15 The Saint in New York

'He told me about his idea. It was a good one. I was able to help him because I knew how to con­tact the sort of people he had to get hold of. I've been his mouthpiece ever since—until tonight.'

'D'you mean you—parted company?'

'Oh, no. I just changed my mind.'

'He must be a remarkable fellow,' said the Saint.

'He is. When I started, I didn't think he'd last a week, even though his ideas were good. It takes something more than good ideas to hold your own in the racket. And he couldn't use per­sonality—direct contact—of any kind. He was determined to be absolutely unknown to anyone from beginning to end. As a matter of fact, he hasn't got much personality—certainly not of that kind. Perhaps he knows it. That may be why he did everything through me—he wouldn't even speak to any of the mob over the telephone. Probably he's one of those men who are Napoleons in their dreams, but who never do anything because directly they meet anyone face to face it all goes out of them. The Big Fellow found a way to beat that. He never met anyone face to face—except me, and somehow I didn't scare him. He just kept on dreaming, all by himself.'

A light was starting to glimmer in the depths of Simon Templar's understanding. It wasn't much of a light, little more than a faint nimbus of luminance in the caverns of an illim­itable obscurity; but it seemed to be brightening, growing in­finitesimally larger with the crawling of time, as if a man walked with a candle in the infinities of a tremendous cave. He had an uncanny illogical premonition that perhaps after all the threads were not so widely scattered—that perhaps the wall might not be so blank as he had thought. Some unreason­able standard of the rightness of things demanded it; anything else would have been out of tune with the rest of his life, a sharp discord in a smooth flow of harmony; but he did not know why he should have that faith in such a fantastic law of coincidence.

'Were his ideas very clever?' he asked.

'He had ways for us to communicate that nobody ever found out,' she replied simply. 'Morrie Ualino tried to find out who he was—so did Kuhlmann. They tried every trick and trap they could think of, but there was never any risk. I call that clever. He had a way of handling ransom money, between the man who picked it up and the time when he eventually got his share himself, which took the dicks into a blind alley every time. You know the trouble with ransom money—it's nearly always fixed so that it can be traced. The Big Fellow never ran the slightest risk there, either, at any time. That was only the beginning. Yes, he's clever.'

Simon nodded. All of that he could follow clearly. It was grotesque, impossible, one of the things that do not and cannot happen; but he had known that from the start. And yet the impossible things had to happen sometimes, or else the whole living universe would long since have sunk into a stagnant mo­rass of immutable laws, and the smug pedants whose sole am­bition is to bind down all surprise and endeavour into their smugly catalogued little pigeonholes would long since have inherited their empty earth. That much he could understand. To handle thugs and killers, the brutal, dehumanized cannon fodder of the underworld, men whose scruples and loyalties and dissensions are as volatile and unpredictable as the flight of a flushed snipe, calls for a peculiar type of dominance. A man who would be a brilliant success in other fields, even a man who might organize and control a gigantic industry, whose thunder might shake the iron satraps of finance on their golden thrones, might be an ignoble failure there. The Big Fellow had slipped round the difficulty in the simplest pos­sible way—had possibly even gained in prestige by the mystery with which he shielded his own weakness. But the question which Maxie had not had time to answer still remained.

'How did the Big Fellow start?' asked the Saint.

'With a hundred thousand dollars.' She smiled at his quick blend of puzzlement and attention. 'That was his capital. I went to Morrie Ualino with the story that this man, whose name I couldn't give, wanted another man kidnapped and perhaps killed. I had the contact, so we could talk straight. You can find some heels who'll bump off a guy for fifty bucks. Most of the regulars would charge you a couple of hundred up, according to how big a noise the job would make. This man was a big shot. It could probably have been done for ten thousand. The Big Fellow offered fifty thousand, cash. He knew everything—he had the inside information, knew every­thing the man was doing, and had the plans laid out with a footrule. All that Morrie and his mob had to do was exactly what the Big Fellow told them, and ask no questions. They thought it was just some private quarrel. They put the snatch on this man, and then I went behind their backs and put in the ransom demand, just as the Big Fellow told me. It had to be paid in thirty-six hours, and it wasn't. The Big Fellow passed the word for him to be rubbed out, and on the deadline he was thrown out of a car on his own doorstep. That was Flo Youssine.'

'The theatrical producer? ... I remember. But the ransom story came out as soon as he was killed—'