He might have touched off a charge of blasting powder at their feet Nather caught his breath in a gasping hiccough like a man shot in the stomach. Fernack rose an inch from his chair on tautened thighs: his grey eyes bulged, then narrowed to glinting slits.
"Say that again!" he rasped.
"You don't get the idea." The Saint smiled, but his sapphire gaze was as quiet as the levelled gun. "I was just asking you to translate something. Can you tell me what it means?"
"Who wants to know?"
Nather scrambled up from his chair, his fists clenched and Ms face working. His face was putting in a big day.
"This is intolerable!" he barked hoarsely. "Isn't there anything you can do, Fernack, instead of sitting there listening to this—this maniac?"
Fernack glanced at him.
"Sure," he said briefly. "You take his gun away, and I'll do it."
"I'll report you to the commissioner!" Nather half screamed. "By God, I'll have you thrown out of the force! What do we have laws for when an armed hoodlum can hold me up in my own house under your very nose ——"
"And gangsters can shoot cops in broad daylight and get acquitted," added the Saint brightly. "Let's make it an indignation meeting. I don't know what the country's coming to."
Nather choked; and the Saint stood up. There was something in the air which told him that the interview might more profitably be adjourned—and the judge's blustering outburst had nothing to do with it. With that intuitive certainty in his mind, he acted on it in cool disregard of dramatic sequence. That was the way he liked best to work, along his own paths, following a trail without any attempt to dictate the way it should go. But his evening had only just begun.
He strolled to the desk and lifted the lid of a bronze humidor. Selecting a cigar, he crackled it at his ear and sniffed it appreciatively.
"You know good tobacco if you don't know anything else good, Algernon," he murmured.
He discarded the stub of his cigarette and stuck the Corona-Corona at a jaunty angle between his teeth. As an afterthought, he tipped over the humidor and helped himself to a bonus handful of the same crop.
"Well, boys," he said, "you mustn't mind if I leave you. I never overstay my welcomes, and maybe you have some secrets to whisper in each other's ears." He backed strategically to the window and paused there to button his coat. "By the way," he said, "you needn't bother to rush up this window and wave me good-bye. These farewells always make me feel nervous." He spun the automatic around his finger for the last time and hefted it in his hand significantly. "I'd hate there to be any accidents at the last minute," said the Saint; and was gone.
Fernack stared at the rectangle of empty blackness and emptied his lungs in a long sigh. After some seconds he got up. He walked without haste to the open casements and stood there looking silently out into the dark; then he turned back to the room.
"That's a guy I could like," he said thoughtfully.
Nather squinted at him.
"You'd better get out, too," snarled the judge. "You'll hear more about this later ——"
"You'll hear more about it now," Fernack said coldly; and there was something in his voice which made Nather listen.
What the detective had to say did not take long. Fernack on business was not a man to expand himself wordily at any time, and any euphemistic phrases which he might have revolved in his mind had been driven out of it entirely. He stowed his kid gloves high up on the shelves of his disgust, and propounded his assessment of the facts with a profane brutality that left Nather white and shaking.
Three minutes after Simon Templar's departure, Inspector Fernack was also barging out of the room, but by a more orthodox route. He thundered down the stairs and shouldered aside the obsequious butler who made to open the door for him, and flung himself in behind the wheel of his prowl car with a short-winded violence that could not be accounted for solely by an ardent desire to remove himself from those purlieus. But his evening was not finished, either; though he did not know this at that moment.
He slammed the door, switched on the ignition, and unlocked the steering column; and then something hard probed its way gently but firmly into his ribs, and the soft voice of the Saint wafted into his right ear.
"Hold on, Inspector. You and I are going for a little joy ride!"
* * *
Inspector Fernack's jaw sagged.
Under the stress of his unrelieved emotions, he had not noticed the Saint's arrival or the noiseless opening of the other door. There was no reason on earth why he should have looked for either. According to his upbringing, it was so baldly axiomatic that the Saint would by that time be skating through the traffic three or four miles away that he had not even given the subject a thought. The situation in which he found himself for the second time was so deliriously unexpected that he was temporarily paralyzed. And in that space of time Simon slid in onto the cushions beside him and closed the door.
Fernack's jaw closed, and he looked into the level blue eyes behind the gun.
"What's your idea?"
"We'll go places. I'd like to talk to you, and it's just possible you might like to talk to me. We'll go anywhere you like, bar Centre Street"
The granite lines of the detective's face twitched. There were limits to his capacity for boiling indignation, a point where the soaring curve of his wrath curled over and fell down a precipitous switchback—and the gay audacity of the man at his side had boosted him to that point in two terrific jumps. For a second the detective's temper seemed to teeter breathlessly on the pinnacle like a trolley stalling on a scenic railway; and then it slipped down the gradient on the other side. . . .
"We'll try the park," Fernack said.
A heavy blucher tramped on the starter, and the gears meshed. They turned out of Tenth Street and swung north up Seventh Avenue. Simon leaned comfortably back and used the lighter on the dashboard for his cigar; nothing more was said until they were threading the tangle of traffic at Times Square.
"You know," said the Saint calmly, "I'm getting a bit tired of throwing this gun around. Couldn't we dispense with it and call this conference off the record?"
"Okay by me," rumbled Fernack, without taking his eyes from the road.
Simon dropped the automatic into the side pocket of his coat and relaxed into the whole-hearted enjoyment of his smoke. There was no disturbing doubt in his mind that he could rely absolutely on the truce. They rode on under the blazing lights and turned into Central Park by the wide entrance at Columbus Circle.
A few hundred yards on, Fernack pulled in to the side of the road and killed the engine. He switched on his shortwave radio receiver and lighted his cigar deliberately before he turned. The glow of the tip as he inhaled revealed his rugged face set in a contour of phlegmatic inquiry.
"Well," he said, "what's the game?" Simon shrugged.
"The same as yours, more or less. You work within the law, and I work without it. We're travelling different roads, but they both go the same way. On the whole, my road seems to get places quicker than yours—as witness the late Mr. Irboll."
Fernack stared ahead over his dimmed lights.
"That's why I'm here, Saint. I told the commissioner this morning that I could love any man who rubbed out that rat. But you can't get away with it."
"I've been getting away with it pretty handsomely for a number of years," answered the Saint coolly.
"It's my job to take you in, sweat a confession out of you, and send you up for a session in the hot squat. Tomorrow I may be doing it. You're slick. I'll hand it to you. You're the only man who ever took me for a ride twice in one hour, and made me like it. But to me you're a crook—a killer. The underworld has a big enough edge in this town, without giving it any more. Officially, it's my job to put you away. That's how the cards are stacked."