Call for the Saint (25 page)

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 co-ordinated. 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 around the ring, stopped in the center 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-centered barrier.

Bilinski, visibly startled by the numbing shock of the blow, even though he did catch it on his guard, flung his arms about the Saint in an octopuslike clutch, sagging slightly in order to let his overwhelming weight smother his opponent’s efforts to strike again; but Simon, familiar with the old strength-sapping trick, merely relaxed with him and waited for the referee to come between them.

From her seat at ringside, Patricia Holm, her blond hair wild with excitement, her hands gripping the arms of her chair, pleaded with tense anxiety: “Watch him, Simon, watch him! Be careful!”

“He’d better watch while he can,” Inspector Fernack gibed sardonically. He leaned back in his seat beside her and yelled: “All right, you Angel, shake him loose and let him have it! Give him one for me!”

The referee was still battling to break the Angel’s drowning-man grip when the bell ended the round.

As he walked to his corner, the Saint noticed that there were no boos from the crowd over the inaction of that opening round. There was merely a more intense current of anticipatory excitement, as though everyone felt that they were about to witness a phenomenon of nature which, while it might be delayed somewhat, would take place as ineluctably as a predicted eclipse of the sun. …

The betting, Simon knew, was not on whether or not he’d be knocked out, but rather precisely when and how that cataclysmic event would occur.

Hoppy wiped nonexistent perspiration from the Saint’s brow.

“Dat foist round wuz slow motion, boss,” he rasped encouragingly. “Howja feel?”

The Saint smiled coolly.

“Fine. Where’s Whitey?”

“He forgot de towels.” Hoppy thrust the mouth of the water bottle at Simon’s lips. “Take a drink?”

The Saint leaned back and turned his face away slightly as the water poured out of the uptilted bottle and slopped over his neck and chest.

“Chees, boss!” Hoppy peered at the Saint’s face. “Dijja get any?”

“All I need. Wipe my face.”

Hoppy reached about vaguely for a nonexistent towel, seized the Saint’s dressing gown draped over the edge of the ring apron, and used it instead to mop the moisture from Simon’s face and body.

“Hoppy,” said the Saint in a low voice, as his faithful disciple started to fan him with the robe. “Hoppy, listen.”

“Yeah, boss?”

“This is important,” Simon said quickly. “Keep the cork in that water bottle-understand ? Don’t let anyone try to spill the water that’s left in it. Do you get that, Hoppy?”

Hoppy nodded foggily.

“Yeah, b-but—”

“Hold on to that bottle!” Simon said urgently, obsessed with the nightmare problem of impressing a course of action on Mr. Uniatz’s reflexes beyond any possibility of confusion. “Don’t let it get away from you. I want it after the fight. Put it in your pocket-or in that robe-and keep it under your arm. Don’t drink out of it, whatever you do. If anyone tries to spill it or break it, grab him and hold on to him! Is that clear?”

“Sure, but I don’t get it, boss. Why—”

The warning whistle blew its shrill alarm, and Simon sprang to his feet as Hoppy ducked out of the ring, taking the stool with him.

The bell clanged and the Saint moved out. … He could only hope that his hunch was right, that he had really penetrated the mundane secret of Doc Spangler’s psycho-hypnotic technique. If he guessed wrong, there might still be catastrophic surprises in store. He was answering a gambit of whose ultimate denouement he was not at all certain.

Now the Saint opened up. He darted in with the effortless speed and cold-eyed ferocity of a jungle cat, his lithe body moving in a fierce harmony of scientific destruction, his shoulders flinging a shower of straight javelinlike blows, striving to penetrate the fortress wall of wrists, arms, and gloves that guarded the Angel’s head… .

Bilinski began to give ground, crouching lower and lower beneath the onslaught. Suddenly the Saint changed his mode of attack, his fists wringing up from beneath in a series of whiplash uppercuts. One of them managed to catch the Angel on his nominal forehead, jarring his head back momentarily. Almost simultaneously with the first blow, another crashed through the Angel’s guard and left the little bulb of nose a bloody splotch.

Bilinski began to give ground faster, the first glimmer of real fear in his dull little eyes. But still he refused to retaliate; he went on catching the Saint’s blows on his arms, gloves, shoulders, elbows, rolling instinctively with every one that he caught, like the battle-conditioned veteran, he indisputably was. And as he felt the ropes touch his back, he leaned against them and bounded forward again, taking advantage of their spring, hurling his gross tonnage against the Saint and flinging his arms about him once again, shuffling around so that the Saint’s back was to the ropes instead. Inexorably he pushed Simon backwards against the rubberized strands.

Pat was on her feet, jumping up and down.

“Get away from him, Simon!” she screamed. “Get away from him!”

“Aw, sit down!” Fernack blasted at her. He cupped his hands about his mouth and yelled: “Knock him kicking, Angel! Hit him one for me! For Fernack!”

Pat turned on him furiously.

“Yes,” she shouted, “for poor feeble Fernack!” and brought a flailing hand down on the top of the detective’s derby, jamming it down over his eyes.

A localized area of laughter was swallowed in a sudden earthquake as the crowd surged to its feet en masse.

The Saint was obviously in trouble. He was still against the ropes, even as Torpedo Smith had been, shaking his head as though trying to clear it, as the Angel, close up to him, pumped short deliberate blows into his body. They lacked concussive snap but were nevertheless sickening with the monstrous weight that lay behind them. The Angel seemed to be trying to shake the Saint loose to give himself room for a conclusive blow. That he would succeed seemed a matter of a very brief time. The Saint was already staggering and apparently holding on blindly.

