the underworld since they had had that strange, irregular conversation. Probably Fernack was scouring the city for him at that moment, harried to superhuman efforts by the savage anxiety of commissioners and politicians and their satellites; their next conversation, if they ever had one, would probably be much less friendly and tolerant. But that also seemed as far away as if it belonged in another century. Fay Edwards was waiting.
She had switched off the engine, and she was lighting a cigarette. He saw the calm, almost waxen beauty of her face in the flicker of the match she was holding, the untroubled quiet of her eyes, and had to make an effort to remember that she had killed one man that night and helped him to kill another.
'Was that all right?' she asked.
'It was all right,' he said.
'I saw your list,' she said reflectively. 'You had my name on it. What have I done? I suppose you want something with me. I'm here—now.'
He shook his head.
'There should have been a question mark after it. I put you down for a mystery. I was listening in when you spoke to Nather—that was the first time I heard your voice. I was watching you with Morrie Ualino. You gave me the gun that got me out of there. I wanted to know who you were—what you had been—why you were in the racket. Just curiosity.'
She shrugged.
'Now you know the answer.'
'Do I?' The response was automatic, and at once he wished he had checked it. He felt her eyes turning to look at him, and added quickly: 'When you came and told Maxie tonight that the Big Fellow said he was to let me go—that wasn't the truth.'
'What makes you think so?'
'I'm guessing. But I'll bet on it.'
She drew on her cigarette placidly. The smoke drifted out and floated down the beam of the lights.
'Of course it wasn't true. The Big Fellow was on your list as well, wasn't he?' she said inconsequently. 'Do you want him, too?'
'Most of all.'
'I see. You're very determined—very single-minded, aren't you?'
'I have to be,' said the Saint. 'And I want to finish this job. I want to write 'The End' to it and start something else. I'm a bit tired.'
She was smoking thoughtfully, a very faint frown of concentration cutting one tiny etched line between her brows—the only wrinkle in the soft perfection of her skin. She might have been alone in her room preparing to go out, choosing between one dress and another. It meant nothing to her,emotions that the only thing they shared in their acquaintance were killings, that the Saint's mission was set down in an unalterable groove of battle and sudden death, that all the paths they had taken together were laid to the same grim goal. He had an eerie feeling that death and killings were the things she understood best—that perhaps there was nothing else she really understood.
'I think I could find the Big Fellow,' she said; and he tried to appear as casual and unconcerned as she was.
'You know him, don't you?'
'I'm the only one who knows him.'
It was indescribably weird to be sitting there with her, wounded and tired, and to be discussing with her the greatest mystery that the annals of New York crime had ever known, waiting on the threshold of unthinkable revelations, where otherwise he would have been faced with the same illimitable blank wall as had confronted him from the beginning. In his wildest day-dreams he had never imagined that the climax of his quest would be reached like that, and the thought made him feel unwontedly humble.
'He's a great mystery, isn't he?' said the Saint meditatively. 'How long have you known him?'
'I met him nearly three years ago, before he was the Big Fellow at all—before anyone had ever heard of him. He picked me up when I was down and out.' She was as casual about it as if she had been discussing an ephemeral scandal of nine days' importance, as if nothing of great interest to anyone hung on what she said.
