The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (7 page)

This was three years before the columnist of the Elmford News was moved to inquire:

“How long does our mayor think he can kid reporters and deputations with his celebrated pose of injured innocence?

“We always thought it was a good act while it lasted; but isn’t it time we had a new show?”

It was not the first time that it had been suggested in print that the naive and childlike simplicity which was Sam Purdell’s greatest charm was one of the shrewdest fronts for ingenious corruption which any politician had ever tried to put over on a batch of sane electors, but this was the nearest that any commentator had ever dared to come to saying that Sam Purdell was a crook.

It was a suggestion which left Sam a pained and puzzled man. He couldn’t understand it. These adopted children of his, these citizens whose weal occupied his mind for twenty-four hours a day, were turning round to bite the hand that fed them. And the unkindest cut of all, the blow which struck at the roots of his faith in human gratitude, was that he had only tried to do his best for the city which had been delivered into his care.

For instance, there was the time when, dragged forth by the energy of one of his rotund daughters, he had climbed laboriously one Sunday afternoon to the top of the range of hills which shelter Elmford on the north. When he had got his wind and started looking round, he realized that from that vantage point there was a view which might have rejoiced the heart of any artist. Sam Purdell was no artist, but he blinked with simple pleasure at the panorama of rolling hills and wooded groves with the river winding between them like the track of a great silver snail; and when he came home again he had a beautiful idea.

“You know, we got one of the finest views in the state up there on those hills! I never saw it before, and I bet you didn’t either. And why? Because there ain’t no road goes up there; and when you get to my age it ain’t so easy to go scrambling up through those trees and brush.”

“So what?” asked Al Eisenfeld, who was even less artistic and certainly more practical.

“So I tell you what we do,” said Sam, glowing with the ardour of his enthusiasm almost as much as with the aftereffects of his unaccustomed exercise. “We build a highway up there so they can drive out in their automobiles week ends and look around comfortably. It makes work for a lot of men, and it don’t cost too much; and everybody in Elmford can get a lot of free pleasure out of it. Why, we might even get folks coming from all over the country to look at our view.”

He elaborated this inspiration with spluttering eagerness, and before he had been talking for more than a quarter of an hour he had a convert.

“Sure, this is a great idea, Sam,” agreed Mr Eisenfeld warmly. “You leave it to me. Why, I know—we’ll call it the Purdell Highway… .”

The Purdell Highway duly came into being at a cost of four million dollars. Al Eisenfeld saw to it. In the process of pushing Sam Purdell up the political tree he had engineered himself into the strategic post of Chairman of the Board of Aldermen, a position which gave him an interfering interest in practically all the activities of the city. The fact that the cost was about twice as much as the original estimate was due to the unforeseen obstinacy of the owner of the land involved, who held out for about four times the price which it was worth. There were rumours that someone in the administration had acquired the territory under another name shortly before the deal was proposed, and had sold it to the city at his own price—rumours which shocked Sam Purdell to the core of his sensitive soul.

“Do you hear what they say, Al?” he complained, as soon as these slanderous stories reached his ears. “They say I made one hundred thousand dollars graft out of the Purdell Highway I Now, why the hell should they say that?”

“You don’t have to worry about what a few rats are saying, Sam,” replied Mr Eisenfcld soothingly. “They’re only jealous because you’re so popular with the city. Hell, there are political wranglers who’d tell stories about the Archangel Gabriel himself if he was Mayor, just to try and discredit the administration so they could shove their own crooked party in. I’ll look into it.”

Mr Eisenfeld’s looking into it did not stop the same rumours circulating about the Purdell Bridge, which spanned the river from the southern end of the town and linked it with the State Highway, eliminating a detour of about twenty miles. What project, Sam Purdell asked, could he possibly have put forward that was more obviously designed for the convenience and prosperity of Elmford? But there were whispers that the Bennsville Steel Company, which had obtained the contract for the bridge, had paid somebody fifty thousand dollars to see that their bid was accepted. A bid which was exactly fifty percent higher than the one put in by their rivals.

