He picked up his glass, trying to control his hand. A blob of whisky fell from it and formed a shining pool on the table—to his fear-poisoned mind the spilt liquid was suddenly crimson, like a drop of blood from a bullet-torn chest
"Dot is right," Kuhlmann was saying deliberately. "You're a goot boy too, Pappy. Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay to see Morrie?"
Papulos caught his breath sharply. With a swift movement he tossed the drink down his throat and heard the other's soft-spoken words hammering into his brain like bullets.
"Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay to see Morrie, as if he had been searched, und let him take a knife and a gun mit him?"
"You're crazy!" Papulos blurted harshly. "Of course I sent him to Morrie—I knew Morrie wanted to see him. He didn't have a knife an' a gun when he left me. Heimie'll tell you that. Heimie searched him——"
Felder started up.
"Why you——"
"Sit down!" Papulos snarled. For one wild moment he saw hope opening out before him, and his voice rose: "I'm sayin" nothing about you. I'm sayin' Dutch is crazy. He'll want to put you on the spot next. An' how d'you know he'll stop there? He'll be calling every guy who's ever been near the Saint a double-crosser—he'll be trying to put the finger on the rest of you before he's through——"
His voice broke off on one high, rasping note; and he sat with his mouth half open, saying nothing more.
He looked into the muzzle of Dutch Kuhlmann's gun, levelled at him across the table; and the warmth of the whisky he had drunk evaporated on the cold weight in his stomach.
"You talk too much, Pappy," said Kuhlmann amiably. "It's a goot job you don't mean everything you say."
The other essayed a smile.
"Don't get me wrong, Dutch," he pleaded weakly. "What I mean is, if we got to knock somebody off, why not knock off the Saint?"
"Dat's right," chimed in Heimie Felder. "We'll knock off de Saint. Why didn't any of youse mugs t'ink of dat before? I'll knock him off myself, poissonal."
Dutch Kuhlmann smiled, without moving his gun.
"Dot is right," he said. "Ve'll knock off der Saint, und not have nobody making any more mistakes. You're a goot boy, Pappy. Go outside and vait for us, Pappy—we have a little business to talk about."
The thumping died down in the Greek's chest, and suddenly he was quite still and strengthless. He sighed wearily, knowing all too well the futility of further argument. Too often he had heard Kuhlmann pronouncing sentence of death in those very words, smiling blandly and genially as he spoke: "You're a goot boy. Go outside and vait for us. . . ."
He stood up, with a feeble attempt to muster the stoical jauntiness that was expected of him.
"Okay, Dutch," he said. "Be seein' ya."
There was an utter silence while he left the room; and as he closed the door behind him his brief display of poise drained out of him. Simon Templar would scarcely have recognized him as the same sleek, self-possessed bully that he had encountered twelve hours ago.
The doorkeeper sat in a far corner, turning the pages of a tabloid. He looked up with a start as Papulos came through but the Greek ignored him. Under sentence of death himself, probably to die on the same one-way ride, a crude pride held him aloof. He walked up to the bar and rapped on the counter, and Toni came up with his smooth expressionless face.
"Brandy," said Papulos.
Toni served him without a word, without even an inquisitive glance. Outside of that back room from which Papulos had just emerged, no one knew what had taken place; the world went on without a change. No one could have told what Toni thought or guessed. His olive-skinned features seemed to possess no register of emotion. The finger might be on him, too: he had served the Saint, and directed him to the Graylands Hotel, at the beginning of all the trouble—he might have received his own sentence in the back room, three hours ago. But he said nothing and turned away as Papulos drank.
There was a swelling emptiness below the Greek's breastbone which two shots of cognac did nothing to fill. Even while he drank, he was a dead man, knowing perfectly well that there was no Appellate Division in the underworld to find a reversible error which might give him a chance for life. He knew that in a few useless' hours death would claim him as certainly as if it had been inscribed in the book of Fate ten thousand years ago. He knew that there was no one who would join him in a challenge to Kuhlmann's authority—no one who could help him, no one who could rescue him from the vengeance of the gang. ...
And then suddenly the flash of a wild idea illumined some dark recess of his memory.
In his mind he saw the face of a man. A bronzed reckless face with cavalier blue eyes that seemed to hold a light of mocking laughter. The lean hard-muscled figure of a man whose poise held no fear for the vengeance of all the legions of the underworld. A man who was called the Saint. . . .
And in that instant Papulos realized that there was one man who might do what all the police of New York could not do— who might stand between him and the crackling death that waited for him.
He pushed his glass forward wordlessly, watched it refilled, and drained it again. For the first time that morning his stomach felt the warmth of the raw spirit. The doorkeeper knew nothing; Toni Ollinetti knew nothing—could not possibly know anything. If Kuhlmann came out and found him gone the mob would trail him down like bloodhounds and inevitably find him even though he fled to the uttermost ends of the continent; but then it might be too late.
Papulos flung a bill on the counter and turned away without waiting for change. His movements were those of an automaton, divorced from any effort of will or deliberation, impelled by nothing but an instinctive surging rebellion against the blind march of death. He waved an abrupt, careless hand. "Be seein' ya," he said; and Toni nodded and smiled, without expression. The doomed doorkeeper looked up as he went by, with a glaze of despair in his dulled eyes: Papulos could feel what was in the man's mind, the dumb resentful envy of a condemned man seeing his fellow walking out into the sweet freedom of life: but the Greek walked by without a glance at him.
The bright morning air struck into his senses with its intolerable reminder of the brief beauty of life, quickening his steps as he came out to the street. His movements had the desperate power of a drowning man. If an army had appeared to bar his way, he would have drawn his gun and gone down fighting to break through them.
His car stood at the curb. He climbed in and stamped on the self-starter. Before the engine had settled down to smooth running he was flogging it to drag him down the street, away from the doom that waited in Charley's Place. He had no plan in his mind. He had no idea how he would find the Saint, where all the police organizations of the city had failed. He only knew that the Saint was his one hope of reprieve, and that the inaction of waiting for execution like a bullock in a slaughter line would have snapped his reason. If he had to die, he would rather die on the run, struggling towards life, than wait for extinction like a trapped rat. But he looked in the driving mirror as he turned into Seventh Avenue, and saw no one following him.
But he saw something else.
It was a hand that came up out of the back of the car—a lean brown hand that grasped the back of his seat close to his shoulder and dragged up a man from the floor. His heart leapt into his throat, and the car swerved dizzily under his twitching hands. Then he saw the face of the man, and a racing trip hammer started up under his ribs.
The man squeezed himself adroitly over into the vacant front seat and calmly proceeded to search the dashboard for a lighter to kindle his cigarette.