He sat slumping wearily before the table in his library. The white light of his desk lamp made his sallow face appear even paler than it was naturally; his hands were resting on the blotter in front of him, clenched into impotent fists, and he was staring at them, with a dull, almost childish hurt creasing deep grooves into the flesh on either side of his mouth.
Upstairs, his daughter slept peacefully, resting again in her own bed with the careless confidence of childhood; and for that privilege he had been compelled to pay the price. In spite of the fact that that strange Robin Hood of the twentieth century who was called the Saint had brought her back to him without a fee, Inselheim knew that the future safety of the girl still depended solely on his own ability to meet the payments demanded of him. He knew that his daughter had been kidnapped as a warning rather than for actual ransom, knew that there were worse weapons than kidnapping which the Terror would not hesitate to employ at the next sign of rebellion; if he had ever had any doubts on that score, they had been swept away by the cold guttural voice which had spoken to him over the telephone that morning; and it was the knowledge of those things that clenched his unpractised fists at the same time as that dull bitter pain of helplessness darkened his eyes.
Ezekiel Inselheim was wondering, as others no less rich and famous had wondered before him, why it was that in the most materially civilized country in the world an honoured and peaceful citizen had still to pay toll to a clique of organized bandits, like medieval peasants meeting the extortions of a feudal barony. He was wondering, with a grim intensity of revolt, why the police, who were so impressively adept at handing out summonses for traffic violations, and delivering perjured testimony against unfortunate women, were so plaintively incapable of holding the racketeers in check. And he knew the answers only too well.
He knew, as all America knew, that with upright legislators, with incorruptible police and judiciary, the gangster would long ago have vanished like the Western bad man. He knew that without the passive cooperation of a resigned and leaderless public, without the inbred cowardice of a terrorized population, the racketeers and the grafting political leaders who protected them could have been wiped off the face of the American landscape at a cost of one hundredth part of the tribute which they exacted annually. It was the latter part of that knowledge which carved the stunned, hurt lines deeper into his face and whitened the skin across his fleshy fists. It gave him back none of the money which had been bled out of him, returned him no jot of comfort or security, filled him with nothing but a cancerous ache of degradation which was curdling into a futile trembling agony of hopeless anger. If, at that moment, any of his extortioners had appeared before him, he would have tried to stand up and defy them, knowing that there could be only one outcome to his lonely, pitiful resistance. . . .
And it was at that instant that some sixth sense made him turn his head, with a gasp of fear wrenched from sheer overwrought nerves strangling in his throat.
A languid immaculate figure lolled gracefully on the windowsill, one leg flung carelessly into the room, the other remaining outside in the cool night. A pair of insolent blue eyes were inspecting him curiously, and a smile with a hint of mockery in it moved the gay lips of the stranger. It was a smile with humour in it which was not entirely humorous, blue eyes with an amused twinkle which did not belong to any conventional amusement. The voice, when it spoke, had a bantering lilt, but beneath the lilt was something harder and colder than Inselheim had ever heard before—something that reminded him of chilled steel glinting under a polar moon.
"Hullo, Zeke," said the Saint.
At the sound of that voice the pathetic mustering of anger drained out of Inselheim as if a stopcock had been opened, leaving nothing but a horrible blank void. Upstairs was his child—sleeping. . . . And suddenly he was only a frightened old man again, staring with fear-widened eyes at the revival of the menace which was tearing his self-respect into shreds.
"I've paid up!" he gasped hysterically. "What do you want? I've paid! Why don't you leave me alone——"
The Saint swung his other leg into the room and hitched himself nonchalantly off the sill.
"Oh, no, you haven't," he said gravely. "You haven't paid up at all, brother."
"But I have paid!" The broker's voice was wild, the words tumbling over each other in the ghastly incoherence of panic. "Something must have gone wrong. I paid—I paid tonight, just as you told me to. There must be some mistake. It isn't my fault. I paid ——"
Simon's hands went to his pockets. From the breast pocket of his coat, the side pockets, the pockets of his trousers, he produced bundle after bundle of neatly stacked fifty-dollar bills, tossing them one by one onto the desk in an apparently inexhaustible succession, like a conjuror producing rabbits out of a hat.
"There's your money, Zeke," he remarked cheerfully. "Ninety thousand bucks, if you want to count it. I allotted myself a small reward of ten thousand, which I'm sure you'll agree is a very modest commission. So you see you haven't paid up at all."
Inselheim gaped at the heaps of money on the desk with a thrill of horror. He made no attempt to touch it. Instead, he stared at the Saint, and there was a numbness of stark terror in his eyes.
"Where—where did you get this?"
"You dropped it, I think," explained the Saint easily. "Fortunately I was behind you. I picked it up. You mustn't mind my blowing in by the fire escape—I'm just fond of a little variety now and again. Luckily for you," said the Saint virtuously, "I am an honest man, and money never tempts me —much. But I'm afraid you must have a lot more dough than is good for you, Zeke, if the only way you can think of to get rid of it is to go chucking scads of it around the scenery like that."
Inselheim swallowed hard. His face had gone chalk white.
"You mean you—you picked this up where I dropped it?"
Simon nodded.
"That was the impression I meant to convey. Perhaps I didn't make myself very clear. When I saw you heaving buckets of potatoes over the horizon in that absent-minded sort of way——"
"You fool!" Inselheim said, with quivering lips. "You've killed me—that's what you've done. You've killed my daughter!" His voice rose in a hoarse tightening of dread. "If they don't get this money—they'll kill!"
Simon raised his eyebrows. He sat on the arm of a chair.
"Really?" he asked, with faint interest.
"My God!" groaned the man. "Why did you have to interfere? What's this to you, anyway? Who are you?"
The Saint smiled.
"I'm the little dicky bird," he said, "who brought your daughter back last time."
Inselheim sat bolt upright
"The Saint!"
Simon bowed his acknowledgment. He stretched out a long arm, pulled open the drawer of the desk in which long experience had taught him that cigars were most often to be found, and helped himself.
"You hit it, Zeke. The bell rings, and great strength returns the penny. This is quite an occasion, isn't it?" He pierced the rounded end of the cigar with a deftly wielded matchstick, reversed the match, and scraped fire from it with his thumbnail, ignoring the reactions of his astounded host. "In the circumstances, it may begin to dawn on you presently why I have that eccentric partiality to fire escapes." He blew smoke towards the ceiling and smiled again. "I guess you owe me quite a lot, Zeke; and if you've got a spot of good Bourbon to go with this I wouldn't mind writing it off your account."