"Were his ideas very clever?" he asked.
"He had ways for us to communicate that nobody ever found out," she replied simply. "Morrie Ualino tried to find out who he was—so did Kuhlmann. They tried every trick and trap they could think of, but there was never any risk. I call that clever. He had a way of handling ransom money, between the man who picked it up and the time when he eventually got his share himself, which took the dicks into a blind alley every time. You know the trouble with ransom money—it's nearly always fixed so that it can be traced. The Big Fellow never ran the slightest risk there, either, at any time. That was only the beginning. Yes, he's clever."
Simon nodded. All of that he could follow clearly. It was grotesque, impossible, one of the things that do not and cannot happen; but he had known that from the start. And yet the impossible things had to happen sometimes, or else the whole living universe would long since have sunk into a stagnant morass of immutable laws, and the smug pedants whose sole ambition is to bind down all surprise and endeavour into their smugly catalogued little pigeonholes would long since have inherited their empty earth. That much he could understand. To handle thugs and killers, the brutal, dehumanized cannon fodder of the underworld, men whose scruples and loyalties and dissensions are as volatile and unpredictable as the flight of a flushed snipe, calls for a peculiar type of dominance. A man who would be a brilliant success in other fields, even a man who might organize and control a gigantic industry, whose thunder might shake the iron satraps of finance on their golden thrones, might be an ignoble failure there. The Big Fellow had slipped round the difficulty in the simplest possible way—had possibly even gained in prestige by the mystery with which he shielded his own weakness. But the question which Maxie had not had time to answer still remained.
"How did the Big Fellow start?" asked the Saint.
"With a hundred thousand dollars." She smiled at his quick blend of puzzlement and attention. "That was his capital. I went to Morrie Ualino with the story that this man, whose name I couldn't give, wanted another man kidnapped and perhaps killed. I had the contact, so we could talk straight. You can find some heels who'll bump off a guy for fifty bucks. Most of the regulars would charge you a couple of hundred up, according to how big a noise the job would make. This man was a big shot. It could probably have been done for ten thousand. The Big Fellow offered fifty thousand, cash. He knew everything—he had the inside information, knew everything the man was doing, and had the plans laid out with a footrule. All that Morrie and his mob had to do was exactly what the Big Fellow told them, and ask no questions. They thought it was just some private quarrel. They put the snatch on this man, and then I went behind their backs and put in the ransom demand, just as the Big Fellow told me. It had to be paid in thirty-six hours, and it wasn't. The Big Fellow passed the word for him to be rubbed out, and on the deadline he was thrown out of a car on his own doorstep. That was Flo Youssine."
"The theatrical producer? ... I remember. But the ransom story came out as soon as he was killed—"
"Of course. Morrie sent back to the Big Fellow and said he could do that sort of thing himself, without anybody telling him. The Big Fellow's answer was, 'Why didn't you?' At the same time he ordered another man to be snatched off, at the same price. Morrie did it. There was just as much information as before, the plan was just as perfect, there wasn't a hitch anywhere. Youssine having been killed was a warning, and this time the ransom was paid."
"I see." Simon was fascinated. "And then he worked on Kuhlmann with the same line——"
"More or less. Then he linked him up with Ualino. Naturally it wasn't all done at once, but it was moving all the time. The Big Fellow never made a mistake. After Youssine was killed, nobody else refused until Inselheim hung out the other day. The mobs began to think that the Big Fellow must be a god—a devil—their mascot—anything. But he brought in the money, and that was good enough. He was smarter than any of them had ever been, and they weren't too dumb to see it."
It was so simple that the Saint could have gasped. It had the perfection of all simple things. It was utterly and comprehensively satisfactory, given the initial genius and the capable mouthpiece; it was so obvious that he could have kicked himself for ever allowing the problem to swell to such proportions in his mind, although he knew that nothing is so mysterious and elusive as the simple and obvious. It was like the thimble in the old parlour game—one came on it after an intensive search with a shock of surprise, to find that it had been staring everyone in the face from the beginning.
The development of which Papulos had spoken followed easily. Once a sufficient terrorism had been established, the crude mechanics of kidnapping could be dispensed with. The threat of it alone was enough, with the threat of sudden death to follow if the first warning were ignored. He felt a little less contemptuous of Zeke Inselheim than he had been: the broker had at least made his lone feeble effort to resist, to challenge the terror which enslaved a thousand others of his kind.
"And it's been like that ever since?" Simon suggested.
"Not quite," said the girl. "That was only the beginning. As soon as the racket was established, the Big Fellow organized it properly. There was nothing new about it—it's been done for years, here and there—but it had never been done so thoroughly or so well. The Big Fellow made an industry of it. He couldn't go on hiring Ualino and Kuhlmann to do isolated jobs at so much a time. Their demands would have gone up automatically—they might have tried to do other jobs on their own, and one or two failures would have spoiled the market. All the Big Fellow's victims were handpicked—he was clever there, too. None of them were big public figures, none of them would make terrific newspaper stories, like Lindbergh, none of them would get a lot of public sympathy, none of them had a political hook-up which might have made the cops take special interest, none of them would be likely to turn into fighters; but they were all rich. The Big Fellow wanted things to go on exactly as he had started them. He organized the industry, and the other big shots came in on a profit-sharing basis."
"How was that worked?"
"All the profits were paid into one bank, and all the big shots had a drawing account on it limited to so much per week. The Big Fellow had exactly the same as the rest of them —I handled it all for him. The rest of the profits were to accumulate. It was agreed that the racket should run for three years exactly, and at the end of that time they should divide the surplus equally and organize again if they wanted to. Since you've been here," she added dispassionately, "there aren't many of them left to divide the pool. That means a lot of money for somebody, because last month there were seventeen million dollars in the account."
Her cool announcement of the sum took Simon Templar's breath away. Even though he vaguely remembered having heard astronomical statistics of the billions of dollars which make up America's annual account of crime, it staggered him. He wondered how many men were still waiting to split up that immense fortune, now that Dutch Kuhlmann and Morrie Ualino were gone. There could not be many; but the girl's eyes were turned on him again with quiet amusement
"Is there anything else you want to know?"
"Several things," he said and looked at her. "You can tell me—who is the Big Fellow?"
She shook her head.
"I can't."
"But you said you could find him for me."
"I think I can. But when we began, I promised him I would never tell his name to anyone, or tell anyone how to get in touch with him."
The Saint took a cigarette. His hand was steady, but the steadiness was achieved consciously.
"You mean that if you found him, and I met you in such a way that I accidentally saw him and jumped to the conclusion that he was the man I wanted—your conscience would be clear."