15 The Saint in New York

'Say, that guy has got what it takes. An' if a guy has got what it takes, an' shoots square an' can find the dough, I'll take orders from him. And that goes for Joe an' Heimie an' Dutch and the rest of the mob, too. The dough ain't been so easy since they made liquor legal, see?'

The Saint frowned with inviting perplexity; and Maxie, not at all reluctant, endeavoured to clarify his point.

'When we had prohibition, a bootlegger an' his mob were all right, see? They were breaking the law, but it wasn't a law that anybody cared about. Everybody, even respectable citizens, guys on Park Avenue an' everything, useta know bootleggers and ring 'em up and talk to 'em an' be proud to know them. Why, guys would boast about their bootleggers like they would about their doctors or their lawyers, and get into arguments and fights with other guys about whose boot­legger was the best. They paid us our dough an' didn't grum­ble, because they knew we had to take risks to get the stuff they wanted; and the cops was sort of enemies of the public because they tried to stop us getting the stuff—sometimes. Ya couldn't get a guy to testify against a guy that was getting him his liquor, in favour of another guy who was trying to stop the liquor comin' through, see?'

'Mmm,' conceded the Saint doubtfully, more for punctua­tion than anything else.

'Well, when prohibition went out, that changed every­thing, see? A bootlegger wasn't any guy's friend any more. He was just a racketeer that was trying to stick something on the prices of stuff that any guy could go and buy legitimate, an' the cop was a guy that was trying to put the racketeer out of business an' keep the prices down; and everybody suddenly forgot everything we'd done for 'em in the dry years, an' turned right round on us.' Maxie scowled mournfully at the flimsiness of human gratitude. 'Well, we hadda do something, hadn't we? A guy's gotta live.'

'I suppose so,' said the Saint. 'Which guy is this?'

Maxie wrinkled his nose.

'A lotta guys got in trouble about that time,' he said remi­niscently. 'We had a sort of reform drive, an' got hunted about a lot. It got worse all the time. A lotta guys couldn't get it into their coconuts that it wasn't going to be easy money any more, an' it was too bad about them. You had to have it here.' He thumbed his forehead again mysteriously. 'Business wasn't good, so we hadn't got the money to pay the cops; an' the cops not getting money started going after us again an' makin' things worse.' Maxie sighed reminiscently. 'But then the Big Fellow came along,' he said cheering up, 'an' everything was jake again.'

'Why?' Simon asked, with the same ingenuously puzzled air.

'Well, he put us in the big dough again, see?'

'With the same old rackets?'

'Yeah. But he's got brains. An' information. He's got every­thing taped out. When he says: 'The layout is like this and that, we gotta fix it this way and that way,' we know it's going to be just like he says. So we don't make no mistakes.'

The lights of the waterside had ceased to move, and there was a general stir of voyagers gathering themselves to con­tinue on their way. The driver climbed back into the car and settled himself, waiting for their turn to pull out in the line of disembarking traffic.

Keeping their place decorously in the procession, they climbed the winding road that leads upwards from the Jersey shore, and in a short time they were speeding across the Jersey meadows. The drive became a monotonous race through un­familiar country—straight lines of highway which might have been laid across the face of the moon for all the landmarks that Simon could pick out, straggling lights of unidentifiable small towns, blazing headlights of other cars which leapt up out of the blackness and roared by in an instant of noise, to be swallowed up in the gulf of dark behind. The powerful sedan, guided by the expert hands of the silent driver, flashed at a reckless pace through the countryside, slowed smoothly down from time to time to keep well within the prescribed speed limits of a village, then leapt ahead down another long stretch of open road. Despite the speed at which they were travelling, the journey seemed interminable: the sense of utter isolation, of being shut away from the whole world in that mass-produced projectile whirling through the uncharted night, would have had an overwhelmingly soporific effect if it had not been for the doom to which they were driving.

The Saint had no means of knowing how far ahead that destination lay, and a cold fatalism would not let him ask. He knew that it could not be very far away—knew that his time must be getting short and his need more desperately urgent—but still he had had no opportunity to save himself. The