. Maybe it ‘11 go towards evening up what you did for me one time.” He gripped Marty’s shoulder for a moment and then turned to the other slighter figure which stood beside them. “Take care of him, Cora—and yourself too.”

“I’ll do that.”

A match flared in the Saint’s hands for an instant, but his eyes were intent on the cigarette he was lighting.

“You called Lucky Joe as I told you to?” he asked casually. “Told him you were through with Marty and couldn’t bear to wait another day to take up with the new love?”

“Yes. Half an hour ago.”

“I bet he fell for it.”

“He said he’d be there.” She hesitated. “I don’t know why you’ve done all this for us, Saint, and I don’t know how you did it—but why did you want me to do that?”

The Saint smiled invisibly in the dark.

“Because I made an appointment for him and I wanted to be sure he’d keep it. Some friends of his will be there to meet him. I have to work in these devious ways these days because Inspector Fernack warned me to keep out of trouble. Don’t lose any sleep over it, kid. Be good.”

He kissed her, and held the door while they got into the car. From somewhere far to the north the faint rattle of machine guns came down the wind.

II THE SMART DETECTIVE

Lieutenant corrio was on the carpet. This was a unique experience for him, for he had a rather distinguished record on the New York Detective Bureau. Since the time when he was admitted to it, he had achieved a series of successes which had earned him more than ordinarily rapid promotion without winning him any of the affection of his colleagues and superiors. While he had made comparatively few sensational arrests, he had acquired an outstanding reputation in the field of tracing stolen property, and incidentally in pursuit of this specialty had earned a large number of insurance company rewards which might have encouraged the kindhearted observer to list a very human jealousy among the chief causes of his unpopularity. But apart from this plausible explanation there were even more human reasons why Lieutenant Corrio had so conspicuously failed to make himself the darling of Centre Street—he was a very smug man about his successes, and he had other vanities which were even less calculated to endear him to the other detectives whom his inspired brilliance had more than once put in the shade.

None of these things, however, were sufficient to justify his immediate superiors in administering the official flattening which they had long been yearning to bestow; and it was with some pardonable glow of satisfaction that Inspector John Fernack, who was as human as anyone else if not more so, had at last found the adequate excuse for which his soul had been pining wistfully for many moons.

For at last Lieutenant Corrio’s smug zeal had overreached itself. He had made an entirely gratuitous, uncalled for and unauthorized statement to a reporter on the New York Daily Mail, which had been featured under two-column headlines and decorated with Lieutenant Corrio’s favourite photograph of himself on the first inside sheet of that enterprising tabloid.

This copy of the paper lay on Inspector Fernack’s desk while he spoke his mind to his subordinate, and he referred to it several times for the best quotations which he had marked off in blue pencil in preparation for the interview.

One of these read: “If you ask me why this man Simon Templar was ever allowed to come back to New York, I can’t tell you. I don’t believe in idealistic crooks any more than I believe in reformed crooks, and the Police Department has got enough work to do without having any more hoodlums of that kind spilled onto us.

But I can tell you this. There have been a lot of changes in the Detective Bureau since Templar was last here, and he won’t find it so easy to get away with his racket as he did before.”

There was another one: “If this cheap gunman that they call the Saint doesn’t believe me, he’s only got to start something. I’m taking care of him myself, and if he pulls so much as a traffic violation while he’s in the city I’ll get him put away where he won’t give anyone any more trouble.”

Fernack read out these extracts in his most scorching voice, which was a very scorching voice when he put his heart into it.

“I hadn’t heard the news about your bein’ appointed Police Commissioner,” Fernack said heavily, “but I’d like to be the first to congratulate you. Of course a guy with your looks will find it a pretty soft job.”

Lieutenant Corrio shrugged his shoulders sullenly. He was a dark and rather flashily good-looking man, who obviously had no illusions about the latter quality, with a wispy moustache and the slimmest figure consistent with the physical requirements of the force.