15 The Saint in New York

that angle; but he said: 'She's good to look at, all right, but I can't see anything else she's got that you could use. I wouldn't let any girls sit in on my business—you can never trust 'em.'

Maxie regarded him pityingly.

'Say, why don't ya get wise? That dame has got it here.' He tapped the area where his brain might be presumed to reside. 'She's got more of it than you or anybody else like ya.'

Simon shrugged dubiously.

'You ought to know. But I wouldn't do it. The cleverer a dame is, the more she's dangerous. You can't ever be sure of 'em. They ride along with you for a while, and then the first thing you know they've fallen for some other guy and they're working like hell to double-cross you.'

'What, her?' Maxie's stare deepened with indignation as well as scorn. 'I guess Heimie was right—you must be nuts. Who's she going to double-cross? She's the Big Fellow's mouth­piece.'

The Saint's face was expressionless.

'Mouthpiece?' he repeated slowly.

'Yeah. She talks for him. If he's got something to say, she says it. If we got anything to say, she takes it back. She's the only one in the mob who knows everything that's going on.'

Simon did not move. He sat perfectly still, watching the lights along the riverside begin to slide across the darkness as the ferry pulled out from the pier. The urgency of his pre­dicament dropped out of his mind as if a trapdoor had fallen open, leaving a sensation of emptiness through which weaved an eerie squirm of excitement Maxie's frank expansiveness fairly took his breath away.

It was about the last thing he had expected to develop from that ride. And then, in another moment, he realized how it came about. The callous confidence of his executioners was an attitude which worked two ways; the utter, irrevocable finality of it was sufficient to make conversations possible which could never have happened otherwise. In a different setting, threats and torture and even the menace of certain death would have received no response but a stony, iron-jawed silence, according to that stoical gangland code of which the late Mr. Papulos had been such a faithless ex­ponent; but to a condemned prisoner on the road to execution a gunman could legitimately talk, and might even de­rive some pleasure from the dilation of his ego and the proof of his own omniscience and importance in so doing—death loomed so inevitably ahead, and dead men told no tales. It gave the Saint a queer feeling of fatality to realize that he had to come to the end of his usefulness before he could make any headway in his quest, but even if dissolution had been a bare yard away he could never have separated himself from the instinct to learn all that he could while knowledge was being offered. And even at that stage he had not lost hope.

'I'm sorry I didn't meet this Big Fellow,' he remarked, with­out a variation in his even tone of casual conversation. 'He must be worth knowing.'

'You got too near as it was,' Joe said matter-of-factly. 'You shouldn't of tried it, pal.'

'He sounds an exclusive sort of bird,' Simon admitted; and Maxie took the cigarette out of his mouth to grin widely.

'You ain't said nuth'n yet. Exclusive ain't the word for it. Say, you don't know how good we're bein' to ya. You're lucky to of got away from Morrie Ualino—Morrie 'd 've had ya in the hot box for sure.'

As if he felt a glow of conscious pride at this discovery of his own share in such an uncustomary humaneness, he pulled out his crumpled pack of Chesterfields and offered them again. Simon took one and accepted a light, the procedure being governed by exactly the same courtesy and caution as before.

'Yes,' he said thoughtfully, 'your Big Fellow must be the wrong kind of bloke to buck.'

'You're learning late,' Maxie agreed laconically.

'All the same,' pursued the Saint, with an air of vague puz­zlement, 'I can't quite see what makes you and the rest of the mob take your orders from a fellow who isn't in the racket —a bird you haven't ever even seen. I mean, what have you got to gain by it?'

Maxie hitched himself round and tapped a nicotine-stained forefinger on his brain pan again, in that occult gesture which appeared to be his synonym for a salute to intelligence.