The well-meaning mayor
Sam Purdell never quite knew how he became Mayor. He was a small and portly man with a round blank face and a round blank mind, who had built up a moderately profitable furniture business over the last thirty-five years and acquired in the process a round pudding-faced wife and a couple of suet dumplings of daughters; but the inexhaustible zeal for improving the circumstances and morals of the community, that fierce drive of ambition and the twitching of the ears for the ecstatic screams of "Heil" whenever he went abroad, that indomitable urge to be a leader of his people from which Hitlers and Mussolinis are born, was not naturally in him.
It is true that at the local reform club, of which he was a prominent member, he had often been stimulated by an appreciative audience and a large highball to lay down his views on the way in which he thought everything on earth ought to be run, from Japanese immigration to the permissible percentage of sulphur dioxide in dried apricots; but there was nothing outstandingly indicative of a political future in that. This is a disease which is liable to attack even the most honest and respectable citizens in such circumstances. But the idea that he himself should ever occupy the position in which he might be called upon to put all those beautiful ideas into practice had never entered Sam Purdell's head in those simple early days; and if it had not been for the drive supplied by Al Eisenfeld, it might never have materialized.
"You ought to be in politics, Sam," Al had insisted, at the close of one of these perorations several years before.
Sam Purdell considered the suggestion.
"No, I wouldn't be clever enough," he said modestly.
To tell the truth, he had heard the suggestion before, had repudiated it before and had always wanted to hear it contradicted. Al Eisenfeld obliged him. It was the first time anybody had been so obliging.
This was three years before the columnist of the Elmford News was moved to inquire:
"How long does our mayor think he can kid reporters and deputations with his celebrated pose of injured innocence? We always thought it was a good act while it lasted; but isn't it time we had a new show?"
It was not the first time that it had been suggested in print that the naive and childlike simplicity which was Sam Purdell's greatest charm was one of the shrewdest fronts for ingenious corruption which any politician had ever tried to put over on a batch of sane electors, but this was the nearest that any commentator had ever dared to come to saying that Sam Purdell was a crook.
It was a suggestion which left Sam a pained and puzzled man. He couldn't understand it. These adopted children of his, these citizens whose weal occupied his mind for twenty-four hours a day, were turning round to bite the hand that fed them. And the unkindest cut of all, the blow which struck at the roots of his faith in human gratitude, was that he had only tried to do his best for the city which had been delivered into his care.
For instance, there was the time when, dragged forth by the energy of one of his rotund daughters, he had climbed laboriously one Sunday afternoon to the top of the range of hills which shelter Elmford on the north. When he had got his wind and started looking round, he realized that from that vantage point there was a view which might have rejoiced the heart of any artist. Sam Purdell was no artist, but he blinked with simple pleasure at the panorama of rolling hills and wooded groves with the river winding between them like the track of a great silver snail; and when he came home again he had a beautiful idea.
"You know, we got one of the finest views in the state up there on those hills! I never saw it before, and I bet you didn't either. And why? Because there ain't no road goes up there; and when you get to my age it ain't so easy to go scrambling up through those trees and brush."
"So what?" asked Al Eisenfeld, who was even less artistic and certainly more practical.
"So I tell you what we do," said Sam, glowing with the ardour of his enthusiasm almost as much as with the aftereffects of his unaccustomed exercise. "We build a highway up there so they can drive out in their automobiles week ends and look around comfortably. It makes work for a lot of men, and it don't cost too much; and everybody in Elmford can get a lot of free pleasure out of it. Why, we might even get folks coming from all over the country to look at our view."
He elaborated this inspiration with spluttering eagerness, and before he had been talking for more than a quarter of an hour he had a convert.
"Sure, this is a great idea, Sam," agreed Mr. Eisenfeld warmly. "You leave it to me. Why, I know — we'll call it the Purdell Highway… "
The Purdell Highway duly came into being at a cost of four million dollars. Al Eisenfeld saw to it. In the process of pushing Sam Purdell up the political tree he had engineered himself into the strategic post of Chairman of the Board of Aldermen, a position which gave him an interfering interest in practically all the activities of the city. The fact that the cost was about twice as much as the original estimate was due to the unforeseen obstinacy of the owner of the land involved, who held out for about four times the price which it was worth. There were rumours that someone in the administration had acquired the territory under another name shortly before the deal was proposed, and had sold it to the city at his own price — rumours which shocked Sam Purdell to the core of his sensitive soul.
