Joe piled in on the other side, and a third man took the wheel. The muzzle of another gun stabbed into the Saint's other side, and there was a cold tenseness in the eyes of the escort which indicated that their fingers were taut on the triggers. On this ride they were taking no chances.
Simon looked out of the windows while the driver jammed his foot down on the starter. The few pedestrians who passed scarcely glanced aside. If they had glanced aside, they would have seen nothing extraordinary; and if they had seen anything extraordinary, the Saint reflected with a wry grin, they would have run for their lives. He had taken a hand in a game where he had to play alone, and there would be no help from anyone but himself. . . . But even as he looked back, he saw the slim figure of Fay Edwards framed in the dark doorway through which he had been brought; and the old questions leapt to his mind again.
The brim of her hat cast a shadow over her eyes, and he could not even tell whether she was looking in his direction. He had no reason to think that she would. Throughout his interview with Orcread she had sat like an inattentive spectator, smoking, and thinking her own thoughts. When Kuhlmann's sentence had been passed upon him she had been lighting another cigarette: she had not even looked up, and her hand had not shaken. When he was turned and hustled out of the room she had been raising her eyes to look at him again, with a calm impersonal regard that told him no more than her present pose.
"Better take a good look," advised Maxie.
There was no derision, no bitterness in his voice—it simply uttered a grim reminder of the fact that Simon Templar was doomed to have few more attractive things to look at.
The Saint smiled and saw the girl start off to cross the road behind the car, without looking round, before Joe reached forward and drew the curtains.
"She's worth a look," Simon murmured and slanted an eyebrow at the closed draperies which shut out his view on either side. "This wagon looks like a hearse already."
Joe grunted meaninglessly, and the car pulled away from the curb and circled the block. The blaze of Broadway showed ahead for a moment, like the reflection of a fire in the sky; then they were turned around and driving west, and the Saint settled down and made himself as comfortable as he could.
The situation had no natural facilities for comfort. There was something so businesslike, so final and confident, in the manner of his captors, that despite himself an icy finger of doubt traced its chill course down the Saint's spine. Except for the fact that no invisible but far-reaching hand of the Law sanctioned this strange execution, it had a disturbing similarity to the remorseless ritual of lawful punishment.
Before that he had been in tight corners from which the Law might have saved him if he had called for help; but he had never called. There was something about the dull, ponderous interventions of the Law which had never appealed to him, and in this particular case their potentialities appealed to him least of all. Intervention, even if it succeeded, meant arrest and trial; and his brief acquaintance with Orcread and Yeald had been sufficient to show him how much justice he could expect from that. Not that the matter of justice was very vital in his case. The most incorruptible court in the world, he had to admit, could do nothing else but sentence him to about forty years' imprisonment even if it didn't go so far as ordering execution, and on the whole he preferred his chances with the illicit sentence. It would not be the first time that he had sat in a game of life and death and played the cards out with a steady hand no matter how the luck ran; and now he would do it again, though at that precise moment he hadn't the faintest idea what method he would use. Yet for the first time in many years he wondered if he had not taken on too much.
But no hint of what passed in his mind showed on his face. He leaned back, calm-eyed and nonchalant, as if he were one of a party of friends on their way home; and even when they stopped at the driveway of a ferry he did not move. He cocked one quizzical blue eye at Maxie.
"So it's to be Jersey this time, is it?"
"Yeah," said the gunman, with a callous twist of humour. "We thought ye might like a change."
An efficient-looking blue-coated patrolman stood no more than four yards away; but no sixth sense, no clairvoyant flash of prescience, warned him to single out the gleaming black sedan from the line of other vehicles which were waiting their turn to go on board. He dreamed his dreams of an inspectorship in a division well populated with citizens who would be unselfishly eager to dissuade him with cash and credit from the obvious perils of overworking himself at his job; and the Saint made no attempt to interrupt him. The driver paid their fares, and they settled into their place on the ferry to wait until it chose to sail.
Simon gazed out at the inky waters of the Hudson and wondered idly why it should be that the departure of a ferry was always accompanied by twice as much fuss and anxiety as the sailing of an ocean liner; and he derived a rather morbid exhilaration even from that vivid detail of his experience. He had heard much, and speculated more, about that effective American method of removing an appointed victim; but in spite of his flippant remarks to Valcross he had not expected that he would have this unique opportunity of learning at first hand the sensations of the man who played the leading role in the drama. He felt that in this instance the country, which had adopted the "ride" as a native sport for wet week-ends was rather overdoing itself in its eagerness to show him the works so quickly and comprehensively, but the tightness of his corner was not capable of damping a keen professional interest in the proceedings. And yet, all the time, he missed the reassuring pressure of the knife blade that should have been cuddling snugly along his forearm; and his eyes were very cold and bright as he flicked his cigarette end through the open front window and watched it spring like a red tracer bullet across the dark. . . .
Maxie rummaged in his pockets with his free hand, drew forth a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and extended it politely.
"Have another?"
"A last smoke for the condemned man, eh?"
Equally courteous and unruffled, the Saint thumbed a Chesterfield from the package and carefully straightened it out. Maxie passed him the cigar lighter from the arm rest and then lighted a smoke for himself; but in none of the motions of this studious observance of the rules of etiquette was there an opening for a surprise attack from the victim. Simon felt Joe's automatic harden against his side almost imperceptibly while the exchange of courtesies was going on, and knew that his companions had explored all the possibilities of such situations before they began to shave. He signed and leaned back again, exhaling twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.
"What is that girl Fay?" he asked casually, taking up a natural train of thought from the gunman's penultimate remark.
Maxie tilted back his hat.
"Whaddaya mean, what is she? She's a doll."
Simon reviewed the difficulties of reaching Maxie's intellect with the argument that was occupying his own mind. He knew better than anyone else that the glamorous woman of mystery whose feminine charms rule hard-boiled desperadoes as with a rod of iron, and whose brilliant brain outwits criminals and detectives with equal ease, belonged only in the pages of highly spiced fictional romance, and that in the underworld of New York she was the most singular curiosity of all. To the American hoodlum and racketeer the female of the species has only one function, reserved for his hours of relaxation, and requiring neither intelligence nor outstanding personality. When he calls her a "doll," his vocabulary is an accurate psychological revelation. She is a toy for his diversion, on which he can squander his easily won dollars to the advertisement of his own wealth, to whom he can boast and in boasting expand his own ego and feel himself a great guy; but she has no place in the machinery of his profession except as a spy, a stringer of suckers, or a dumb instrument for putting a rival on the spot, and she has no place in his councils at all.