“Do you know anything about somebody taking fifty thousand dollars to put this bid through?” demanded Sam Purdell wrathfully, when he heard about it; and Mr Eisenfeld was shocked.

“That’s a wicked idea, Sam,” he protested. “Everyone knows this is the straightest administration Elm-ford ever had. Why, if I thought anybody was taking graft, I’d throw him out of the City Hall with my own hands.”

There were similar cases, each of which brought Sam a little nearer to the brink of bitter disillusion. Sometimes he said that it was only the unshaken loyalty of, his family which stopped him from resigning his thank-less labours and leaving Elmford to wallow in its own ungrateful slime. But most of all it was the loyalty and encouragement of Mr Eisenfeld.

Mr Eisenfeld was a suave sleek man with none of Sam Purdell’s rubicund and open-faced geniality, but he had a cheerful courage in such trying moments which was always ready to renew Sam Purdell’s faith in human nature. This cheerful courage shone with its old unfailing luminosity when Sam Purdell thrust the offending copy of the Elmford News which we have already referred to under Mr Eisenfeld’s aggrieved and incredulous eyes.

“I’ll show you what you do about that sort of writing, Sam,” said Mr Eisenfeld magnificently. “You just take it like this–-“

He was going on to say that you tore it up, scattering the libellous fragments disdainfully to the four winds but as he started to perform this heroic gesture his eye was arrested by the next paragraph in the same column, and he hesitated.

“Well, how do you take it?” asked the mayor peevishly.

Mr Eisenfeld said nothing for a second and the mayor looked over his shoulder to see what he was reading.

“Oh, that 1” he said irritably. “I don’t know what that means. Do you know what it means, Al?”

“That” was a postscript about which Mr Purdell had some excuse to be puzzled.

“We hear that the Saint is back in this country. People who remember what he did in New York a couple of years ago might feel like inviting him to take a trip out here. We can promise he would find plenty of material on which to exercise his talents.”

“What Saint are they talkin’ about?” asked the mayor. “I thought all the Saints was dead.”

“This one isn’t,” said Mr Eisenfeld; but for the moment the significance of the name continued to elude him. He had an idea that he had heard it before and that it should have meant something definite to him. “I think he was a crook who had a great run in New York a while back. No, I remember it now. Wasn’t he a sort of free-lance reformer who had some crazy idea he could clean up the city and put everything to rights… ?”

He began to recall further details; and then as his memory improved he closed the subject abruptly. There were incidents among the stories that came filtering back into his recollection which gave him a vague discomfort in the pit of his stomach. It was ridiculous, of course—a cheap journalistic glorification of a common gangster; and yet, for some reason, certain stories which he remembered having read in the newspapers at the time made him feel that he would be happier if the Saint’s visit to Elmford remained a theoretical proposition.

“We got lots of other more important things to think about, Sam,” he said abruptly, pushing the newspaper into the wastebasket. “Look here—about this monument of yours on the Elmford Riviera …”

The Elmford Riviera was the latest and most ambitious public work which the administration had undertaken up to that date. It was to be the crowning achievement in Sam Purdell’s long list of benevolences towards his beloved citizens.

A whole two miles of the riverbank had been acquired by the city and converted into a pleasure park which the sponsors of the scheme claimed would rival anything of its kind ever attempted in the state. At one end of it a beautiful casino had been erected where the citizens of Elmford might gorge themselves with food, deafen themselves with three orchestras and dance in tightly wedged ecstasy till feet gave way. At the other end was to be provided a children’s playground, staffed with trained attendants, where the infants of Elmford might be left to bawl their heads off under the most expert and scientific supervision while their elders stopped to enjoy the adult amenities of the place. Behind the riverside drive, a concession had been arranged for an amusement park in which the populace could be shaken to pieces on roller coasters, whirled off revolving discs, thrown about in barrels, skittered over the falls and generally enjoy all the other elaborate forms of discomfort which help to make the modern seeker after relaxation so contemptuous of the unimaginative makeshift tortures which less enlightened souls had to get along with in medieval days. On the bank of the river itself, thousands of tons of sand had been imported to create an artificial beach where droves of holiday-makers could be herded together to blister and steam themselves into blissful imitations of the well-boiled prawn. It was, in fact, to be a place where Elm-ford might suffer all the horrors of Coney Island without the added torture of getting there.

