15 The Saint in New York

That was about as much as anybody saw or understood. Somehow, without a struggle, the Saint was free; and a steel blade flashed in his hand. It swept upwards in front of him in a terrible arc; and Ualino clutched at his stomach and sank down, with his knees buckling under him and a ghastly crim­son tide bursting between his fingers. . . . Nobody else had time to move. The sheer astounding speed of it numbed even the most instinctive processes of thought—they might as easily have met and parried a flash of lightning. . . . And then the knife swept on upwards, and the hilt of it struck the electric light bulb over the table and brought utter darkness with an explosion like a gun.

Simon leapt for the window.

A hand touched his arm, and his knife drew back again for a vicious thrust. And then, with a sudden effort, he checked it in mid-flight. . . .

For the hand did not tighten its grip. Halting in the black dark, with the shouts and blunderings of infuriated men roar­ing around him, his nostrils caught a faint breath of perfume. Something cold and metallic touched his hand, and instinc­tively his fingers closed round it and recognized it for the butt of an automatic. And then the light touch on his sleeve was gone; and with the trigger guard between his teeth he sprang to the windowsill and reached upwards and outwards into space.

Chapter 4

How Simon Templar Read Newspapers, and Mr. Papulos Hit the Skids

 

He lay out on the tiles at a perilous downward angle of forty-five degrees, as he had swung himself straight up from the windowsill, with his feet stretched towards the sky and only the grip of his hands in the gutter holding him. from an imminent nosedive to squishy death. Directly below him he could see the torsos and bullet heads of two gorillas illumi­nated in the light of a match held by a third, as they leaned out from the window and raked the dark ground below with straining, startled eyes. Their voices floated up to him like the music of checked hounds to a fox that has crossed its own scent.

'He must of gone that way.'

'Better get down an' see he don't take the car.'

'Take the car hell—I got the keys here.'

The craning bodies heaved up again and vanished back into the room. He heard the quick thumping of their feet and the crash of the door; and then for a space another silence settled on the Long Island night.

Simon shifted the weight on his aching shoulders and grinned gently under the stars. In its unassuming way it had been a tense moment, but the advantage of the unexpected was still with him. The minds of most men run on well-charted rails, and perhaps the mind of the professional killer in times of sudden death has fewer sidetracks than any other. To the four raging and bewildered thugs who were even then pound­ing down the stairs to guard their precious car and comb the surrounding meadows, it was as inconceivable as it had been to Inspector Fernack that any man in the Saint's position, with the untrammelled use of his limbs, should be interested in any other diversion than that of boring a hole through the horizon with the utmost assiduousness and dispatch. But like Inspector Fernack, the four public enemies who fell into this grievous error were enjoying their first encounter with that dazzling recklessness which made Simon Templar an incalcu­lable variant in any equation.

With infinite caution the Saint began to manoeuvre himself sideways along the roof.

It was a gymnastic exercise for which no rules had been de­vised in any manual of the art. He had circled up to the roof in that position because it was quicker than any other; and, once he was up there, it was practically impossible to reverse it. Nor would he have gained anything if he had by some in­credible contortions managed to get his feet down to the gutter and his head up to its proper elevation, for his only means of telling when he had reached his destination was by peering down over the gutter at the windows underneath. And that destination was the room outside which the scrawny-necked individual had been lounging when he arrived.

Once a loose section of metal gave him the most nerve-racking two-yard journey of his life; more than once, when one of the men who were searching for him prowled under the house, he had to remain motionless, with all his weight on the heels of his hands, till the muscles of his arms and shoulders cracked under the strain. It was a task which should have taken the concentration of every fibre of his being, but the truth is that he was thinking about Fay Edwards for seven-eighths of the way.

What was she doing now? What was she doing at any time in that bloodthirsty half-world? Simon realized that even now he had not heard her speak—his assumption that she was the girl of Nather's