"Where to, pal?" bellowed the driver over his shoulder.
Simon gave him Fernack's address.
There was a wail of police sirens starting up behind them— far behind. Weaving through the traffic, cornering on two wheels, whisking over crossroads in defiance of red lights, supremely contemptuous of the signs on one-way streets, performing hair-raising miracles of navigation with one hand, Mr. Sebastian Lipski found opportunities to scratch the back of his head with the other. Mr. Lipski was worried.
"Chees!" he said bashfully, as if conscious that he was guilty of unpardonable sacrilege, and yet unable to overcome the doubts that were seething in his breast. "What is dis racket, anyway? Foist ya puts de arm on a guy wit' out any trouble. Den ya lets him go. Den ya shoots up Fift' Avenue an' brings him back again. Howja play dis snatch game, what I wanna know?"
"Don't think about it," said the Saint through his teeth. "Just drive!"
He felt a touch on his arm and looked down at the girl. She had pulled off her hat, and her hair was falling about her cheeks in a flood of soft gold. There were shadows in her amazing amber eyes, but the rest of her face was untroubled, unlined, like unearthly satin, with the bloom of youth and life undimmed on it. The parting of her lips might have been the wraith of a smile.
"Don't worry," she said. "I'm not going with you—very far."
"That's nonsense," he said roughly. "It's nothing serious. "You're going to be all right"
But he knew that he lied.
She knew, too. She shook her head, so that the golden curls danced.
"It doesn't hurt," she said. "I'm comfortable here."
She was nestling in the crook of his arm, like a tired child. The towers and canyons of New York whirled round the windows, but she did not see them. She went her way as she had lived, without fear or pity or remorse, out of the unknown past into the unknown future. Perhaps even then she had never looked back, or looked ahead. All of her was in the present. She belonged neither to times nor seasons. In some strange freak of creation all times and seasons had been mingled in her, were fused in the confines of that flawless incarnation; the eternal coordinates of the ageless earth, death and desire. She sighed once.
"I'm so sorry," she said. "I suppose it wasn't meant to happen—this time."
He could not speak.
"Kiss me again, Simon," she said quietly.
He kissed her. Why had she seemed unapproachable? She was himself. It was his own lawless scorn of life and death which had conquered her, which had brought her twice to save his life and taken her own life in the end. If the whole world had condemned her, he could not have cast a stone. He did not care. They moved in the same places, the wide sierras of outlawry where there were no laws.
She slipped back, gazing into his face as if she were trying to remember every line of it for a hundred years. She was smiling, and there was a light in her darkening amber eyes which he would never understand. He could see her take breath to speak.
"Au revoir, Simon," she said; and as she had lived with death, so she died.
He let her go gently and turned away. Strange tears were stinging his eyes so that he could not see. The taxi lurched round a corner with its engine growling. The noises of the city ebbed and swelled like the beat of a tidal sea.
He became aware that Valcross was tugging at his arm, whining in a horrible mouthy incoherence of terror. The yammering words came dully through into his brain:
"Can't you do something? I don't want to die. I've been good to you. I didn't mean to cheat you out of your million dollars. I'll do anything you say. I don't want to die. You shot me. You've got to take me to a doctor. I've got money. You can have anything you like. I've got millions. You can have all of them. I don't want them. Take what you want——"
"Be quiet," said the Saint in a dreadful voice.
"Millions of dollars—in the bank—they're all yours——"
Simon struck him on the mouth.
"You fool," he said. "All the money in the world couldn't pay for what you've done."
The man shrank away from him, and his babbling rose to a scream.
"What is it you want with me, then? I can give you anything. If it isn't money, what do you want? Damn you, what is your racket?"
Then the Saint turned towards him, and even Valcross was silent when he saw the look on the Saint's face. His mouth worked mutely, but the words would not leave his throat. His trembling hands went up as if to shield himself from the stare of those devilish blue eyes.
"Death," said the Saint, in a voice of terrible softness. "Death is my racket."
They turned into Washington Square from the south. Simon had never noticed what route they took to shake off pursuit, but the wail of sirens had ceased. The muttering thunder of the city had swallowed it up. The taxi was slowing down to a more normal pace. Buses rumbled ponderously by; the endless stream of cars and vans and taxis flowed along, as it would flow day and night while the city stood, one of a myriad impersonal rivers on which human activities took their brief bustling voyages, coming and going without trace. A newsboy ran down the sidewalk, bawling his ephemeral sensation. In a microscopic corner of one infinitesimal speck of dust floating through the black abysses of infinity, inconsiderable atoms of human life hurried and fumed and fretted and were broken and triumphant in the trivial affairs of their brief instant in eternity. Lives began and lives ended, but the primordial accident of life went on.
The cab stopped, and the driver looked round.
"Dis is it," he announced. "What next?"
"Wait here a minute," said the Saint; and then he saw Fernack standing on the steps of his house.
He got out and walked slowly towards the detective, and Fernack stood and watched him come. The strong, square-jawed face did not relax; only the flinty grey eyes under the shaggy brows had any expression.
Simon drew out the pearl-handled gun, reversed it, and held it out as if he were surrendering a sword.
"I've kept my word," he said. "That's the end of my parole."
Fernack took the revolver and slid it into his hip pocket.
"Didn't you find the Big Fellow?"
"He's in the taxi."
A glimmer of immeasurable content passed across Fernack's eyes, and he looked over the Saint's shoulder, down towards the waiting cab. Then, without a word, he went past the Saint, across the pavement, and opened the door. Valcross half fell towards him. Fernack caught him with one hand and hauled the slobbering man out and upright. Then he saw something else in the taxi, and stood very still.
"Who's this?" he said.
There was no answer. Fernack turned round and looked up and down the street. Simon Templar was gone.
Epilogue
Mr. Theodore Bungstatter, of Brooklyn, espoused his cook on the eleventh day of June in that year of grace, having finally convinced her that his inability to repeat his devotion coherently on a certain night was due to nothing more unregenerate than a touch of influenza. They spent their honeymoon at Niagara Falls, and on the third day of it she induced him to sign the pledge; but in spite of this concession to her prejudices she never cooked for him again, and the rest of their wedded bliss was backgrounded by a procession of disgruntled substitutes who brought Mr. Bungstatter to the direst agonies of dyspepsia.
Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim paced his library and said to a deputation of reporters: "It is the duty of all public-spirited citizens to resist racketeering and extortion even at the risk of their own lives or the lives of those who are nearest and dearest to them. The welfare of the state must override all considerations of personal safety. We are fighting a war to the death with crime, and the same code of self-sacrifice must guide every one of us as if we were at war with a foreign power. It is the only way in which this vile cancer in our midst can be rooted out." And while he spoke he remembered the cold appraising eyes of the outlaw who had faced him in that same room, and behind the pompous phrasing of his words was the pride of a belief that if he himself were tried again he would not be found wanting.