15 The Saint in New York

'Au revoir,' she said softly; and somehow he was outside the car, standing on the pavement, watching the car slide silently away into the dark, and wondering at himself, with the fresh­ness of her lips still on his mouth and a ghost of fear in his heart.

Presently he awoke again to the throbbing of his shoulder and the maddening tiredness of his body. He turned and walked slowly across to the private entrance of the Waldorf apartments. 'Well,' he thought to himself, 'before morning I shall have met the Big Fellow, and that'll be the end of it' But he knew it would only be the beginning.

He went up in the private elevator, lighting another ciga­rette. Some of the numbness had loosened up from his right hand: he moved his fingers, gingerly, to assure himself that they worked, but there was little strength left in them. It hurt him a good deal to move his arm. On the whole, he supposed that he could consider himself lucky to be alive at all, but he felt the void in himself which should have been filled by the vitality that he had lost, and was vaguely angry. He had always so vigorously despised weariness and lassitude in all their forms that it was infuriating to him to be disabled—most of all at such a time. He was hurt as a sick child is hurt, not knowing why; until that chance shot of Maxie's had found its mark, the Saint had never seriously imagined that anything could attack him which his resilient health would not be able to throw off as lightly as he would have thrown off the hang­over of a heavy party. He told himself that if everything else about him had been normal, if he had been overflowing with his normal surplus of buoyant energy and confidence, not even the strange sorcery of Fay Edwards could have troubled him. But he knew that it was not true.

The lights were all on in the apartment when he let him­self in, and suddenly he realized that he had been away for a long time. Valcross must have despaired of seeing him again alive, he thought, with a faint grim smile touching his lips; and then, when no familiar kindly voice was raised in welcome, he decided that the old man must have grown tired in waiting and dozed off over his book. He strolled cheerfully through and pushed open the door of the living room. The lights were on there as well, and he had crossed the threshold before he grasped the fact that neither of the two men who rose to greet him was Valcross.

He stopped dead; and then his hand leapt instinctively to­wards the electric^:light switch. It was not until then that he realized fully how tired he was and how much vitality he had lost. The response of his muscles was slow and clumsy, and a twinging stab of pain in his shoulder checked the movement halfway and put the seal on its failure.

'Better not try that again, son,' warned the larger of the two men harshly; and Simon Templar looked down the barrel of a businesslike Colt and knew that he was never likely to hear a word of advice which had a more soberly overwhelming claim to be obeyed.

Chapter 8

How Fay Edwards Kept Her Word, and Simon Templar Surrendered His Gun

 

'Well, well, well!' said the Saint and was surprised at the huskiness of his own voice. 'This is a pleasant surprise.' He frowned at one of the vacant chairs. 'But what have you done with Marx?'

'Who do you mean—Marx?' demanded the large man alertly.

The Saint smiled.

'I'm sorry,' he said genially. 'For a moment I thought you were Hart & Schaffner. Never mind. What's in a name?—as the actress said to the bishop when he told her that she re­minded him of Aspasia. Is there anything I can do for you, or has the hotel gone bankrupt and are you just the bailiffs?'

The two men looked at each other for a moment and found that they had but a single thought. The smaller man voiced it, little knowing that a certain Heimie Felder had beaten him to it by a good number of hours.

'It's a nut,' he affirmed decisively. 'That's what it is. Let's give it the works.'

Simon Templar leaned back against the door and regarded them tolerantly. He was stirred to no great animosity by the opinion which the smaller man had expressed with such an admirable economy of words—he had been hearing it so often recently that he was getting used to it. And at the back of his mind he was beginning to wonder if it might contain a germ of truth. His entrance into that room had been one of the most ridiculously careless manoeuvres he had ever executed, and his futile attempt to reach the light switch still made him squirm slightly to think of. Senile decay, it appeared, was rapidly over­taking him. . . .

He studied the two men with grim intentness. They have been classified, for immediate convenience, as the larger and the smaller man; but in point of fact there was little to choose between them—the effect was much the same as establishing the comparative dimensions of a rhinoceros and a hippopot­amus. The 'smaller' man stood about