15 The Saint in New York

Valcross picked up a telephone directory and scratched his head over it.

'Sutton Place, you said?' He looked through the book, found a place, and deposited the open volume on Simon's knee. Simon glanced over the Inselheims and located a certain Ezekiel of that tribe whose address was in Sutton Place. 'I wondered if that would be the man,' Valcross said.

The name meant nothing in Simon Templar's hierarchy.

'Who is he?'

'Zeke Inselheim? He's one of the richest brokers in New York City.'

Simon closed the book.

'So that's why Nather is staying home tonight!'

He took the glass that Valcross refilled for him, and smoked in silence. The reason for the all-car call, and Fernack's pertur­bation, became plainer. And the idea of carrying on the night in the same spirit as he had begun it appealed to him with in­creasing voluptuousness. Presently he finished his drink and stood up.

'Would you like to order me some coffee? I think I'll be going out again soon.'

Valcross looked at him steadily.

'You've done a lot today. Couldn't you take a rest?'

'Would you have taken a rest if you were Zeke Inselheim?' Simon asked. 'I'd rather like to be taken for that ride tonight.'

He was back in the living room in ten minutes, fresh and spruce from a cold shower, with his dark hair smoothly brushed and his gay blue eyes as bright and clear as a summer morning. His shirt was open at the neck as he had slipped it on when he emerged from the bathroom, and the left sleeve was rolled up to the elbow. He was adjusting the straps of a curious kind of sheath that lay snugly along his left forearm: the exquisitely carved ivory hilt of the knife it carried lay close to his wrist, where his sleeve would just cover it when it was rolled down.

Valcross poured the coffee and watched him. There was a dynamic power in that sinewy frame, a sense of magnificent recklessness and vital pride, that was flamboyantly inspiring.

'If I were twenty years younger,' Valcross said quietly, 'I'd be going with you.'

Simon laughed.

'If there were four more of you, it wouldn't make any dif­ference.' He turned his arm over, displaying the sheathed knife for a moment before he rolled down his sleeve. 'Belle and I will do all that has to be done on this journey.'

In ten minutes more he was in a taxi, riding westwards through the ravines of the city. The vast office buildings of Fifth Avenue, abandoned for the night to cleaners and care­takers, reared their geometrical patterns of lighted windows against the dark sky like huge illuminated honeycombs. The cab crossed Broadway and Seventh Avenue, plunging through the drenched luminance of massed theatre and cinema and cabaret signs like a swimmer diving through a wave, and floated out on the other side in the calmer channel of faintly odorous gloom in which a red neon tube spelt out the legend: 'Charley's Place.'

The house was an indeterminate, rather dingy structure of the kind that flattens out the skyline westwards of Seventh Avenue, where the orgy of futuristic building which gave birth to Chrysler's Needle has yet to spread. It shared with its neigh­bours the depressing suggestion of belonging to a community of nondescript persons who had once resolved to attain some sort of individuality, and who had achieved their ambition by adopting various distinctive ways of being nondescript. The windows on the ground level were covered by greenish cur­tains which acquired a phosphorescent kind of luminousness from the lights behind them.

Simon rang the bell, and in a few moments a grille in the heavy oak door opened. It was a situation where nothing could be done without bluff; and the bluff had to be made on a blind chance.

'My name's Simon,' said 'the Saint. 'Fay Edwards sent me.'

The man inside shook his head.

'Fay ain't come in yet. Want to wait for her?'

'Maybe I can get a drink while I'm waiting,' Simon shrugged.