'You, Joe, und you, Maxie—give him der business. Und meet me here again aftervards.'
Without a flicker of expression the two men detached themselves from the wall and followed the Saint out, their hands automatically feeling in their pockets. The door closed behind the cortege, and for a moment nobody moved.
And then Dutch Kuhlmann dragged out his large white handkerchief and dabbed with it at his eyes. A distinct sob sounded in the room; and the remaining gunmen glanced at each other with almost sheepish grins. Dutch Kuhlmann was crying.
* * *
The moon which had shed its light over the earlier hours of the evening, and which had germinated the romance of Mr. Bungstatter of Brooklyn, had disappeared. Clouds hung low between the earth and the stars, and the night nestled blackly over the city. A single booming note from the Metropolitan Tower announced the passing of an hour after midnight.
On the fringe of the town, sleep claimed honest men. In the Bronx and the nearest portions of Long Island, in Hoboken, Peekskill, and Poughkeepsie, families slept peacefully. In Brooklyn, Mr. Theodore Bungstatter slept in ecstatic bliss— and, it must be confessed, snored. And with the hard nozzle of Maxie's automatic grinding deep into his ribs Simon Templar was hurried across the pavement outside Charley's Place and into a waiting car.
Joe piled in on the other side, and a third man took the wheel. The muzzle of another gun stabbed into the Saint's other side, and there was a cold tenseness in the eyes of the escort which indicated that their fingers were taut on the triggers. On this ride they were taking no chances.
Simon looked out of the windows while the driver jammed his foot down on the starter. The few pedestrians who passed scarcely glanced aside. If they had glanced aside, they would have seen nothing extraordinary; and if they had seen anything extraordinary, the Saint reflected with a wry grin, they would have run for their lives. He had taken a hand in a game where he had to play alone, and there would be no help from anyone but himself. . . . But even as he looked back, he saw the slim figure of Fay Edwards framed in the dark doorway through which he had been brought; and the old questions leapt to his mind again.
The brim of her hat cast a shadow over her eyes, and he could not even tell whether she was looking in his direction. He had no reason to think that she would. Throughout his interview with Orcread she had sat like an inattentive spectator, smoking, and thinking her own thoughts. When Kuhlmann's sentence had been passed upon him she had been lighting another cigarette: she had not even looked up, and her hand had not shaken. When he was turned and hustled out of the room she had been raising her eyes to look at him again, with a calm impersonal regard that told him no more than her present pose.
'Better take a good look,' advised Maxie.
There was no derision, no bitterness in his voice—it simply uttered a grim reminder of the fact that Simon Templar was doomed to have few more attractive things to look at.
The Saint smiled and saw the girl start off to cross the road behind the car, without looking round, before Joe reached forward and drew the curtains.
'She's worth a look,' Simon murmured and slanted an eyebrow at the closed draperies which shut out his view on either side. 'This wagon looks like a hearse already.'
Joe grunted meaninglessly, and the car pulled away from the curb and circled the block. The blaze of Broadway showed ahead for a moment, like the reflection of a fire in the sky; then they were turned around and driving west, and the Saint settled down and made himself as comfortable as he could.
The situation had no natural facilities for comfort. There was something so businesslike, so final and confident, in the manner of his captors, that despite himself an icy finger of doubt traced its chill course down the Saint's spine. Except for the fact that no invisible but far-reaching hand of the Law sanctioned this strange execution, it had a disturbing similarity to the remorseless ritual of lawful punishment.
Before that he had been in tight corners from which the Law might have saved him if he had called for help; but he had never called. There was something about the dull, ponderous interventions of the Law which had never appealed to him, and in this particular case their potentialities appealed to him least of all. Intervention, even if it succeeded, meant arrest and trial; and his brief acquaintance with Orcread and Yeald had been sufficient to show him how much justice he could expect from that. Not that the matter of justice was very vital in his case. The most incorruptible court in the world, he had to admit, could do nothing else but sentence him to about forty years' imprisonment even if it didn't go so far as ordering execution,
