"Okay, wise guy. I'll find out soon enough. And if you got it where I think you did, it's going to be just too bad."
He plumped himself on one of the beds and picked up the telephone. The guards stood by phlegmatically, waiting for the connection to go through. One of them gazed sourly at a cigar that had gone out, and picked up a box of matches. The fizz of a match splashed through the silence; and then the Greek was talking.
"Hullo, Judge. This is Papulos. Listen, I got a monkey down here who just flashed a twenty-grand roll in C notes, and a certain slip of paper. . . ."
The Saint saw him stiffen and grind the receiver harder into his ear. The guard with the relighted cigar blew out a cloud of malodorous smoke and drew patterns on the carpet with a pointed toe. The receiver clacked and spattered into the stillness, and Simon flexed his forearm for the reassuring pressure of the knife sheathed inside his sleeve.
Papulos dropped the instrument back in its bracket with an ominous click and turned slowly back to the Saint. He got to his feet, with his flattened face jutting forward on his shoulders, and stared at Simon, with his eyes bright and glistening.
"Mr. Simon, eh?" he rasped.
The Saint smiled engagingly.
"Simon Templar is the full name," he said, "but I thought you might feel I was going upstage on you if I insisted on it all."
Papulos nodded.
"So you're the Saint!" His voice was venomous, but deeper still there was a vibration of the hate that can only be born of fear. "You're the rat who plugged Irboll this afternoon. You're the guy who's going to clean up New York." He laughed abruptly, but there was no humour in the sound. "Well, punk—you're through!"
He turned on his heel and issued a series of sharp orders to the two guards.
One word out of the arrangements for his disposal was enough for Simon Templar's ears. His strategy had worked exactly as he had psychologized it from the beginning. By permitting himself to be trapped by Papulos he had taken one more step up the ladder. He was being passed on to the man higher up for the final disposition of his fate; and that man was Morrie Ualino. And where Ualino was, the Saint felt sure, there was a good sporting chance that the heiress of all the Inselheims might also be.
"March," ordered the first guard.
"But what about my twenty grand?" protested Simon aggrievedly.
The second guard grinned.
"Where you're going, buddy, they use asbestos money," he said. "Shove off."
Papulos unlocked the door. The twenty thousand dollars was in the side pocket of his coat, just as he had stuffed it away when he rose from the poker table; and Simon Templar never took prophecies of his eventual destination too seriously. He figured that a nation which had Samuel Insull in its midst would not be unduly impoverished by the loss of twenty thousand berries; and as he reached the door he stopped to lay a hand on the Greek's shoulder with a friendliness which he did not feel.
"Remember, little buttercup," said the Saint outrageously, "whatever you do, we shall always be sweethearts——"
Then one of the guards pushed him on; and Simon stowed twenty thousand dollars unobtrusively away in his pocket as they went through the hall.
Simon rode beside the first torpedo, while the other drove the sedan north and east. If anything, the pressure of the gun that bored suggestively into his side had the pleasantly familiar touch of an old friend. It was a gentle reminder of danger, a solid emblem of battle and sudden death; and there were a few dozen men in hell who would attest to the fact that he was a stranger to neither.
They rolled smoothly across the Queensborough Bridge, which spans the East River at 59th Street, and the car picked up speed as they blared their way through the semideserted streets of Astoria. Then the broad open highways of Long Island stretched before them; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and turned his brain into a perfectly functioning machine that charted every yard of the route on a memory like a photographic plate.
The outlying suburbs of New York flashed by in quick succession—Flushing, Garden City, Hempstead. They had travelled some miles beyond Springdale when the car slowed down and turned abruptly into a bumpy unfinished driveway that terminated a hundred yards farther on in front of a sombre and shuttered two-story house, where another car was already parked.
One of the guards nudged him out, and the three of them mounted the short flight of steps to the porch in single file. The inevitable face peered through a grille, recognized the leading guard, and said, "Hi, Joe." The bolts were drawn, and they went in.
The hall was lighted by a single heavily frosted orange bulb which did very little more than relieve the blackest shades of darkness. On the right, an open door gave a glimpse of a tiny room containing a small zinc-topped bar; on the left, a larger room was framed between dingy hangings. The larger room had a bare floor with small booths built around the walls, each containing a table covered with a grubby cloth. There was an electric piano in one corner, a dingy growth of artificial vines straggling over the tops of the booths and tacking themselves along the low ceiling, and a half-dozen more of the same feeble orange bulbs shedding their watery glimmer onto the scene. It was a typical gangster's dive, of a pattern more common in New Jersey than on Long Island, and the atmosphere was intended to inspire romance and relaxation, but it was one of the most depressing places in which Simon Templar had ever been.
"Upstairs?" queried the gorilla who had been recognized as Joe; and the man who had opened the door nodded.
"Yeah—waitin' for ya." He inspected the Saint curiously. "Is dis de guy?"
The two guards made simultaneous grunting noises designed to affirm that dis was de guy, and one of them took the Saint's arm and moved him on towards the stairway at the back of the hall. They mounted through a curve of darkness and came up into another dim glow of light on the floor above. The stairs turned them into a narrow corridor that ran the length of the house; Simon was hurried along past one door before which a scrawny-necked individual lounged negligently, blinking at them, as they went by, with heavy-lidded eyes like an alligator's; they passed another door and stopped before the third and last. One of his escorts hammered on it, and it was yanked open. There was a sudden burst of brighter light from within; and the Saint went on into the lion's den with an easy, unhurried stride.
Simon had seen better dens. Except for the brighter illumination, the room in which he found himself was no better than the social quarters on the ground floor. The boards underfoot were uncarpeted, the once dazzlingly patterned wallpaper was yellowed and moulting. There was a couch under the window where two shirt-sleeved hoodlums sat side-saddle over a game of pinochle; they glanced up when the Saint came in, and returned to their play without comment. In the centre of the room was a table on which stood the remains of a meal; and at the table, facing the door, sat Ualino.
Simon identified him easily from Fernack's description. But he saw the man only for one fleeting second; and after that his gaze was held by the girl who also sat at the table.
There was no logical reason why he should have guessed that she was the girl Fay who had spoken to Nather on the telephone—the Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had begun to speak. In a house like that there were likely to be numbers of girls, coming and going; and there was no evidence that Morrie Ualino was an ascetic. But there was something to this girl that might quite naturally have spoken with a voice like the one which Simon had heard. In that stark shabby room her presence was even more incongruous than the immaculate Ualino's. She was slender and fair, with eyes like amber, and her mouth was a soft curve of amazingly innocent temptation. Perhaps she was twenty-three or twenty-four, old enough to have the quiet confidence which adolescence never has; but still she was young in an ageless, enduring way that the years do not change. And once again that queer intuitive throb of expectation went through the Saint, as it had, done when he first heard the voice on Nather's telephone; the stirring of a chord in his mind whose note rang too deep for reason. . . .