"Do you hear what they say, Al?" he complained, as soon as these slanderous stories reached his ears. "They say I made one hundred thousand dollars graft out of the Purdell Highway I Now, why the hell should they say that?"
"You don't have to worry about what a few rats are saying, Sam," replied Mr. Eisenfcld soothingly. "They're only jealous because you're so popular with the city. Hell, there are political wranglers who'd tell stories about the Archangel Gabriel himself if he was Mayor, just to try and discredit the administration so they could shove their own crooked party in. I'll look into it."
Mr. Eisenfeld's looking into it did not stop the same rumours circulating about the Purdell Bridge, which spanned the river from the southern end of the town and linked it with the State Highway, eliminating a detour of about twenty miles. What project, Sam Purdell asked, could he possibly have put forward that was more obviously designed for the convenience and prosperity of Elmford? But there were whispers that the Bennsville Steel Company, which had obtained the contract for the bridge, had paid somebody fifty thousand dollars to see that their bid was accepted. A bid which was exactly fifty percent higher than the one put in by their rivals.
"Do you know anything about somebody taking fifty thousand dollars to put this bid through?" demanded Sam Purdell wrathfully, when he heard about it; and Mr. Eisenfeld was shocked.
"That's a wicked idea, Sam," he protested. "Everyone knows this is the straightest administration Elm-ford ever had. Why, if I thought anybody was taking graft, I'd throw him out of the City Hall with my own hands."
There were similar cases, each of which brought Sam a little nearer to the brink of bitter disillusion. Sometimes he said that it was only the unshaken loyalty of, his family which stopped him from resigning his thank-less labours and leaving Elmford to wallow in its own ungrateful slime. But most of all it was the loyalty and encouragement of Mr. Eisenfeld.
Mr. Eisenfeld was a suave sleek man with none of Sam Purdell's rubicund and open-faced geniality, but he had a cheerful courage in such trying moments which was always ready to renew Sam Purdell's faith in human nature. This cheerful courage shone with its old unfailing luminosity when Sam Purdell thrust the offending copy of the Elmford News which we have already referred to under Mr. Eisenfeld's aggrieved and incredulous eyes.
"I'll show you what you do about that sort of writing, Sam," said Mr. Eisenfeld magnificently. "You just take it like this—"
He was going on to say that you tore it up, scattering the libellous fragments disdainfully to the four winds but as he started to perform this heroic gesture his eye was arrested by the next paragraph in the same column, and he hesitated.
"Well, how do you take it?" asked the mayor peevishly.
Mr. Eisenfeld said nothing for a second and the mayor looked over his shoulder to see what he was reading.
"Oh, that!" he said irritably. "I don't know what that means. Do you know what it means, Al?"
"That" was a postscript about which Mr. Purdell had some excuse to be puzzled.
"We hear that the Saint is back in this country. People who remember what he did in New York a couple of years ago might feel like inviting him to take a trip out here. We can promise he would find plenty of material on which to exercise his talents."
"What Saint are they talkin' about?" asked the mayor. "I thought all the Saints was dead."
"This one isn't," said Mr. Eisenfeld; but for the moment the significance of the name continued to elude him. He had an idea that he had heard it before and that it should have meant something definite to him. "I think he was a crook who had a great run in New York a while back. No, I remember it now. Wasn't he a sort of free-lance reformer who had some crazy idea he could clean up the city and put everything to rights…?"
He began to recall further details; and then as his memory improved he closed the subject abruptly. There were incidents among the stories that came filtering back into his recollection which gave him a vague discomfort in the pit of his stomach. It was ridiculous, of course — a cheap journalistic glorification of a common gangster; and yet, for some reason, certain stories which he remembered having read in the newspapers at the time made him feel that he would be happier if the Saint's visit to Elmford remained a theoretical proposition.
"We got lots of other more important things to think about, Sam," he said abruptly, pushing the newspaper into the wastebasket. "Look here — about this monument of yours on the Elmford Riviera…"
The Elmford Riviera was the latest and most ambitious public work which the administration had undertaken up to that date. It was to be the crowning achievement in Sam Purdell's long list of benevolences towards his beloved citizens.
