15 The Saint in New York

were other parties who would be likely to develop an interest in Sutton Place that night. He stepped off the last ladder into the inky blackness of the narrow alley where it let him down without a thought of immediate danger, and heard the slight movement behind him too late. He spun round with his right hand dart­ing to his pocket, but before it bad touched his gun a strong arm was flung round his neck from behind and the steel snout of an automatic jabbed into his back. A voice harsh with exultation snarled in his ear: 'Come a little ways with us, will ya . . . pal?'

*    *    *

Not a shadow of uneasiness darkened the Saint's brow as he crossed the threshold of the back room of Charley's Place and stood for a moment regarding the faces before him. Be­hind him he heard the click of the latch as the door was closed; and the men who had risen from their seats in the front bar and followed him as his captors hustled him through ranged themselves along the walls. More than a dozen men were gathered in the room. More than two dozen eyes were riveted on him in the same calculating stares—eyes as hard and un­winking as coloured marbles, barren of all humanity.

He was unarmed. He had nothing larger than a pin which might have been used as an offensive weapon. His gun had been taken from him; and the knife which he carried in his sleeve, having left men alive and day before to tell the tale of its deadliness, had been removed almost as quickly. The new desperate suspicion of concealed weapons with which his earlier exploits had filled the minds of the mob had prompted a vastly less perfunctory search than the deceased Mr. Papulos had thought necessary—a search which had left no inch of his person untouched, and which had even seized on his penknife and cigarette case as possible sources of danger. The thorough­ness of the examination had afforded the Saint some grim amusement at the time, but not for a moment had he lost sight of what it meant. Yet his poise had never been more easy and debonair, the steel masked down more deceptively in the mocking depths of his eyes, than it was as he stood there smil­ing and nodding to the assembled company like an actor tak­ing a bow.

'How! my palefaced brothers,' he murmured. 'The council sits, though the pipe of peace is not in evidence. Well, well, well—every time we get together you think of new games, as the bishop said to the actress. And what do we play tonight?'

A weird light came into the eyes of Heimie Felder, who sat at the table with a fresh bandage round his head. He leaned across and whispered to Dutch Kuhlmann.

'Nuts,' he said, almost pleadingly. 'De guy is nuts. Dijja hear what he says?'

Kuhlmann's contracted pupils were fixed steadily on the Saint's face. He made no answer. And after that first general survey of the congregation in which he had been included, Simon had not looked at him. For all of the Saint's interest was taken up with the girl who also sat at the table.

It was strange what a deep impression she had made on him in the places where she had crossed his path. He realized that even now he knew nothing about her. He had heard, or as­sumed that he heard, her voice over the telephone; he had seen, or assumed that he saw, the owner of that disembodied voice in the house on Long Island where Viola Inselheim was held and Morrie Ualino died; and once he had felt her hand in the darkness and she had pressed a gun into his hand. But she had never identified herself to more than one of his senses at the same time; and he knew that his cardinal belief that this slim, fair-haired girl with the inscrutable amber eyes was that mysterious Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had spoken rested on nothing but intuition. And yet, even while the active part of his brain had been most wrapped up in the practical mechanics of his vendetta, her image had never been very far from his mind.

The sight of her in that room, the one glimpse of colour and beauty in the grim circle of silent men, brought back to the Saint every question that he had asked himself about her. Every question had trailed off into the same nebulous voids of guesswork in which the hope of any absolute answer was more elusive than the end of a rainbow; but to see her again at such a moment gave him a throb of pleasure for which there was no logical accounting. Once when he was in need she had helped him; he might never know why. Now he was again in need, and he wondered what she was thinking and what she would do. Her face told him nothing—only a spark of something to which he could give no name gleamed for an instant in her eyes and was gone.

Dutch Kuhlmann turned to her.

'This is der Saint?' he asked.

She answered without shifting her gaze from Simon: 'Yes. That's the man who killed Morrie.'

It was the first tune he had ever seen her and