The opening preliminary was already under way when the Saint, with Hoppy and Patricia Holm, strode through the tag-end of the crowd of street urchins who eddied about the “artists’ ” entrance of the Manhattan Arena.
Whitey met them in the doorway.
“I was gettin’ worried,” he said anxiously. “What happened to ya? The show’s started.”
He started them down the corridor that turned off to the dressing-room section. The Saint stopped him.
“Whitey, will you show Miss Holm to her seat? I don’t think she can find her way up front from this part of the Arena.”
The tempting curve of Miss Holm’s red mouth drew to a pout.
“You mean I’ve got to spend the next hour or so in solitary refinement?”
“Well, you certainly can’t spend it in my dressing-room,” said the Saint. “It’s not exactly a ladies’ boudoir.”
Whitey nodded to Patricia, in visible awe of her golden-blonde beauty.
“Sure, just follow me,” he said. He turned to Simon. “I’ll check on the Angel’s hand-wraps on my way back.”
They disappeared round a turn from where the roar of the crowd was flowing like the muted roar of distant surf.
The Saint went on with Hoppy to his dressing-room, feeling the ghostly fingers of peril once more playing their familiar cadenza along his vertebrae and up through the roots of his hair... He knew, his every instinct told him, that tonight he was fighting for greater stakes than glory or dollars. Tonight would be more than a mere encounter with padded gloves. Tonight he would be fighting for his life.
A swarthy snaggle-toothed character in a dirty polo shirt was seated on a broken-down chair as they entered the dressing-room. Hoppy recognized him at once.
“Mushky,” he growled. “I fought you was in de Angel’s corner.”
“So I am, chum, so I am,” Mr Mushky Thompson agreed affably. “I gotta take a gander when you bandage de Saint’s hands.”
“That’s what I admire about this business,” Simon remarked cheerfully. “Everyone trusts everyone else.”
Hoppy fixed Mr Thompson with a baleful glare.
“Out, ya bum,” he ordered.
“Now wait,” Mushky protested. “It’s de rules. I—”
“Oh, let him alone,” said the Saint. “Whitey is watching the Angel, isn’t he? It isn’t exactly a unilateral proposition.”
“Sure,” Mr Thompson agreed with hasty anxiety. “No cause for gettin’ mad, Hoppy. I’m just one of de hired hands.”
Hoppy grunted and proceeded about the business of laying out the hand bandages, adhesive tape, rubber mouthpiece, collodion, ammonia, and other paraphernalia of the modern gladiator.
“You working with Karl, Mushky?” the Saint asked casually as he slipped out of his street clothes.
Thompson shook his head.
“Naw... He... uh... got kicked in the face by a beer-wagon horse. Broke his jaw in two places, I hear.”
Hoppy looked up at him a moment, and broke into a deep guffaw.
“Ya don’t say,” he yakked.
Simon slipped into his dark purple sateen trunks and began to lace his boxing shoes swiftly as Hoppy tore strips of adhesive tape into suitable knuckle strips. Mushky Thompson lounged in his chair with a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth until Hoppy had finished taping the Saint’s hands with practised precision, reinforcing the bones without impairing their freedom. Then Mushky got to his feet.
“Good luck,” he threw over his shoulder. “You’ll need it.”
“Tanks,” Hoppy said — and did a take after the gibe sank in.
“Come back here!” the Saint snapped as Mr Uniatz started after the Angel’s second. “Don’t start anything now, you idiot!”
Hoppy made unintelligible gravelly noises through his bared teeth, his nuclear mind infected as much by the vibrant blood cry of the mob as by the taunt. Impending battle — his own or anyone else’s — was apt to make Mr Uniatz emotionally unstable.
Three preliminaries and a semi-final later, the Saint lay on the rubbing table, completely relaxed, listening to ten thousand throats vibrating the walls in a massive chorus of excitement. The semi-final bout had ended in a knock-out, he guessed, from the uproar. He stretched his length peacefully, his eyes closed, everything in him settled into an immeasurable stillness amid the swirling rumble of vociferation. Dimly and indistinguishably he heard the orotund bellow of the announcer introducing somebody after the roar of the crowd had died down a bit, and shortly afterwards the man who had been introduced began speaking over the audience public-address system, and he recognized Grady’s unmistakable accents even though he could not make out the words.
Hoppy stumbled into the dressing-room, breathless from battling the crowd en route.
“What a mob!” he wheezed, his eyes gleaming. “Grady’s up dere makin’ dat announcement!”
A swelling ululation rose in a gathering tidal wave of sound and broke thunderously upon their ears.