A whole two miles of the riverbank had been acquired by the city and converted into a pleasure park which the sponsors of the scheme claimed would rival anything of its kind ever attempted in the state. At one end of it a beautiful casino had been erected where the citizens of Elmford might gorge themselves with food, deafen themselves with three orchestras and dance in tightly wedged ecstasy till feet gave way. At the other end was to be provided a children's playground, staffed with trained attendants, where the infants of Elmford might be left to bawl their heads off under the most expert and scientific supervision while their elders stopped to enjoy the adult amenities of the place. Behind the riverside drive, a concession had been arranged for an amusement park in which the populace could be shaken to pieces on roller coasters, whirled off revolving discs, thrown about in barrels, skittered over the falls and generally enjoy all the other elaborate forms of discomfort which help to make the modern seeker after relaxation so contemptuous of the unimaginative makeshift tortures which less enlightened souls had to get along with in medieval days. On the bank of the river itself, thousands of tons of sand had been imported to create an artificial beach where droves of holiday-makers could be herded together to blister and steam themselves into blissful imitations of the well-boiled prawn. It was, in fact, to be a place where Elm-ford might suffer all the horrors of Coney Island without the added torture of getting there.
And in the centre of this Elysian esplanade there was to be a monument to the man whose unquenchable devotion to the community had presented it with this last and most delightful blessing.
Sam Purdell had been modestly diffident about the monument, but Mr. Eisenfeld had insisted on it.
"You gotta have a monument, Sam," he had said. "The town owes it to you. Why, here you've been working for them all these years; and if you passed on tomorrow," said Mr. Eisenfeld, with his voice quivering at the mere thought of such a calamity, "what would there be to show for all you've done?"
"There's the Purdell Highway," said Sam deprecatingly, "the Purdell Suspension Bridge, the Purdell—"
"That's nothing," said Mr. Eisenfeld largely. "Those are just names. Why, in ten years after you die they won't mean any more than Grant or — or Pocahontas. What you oughta have is a monument of your own. Something with an inscription on it. I'll get the architect to design one."
The monument had duly been designed — a sort of square, tapering tower eighty feet high, crowned by an eagle with outspread wings, on the base of which was to be a great marble plaque on which the beneficence and public-spiritedness of Samuel Purdell would be recorded for all time. It was about the details of the construction of this monument that Mr. Eisenfeld had come to confer with the mayor.
"The thing is, Sam," he explained, "if this monument is gonna last, we gotta make it solid. They got the outside all built up now; but they say if we're gonna do the job properly, we got to fill it up with cement."
"That'll take an awful lot of cement, Al," Sam objected dubiously, casting an eye over the plans; but Mr. Eisenfeld's generosity was not to be balked.
"Well, what if it does? If the job's worth doin' at all, it's worth doin' properly. If you won't think of yourself, think of the city. Why, if we let this thing stay hollow and after a year or two it began to fall down, think what people from out of town would say."
"What would they say?" asked Mr. Purdell obtusely.
His adviser shuddered.
"They'd say this was such a cheap place we couldn't even afford to put up a decent monument for our mayor. You wouldn't like people to say a thing like that about us, would you, Sam?"
The mayor thought it over.
"Okay, Al," he said at length. "Okay. But I don't deserve it, really I don't."
Simon Templar would have agreed that the mayor had done nothing to deserve any more elaborate monument than a neat tombstone in some quiet worm cafeteria. But at that moment his knowledge of Elmford's politics was not so complete as it was very shortly to become.
When he saw Molly Provost slip the little automatic out of her bag he thought that the bullet was destined for the mayor; and in theory he approved. He had an engaging callousness about the value of political lives which, if universally shared, would make democracy an enchantingly simple business. But there were two policemen on motorcycles waiting to escort the mayoral car into the city, and the life of a good-looking girl struck him as being a matter for more serious consideration. He felt that if she were really determined to solve all of Elmford's political problems by shooting the mayor in the duodenum, she should at least be persuaded to do it on some other occasion when she would have a better chance of getting away with it. Wherefore the Saint moved very quickly, so that his lean brown hand closed over hers just at the moment when she touched the trigger and turned the bullet down into the ground.
Neither Sam Purdell nor Al Eisenfeld, who were climbing into the car at that moment, even so much as looked around; and the motorcycle escort mercifully joined with them in instinctively attributing the detonation to the backfire of a passing truck.
