“The Masked Angel has a very clever manager.”
The bell for the second round brought Torpedo Smith out with a rush. Gaining confidence with every blow, he drove the quivering hulk of the Angel back on his heels, bringing the crowd to its feet in a steady roar of excitement.
“Hoppy,” the Saint spoke into Hoppy’s ear, “has the Angel ever been cut under that black stocking he wears over his head?”
“Huh? Naw, boss! His fights never last long enough for him to get hoit.” Hoppy’s eyes squinted anxiously. “Chees! Why don’t he do sump’n? Torpedo Smith is givin’ him de woiks!”
Pat was bouncing in her seat, the soft curve of her lips parted with excitement as she watched.
“I thought the Angel was so wonderful,” she gibed. “Come on, Torpedo!”
“Dey’re bot’ on de ropes!” Hoppy exclaimed hoarsely.
The Saint’s hawk-sharp eyes suddenly narrowed. No, it was Torpedo Smith who was on the ropes now. With the Angel in control!.. Something had happened. Something he hadn’t seen. He gripped Hoppy’s arm.
“Something’s wrong with Smith.”
Something was very definitely wrong with Torpedo Smith. He stood shaking his head desperately as if to clear it, holding on to the top strand with one hand and with the other trying to push away the black-masked monster who was now opening up with the steady, relentless power of a pile-driver.
“De Angel musta hit him!” Hoppy yelled. “I told ya, didn’t I? I told ya!” His foghorn bellow rose over the mob’s fierce blood cry. “Smith’s down!”
Torpedo Smith, obviously helpless, had slumped beneath the repeated impact of the Angel’s deliberate blows and now lay where he had fallen, face down, motionless, as the referee tolled him out.
The sea of humanity began ebbing like a tide towards the exits, the vast drone of their voices and shuffling feet covered by the reverberating recessional of a pipe-organ striking up “Anchors Aweigh” from somewhere in the bowels of the coliseum.
“Well, ya see, boss?” Hoppy jubilated as they drifted into the aisle. “It’s just like I told ya. De Angel’s dynamite.”
Pat shook her golden head compassionately.
“That poor fellow — the way that horrible creature hit him when he was helpless! Why didn’t the referee stop it?”
She turned, suddenly aware that Simon was no longer behind her. She looked about bewilderingly. “Simon!”
“Dere he is!” Hoppy waved a hamlike hand towards the end of the row they had just left. “Boss!”
The Saint was standing there, the occupants of the first rows of the ringside eddying past him, watching the efforts of Whitey Mullins and his assistants to revive the slumbering Smith.
Hoppy breasted the current with the irresistible surge of a battleship and returned to Simon’s side with Pat in his wake.
“’S matter, boss?”
“What is it, Simon?”
The Saint glanced at her and back at the ring. He took a final pull at his cigarette, and dropped it to crush it carefully with one foot.
“They’ve just called the Boxing Commission doctor into Smith’s corner,” he said.
Pat stared at the ring.
“Is he still unconscious?”
“Aw, dat’s nuttin’.” Hoppy dismissed Smith’s narcosis with a scornful lift of his anthropogenous jaw. “I slug a guy oncet who is out for twelve hours, an’ when dey—”
“Wait a minute,” the Saint interrupted, and moved towards Smith’s corner as Whitey Mullins leaped from the ring to the floor.
“Whitey!” Hoppy bellowed joyfully. “Whassamatter, chum? Can’t ya wake up dat sleeping beauty?”
Whitey glanced at him with no recognition, his wide, flexible mouth contorted curiously.
Hoppy blinked.
“Whitey! Whassamatter?”
Pat glanced at the ring with quick concern.
“Is Smith hurt badly?”
The tow-headed little man with the lean limber face stared at her a moment with twisting lips. When he spoke his high-pitched Brooklyn accent was routed with tragedy.
“He’s dead,” he said, and turned away.
The spectral cymbals of grim adventure clashed an eerie tocsin within the Saint, louder now than when first he heard their faint far notes in Connie Grady’s flustered appeal for him to search the sinister riddle of the Angel’s victories, and save her fiancé from unknown peril. They had rung in the nebulous confusion of her plea, in the tortured suspicions unvoiced within her haunted eyes... Now he heard their swelling beat again, a phantom reprise that prickled his skin with ghostly chills.
He spoke softly into Pat’s ear.
“Darling, I just remembered. Hoppy and I have some vitally urgent business to attend to immediately. Do you mind going home alone — at once?”
Patricia Holm looked up sharply, the startled pique on her lovely face giving way swiftly to disquieted resignation. She knew him too well.
“What is it, Simon? What are you up to?”
“I’ll explain later. I’m already late. Be a good girl.” He kissed her lightly. “I’ll make it up to you,” he said, and left her gazing after him as he sauntered down the long concrete ramp leading to the fighters’ dressing-rooms with Hoppy shambling in his wake like a happy bear.
Chapter two
The door of the number one dressing-room beneath the floor of the Manhattan Arena rattled and shook as the sportswriters milled about the corridor outside and protested their exclusion. Who, one of them shouted, did the big ham think he was, Greta Garbo?
Behind the locked door Kurt Spangler rubbed his shining bald head and listened benignly to the disgruntled din.
“Maybe I should oughta give ’em an interview, huh, Doc?” The pink mountain of flesh lying on the rubbing table lifted a head the general size and shape of a runt egg-plant. “I don’t want they should think I’m a louse.”
The un-Masked Angel blinked, his little brown eyes apologetic beneath the shadow of brows ridged with the compounded scar tissues of countless ancient cuts and contusions.
“Never mind what they think,” Doc Spangler beamed comfortingly. “Let them disparage you — revile you — hate you.” His sonorous voice sank confidingly. “It’s exactly what we want.”
The Angel sighed unhappily. His head dropped back on the rubbing table as the two handlers pulled off the gloves, tossed them in a corner, and proceeded to rip off the hand wrappings of gauze and tape.
“The more the newspapers hate you,” Doc Spangler expounded, “the more cash they’ll pay to see you get beaten.” He rubbed his hands, considering the Angel with all the pride a farmer might display surveying his prize hog. “Kid McCoy, for instance,” the doctor illustrated. “He made a fortune on the hatred of the mob. They paid to see him fight in the hope he would be slaughtered. Only he never was — not till after he became champion, anyway. And neither will you be, my lad. Not as long as you continue to follow my instructions.”
The Angel grunted as Karl, one of his handlers, kneaded the mountainous mesa of his belly. His naked body, a pink mass of monstrous convexities, gleamed beneath the bright incandescents with a sheen of oily sweat that high-lighted the ruby splotches where Torpedo Smith’s gloves had exploded. His flat button nose, the distorted rosette of flesh that were his ears, furnished further evidence that Dr Spangler’s discovery, far from being a supernova in the pugilistic firmament, was actually a battle-battered veteran, the survivor of an unnumbered multitude of beatings.
“I did like you said wit’ Smith, didn’t I, Doc?” the Angel mumbled.
“You did indeed! You followed my instructions to the letter tonight. Always remember to keep covered till your man seems a bit careless.” Spangler patted one beefy shoulder. “You were great tonight, my boy.”