Saint in New York Read Free Page B

other
side of the world, to help an old man with a job that’s too big for
him.”
    He turned suddenly and looked at the Saint
again, taking him in from the sweep of his smoothly brushed hair to the stance of his tailored shoes—the rakish lines of the dark, reck less face,
the level mockery of the clear blue eyes, the rounded poise of
muscular shoulders and the curve of the chest under the thin,
jaunty shirt, the steady strength of one brown half-raised
hand with the cigarette clipped lightly be tween the first two
fingers, the lean fighter’s hips and the reach of long,
immaculate legs. No man whom he had ever known could have been
so elegantly at ease and at the same time so alert and dangerous—and he had
known many men. No other man he had known could ever have measured up in his
judgment to the stature of devil-may-care confidence that he had demanded
in his own mind and set out to find—. and Valcross called himself a judge of
men.
    His hands fell on the Saint’s shoulders; and
they had to reach up to do it. He felt the slight, supple stir of the
firm sinews and smiled.
    “You might do it, son,” he said.
“You might clean up this rotten mess of crooks and grafters that’s
organizing itself to become the biggest thing this city of mine
has ever had to fight. If you can’t do it, I’ll let myself be told for
the first time that it’s impossible. Just be a little bit careful. Don’t
swagger yourself into a jail or a shower of bullets before you’ve had a chance to
do any good. I’ve seen those things happen before. Other fellows have
tried—bigger men than you, son—stronger men than you, braver
men than you, cleverer men than you—— ”
    The Saint smiled back.
    “Admitting for the moment that they ever
lived,” he re marked amiably, “you never saw anyone luckier than
me.”
    But his mind went back to the afternoon in
Madrid when Valcross had sat next to him in the Plaza de Toros and had struck up a conversation which had resulted in them spending the evening
together. It went back to a moment much later that night, after they
had dined together off the indescribable suckling pig at
Botin’s, when they sat over whiskies and sodas in Valcross’s room at
the Ritz; when Valcross had admitted that he had spent three weeks chasing
him around Europe solely to bring about that casual encounter, and had told him why. He could hear the old man’s quiet voice as it had spoken to
him that night
    “They found him a couple of weeks later—I
don’t want to go into details. They aren’t nice to think about, even
now. … Two or three dozen men were pulled in and questioned. But maybe
you don’t know how things are done over there. These men kept their
mouths shut. Some of them were let out. Some of them went up
for trial. Maybe you think that means something.
    “It doesn’t. This business is giving work
to all the gang sters and gunmen it needs—all the rats and killers who
found themselves falling out of the big money when there was nothing
more to be made out of liquor. It’s tied up by the same leaders,
protected by the same crooked politicians—and it pays more. It’s
beating the same police system, for the same reason the old
order beat it—because it’s hooked up with the same political system that
appoints police commis sioners to do as they’re told.
    “There wasn’t any doubt that these men
they had were guilty. Fernack admitted it himself. He told me their
records —everything that was known about them. But he couldn’t do
anything. They were bailed out, adjourned, extradited, postponed—all the
legal tricks. In the end they were ac quitted. I saw them walk out of the
court grinning. If I’d had a gun with me I’d have tried to kill them
then.
    “But I’m an old man, and I wasn’t trained
for that sort of thing. I take it that you were. That’s why I looked
for you. I know some of the things you’ve done, and now I’ve met
you in the flesh. I think it’s the kind of job