It was such a small gun that the Saint's hand easily covered it; and he held the gun and her hand together in a viselike grip, smiling as if he were just greeting an-old acquaintance, until the wail of the sirens died away.
"Have you got a license to shoot mayors?" he inquired severely.
She had a small pale face which under" a skillfully applied layer of cosmetics might have taken on a bright doll-like prettiness; but it was not like that yet. But he had a sudden illuminating vision of her face as it might have been, painted and powdered, with shaved eyebrows and blackened eyelashes, subtly hardened. It was a type which he had seen often enough before, which he could recognize at once. Some of them he had seen happily married, bringing up adoring families; others… For some reason the Saint thought that this girl ought not to be one of those others.
Then he felt her arm go limp, and took the gun out of her unresisting hand. He put it away in his pocket.
"Come for a walk," he said.
She shrugged dully.
"All right."
He took her arm and led her down the block. Around the corner, out of sight of the mayor's house, he opened the door of the first of a line of parked cars. She got in resignedly. As he let in the clutch and the car slipped away under the pull of a smoothly whispering engine, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed silently.
The Saint let her have it out. He drove on thoughtfully, with a cigarette clipped between his lips, until the taller buildings of the business section rose up around them. In a quiet turning off one of the main streets of the town, he stopped the car outside a small restaurant and opened the door on her side to let her out.
She dabbed her eyes and straightened her hat mechanically. As she looked around and realized where they were, she stopped with one foot on the running board.
"What have you brought me here for?" she asked stupidly.
"For lunch," said the Saint calmly. "If you feel like eating. For a drink, if you don't. For a chat, anyhow."
She looked at him with fear and puzzlement still in her eyes.
"You needn't do that," she said steadily. "You can take me straight to the police station. We might as well get it over with."
He shook his head.
"Do you really want to go to a police station?" he drawled. "I'm not so fond of them myself, and usually they aren't very fond of me. Wouldn't you rather have a drink?"
Suddenly she realized that the smile with which he was looking down at her wasn't a bit like the grimiy triumphant smile which a detective should have worn. Nor, when she looked more closely, was there anything else about him that quite matched her idea of what a detective would be like. It grieves the chronicler to record that her first impression was that he was too good-looking. But that was how she saw him. His tanned face was cut in a mould of rather reckless humour which didn't seem to fit in at all with the stodgy and prosaic backgrounds of the law. He was tall, and he looked strong — her right hand still ached from the steel grip of his fingers — but it was a supple kind of strength that had no connection with mere bulk. Also he wore his clothes with a gay and careless kind of elegance which no sober police chief could have approved. The twinkle in his eyes was wholly friendly.
"Do you mean you didn't arrest me just now?" she asked uncertainly.
"I never arrested anybody in my life," said the Saint cheerfully. "In fact, when they shoot politicians I usually give them medals. Come on in and let's talk."
Over a couple of martinis he explained himself further.
"My dear, I think it was an excellent scheme, on general principles. But the execution wasn't so good. When you've had as much experience in bumping people off as I have, you'll realize that it's no time to do it when a couple of cops are parked at the curb a few yards away. I suppose you realize that they would have got you just about ten seconds after you created a vacancy for a new mayor?"
She was still staring at him rather blankly.
"I wasn't trying to do anything to the mayor," she said. "It was Al Eisenfeld I was going to shoot, and I wouldn't have cared if they did get me afterwards."
The Saint frowned.
"You mean the seedy gigolo sort of bird who was with the mayor?"
She nodded.
"He's the real boss of the town. The mayor is just a figurehead."
"Other people don't seem to think he's as dumb as he looks," Simon remarked.
"They don't know. There's nothing wrong with Purdell, but Eisenfeld—"
"Maybe you have inside information," said the Saint.
She looked at him over her clenched fists, dry-eyed and defiant.
"If there were any justice in the world Al Eisenfeld would be executed."
The Saint raised his eyebrows and she read the thought in his mind and met it with cynical denial.
"Oh no — not in that way. There's no murder charge that anyone could bring against him. You couldn't bring any legal evidence in any court of law that he'd ever done any physical harm to anyone that I ever heard of. But I know that he is a murderer. He murdered my father."
