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.
Chapter sixteen
The Saint turned and moved almost casually out of his corner to meet the slowly approaching Angel. Bilinski shuffled forward, peering between forearms lifted before him, his body almost doubled over so that his elbows guarded his belly while his gloves shielded his face. No legally vulnerable square inch of his body was unprotected. He came forward steadily, inch by inch, making no attempt to lead or feint, merely coming forward with the massive low-gear irresistibility of a large tank, peering intently, cautiously — almost fearfully, Simon thought — between the bulging barriers of his ham-sized arms.
The Saint moved around him in a leisurely half-circle, every muscle, every nerve completely at ease, relaxed, and coordinated. He was oblivious of the crowd now, studying his problem with almost academic detachment, the latent lightning in his fists perfectly controlled. He couldn’t help feeling the same guarded wonder that he knew Torpedo Smith, and for that matter all of the Angel’s opponents, must have felt at the apparent impotence of the Angel’s attack right up to the moment of the blow that sent them on the way to oblivion. He thought to himself, “Nothing happens the first round... nothing ever happens the first round...” The crux of his problem, he felt sure was what the Angel did to open his victims for the inevitable knockout later on...
Bilinski, apparently growing tired of following Simon round the ring, stopped in the centre and remained there, crouched, merely revolving to follow the Saint’s lackadaisical circumvolutions about him.
The cash customers began to shake the stadium with the drumming of their stamping feet in the familiar demand for action. A demand, Simon thought, which was no more than fair... He stepped in, threw a left that cracked like a whiplash against the Angel’s fleshy forearms, and crossed with a downward-driving right that strove to crash past into the massive belly beyond. But the Angel instinctively brought his arms closer together so that the Saint’s gloved fist thudded into their bone-centred barrier.