Saint in New York by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

him. I’m inquisitive.”
    Nather’s eyes flinched wildly.
    “I’m damned if I’ll talk to you any
more!”
    “You’re damned if you won’t.”
    “You can go to hell.”
    “And the same applies,” said the
Saint equably.
    He stood up and came round the desk, poising
himself on straddled feet a pace in front of the judge, lean and
dynam ically balanced as a panther.
    “You’re very dense, Algernon,” he
remarked calmly. “You don’t seem to get the idea at all. Maybe our little
interlude of song and badinage has led you up the wrong tree. You can make a
good guess why I’m here. You know that I didn’t drop in just for the pleasure
of admiring your classic profile. You know who I am. I don’t care what you
pick on, but you can tell me something. Any of your maidenly
secrets ought to be worth listening to. Come through, Nather—or else…”
    “Or else what?”
    The Saint’s gun moved forward until it pressed
deep into the
judge’s flabby navel.
    “Or else find out what Ionetzki and Jack
Irboll know!”
    Nather’s heavy, sullen lips twisted back from yellowed teeth. And Simon jabbed the gun a notch further into the
judge’s stomach.
    “And don’t lie,” said the Saint
caressingly; “because I’m friendly to undertakers and that funeral
parlour looked as if it could do with some business.”
    Nather passed a fevered tongue over hot dry
lips. He had not lived through thirty years of intermittent contacts
with the underworld without learning to recognize that queer bitter fibre in a
man that makes him capable of murder. And the terrific inward
struggle of that last moment before the telephone bell rang had blunted his
vitality. The strength was not in him to screw himself to that desperate
pitch again. He knew, beyond all question, that if he refused to talk, if
he at tempted to lie, that bantering tiger of a man who was squeez ing the
gun ever deeper into his vitals would destroy him as ruthlessly as he would
have crushed an ant. Nather’s larynx heaved twice, convulsively; and then,
before he could speak, a muffled tread sounded beyond the locked door.
    The Saint tautened, listening. From the
ponderous, flat-footed measure of the stride he guessed it to belong to the butler.
Nather looked up with a sudden gleam of hope; but the steady pressure of
the gun muzzle in his yielding flesh did not vary by a
milligram. The Saint’s light whisper floated to his ears in an airy
breath.
    “Heroes die young,” it murmured
pithily.
    A knock sounded on the door—a discreet knock
that could only have been made by a servant. Nather, with his vengeful eyes
frozen on the Saint, lip-read the order rather than heard it.
“Ask him what he wants.”
    “Well?” Nather growled out.
    “Inspector Fernack is downstairs, sir.
He says it’s important.”
    Nather stared at the Saint And the Saint
smiled. Once again his reckless fighting lips shaped an almost inaudible
command.
    “Tell him to come up,” Nather
repeated after him, and could not believe that he was obeying an
order.
    He sat silent and rigid as the butler’s
footsteps receded and died away; and at last Simon withdrew the gun
barrel which had for so long been boring insidiously into the judge’s
ab domen.
    “Better and better,” said the Saint
amazingly, flipping a cigarette into his lips. “I was wanting
to meet Fernack.”
    Nather gaped at him incredulously. The
situation was grotesque, unbelievable; and yet it had occurred. The automatic had been
eased out of his belly—it was even then circling around the Saint’s forefinger
in one of those carelessly con fident gyrations—which it certainly would not
have been if any of the Saint’s instructions had been disobeyed. The thing
was beyond Nather’s understanding. The glacial recklessness of it was subtly
disquieting, in a colder and more deadly way than the menace of the gun
had ever been: it argued a self-assurance that was frightening, and with that fear
went the crawling question of whether