Call for the Saint Read Online Free PDF Page B

Frankie said without rancor. “Sure he is. But nobody’s asking you.”
    His hands worked over the Saint, efficiently exploring every inch from head to foot where a weapon could have been concealed.
    Simon said pleadingly: “I don’t understand this. Where are we going?”
    “It’s like a lodge, see?” Frankie told him. “You gotta be introduced and sworn in, see?”
    Simon tried to keep up with their route by ear, but even a man born and bred in Chicago would have been finally baffled by the turns and backtracks the car took. He could only hope that they would not be confusing enough to shake off Hoppy in spite of the trained bloodhound talents which, like his celerity on the draw, were among the few useful legacies of his vocation during the Volstead Era.
    A little more than half an hour later, as near as the Saint could judge, the car stopped and the door clicked open. Simon put up a hand to his blindfold, but Frankie slapped it down. The same cruelly probing fingers gripped his arm again and guided him out of the sedan and across a paved area where wind blew mildly against his face. There was very little noise of traffic now, and the air had the cleaner smell of a residential district.
    A door opened and shut. Simon could hear his footsteps echoed, and presently another latch clicked, and he was guided down a steep flight of steps.
    “Okay, turn on the lights,” Frankie said. The guiding hand let go. Frankie said: “Stay where you are.”
    The Saint stood still, and in the hushed pause that followed he was aware of tiny scuffs and rustles of movement, such as would come from a small group of people waiting in conscious silence.
    Then the blindfold was lifted from his eyes, and a painful intensity of light blazed directly into his face.
    He did not wince, though the glare was brutal. The new blindness which it induced made little difference-he knew that it would have been impossible to see past those spotlights at any time. This was the police line-up, with a difference. He stood motionless, knowing that eyes were studying him from behind the lights, but that these were not the eyes of guardians of the law and peace. They belonged to brothers-in-arms of Junior, alert to recognize him if he were a spy for any opposition gang, or memorizing his features in readiness for future shakedowns.
    A voice began to speak, artificially distorted through a crude public-address system..
    “We welcome you to the Metropolitan Benevolent Society,” it said unctuously-“an organization designed for all the aid and protection we can give will be at your service …”
    It was a formalized little speech, which might have been a phonograph recording for all Simon could tell; he guessed that it had been used often before and was a part of the regular routine. Again that flash of monstrous incongruity struck through him at the situation-ruthless killers making a Rotary Club speech, the Arabian Nights in Chicago. But his face showed nothing but a slightly vacuous, listening intentness.
    The speaker went on to observe that begging was one of the most ancient and honorable professions, that ancient monks had practiced it respectably, as the Salvation Army did today, but that in these times the individual practitioner was in danger of all kinds of arbitrary persecution. And just as exploited Labor had been forced to band together to safeguard the rights which no lone individual could defend, so the professional mendicants had been obliged to band together and declare a closed shop for their fraternity-this same fraternity, of course, being the Metropolitan Benevolent Society.
    It sounded good, the Saint admitted to himself. He was beginning to be able to see a little now, through the swimming spots and dazzles of his maltreated retinas; but there was not a great deal to see-only part of a bare cement-walled room with one door in it, and a portable loud-speaker on the floor to one side, with wires trailing from it and disappearing behind