In the Saint’s corner, Hoppy Uniatz, his face tortured into a mask of pleading horror, leaned over the bottom strand of the ropes, his clenched fists pounding the canvas desperately.

“Boss!” he begged, his raucous voice screeching with the intensity of his emotion. “Boss, get away from dem ropes. Don’t let him crowd ya! Boss!”

Patricia’s eyes filled with frightened tears.

“Simon!” she sobbed. “Get away, get away!”

And strange things were happening to Inspector John Henry Fernack-things which, in abstract theory, he would have hooted at as fantastically impossible. Faced with the reality of his old adversary’s imminent downfall, a thing which in his heart of hearts he had long ceased to believe possible, he found himself inexplicably on his feet, howling: “What’s the matter, Saint? You gonna let that dumb lug do that to you? Move around, Templar, move around!”

But the Saint seemed finished. He let the referee come between him and the Angel, and staggered along the ropes, apparently helpless and ripe for the knockout blow. … He wondered, as he peered at the Angel with eyes that he hoped had a glazed appearance, how many more of those sickening body blows he could have taken if the referee hadn’t parted them when he did… .

This, the Saint knew, was the final move in his play, the all-deciding feint. It would, he hoped, open the Angel’s guard sufficiently to permit a blow to the jaw. It would prove something else as well. For he knew that Bilinski’s experience would have warned him against such a trick-unless he had reason to believe that the Saint’s sudden torpor was not faked, but real! For the Angel must know perfectly well that he had struck no blow that could have dazed his opponent to that extent. Nevertheless, he was opening up more and more, as if he expected the Saint to give ground-as if, indeed, he was ready for Simon to collapse about this point. The Saint doubted that the Angel actually knew how this was being achieved. He was taking Spangler’s word for it, and going on past corroborative experience… .

The Saint slumped against the ropes, and not one person in the entire mob could have suspected the grim triumph that coursed through his every nerve as the Angel charged in for the slaughter, wide open, a bone-shattering right hurtling at the Saint’s jaw.

But the blow never reached its destination.

For even as the Angel started it, Simon Templar’s right hand came up from where it had been sagging near the floor, and landed, with the approximate velocity of an ack-ack shell and the same general concussive effect, flush on the Angel’s froglike chin. Barrelhouse Bilinski’s feet were jolted up a good three inches off the floor; and when he came down again, his eyes glassy, his arms flailing loosely, he continued all the way down-down to the canvas like a mountainous mass of boneless gelatin.

He lay there twitching slightly; and it was evident to the blindest of the now completely hysterical audience that he would continue to lie there until someone carried him away.

The Saint strolled to his neutral corner as the referee began the formality of counting out the sleeping Angel. He failed to see either Hoppy or Whitey as he leaned against the ropes, and for a moment he was puzzled. Then, through the deafening hullabaloo, he thought he heard Hoppy’s bronchitic foghorn somewhere below. As the referee completed his toll and Mushky leaped into the ring to retrieve the Angel’s carcass, Simon slipped through the ropes and into the midst of the raving, eddying ringside mob, looking about anxiously.

“Hoppy!” he called.

Through the unbroken pandemonium and the pleas of the newspaper reporters and cameramen converging upon him, he heard Hoppy again, this time more distinctly: “Boss, I got him! I got him!”

“Where are you?” Simon shouted.

“Under de ring! Dis way!”

The great pipe organ burst into “Hail the Conquering Hero Comes” as Simon peered beneath the apron and saw, silhouetted against the supporting joists, Mr. Uniatz holding down a set of kicking arms and legs by the simple expedient of sitting on the body that sprouted them.

“He gives me an argument when I don’t let him spill out de bottle,” Hoppy explained in stentorian confidence. “So I do like ya tell me.”

“Bring him out,” said the Saint.

Several dozen spectators crowded around, seething with excitement, while the photographers, frustrated in their efforts to get the Saint back in the ring, aimed their cameras at him crouched under the apron. Their flash bulbs went off in broadsides as Hoppy wrestled with his quarry.

The blue uniforms of policemen were converging on the spot; and over the hubbub and the pealing of the organ Simon heard the brassy tones of another familiar voice approaching.

“One side, get outta the way! One side! What’s going on here?” Inspector Fernack trumpeted as he fought his way through the crowd.

Hoppy finally dragged out his kicking clawing captive by the collar of its turtle-neck sweater.

“He tries to pull dis rod on me!” he said, and handed the gun to Simon. He yanked the man to his feet, as Fernack broke through the final barrier of humanity. “Stand up, youse!”

As the Saint had expected, it was Whitey Mullins.

“What the hell goes on here?” Fernack demanded; and Simon handed him the gun.

“Take this, John Henry. I’ve got a slug I dug out of a pawnshop doorframe that I think’ll fit it. And I’ll give you odds that the bullet that laid out Steve Nelson will also fit Whitey’s gun.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Simon and Patricia were in Steve Nelson’s hospital room next morning when Inspector Fernack arrived. Connie Grady was also there, accompanied by a subdued and sympathetic Michael. Mr. Uniatz was also present, accompanied by a breakfast bottle of bourbon. It was like Old Home Week.