And in the centre of this Elysian esplanade there was to be a monument to the man whose unquenchable devotion to the community had presented it with this last and most delightful blessing.

Sam Purdell had been modestly diffident about the monument, but Mr Eisenfeld had insisted on it.

“You gotta have a monument, Sam,” he had said. “The town owes it to you. Why, here you’ve been working for them all these years; and if you passed on tomorrow,” said Mr Eisenfeld, with his voice quivering at the mere thought of such a calamity, “what would there be to show for all you’ve done?”

“There’s the Purdell Highway,” said Sam deprecatingly, “the Purdell Suspension Bridge, the Purdell–-“

“That’s nothing,” said Mr Eisenfeld largely. “Those are just names. Why, in ten years after you die they won’t mean any more than Grant or—or Pocahontas. What you oughta have is a monument of your own. Something with an inscription on it. I’ll get the architect to design one.”

The monument had duly been designed—a sort o’f square, tapering tower eighty feet high, crowned by an eagle with outspread wings, on the base of which was to be a great marble plaque on which the beneficence and public-spiritedness of Samuel Purdell would be recorded for all time. It was about the details of the construction of this monument that Mr Eisenfeld had come to confer with the mayor.

“The thing is, Sam,” he explained, “if this monument is gonna last, we gotta make it solid. They got the outside all built up now; but they say if we’re gonna do the job properly, we got to fill it up with cement.”

“That ‘11 take an awful lot of cement, Al,” Sam objected dubiously, casting an eye over the plans; but Mr Eisenfeld’s generosity was not to be balked.

“Well, what if it does? If the job’s worth doin’ at all, it’s worth doin’ properly. If you won’t think of yourself, think of the city. Why, if we let this thing stay hollow and after a year or two it began to fall down, think what people from out of town would say.”

“What would they say?” asked Mr Purdell obtusely.

His adviser shuddered.

“They’d say this was such a cheap place we couldn’t even afford to put up a decent monument for our mayor. You wouldn’t like people to say a thing like that about us, would you, Sam?”

The mayor thought it over.

“Okay, Al,” he said at length. “Okay. But I don’t deserve it, really I don’t.”

Simon Templar would have agreed that the mayor had done nothing to deserve any more elaborate monument than a neat tombstone in some quiet worm cafeteria. But at that moment his knowledge of Elmford’s politics was not so complete as it was very shortly to become.

When he saw Molly Provost slip the little automatic out of her bag he thought that the bullet was destined for the mayor; and in theory he approved. He had an engaging callousness about the value of political lives which, if universally shared, would make democracy an enchantingly simple business. But there were two policemen on motorcycles waiting to escort the mayoral car into the city, and the life of a good-looking girl struck him as being a matter for more serious consideration. He felt that if she were really determined to solve all of Elmford’s political problems by shooting the mayor in the duodenum, she should at least be persuaded to do it on some other occasion when she would have a better chance of getting away with it. Wherefore the Saint moved very quickly, so that his lean brown hand closed over hers just at the moment when she touched the trigger and turned the bullet down into the ground.

Neither Sam Purdell nor Al Eisenfeld, who were climbing into the car at that moment, even so much as looked around; and the motorcycle escort mercifully joined with them in instinctively attributing the detonation to the backfire of a passing truck.

It was such a small gun that the Saint’s hand easily covered it; and he held the gun and her hand together in a viselike grip, smiling as if he were just greeting an-old acquaintance, until the wail of the sirens died away.

“Have you got a license to shoot mayors?” he inquired severely.

She had a small pale face which under” a skillfully applied layer of cosmetics might have taken on a bright doll-like prettiness; but it was not like that yet. But he had a sudden illuminating vision of her face as it might have been, painted and powdered, with shaved eyebrows and blackened eyelashes, subtly hardened. It was a type which he had seen often enough before, which he could recognize at once. Some of them he had seen happily married, bringing up adoring families; others … For some reason the Saint thought that this girl ought not to be one of those others.