'Didn't you find the Big Fellow?'
'He's in the taxi.'
A glimmer of immeasurable content passed across Fernack's eyes, and he looked over the Saint's shoulder, down towards the waiting cab. Then, without a word, he went past the Saint, across the pavement, and opened the door. Valcross half fell towards him. Fernack caught him with one hand and hauled the slobbering man out and upright. Then he saw something else in the taxi, and stood very still.
'Who's this?' he said.
There was no answer. Fernack turned round and looked up and down the street. Simon Templar was gone.
Epilogue
Mr. Theodore Bungstatter, of Brooklyn, espoused his cook on the eleventh day of June in that year of grace, having finally convinced her that his inability to repeat his devotion coherently on a certain night was due to nothing more unregenerate than a touch of influenza. They spent their honeymoon at Niagara Falls, and on the third day of it she induced him to sign the pledge; but in spite of this concession to her prejudices she never cooked for him again, and the rest of their wedded bliss was backgrounded by a procession of disgruntled substitutes who brought Mr. Bungstatter to the direst agonies of dyspepsia.
Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim paced his library and said to a deputation of reporters: 'It is the duty of all public-spirited citizens to resist racketeering and extortion even at the risk of their own lives or the lives of those who are nearest and dearest to them. The welfare of the state must override all considerations of personal safety. We are fighting a war to the death with crime, and the same code of self-sacrifice must guide every one of us as if we were at war with a foreign power. It is the only way in which this vile cancer in our midst can be rooted out.' And while he spoke he remembered the cold appraising eyes of the outlaw who had faced him in that same room, and behind the pompous phrasing of his words was the pride of a belief that if he himself were tried again he would not be found wanting.
Mr. Heimie Felder, wrestling in argument with a circle of boon companions in Charley's Place, said: 'Whaddya mean, de guy was nuts? Coujja say a guy dat bumped off Morrie Ualino an' Dutch Kuhlmann was nuts? Say, listen, I'm tellin'ya ....
' Mr. Chris Cellini laid a magnificent juicy steak, two inches thick, tenderly on the bars of his grill. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, his strong hands moved with the deft sureness and delight of an artist. The smell of food and wine and tobacco was perfume in his nostrils, the babel of human fellowship was music in his ears. His rich laugh rang jovially through his beloved kitchen. 'No, I ain't seen the Saint a long while. Say, he was a wild fellow, that boy. I'll tell you a story about him one day.'
Mr. Sebastian Lipski said to an enraptured audience in his favourite restaurant at Columbus Circle: 'Say, dijja never hear about de time when me an' de Saint snatched off de Big Fellow? De time when we took de Vandrick National Bank wit' two guns? Chees, youse guys ain't hoid nut'n' yet!'
Mr. Toni Ollinetti wiped invisible stains from the shining mahogany of his bar, mechanically, with a spotless white napkin. His smooth face was expressionless, his brown eyes carried their own thoughts. Whenever anything was ordered, he served it promptly, unobtrusively, and well; his flashing smile acknowledged every word that was addressed to him with the most perfect allotment of politeness, but the smile went no further than the gleam of his white teeth. It was impossible to tell whether he was tired—he might have just come on duty, or he might have had no sleep for a week. The life of Broadway and the bright lights passed before him, new faces appearing, old faces dropping out, the whole endlessly shifting pageant of the half-world. He saw everything, heard everything, and said nothing.
Inspector John Fernack caught a train down from Ossining twenty minutes after the Big Fellow went to the chair. He was a busy man, and he could not afford to linger over ancient cases. In his spare time he was still trying to catch up with Euripides; but he had very little spare time. There had been a change of regime at the last municipal election. Tammany Hall was in the background, organizing its forces for the next move to the polls; Orcread was taking a world cruise for his health, Marcus Yeald was no longer district attorney; but Quistrom was still police commissioner, and a lot of old accounts were being settled. There was the routine copy of a letter on his desk:
METROPOLITAN POLICE, SPECIAL BRANCH,
SCOTLAND HOUSE, LONDON, S.W.I.