And the Saint waited without interruption. The story came tumbling out in a tangle of words that bit into his brain with a burden of meaning that was one of the most profound and illuminating surprises that he had known for some considerable time. It was so easy to talk to him that before long he knew nearly as much as she did herself. He was such an easy and understanding listener that somehow it never seemed strange to her until afterwards that she had been pouring out so much to a man she had known for less than an hour. Perhaps it was not such an extraordinary story as such stories go — perhaps many people would have shrugged it away as one of the commonplace tragedies of a hard-boiled world.
"This fellow Schmidt was a pal of Eisenfeld's. So they tried to make Dad lay off him. Dad wouldn't listen to them. He was Police Commissioner before this administration came in and he'd never listened to any politicians in his life. He always said that he went into the force as an honest man, and he was going to stay that way. So when they found they couldn't keep him quiet, they framed him. They made out that he was behind practically every racket in the town. They did it cleverly enough. Dad knew they'd got him. He knew the game too well to be able to kid himself. He was booked to be thrown out of the force in disgrace — probably sent to jail as well. How could he hope to clear himself? The evidence which he had collected against Schmidt was in the District Attorney's office, but when Dad tried to bring that up they said that the safe had been burgled and it was gone. They even turned it around to make it look as if Dad had got rid of the evidence himself — the very thing he had told them he would never agree to do, so — I suppose he took the only way out that he could see. I suppose you'd say he was a coward to do it, but how could you ever know what he must have been suffering?"
"When was this?" asked the Saint quietly.
"Last night. He — shot himself. With his police gun. The shot woke me up. I — found him. I suppose I must have gone mad too. I haven't slept since then — how could I? This morning I made up my mind. I came out to do the only thing that was left. I didn't care what happened to myself after that." She broke off helplessly. "Oh, I must have been crazy! But I couldn't think of anything else. Why should he be able to get away with it? Why should he?" she sobbed.
"Don't worry," said the Saint quietly. "He won't."
He spoke with a quiet and matter-of-fact certainty which was more than a mere conventional encouragement. It made her look at him with a perplexity which she had been able to forget while he made her talk to him reawakening in her gaze. For the first time since they had sat down, it seemed, she was able to remember that she still knew nothing about him; that he was no more than a sympathetic stranger who had loorned up unheralded and unintroduced out of the fog which had still not completely cleared from her mind.
"Of course you aren't a detective," she said childishly. "I'd have recognized you if you were; but if you aren't, what are you?"
He smiled.
"I'm the guy who gives all the detectives something to work for," he said. "I'm the source of more aches in the heads of the ungodly than I should like to boast about. I am Trouble, Incorporated — President Simon Templar, at your service. They call me the Saint."
"What does that mean?" she asked helplessly.
In the ordinary way Simon Templar, who had no spontaneous modesty bred into his composition, would have felt a slight twinge of disappointment that his reputation had not preceded him even to that out-of-the-way corner of the American continent; but he realized that there was no legitimate reason why she should have reacted more dramatically to the revelation of his identity, and for once he was not excessively discontented to remain unrecognized. There were practical disadvantages to the indulgence of this human weakness for publicity which, at that particular moment and in that particular town, he was prepared to do without. He shook his head with the same lazy grin that was so extraordinarily comforting and clear-sighted.
"Nothing that you need worry about," he said. "Just write me down as a bloke who never could mind his own business, and give me some more of the inside dope about Al."
"There isn't a lot more to tell you," she said. "I think I've already given you almost everything I know."
"Doesn't anyone else in the town know it?"
"Hardly anybody. There are one or two people who guess how things really are, but if they tried to argue about it they'd only get laughed at. He's clever enough to have everybody believing that he's just Sam Purdell's mouthpiece; but it's the other way around. Sam Purdell really is dumb. He doesn't know what it's all about. He thinks of nothing but his highways and parks and bridges, and he honestly believes that he's only doing the best he can for the city. He doesn't get any graft out of it. Al gets all that; and he's clever enough to work it so that everybody thinks he's innocent and Sam Purdell is the really smart guy who's getting all the money out of it — even the Board of Aldermen think so. Dad used to talk to me about all his cases and he found out a lot about Eisenfeld while he was investigating this man Schmidt. He'd have gone after Eisenfeld himself next — if he'd been able to keep going. Perhaps Eisenfeld knew it and that made him more vicious."
"He didn't have any evidence against Eisenfeld?"
