“You know the characters he was attacking,” Simon said. “Have you had any of them in and asked them questions?”
“Oh, sure, I’ve had ’em in. And asked ’em stupid questions. And got the stupid answers I deserved.” The detective’s voice was harsh with corrosive acid. “If you mean did I give ’em a good old-fashioned going over, you know damn well I didn’t. You remember how in Prohibition nobody could lay a hand on a top gangster for all the shyster attorneys around him and the crooked politicians spreading their pocket handkerchiefs for him to walk on so’s his shoes wouldn’t get dusty? Well, these mugs make those old-time mobsters look like punks. They got twice as many lawyers and half the time they don’t even bother with the politicians. These guys are legitimate — at least until somebody proves otherwise. They got fancy offices an’ secretaries an’ all the trimmings, just like the president of General Motors. They go to conventions an’ banquets and make speeches. Suppose we caught some goon who beat somebody up, and maybe twisted his arm a bit till he named one of the bosses who hired him to do it? The boss would laugh at us. Just some overenthusiastic union member trying to talk himself out of an assault rap, he’d say — and what other proof do we have?”
“Who would you use your rubber hose on if you could get away with it?” Simon asked sympathetically, but with just enough hint of an underlying taunt to be sure of stinging Fernack out of any imminent reversion to the discreet habits of the clam. “Boyd was shooting at so many guys. Did he have anyone in his sights sharply enough to make himself an obvious murder risk?”
“Yeah. Just one guy that I put him on the tail of. But what he dug up, after the lead I gave him, was all his own. He said it was hot enough that if it wouldn’t get this guy at least five years in a Federal pen it could only be because the Attorney General was fixed. Anyway, he had somebody worried enough to want him bumped off.”
“Where did he keep this information?”
“That’s what I was up to the Syndicate office trying to find out. But they don’t have it. Nobody seems to know where it is — unless, probably, it was all in his head. But it don’t mean the same any more. Suppose anybody found it now and this louse did draw a five-year stretch. That only pays for some of his past racketeering. The murder is still on the house.” Fernack’s big knuckles whitened around his glass in a contraction of coldly suppressed fury that threatened to crush it like an eggshell. “There’s only one way he’s ever likely to be tied into that bombing, and that’d be if someone backed him up to a wall and beat a confession out of him. Which the judge would throw out anyhow. But I can remember a time when I’d of done it just the same, just for the satisfaction of seeing he didn’t beat the rap without even getting his hair mussed.”
“What’s his name?” Simon persisted.
“Nat Grendel,” Fernack said, almost defiantly. “You’ve heard of him.”
The Saint nodded.
“I read Boyd’s articles. But I didn’t think Grendel would go all the way to murder.”
“Some guys will go a long way to stay out of Leavenworth.”
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“I never get enough exercise in this effete city. How would you feel if I did some of the old-fashioned brutal things to Brother Grendel that they won’t let you do, now that Centre Street has become so correct and maidenly?”
The detective glared at him in what anyone who had not followed their long acquaintance through all its vicissitudes would certainly have considered a disproportionately apoplectic reaction to such a friendly offer.
“You stay out of this! If somebody takes Nat Grendel for a ride, in the name of some kind o’ justice above the Law, like you did to some other guys in this town once, I’ll know it was you and I’ll send you to the electric chair and I’ll pull the switch myself, so help me. I got enough trouble already — and you can’t get away with that stuff any more.” He drained his glass violently and added, with what seemed like a somewhat naive superfluity, “Anyhow, Grendel’s only the guy who wanted Boyd wiped out. The guy whose trademarks were all over that bomb job is the Engineer.”
In the underworld’s roster of peculiar specialists the man who was usually referred to as the Engineer was perhaps the most sinister and shadowy. The latter adjective is applicable to his reputation and modus operandi rather than to his physical aspect, which was anything but wraithlike.
His real name was Herman Uberlasch, and he had the bullet head, stolid features, and bovine build with which any cartoonist would have automatically endowed a character intended to represent a typical Teuton. A straggly mustache masked the ruthless line of a bear-trap mouth, and gold-rimmed glasses of unfashionable shape maintained a deceptive screen of gentle helplessness before his very pale blue eyes. Ostensibly he operated a watch, clock, and small-appliance repair shop on a shabby corner of Third Avenue, but his unsuspecting neighbors would have been amazed to see the figures on the income-tax returns which he meticulously filed each year. To the inspectors, who were also amazed and slightly incredulous, he explained unblinkingly that he was sometimes paid quite fantastic fees for overhauling priceless antiques and heirlooms, and beyond that, since there was no evidence that he had been unwise enough to conceal any income, they had no authority to go.
But in more sophisticated circles, Herman Uberlasch was widely believed to have been the first practical joker to wire a bundle of dynamite and a detonator to the ignition system of a car in such a way that the next person attempting to start it would simultaneously eliminate both himself and his vehicle from the automobile market. That story may belong strictly to folklore. But even if there is any truth in it, he progressed rapidly to more complex and ingenious conceptions. He was more plausibly credited with inventing a cigarette lighter which could actually be lighted for demonstration purposes, but which exploded like a grenade when operated by anyone who did not know its secret, and there is no longer much doubt that he originated the prank of mounting a .45 cartridge inside a telephone receiver with such a cleverly sprung firing mechanism that as far as the victim was concerned its message literally went in one ear and out of the other. He had a solution for almost any problem that could be handled mechanically, and he was always alert for ways to adapt the latest advances of science and technology to his work: when television came in, he was the first to think of fitting a picture tube with a special cathode that in one or two sessions would give its audience a dose of X-rays which would soon place them beyond the reach of the most insistent commercial.
It was for achievements thus unsung, or at least vocalized only in very limited choral society, that Uberlasch won his reputation as the Engineer, but as the time-honored and straightforward custom of taking troublesome individuals for a ride became somewhat outmoded or less practical, his unusual talents were increasingly in demand, and to his great disgust his name was bandied about among the cognoscenti, and a man who heard that the Engineer had been assigned to him would scarcely dare to strike a match for fear that it might kindle his own funeral pyre. But still it was all only accepted rumor and furtive whisperings, for the Engineer himself never boasted, nor did his gadgets leave any evidence that could embarrass him.