He squinted approvingly down the shining barrel of his gun, secured the safety catch, and patted it affectionately into his pocket. Then he rose and stretched himself and went over to the window where Valcross was standing.
Before them was spread out the ragged panorama of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West. A narrow hump of rock sheltered from the Atlantic by the broad shoulder of Brooklyn, a mere ripple of stone in the ocean's inroads, on which the indomitable cussedness of Man had elected to build a city—and, not contented with the prodigious feat of overcoming such a dimensional difficulty at all, had made monuments of its defiance. Because the city could not expand laterally, it had expanded upwards; but the upward movement was a leap sculptured in stone, a flight born of necessity that had soared far beyond the standards of necessity, in a magnificent impulse of levitation that obliterated its own source. Molehills had become mountains in an art begotten of pure artifice. In the shadow of those grey and white pinnacles had grown up a modern Baghdad where the ends of the earth came together. A greater Italian city than Rome, a greater Irish city than Dublin, a greater German city than Cologne; a city of dazzling wealth whose towers had once looked like peaks of solid gold to hungry eyes reaching beyond the horizons of the Old World; a place that had sprung up from a lonely frontier to a metropolis, a central city, bowing to no other. A place where civilization and savagery had climbed alternately on each other's shoulders and reached their crest together. . . .
"This has always been my home," said Valcross, with a queer softness.
He turned his eyes from east to west in a glance that swept in the whole skyline.
"I know there are other cities; and they say that New York doesn't represent anything but itself. But this is where my life has been lived."
Simon said nothing. He was three thousand miles from his own home; but as he stood there at the window he saw what the older man was seeing, and he could feel what the other felt. He had been there long enough to sense the spell that New York could lay on a man who looked at it with a mind not too tired for wonder—the pride and amazement at which cynical sophisticates laughed, which could still move the heart of a man who was not ashamed to sink below the surface and touch the common humanity that is the builder of cities. And because Simon could understand, he knew what was in the other's mind before it was spoken.
"I have to send for you," Valcross said, "because there are other people, more powerful than I am, who don't feel like that. The people to whom it isn't a home, but a battle-field to be looted. That is why you have to come here, from the other side of the world, to help an old man with a job that's too big for him."
He turned suddenly and looked at the Saint again, taking him in from the sweep of his smoothly brushed hair to the stance of his tailored shoes—the rakish lines of the dark, reckless face, the level mockery of the clear blue eyes, the rounded poise of muscular shoulders and the curve of the chest under the thin, jaunty shirt, the steady strength of one brown half-raised hand with the cigarette clipped lightly between the first two fingers, the lean fighter's hips and the reach of long, immaculate legs. No man whom he had ever known could have been so elegantly at ease and at the same time so alert and dangerous—and he had known many men. No other man he had known could ever have measured up in his judgment to the stature of devil-may-care confidence that he had demanded in his own mind and set out to find—. and Valcross called himself a judge of men.
His hands fell on the Saint's shoulders; and they had to reach up to do it. He felt the slight, supple stir of the firm sinews and smiled.
"You might do it, son," he said. "You might clean up this rotten mess of crooks and grafters that's organizing itself to become the biggest thing this city of mine has ever had to fight. If you can't do it, I'll let myself be told for the first time that it's impossible. Just be a little bit careful. Don't swagger yourself into a jail or a shower of bullets before you've had a chance to do any good. I've seen those things happen before. Other fellows have tried—bigger men than you, son—stronger men than you, braver men than you, cleverer men than you——"
The Saint smiled back.
"Admitting for the moment that they ever lived," he remarked amiably, "you never saw anyone luckier than me."
But his mind went back to the afternoon in Madrid when Valcross had sat next to him in the Plaza de Toros and had struck up a conversation which had resulted in them spending the evening together. It went back to a moment much later that night, after they had dined together off the indescribable suckling pig at Botin's, when they sat over whiskies and sodas in Valcross's room at the Ritz; when Valcross had admitted that he had spent three weeks chasing him around Europe solely to bring about that casual encounter, and had told him why. He could hear the old man's quiet voice as it had spoken to him that night
"They found him a couple of weeks later—I don't want to go into details. They aren't nice to think about, even now. . . . Two or three dozen men were pulled in and questioned. But maybe you don't know how things are done over there. These men kept their mouths shut. Some of them were let out. Some of them went up for trial. Maybe you think that means something.
"It doesn't. This business is giving work to all the gangsters and gunmen it needs—all the rats and killers who found themselves falling out of the big money when there was nothing more to be made out of liquor. It's tied up by the same leaders, protected by the same crooked politicians—and it pays more. It's beating the same police system, for the same reason the old order beat it—because it's hooked up with the same political system that appoints police commissioners to do as they're told.
"There wasn't any doubt that these men they had were guilty. Fernack admitted it himself. He told me their records —everything that was known about them. But he couldn't do anything. They were bailed out, adjourned, extradited, postponed—all the legal tricks. In the end they were acquitted. I saw them walk out of the court grinning. If I'd had a gun with me I'd have tried to kill them then.
"But I'm an old man, and I wasn't trained for that sort of thing. I take it that you were. That's why I looked for you. I know some of the things you've done, and now I've met you in the flesh. I think it's the kind of job you might like. It may be the last job you'll ever attempt. But it's a job that only an outlaw can do.
"I've got plenty of money, and I'm expecting to spend it You can have anything you need to help you that money will buy. The one thing it won't buy is safety. You may find yourself in prison. You're even more likely to find yourself dead. I needn't try to fool you about that
"But if you can do your justice on these men who kidnapped and killed my son, I'll pay you one million dollars. I want to know whether you think it's worth your while—tonight."
And the Saint could feel the twitch of his own smile again, and hear himself saying: "I'd do it for nothing. When do we go?"
These things came back to him while Valcross's hands still rested on his shoulders; and it was the first time since that night in Madrid that he had given any thought to the magnitude of the task he had undertaken.
* * *
Simon Templar had been in New York before; but that was in the more spacious and leisurely days when only 8.04 of the gin was amateur bathtub brew, before the Woolworth Building was ranked as a bungalow, when lawbreakers were prosecuted for breaking the law more frequently than for having falsified their income-tax returns. Times Square and 42nd Street were running a shabby second to the boardwalk at Coney Island; the smart shops had moved off the Avenue one block east to Park; and the ever-swinging doors of the gilded saloons that had formerly decorated every street corner had gone down before that historic wave of righteousness which dyed the Statue of Liberty its present bilious shade of green.