"Only a little. Hardly anything if you're talking about legal evidence, but he knew plenty of things he might have proven if he had been given time. That's how it is, anyway."
The Saint lighted a cigarette and gazed at her thoughtfully through a stream of smoke.
"You understood a lot more than I did, Molly," he murmured. "But it's a great idea… And the more I think of it, the more I think you must be right."
He let his mind play around with the situation for a moment. Maybe he was too subtle himself, but there was something about that fundamental master stroke of Mr. Eisenfeld's cunning that appealed to his incorrigible sense of the artistry of corruption. To be the power behind the scenes while some lifelike figurehead stood up to receive the rotten eggs was just ordinary astuteness. But to choose for that figurehead a man w ho was so honest and stupid that it would take an earthquake to make him realize what was going on, and whose honest stupidity might appear to less simple-minded inquirers as an impudent disguise for double-dyed villainy — that indicated a quality of guile to which Simon Templar raised an appreciative hat. But his admiration of Mr. Eisenfeld's ingenuity was purely theoretical.
He made a note of the girl's address.
"I'll keep the gun," he said before they parted. "You won't be needing it, and I shouldn't like you to lose your head again when I wasn't around to interfere." His blue eyes held her for a moment with quiet confidence. "Al Eisenfeld is going to be dealt with — I promise you that."
It was one of his many mysteries that the fantastic promise failed to rouse her to utter incredulity. Afterwards she would be incredulous, after he had fulfilled the promise even more so; but while she listened at that moment there was a spell about him which made all miracles seem possible.
"What can you do?" she asked, in the blind but indescribably inspiring belief that there must be some magic which he could achieve.
"I have my methods," said the Saint. "I stopped off here anyhow because I was interested in the stories I'd heard about this town, and we'll just call it lucky that I happened to be out trying to take a look at the mayor when you had your brainstorm. Just do one thing for me. Whatever happens, don't tell a living soul about this lunch. Forget that you ever met me or heard of me. Let me do the remembering."
Mr. Eisenfeld's memory was less retentive. When he came home a few nights later, he had completely forgotten the fleeting squirm of uneasiness which the reference to the Saint in the Elmford News had given him. He had almost as completely forgotten his late Police Commissioner; although when he did remember him, it was with a feeling of pleasant satisfaction that he had been so easily got rid of. Already he had selected another occupant for that conveniently vacated office, who he was assured would prove more amenable to reason. And that night he was expecting another visitor whose mission would give him an almost equal satisfaction.
The visitor arrived punctually, and was hospitably received with a highball and a cigar. After a brief exchange of cordial commonplaces, the visitor produced a bulging wallet and slid it casually across the table. In the same casual manner Mr. Eisenfeld picked it up, inspected the contents and slipped it into his pocket. After which the two men refilled their glasses and smoked for a while in companionable silence.
"We got the last of that cement delivered yesterday," remarked the visitor, in the same way that he might have bridged a conversational hiatus with some bromidic comment on the weather.
Mr. Eisenfeld nodded.
"Yeah, I saw it. They got the monument about one quarter full already — I was by there this afternoon."
Mr. Schmidt gazed vacantly at the ceiling.
"Any time you've got any other job like that, we'll still be making good cement," he said, with the same studied casualness. "You know we always like to look after anyone who can put a bit of business our way."
"Sure, I'll remember it," said Mr. Eisenfeld amiably.
Mr. Schmidt fingered his chin. "Too bad about Provost, wasn't it?" he remarked.
"Yeah," agreed Mr. Eisenfeld, "too bad."
Half an hour later he escorted his guest out to his car. The light over the porch had gone out when he returned to the house, and without giving it any serious thought he attributed the failure to a blown fuse or a faulty bulb. He was in too good a humour to be annoyed by it; and he was actually humming complacently to himself as he groped his way up the dark steps. The light in the hall had gone out as well, and he frowned faintly over the idle deduction that it must have been a fuse. He pushed through the door and turned to close it; and then a hand clamped over his mouth, and something hard and uncongenial pressed into the small of his back. A gentle voice spoke chillingly in his ear.
"Just one word" — it whispered invitingly — "just one word out of you, Al, and your life is going to be even shorter than I expected."
