can only be born of fear. 'You're the rat who plugged Irboll this afternoon. You're the guy who's going to clean up New York.' He laughed abruptly, but there was no humour in the sound. 'Well, punk—you're through!'
He turned on his heel and issued a series of sharp orders to the two guards.
One word out of the arrangements for his disposal was enough for Simon Templar's ears. His strategy had worked exactly as he had psychologized it from the beginning. By permitting himself to be trapped by Papulos he had taken one more step up the ladder. He was being passed on to the man higher up for the final disposition of his fate; and that man was Morrie Ualino. And where Ualino was, the Saint felt sure, there was a good sporting chance that the heiress of all the Inselheims might also be.
'March,' ordered the first guard.
'But what about my twenty grand?' protested Simon aggrievedly.
The second guard grinned.
'Where you're going, buddy, they use asbestos money,' he said. 'Shove off.'
Papulos unlocked the door. The twenty thousand dollars was in the side pocket of his coat, just as he had stuffed it away when he rose from the poker table; and Simon Templar never took prophecies of his eventual destination too seriously. He figured that a nation which had Samuel Insull in its midst would not be unduly impoverished by the loss of twenty thousand berries; and as he reached the door he stopped to lay a hand on the Greek's shoulder with a friendliness which he did not feel.
'Remember, little buttercup,' said the Saint outrageously, 'whatever you do, we shall always be sweethearts——'
Then one of the guards pushed him on; and Simon stowed twenty thousand dollars unobtrusively away in his pocket as they went through the hall.
Simon rode beside the first torpedo, while the other drove the sedan north and east. If anything, the pressure of the gun that bored suggestively into his side had the pleasantly familiar touch of an old friend. It was a gentle reminder of danger, a solid emblem of battle and sudden death; and there were a few dozen men in hell who would attest to the fact that he was a stranger to neither.
They rolled smoothly across the Queensborough Bridge, which spans the East River at 59th Street, and the car picked up speed as they blared their way through the semideserted streets of Astoria. Then the broad open highways of Long Island stretched before them; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and turned his brain into a perfectly functioning machine that charted every yard of the route on a memory like a photographic plate.
The outlying suburbs of New York flashed by in quick succession—Flushing, Garden City, Hempstead. They had travelled some miles beyond Springdale when the car slowed down and turned abruptly into a bumpy unfinished driveway that terminated a hundred yards farther on in front of a sombre and shuttered two-story house, where another car was already parked.
One of the guards nudged him out, and the three of them mounted the short flight of steps to the porch in single file. The inevitable face peered through a grille, recognized the leading guard, and said, 'Hi, Joe.' The bolts were drawn, and they went in.
The hall was lighted by a single heavily frosted orange bulb which did very little more than relieve the blackest shades of darkness. On the right, an open door gave a glimpse of a tiny room containing a small zinc-topped bar; on the left, a larger room was framed between dingy hangings. The larger room had a bare floor with small booths built around the walls, each containing a table covered with a grubby cloth. There was an electric piano in one corner, a dingy growth of artificial vines straggling over the tops of the booths and tacking themselves along the low ceiling, and a half-dozen more of the same feeble orange bulbs shedding their watery glimmer onto the scene. It was a typical gangster's dive, of a pattern more common in New Jersey than on Long Island, and the atmosphere was intended to inspire romance and relaxation, but it was one of the most depressing places in which Simon Templar had ever been.
'Upstairs?' queried the gorilla who had been recognized as Joe; and the man who had opened the door nodded.
'Yeah—waitin' for ya.' He inspected the Saint curiously. 'Is dis de guy?'
The two guards made simultaneous grunting noises designed to affirm that dis was de guy, and one of them took the Saint's arm and moved him on towards the stairway at the back of the hall. They mounted through a curve of darkness and came up into another dim glow of light on the floor above. The stairs turned them into a narrow corridor that ran the length of the house; Simon was hurried along past
