15 The Saint in New York

the windows. White-coated, smooth-faced and inscrutable as ever, Toni Ol­linetti dusted the glass-topped tables and paid no attention to the murmur of voices from the back room. He looked neither fresh nor tired, as he looked at any hour out of the twenty-four: no one could have told whether he had just awoken or whether he had not slept for a week.

The scene in the back room was livelier. The lights were switched on, flooding the session with the peculiarly cold yel­low colour that electricity has in the daytime. There was a bottle of whisky and an array of glasses on the table to stimu­late decision, and the air was full of tobacco smoke of varying antiquities.

'De guy is nuts,' Heimie Felder had proclaimed, more than once.

His right arm was in a sling, as an advertisement of the Saint's particular brand of nuttiness. He enjoyed the distinc­tion of being one of the few men who had done battle with the Saint and survived to tell of it, and it was a pity that his vo­cabulary was scarcely adequate to deal with the subject. He had given much painful thought to the startling events of the previous night, but he had been unable to make any notable advance on his first judgment.

'You ought to of seen him,' said Heimie. 'When we took him in de udder room, over in de hotel, he was just surly an' kep' his mout' shut like he was an ordinary welsher. We asks him, 'Whereja get dat dough?' an' Pappy gives him a poke in de kisser, an' he hauls off an' tries to take a sock at Pappy dat was so slow Pappy could of gone off an' played anudder hand an' come back an' it still wouldn't of reached him. So Pappy rings up Judge Nather, an' Nather says: 'Yeah, de guy holds me up an' takes de dough off of me a coupla hours ago.' So we take him along to Morrie Ualino, out there on Long Island where dey got de kid; an' it seems de Saint knows about dat, too. But nobody ain't worryin' about what he knows any more, becos we're all figurin' dat when he goes out of there he won't be comin' back unless his funeral procession goes past de house. De guy is nuts. He stands there an' starts ribbin' Morrie about him bein' a dude, an' you know how mad dat useta make Morrie. You can see Morrie is gettin' madder 'n' madder every minute, but dis guy just grins an' goes on kid­ding. I tell ya, he's nuts. An' then he's got hold of a knife from somewhere, an' he cuts my wrist open till I has to let go; an' then, zappo, he's got his knife in Morrie's guts an' broke de electric light bulb, an' while we're chasin' him he ducks over de roof somehow an' gets de kid. He's gotten a Betsy from somewhere, an' he shoots up de jernt an' gets away in Morrie's car. De guy is nuts,' explained Heimie, clinching the matter.

Dutch Kuhlmann poured himself out a half-tumbler of whisky and downed it without blinking. He was a huge fleshy man with flaxen hair and pale blue eyes; and he looked ex­actly like an amiable waiter from a Bavarian beer garden. No one, glancing at him in ignorance, would have suspected that before the unhonoured demise of the Eighteenth Amendment he was the man who supplied half the thirsty East with beer, reigning in stolid sovereignty over the greatest czardom of illicit hops in American history. No one would have suspected that the brain which guided the hulking flabby frame had carved out and consolidated and maintained that sovereignty with the ruthlessness of an Attila. His record at police head­quarters was clean: to the opposition, accidents had simply happened, with nothing to connect them with Dutch Kuhl­mann beyond their undoubtedly fortunate coincidence with the route of his ambitions: but those who moved in the queer dark stratum which touches the highest and the lowest points in Manhattan's geology told their stories, and his trucks ran unchallenged from Brooklyn to New Orleans.

'Dot is a great shame, about Morrie,' said Kuhlmann. 'Morrie vass a goot boy.'

He took out a large linen handkerchief, dried a tear from the corner of each eye, and blew his nose loudly. The passing of Morrie Ualino left Dutch Kuhlmann the unquestioned cap­tain of the coalition whose destinies were guided by the Big Fellow, but there was no doubt of the genuineness of his grief. After he had given the orders which sent his own cousin and strongest rival in the beer racket on the long, one-way ride, it was said that Kuhlmann had wept all night.

There was a brief respectful silence in honour of the defunct Morrie—several members of the Ualino mob were present, for without the initiative or personality to take his place they drifted automatically into the cohorts of the nearest leader. And then Kuhlmann pulled his sprawling bulk together.

'Vot I vant to know,' he said with remorseless logic, 'is, vot is the Saint gettin' out of this?'

'He got twenty grand from Nather,' said Papulos. 'Prob­ably he's collected a reward from Inselheim for bringing the kid back. He's getting plenty!'

Kuhlmann's pale eyes turned slowly onto the speaker, and under their placid scrutiny Papulos felt something inside him­self turning cold. For, if you liked to look at it in a certain way, Morrie Ualino had died only because Papulos had passed the Saint along to him—with that terrible knife which had somehow escaped their search. And the men around him, Papulos knew, were given to looking at such things in a cer­tain way. The subtleties of motive and accident were too great a strain on their limited mentalities: they regarded only ul­timate