“Say,” Hoppy exulted, “sounds like dey like what he told ’em, huh?” He came over to the Saint. “Boss, what does Spangler say when Grady tells him ya goin’ in for Nelson?”
The Saint yawned.
“Oh, he raised a little stench about it at first, but Mike reminded him that my bet stated that Bilinski would be knocked out — it didn’t say by whom. So he changed his mind... By the way, did Pat get a good seat?”
“Yeah,” Hoppy chuckled hoarsely. “An’ guess who’s she settin’ next to!”
“Are you training for a quiz programme, or would you just like to tell me?”
“Inspector Foinack!”
The Saint considered him reverently for a moment, while the forthcoming possibilities of that supernal juxtaposition developed the gorgeous gamut of their emotional potential.
“Oh, my God!” Simon breathed. “I’d rather watch that than my own fight.”
There was a patter of footsteps and Whitey Mulling darted into the dressing-room. His face was contorted with savage glee.
“Okay,” he croaked. “You’re on, Saint. They’re waitin’ for you!” He snatched up the water bucket. “Grab the water-bottle and sponge,” he yelped at Hoppy, and went to the door.
The Saint swung his long legs off the table to the floor and stood up. He followed Whitey out of the door into the corridor, with Hoppy bringing up the rear.
“Brother, I only wisht it was that lousy crook Spangler you was smackin’ around tonight,” Mullins grated with vitriolic bitterness as they mounted the ramp into the Arena, “and not just that dumb ox he stole from me.”
Simon sensed an excitement, a temper in the crowd that was different from the usual mass tension of the ordinary fight attendance at Grady’s weekly shows. It was electric with anticipation of the unexpected, a breathless waiting watchfulness that he felt as he mounted to the apron of the ring and slipped between the ropes amid a thunderclap of acclaim. There was a slight note of hysteria in it, he thought as he seated himself on the stool in his corner and looked about the ocean of faces that spread on every side.
The Masked Angel hadn’t appeared yet, but the Saint rather expected that Spangler would try every trick in the bag, including the petty one of wearing down the opposition’s nerves by making him wait.
He failed to spot Pat among the buzzing tide of faces at the ringside, but everything beyond the glare of light centring on the ring was little more than a smoke-dimmed blur. The faces, void of all individuality, were such as one encounters sometimes in nightmare sequences, a phantasmagoria of eyes and noise — hard, critical, and skin-prickingly theriomorphic... He wondered momentarily if Steve was in good enough shape to listen to the fight from his bedside... Connie had been with him nearly all day at the hospital...
A roar like an approaching forest fire filled the packed coliseum with surging clamour as the Masked Angel appeared up the ramp, preceded by Doc Spangler and followed by a cohort of handlers bearing the various accessories of refreshment and revival. The incredible bulk of the Angel loomed up over the apron of the ring and squeezed between the ropes in his corner, his plates of sagging fat quivering like chartreuse jelly. Unmasked now, his ridiculous little nubbin of a head bobbed from side to side in acknowledgment of the roars of the mob, his round little cheeks and button nose more an inspiration for laughter than the fearsome horror his black mask had aroused.
Behind him, Doc Spangler leaned over his shoulder and spoke softly into an ear that was the approximate size and shape of a Brussels sprout.
As the Saint watched them from beneath lowered lids, he felt once again the spectral footfalls of ghostly centipedes parading his spine, knowing that his real danger was as yet undetermined, the point of attack, unknown. How it would come, in what shape or form, he wasn’t quite sure. He’d covered all the possibilities, or so he thought; but whether the threat, the unknown secret weapon that the Angel must surely possess, would come from an act of the Angel himself, or from some outside agent, he wasn’t quite sure. All he had was an idea... He felt its shadow upon him like a ghostly mist, ambient and all-pervading...
The bell clanged sharply a few times; the throbbing hum of the crowd subsided somewhat. The main-bout referee, dapper and fresh in white tennis shoes and flannels, stepped to the centre of the ring and gestured the Saint and the Angel to come to him.
Simon rose, followed by Whitey and Hoppy, and came forward to face the Angel, who shambled up to the referee flanked by Spangler and Mushky Thompson. The Angel towered over them all, an utterly gross, unlovely specimen of so-called homo sapiens.
The referee droned the familiar formula: “...break when I say break... no hitting in breaks, no rabbit or kidney punches... protect yourself at all times... shake hands, come out fighting...”
They touched gloves, and the Saint walked nonchalantly back to his corner. He rubbed his feet a couple of times on the resin sprinkled there while Hoppy pulled the stool out of the ring. The sound of the bell seemed unreal and far away when, after what seemed an extraordinarily long time, it finally rang.