Oddly enough, in his preoccupation with that angle on the task in hand, the Saint had forgotten that there were other parties who would be likely to develop an interest in Sutton Place that night. He stepped off the last ladder into the inky blackness of the narrow alley where it let him down without a thought of immediate danger, and heard the slight movement behind him too late. He spun round with his right hand darting to his pocket, but before it bad touched his gun a strong arm was flung round his neck from behind and the steel snout of an automatic jabbed into his back. A voice harsh with exultation snarled in his ear: "Come a little ways with us, will ya . . . pal?"
* * *
Not a shadow of uneasiness darkened the Saint's brow as he crossed the threshold of the back room of Charley's Place and stood for a moment regarding the faces before him. Behind him he heard the click of the latch as the door was closed; and the men who had risen from their seats in the front bar and followed him as his captors hustled him through ranged themselves along the walls. More than a dozen men were gathered in the room. More than two dozen eyes were riveted on him in the same calculating stares—eyes as hard and unwinking as coloured marbles, barren of all humanity.
He was unarmed. He had nothing larger than a pin which might have been used as an offensive weapon. His gun had been taken from him; and the knife which he carried in his sleeve, having left men alive and day before to tell the tale of its deadliness, had been removed almost as quickly. The new desperate suspicion of concealed weapons with which his earlier exploits had filled the minds of the mob had prompted a vastly less perfunctory search than the deceased Mr. Papulos had thought necessary—a search which had left no inch of his person untouched, and which had even seized on his penknife and cigarette case as possible sources of danger. The thoroughness of the examination had afforded the Saint some grim amusement at the time, but not for a moment had he lost sight of what it meant. Yet his poise had never been more easy and debonair, the steel masked down more deceptively in the mocking depths of his eyes, than it was as he stood there smiling and nodding to the assembled company like an actor taking a bow.
"How! my palefaced brothers," he murmured. "The council sits, though the pipe of peace is not in evidence. Well, well, well—every time we get together you think of new games, as the bishop said to the actress. And what do we play tonight?"
A weird light came into the eyes of Heimie Felder, who sat at the table with a fresh bandage round his head. He leaned across and whispered to Dutch Kuhlmann.
"Nuts," he said, almost pleadingly. "De guy is nuts. Dijja hear what he says?"
Kuhlmann's contracted pupils were fixed steadily on the Saint's face. He made no answer. And after that first general survey of the congregation in which he had been included, Simon had not looked at him. For all of the Saint's interest was taken up with the girl who also sat at the table.
It was strange what a deep impression she had made on him in the places where she had crossed his path. He realized that even now he knew nothing about her. He had heard, or assumed that he heard, her voice over the telephone; he had seen, or assumed that he saw, the owner of that disembodied voice in the house on Long Island where Viola Inselheim was held and Morrie Ualino died; and once he had felt her hand in the darkness and she had pressed a gun into his hand. But she had never identified herself to more than one of his senses at the same time; and he knew that his cardinal belief that this slim, fair-haired girl with the inscrutable amber eyes was that mysterious Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had spoken rested on nothing but intuition. And yet, even while the active part of his brain had been most wrapped up in the practical mechanics of his vendetta, her image had never been very far from his mind.
The sight of her in that room, the one glimpse of colour and beauty in the grim circle of silent men, brought back to the Saint every question that he had asked himself about her. Every question had trailed off into the same nebulous voids of guesswork in which the hope of any absolute answer was more elusive than the end of a rainbow; but to see her again at such a moment gave him a throb of pleasure for which there was no logical accounting. Once when he was in need she had helped him; he might never know why. Now he was again in need, and he wondered what she was thinking and what she would do. Her face told him nothing—only a spark of something to which he could give no name gleamed for an instant in her eyes and was gone.
Dutch Kuhlmann turned to her.
"This is der Saint?" he asked.
She answered without shifting her gaze from Simon: "Yes. That's the man who killed Morrie."
It was the first tune he had ever seen her and heard her speak at once, the first definite knowledge that his intuition had been right; and a queer thrill leapt through him at the sound of her voice. It was as if he had been fascinated by a picture, and it had suddenly come to life.
"Good-evening, Fay," he said.
She looked at him for a moment longer and then took a cigarette from her bag and struck a match. The movement veiled her eyes, and the spark which he thought he had seen there might have existed only in his imagination.
Kuhlmann nodded to a man who stood by the wall, and another door was unlocked and opened. Through it, after a brief pause, came two other men.
One of them was a big burly man with grey hair and a florid complexion on which the eyebrows stood out startlingly black and bushy, as if they had been gummed on by an absent-minded make-up artist. The other was a small bald-headed man with a heavy black moustache and gold-rimmed pince-nez, whose peering and fluttering manner reminded the Saint irresistibly of a weasel. Seen together, they looked rather like a vaudeville partnership which, either through mishap or design, had been obliged to share the props originally intended for one, and who had squabbled childishly over the division: between them they possessed the material for two normally sized men of normal hairiness, but on account of their disagreement they had both emerged with extravagant inequalities. Simon had an irreverent desire to remove the bushy eyebrows from the large man and glue them where it seemed they would be more appropriate, above the luxuriant moustache of the small one. Their bearing was subtly different from that of the others who were assembled in the room; and the Saint gave play to his flippant imaginings only for a passing second, for he had recognized them as soon as they came in and knew that the conference was almost complete. One of . them was the district attorney, Marcus Yeald; the other was the political boss of New York City himself, Robert Orcread— known by his own wish as "Honest Bob."
They studied the Saint with open interest while chairs were vacated for them at the table. Yeald did his scrutinizing from a safe distance, peering through his spectacles nervously— Simon barely overcame the temptation to say "Boo!" to him and find out if he would jump as far as he seemed prepared to. Orcread, on the other hand, came round the table without sitting down.
"So you're the guy we've been looking for," he said; and the Saint smiled.
"I guess you know whom you were looking for, Honest Bob," he said.
Orcread's face hardened.
"How did you know my name?"
"I recognized you from your caricature in the New Yorker last week, brother," Simon explained, and gathered at once that the drawing had not met with the Tammany dictator's approval.