He had thought no more about it a couple of days later when he saw a face that he remembered coming out of a travel agency on Fifth Avenue. The girl was so intent on hurrying through the crowd that she might not have noticed him, but he caught her armas she went by and turned her round.
"Hello, Cora," he drawled.
She looked at him with a queer mixture of fear and defiance that surprised him. The look had vanished a moment after she recognized him, but it remained in his memory with the beginning of a question mark after it. He kept his hand on her arm.
"Why — hello, Saint!"
He smiled.
"Hush," he said. "Not so loud. I may be an honest citizen to all intents and purposes, but I haven't got used to it. Come and have a drink and tell me the story of your life."
"I'm sorry." Did he imagine that she still seemed a trifle breathless, just as he might have imagined that swift glimmer of fright in her eyes when he caught hold of her? "Not just now. Can't we have lunch or something tomorrow? I–I've got an appointment."
"With Marty?"
He was sure now. There was a perceptible hesitation before she answered, exactly as if she had paused to consider whether she should tell him the truth or invent a story.
"Yes. Please — I'm in a hurry…"
"So am I." The Saint's voice was innocently persuasive. "Can I give you a lift? I'd like to see Marty again."
"I'm afraid he's ill."
This was a lie. The Saint knew it, but the genial persuasion of his smile didn't alter. Those who knew him best had learned that that peculiarly lazy and aimless smile was the index of a crystallizing determination which was harder to resist than most other men's square-jawed aggression.
A taxi stood conveniently empty by the curb. He opened the door; and he still held her arm.
"Where to?" he asked as they settled down.
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. After a moment she gave him an address. He relayed it to the driver and took out a packet of cigarettes. They rode on for a while in silence, and he studied her thoughtfully without seeming to stare. She had always been pretty in a fair-haired and rather fluffy way, but now for the first time he was aware of a background of character which he hadn't noticed particularly when he had known her before. Perhaps it had always been there, but he hadn't observed her closely enough to see it.
He cast his mind back over the time when they had first met. She was going around with Marty O'Connor then, and apparently they were still going around. That indicated some kind of character at least — he wasn't quite sure what kind. After they had driven a few blocks he reached forward and closed the glass partition to shut them off from the driver.
"Well, dear heart, do you tell me about it or do I drag it out of you? Is Marty in trouble again?"
She nodded hesitantly.
The Saint drew at his cigarette without any visible indications of surprise. When one is a minor racketeer, strong-arm man and reputed gunman like Marty O'Connor, one is liable to be in trouble pretty frequently. Simon concentrated for a moment on trying to blow a couple of smoke rings. The draft from the open window broke them up, and he said: "Who started it?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"Marty did something for me once. If he's in trouble I'd like to do something for him. I suppose it's immoral, but I always had a soft spot for that old thug. On the level, Cora."
"You're not tied up with the cops any more?"
"I never was. I just did some of their work for them once, but they never thanked me. And if I'd ever had anything to take out on Marty I'd have done it years ago."
She looked at him for some seconds before she answered, and then her answer was only made indirectly. She leaned forward and opened the partition again just long enough to change the address he had given the driver to another two blocks north of it.
"You know the game," said the Saint appreciatively, and for the first time she looked him full in the eyes.
"I have to," she said. "The G-men have been combing the town for Marty for the last three months."
Simon raised his eyebrows without emotion.
"What did he do? Did he take up kidnapping, or is he another of these income-tax defaulters?"
She looked at him queerly for a moment, and when she laughed there was a sharp note of strain in the sound.
"The trouble is he knows too much about income tax. He'd be the star witness against Luckner if they could get his evidence."
"And he doesn't want to give it?"
"He doesn't want to die," said the girl brutally.
Simon put his feet up on the spare scat opposite him and smoked placidly. Coincidence was a queer thing, but he had ceased to marvel at its complexities. Once again, through that chance encounter, lie found the subject of Lucky Joe Luckner thrust into his mind, and the repetition gave it enough weight to make it stay there. But he was wise enough not to press the girl for any more details during the drive. In due course of time he would know all that he wanted to know; and he was prepared to wait. He would see Marty himself.
The cab stopped outside a dingy brick house between Ninth and Tenth avenues. A half-dozen grimy guttersnipes were playing raucous baseball in the street. The windows in the front of the house were clouded with the accumulated dirt of ages. Inside the front door, the dark hall was paved with a strip of threadbare linoleum, and Simon felt the slithery gloss of thick dust under his finger tips when he put his hand on the banister as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. His nose wrinkled in response to a faint pervasive odour of ancient cooking. And a slight frown creased itself into his forehead. He was still a long way from having all his questions answered. To find Marty O'Connor in a place like this, even as a hideout, was a mystery in itself — Marty who had always been such a swell dresser with a highly developed taste for spring mattresses and Turkey carpets and flashy decoration.
The girl opened the door and they went into the living room. The furniture there was in keeping with what anyone would have expected from a preliminary glance of the building — cheap, shoddy and shabby — but Simon noticed that unlike the rest of the place it appeared to be clean. Cora pulled off her hat.
"Hello, Marty," she called. "I brought a friend to see you."
Marty O'Connor appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. He was in his shirt sleeves, a shirt open at the neck, and he kept one hand in his pocket. He stared at the Saint blankly, and then his homely face broke into a slow gold-and-ivory grin.
"Well for… Where the hell did you come from?"
The Saint chuckled. Marty took his right hand out of his pocket for the first time and Simon grasped it.
"I wouldn't have believed you could get any uglier, Marty, but you made it."
The gunman hauled him towards a chair and sat him down. He looked a little less plump than he had been when the Saint saw him last, and there seemed to be a trace of hollowness in his unshaven cheeks; but the feckless twinkle in his faded eyes was the same as that by which Simon had first been beguiled from his antipathy for the ordinary run of hoodlums.
"I sure am glad to see you here again, Saint. It's a long time since we had a drink together." O'Connor dusted the table with his handkerchief and sat on it. He turned round. "Cora! See if you got any of that gin left we had the other night… Say!" He looked at the Saint again, beaming with a simple pleasure that had temporarily wiped away the furtive defensiveness with which he had emerged from the bedroom. "Where you been all this time?"
"Here and there," said the Saint vaguely. "I've covered a good deal of ground. Have you been looking after yourself?"
"Not so badly."
The girl came back into the room, bearing a garishly labelled bottle and three cheap glasses.