Free Saint in New York by Leslie Charteris Page A

through the ravines of the city. The vast office
buildings of Fifth Avenue, abandoned for the night to cleaners and
care takers, reared their geometrical patterns of lighted windows against the
dark sky like huge illuminated honeycombs. The cab crossed Broadway
and Seventh Avenue, plunging through the drenched luminance of massed
theatre and cinema and cabaret signs like a swimmer diving through a
wave, and floated out on the other side in the calmer channel of
faintly odorous gloom in which a red neon tube spelt out the legend: “Charley’s Place.”
    The house was an indeterminate, rather dingy
structure of the kind that flattens out the skyline westwards of
Seventh Avenue, where the orgy of futuristic building which gave birth to
Chrysler’s Needle has yet to spread. It shared with its neigh bours the
depressing suggestion of belonging to a community of nondescript persons who
had once resolved to attain some sort of individuality, and who had achieved
their ambition by adopting various distinctive ways of being nondescript. The windows on
the ground level were covered by greenish cur tains which acquired a
phosphorescent kind of luminousness from the lights behind them.
    Simon rang the bell, and in a few moments a
grille in the heavy oak door opened. It was a situation where nothing
could be done without bluff; and the bluff had to be made on a blind
chance.
    “My name’s Simon,” said “the
Saint. “Fay Edwards sent me.”
    The man inside shook his head.
    “Fay ain’t come in yet. Want to wait for
her?”
    “Maybe I can get a drink while I’m
waiting,” Simon shrugged.
    His manner was without concern or
eagerness—it struck ex actly the right note of harmless nonchalance.
If the Saint had been as innocent as he looked he could have done it no better; and the doorkeeper peered up and down the street and un latched the
door.
    Simon went through and hooked his hat on a
peg. Beyond the tiny hall was a spacious bar which seemed to occupy
the remainder of the front part of the building. The tables were fairly well
filled with young-old men of the smoothly blue- chinned type,
tailored into the tight-fitting kind of coat which displays to such
advantage the bulges of muscle on the biceps and the upper back.
Their faces, as they glanced up in auto matic silence at the
Saint’s entrance, had a uniform air of fro zen impassivity,
particularly about the eyes, like fish that have been in cold storage
for many years. Scattered among their company was a sprinkling of the amply
curved pudding-faced blondes who may be recognized anywhere as
belonging to the genus known as “gangsters’ molls”—it is a
curious fact that few of the men who shoot their way through amazing wealth to
sophistication in almost all their appetites ever acquire a sophisticated
taste in femininity.
    Simon gave the occupants no more than a
casual first glance, absorbing the general background in one broad
survey. He walked across to the bar and hitched himself onto a high
stool. One of the white-coated bartenders set up a glass of ice water and
waited.
    “Make it a rye highball,” said the
Saint
    By the time the drink had been prepared the
mutter of con versation in the room had resumed its normal pitch. Simon took a sip from his glass and stopped the bartender before he could move
away.
    “Just a minute,” said the Saint.
“What’s your name?”
    The man had an oval, olive-hued,
expressionless face, with beautifully lashed brown eyes and glossily
waved black hair that
made his age difficult to determine.
    “My name is Toni,” he stated.
    “Congratulations,” said the Saint.
“My name is Simon. From Detroit.”
    The man nodded unemotionally, with his soft
dark eyes fixed on
the Saint’s face.
    “From Detroit,” he repeated, as if memorizing a message.
    “They call me Aces Simon,” said the
Saint evenly. The bartender’s unwrinkled face responded as much as a wooden im age might
have done. “I’m told there are some players in