Mr. Eisenfeld stood still, with his muscles rigid. He was not a physical coward but the grip which held his head pressed back against the chest of the unknown man behind him had a firm competence which announced that there were adequate sinews behind it to back up its persuasion in any hand-to-hand struggle. Also, the object which prodded into the middle of his spine constituted an argument in itself which he was wise enough to understand.
The clasp on his mouth relaxed tentatively and slid down to rest lightly on his throat. The same gentle voice breathed again on his right eardrum.
"Let us go out into the great open spaces and look at the night," said the Saint.
Mr. Eisenfeld allowed himself to be conducted back down the walk over which he had just returned. He had very little choice in the matter. The gun of the uninvited guest remained glued to his backbone as if it intended to take root there, and he knew that the fingers which rested so caressingly on his windpipe would have detected the first shout he tried to utter before it could reach his vocal cords.
A few yards down the road a car waited with its lights burning. They stopped beside it.
"Open the door and get in."
Mr. Eisenfeld obeyed. The gun slipped round from his back to his left side as his escort followed him into the seat behind the wheel. Simon started the engine and reached over to slip the gear lever into first. The headlights were switched on as they moved away from the curb; and Mr. Eisenfeld found his first opportunity of giving vent to the emotions that were chasing themselves through his system.
"What the hell's the idea of this?" he demanded violently.
"We're going for a little drive, dear old bird," answered the Saint. "But I promise you won't have to walk home. My intentions are more honourable than anyone like you could easily imagine."
"If you're trying to kidnap me," Eisenfeld blustered, "I'm telling you you can't get away with it. I'll see that you get what's coming to you! Why, you…"
Simon let him make his speech without interruption. The lights of the residential section twinkled steadily past them, and presently even Eisenfeld's flood of outraged eloquence dwindled away before that impenetrable calm. They drove on over the practically deserted roads — it was after midnight, and there were very few attractions in that area to induce the pious citizens of Elmford to lose their beauty sleep — and presently Mr. Eisenfeld realized that their route would take them past the site of the almost completed Elmford Riviera on the bank of the river above the town.
He was right in his deduction, except for the word "past." As a matter of fact, the car jolted off the main highway onto the unfinished road which led down to Elmford's playground; and exactly in the middle of the two-mile esplanade, under the very shadow of the central monument which Sam Purdell had been so modestly unwilling to accept, it stopped.
"This is as far as we go," said the Saint, and motioned politely to the door.
Mr. Eisenfeld got out. He was sweating a little with perfectly natural fear, and above that there was a growing cloud of mystification through which he was trying to discover some coherent design in the extraordinary series of events which had enveloped him in those last few minutes. He seemed to be caught up in the machinery of some hideous nightmare, in which the horror was intensified by the fact that he could find no reason in the way it moved. If he was indeed the victim of an attempt at kidnapping, he couldn't understand why he should have been brought to a place like that; but just then there was no other explanation that he could see.
The spidery lines of scaffolding on the monument rose up in a futuristic filigree over his head, and at the top of it the shadowy outlines of the chute where the cement was mixed and poured into the hollow mould of stone roosted like a grotesque and angular prehistoric bird.
"Now we'll climb up and look at the view," said the Saint.
Still wondering, Mr. Eisenfeld felt himself steered towards a ladder which ran up one side of the scaffolding. He climbed mechanically, as he was ordered, while a stream of unanswerable questions drummed bewilderingly through his brain. Once the wild idea came to him to kick downwards at the head of the man who followed him; but when he looked down he saw that the head was several rungs below his feet, keeping a safely measured distance, and when he stopped climbing, the man behind him stopped also. Eisenfeld went on, up through the dark. He could have shouted then, but he knew that he was a mile or more from the nearest prison who might have heard him.
They came out on the plank staging which ran around the top of the monument. A moment later, as he looked back, he saw the silhouette of his unaccountable kidnapper rising up against the dimly luminous background of stars and reaching the platform to lean lazily against one of the ragged ends of scaffold pole which rose above the narrow catwalk. Behind him, the hollow shaft of the monument was a square void of deeper blackness in the surrounding dark.
"This is the end of your journey, Al," said the stranger softly. "But before you go, there are just one or two things I'd like to remind you about. Also, we haven't been properly introduced, which is probably making things rather difficult for you. You had better know me… I am the Saint."
Eisenfeld started and almost overbalanced. Where had he heard that name before? Suddenly he remembered, and an uncanny chill crawled over his flesh.
