15 The Saint in New York

'Tradition would have it that Morrie sleeps with his fa­thers,' he said, very gently; 'but one can't be sure that he knows who they were.'

He opened the bureau and took out a plain white card. On it were written six names. One of them—Jack Irboll's—was already scratched out. With his fountain pen he drew a single straight line through the next two; and then, at the bottom of the list, he wrote another. It was The Big Fellow. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote an eighth, lower down, and drew a neat panel round it: Fay Edwards.

'Who is she?' inquired Valcross, looking over his shoulder; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and pushed back his hair.

'That's what I'd like to know. All I can tell you is that her gun saved me a great deal of trouble, and was a whole lot of grief to some of the ungodly. . . . This is a pretty passable beginning, Bill—you ought to enjoy the headlines tomorrow morning.'

His prophecy of the reactions of the press to his exploits would have been no great strain on anyone's clairvoyant gen­ius. In the morning he had more opportunities to read about himself than any respectably self-effacing citizen would have desired.

Modesty was not one of Simon Templar's virtues. He sat at breakfast with a selection of the New York dailies strewn around him, and the general tenor of their leading pages was very satisfactory. It is true that the Times and the Herald Tribune, following a traditional policy of treating New York's annual average of six hundred homicides as regrettable faux pas which have no proper place in a sober chronicle of the passing days, relegated the Saint to a secondary position; but any aloofness on their part was more than compensated by the enthusiasm of the Mirror and the News. SAINT RESCUES VIOLA, they howled, in black letters two and a half inches high. UALINO SLAIN. RACKET ROMEO'S LAST RIDE. UALINO, VOELSANG, DIE. SAINT SLAYS TWO, WOUNDS THREE. LONG ISLAND MASSACRE. SAINT BATTLES KIDNAPPERS. There were photographs of the rescued Viola Inselheim with her stout papa, photographs of the house where she had been held, gory photographs of the dead. There was a photograph of the Saint himself; and Simon was pleased to see that it was a good one.

At the end of his meal, he pushed the heap of vociferous newsprint aside and poured himself out a second cup of coffee. If there had ever been any lurking doubts of his authenticity —if any of the perspiring brains at police headquarters down on Centre Street, or any of the sizzling intellects of the underworld, had cherished any shy reluctant dreams that the Saint was merely the product of a sensational journalist's overheated imagination—those doubts and dreams must have suffered a last devastating smack on the schnozzola with the publication of that morning's tabloids. For no sensational journalist's im­agination, overheated to anything below melting point, could ever have created such a story out of unsubstantial air. Simon lighted a cigarette and stared at the ceiling through a haze of smoke with very clear and gay blue eyes, feeling the deep thrill of other and older days in his veins. It was very good that such things could still come to pass in a tamed and supine world, better still that he himself should be their self-appointed spokesman. He saw the kindly grey head of William Valcross nodding at him across the room.

'Just now you have the advantage,' Valcross was saying. 'You're mysterious and deadly. How long will it last?'

'Long enough to cost you a million dollars,' said the Saint lightly.

He went over to the bureau and took out the card on which the main points of his undertaking were written down, and carried it across to the open windows. It was one of those spring mornings on which New York is the most brilliant city in the world, when the air comes off the Atlantic with a heady tang like frosted wine, and the white pinnacles of its towers stand up in a sky from which every particle of impurity seems to have been washed by magic; one of those mornings when all the vitality and impetuous aspiration that is New York in­sinuates itself as the only manner of life. He filled his lungs with the cool, clean alpine air and looked down at the specks of traffic crawling between the mechanical stops on Park Ave­nue; the distant mutter of it came up to him as if from another world into which he could plunge himself at will, like a god going down to earth; and on that morning he understood the cruelty and magnificence of the city, and how a man could sit there in his self-made Olympus and be drunk with faith in his own power. . . . And then the Saint laughed softly at the beauty of the morning and at himself, for instead of being a god enthroned he was a brigand looking down from his eyrie and planning new forays on the plain; and perhaps that was even better.

'Who's next on the list?' he asked, and looked at the card in his hand.

Straight away west on 49th Street, beyond Seventh Avenue, the same urgent question was being discussed in the back room of Charley's Place. It was too early in the day for the regular customers, and the bar in the front part of the building had a dingy and forsaken aspect in the dim rays of daylight that struggled through the heavy green curtains at