"There are various reasons why it doesn't seem necessary for you to go on living," went on that very gentle and dispassionate voice, "and your ugly face is only one of them. This is a pretty cockeyed world when you take it all round, but people like you don't improve it. Also, I have heard a story from a girl called Molly Provost — her father was Police Commissioner until Tuesday night, I believe."
"She's a liar," gasped Eisenfeld hoarsely. "You're crazy! Listen—"
He would have sworn that the stranger had never touched him except with his gun since they got into the car, but suddenly an electric flashlight spilled a tiny strip of luminance over the boards between them, and in the bright centre of the beam he saw the other's hand running through the contents of a wallet which looked somehow familiar. All at once Eisenfeld recognized it and clutched unbelievingly at his pocket. The wallet which his guest had given him an hour ago was gone; and Eisenfeld's heart almost stopped beating.
"What are you doing with that?" he croaked.
"Just seeing how much this installment of graft is worth," answered the Saint calmly. "And it looks exactly like thirty thousand dollars to me. Well, it might have been more, but I suppose it will have to do. I promised Molly that I'd see she was looked after, but I don't see why it shouldn't be at your expense. Part of this is your commission for getting this cenotaph filled with cement, isn't it?… It seems very appropriate."
Eisenfeld's throat constricted, and the blood began to pound in his temples.
"I'll get you for this," he snarled. "You lousy crook."
"Maybe I am a crook," said the Saint, in a voice that was no more than a breath of sound in the still night. "But in between times I'm something more. In my simple way I am a kind of justice… Do you know any good reason why you should wait any longer for what you deserve?"
There is a time in every man's life when he knows beyond doubt or common fear that the threads of destiny are running out. It had happened to Al Eisenfeld too suddenly for him to understand — he had no time to look back and count the incredible minutes in which his world had been turned upside down. Perhaps he himself had no clear idea what he was doing, but he knew that he was hearing death in the quiet voice that spoke out of the darkness in front of him.
His muscles carried him away without any conscious command from his brain, and he was unaware of the queer growling cry that rattled in his throat. There was a crash of sound in front of him as he sprang blindly forward, and a tongue of reddish-orange flame spat out of the darkness almost in his face…
Simon Templar steadied himself on one of the scaffold poles and stared down into the square black mould of the monument; but there was nothing that he could see, and the silence was unbroken. After a while his fingers let go the gun, and a couple of seconds later the thud of its burying itself in the wet cement at the bottom of the shaft echoed hollowly back to him.
Presently he climbed up to the chute from which the monument was being filled. He found a great mound of sacks of cement stacked beside it ready for use, and, after a little more search, a hose conveniently arranged to provide water. He was busy for three hours before he decided that he had done enough.
"And knowing that these thoughts are beating in all our hearts," boomed the voice of the Distinguished Personage through eight loud-speakers, "it will always be my proudest memory that I was deemed worthy of the honour of unveiling this eternal testimonial to the man who has devoted his life to the task of making the people of Elmford proud and happy in their great city — the mayor whom you all know and love so well, Sam Purdell!"
The flag which covered the carved inscription on the base of the Purdell memorial fluttered down. A burst of well-organized cheering volleyed from five thousand throats. The cameramen dashed forward with clicking shutters. The bandmaster raised his baton. The brass and wood winds inflated their lungs. A small urchin close to the platform swallowed a piece of chewing gum, choked, and began to cry… „The strains of the "Star Spangled Banner" blasted throbbingly through the afternoon air.
Then, to the accompaniment of a fresh howl of cheering, Sam Purdell stepped to the microphone. He wiped his eyes and swallowed once or twice before he spoke.
"My friends," he said, "this is not a time when I would ask you to listen to a speech. There ain't — isn't anything I can think of worthy of this honour you have done me. I can only repeat the promise which you have all heard me make before — that while I am Mayor of this city there will be only one principle in everything over which I have control: Honesty and a square deal for every man, woman and child in Elmford."
The cheers followed his car as he drove away accompanied by his round perspiring wife and his round perspiring daughters. Mrs Purdell clutched his hand in a warm moist grip.
"That was such a beautiful speech you made, Sam," she said a little tearfully.
Sam Purdell shook his head. He had one secret sorrow.
"I wish Al could have been there," he said.