Read The Saint in London: Originally Entitled the Misfortunes of Mr. Teal for Free Online

“But you couldn’t expect to have all the fun to yourself, could you? Come on, my lad—take that old sock off your head and let’s see how your face is put together.”
    The man did not answer or obey, and Simon stepped forward and whipped off the mask with a deft flick of his hand.
    Having done which, he remained absolutely motionless for several ticks of the clock.
    And then, softly, helplessly, he started to laugh.
    “Suffering snakes,” he wailed. “If it isn’t good old Hoppy Uniatz!”
    “For cryin’ out loud,” gasped Mr. Uniatz. “If it ain’t de Saint!”
    “You haven’t forgotten that time when you took a dive through the window of Rudy’s joint on Mott Street?”
    “Say, an’ dat night you shot up Angie Paletta an’ Russ Kovari on Amsterdam Avenue.”
    “And you got crowned with a chair and locked in the attic—you remember that?”
    Mr. Uniatz fingered his neck gingerly, as though the aches in it brought back memories.
    “Say,” he protested aggrievedly, “whaddaya t’ink I got for a memory—a sieve?” He beamed again, reminiscently; and then another thought overcast his homely features with a shadow of retrospective alarm. “An’ I might of killed you!” he said in an awed voice.
    The Saint smiled.
    “If I’d known it was you, I mightn’t have thought this gun was quite so funny,” he admitted. “Well, well, well, Hoppy—this is a long way from little old New York. What brings you here?”
    Mr. Uniatz scrambled up from the floor and scratched his head.
    “Well, boss,” he said, “t’ings never were de same after prohibition went out, over dere. I bummed around fer a while, but I couldn’t get in de money. Den I hoid dey was room fer guys like me to start up in London, so I come over. But hell, boss, dese Limeys dunno what it’s all about, fer God’s sake. Why, I asks one mob over here what about gettin’ a coupla typewriters, an’ dey t’ink I’m nuts.” Mr. Uniatz frowned for a moment, as if the incapability of the English criminal to appreciate the sovereign uses of machine guns was still preying on his mind. “I guess I must of been given a bum steer,” he said.
    Simon nodded sympathetically and strolled across to the table for a cigarette. He had known Hoppy Uniatz many years ago as a seventh-rate gunman of the classical Bowery breed and had never been able to regard him with the same distaste as he viewed other hoodlums of the same species. Hoppy’s outstanding charm was a skull of almost phenomenal thickness, which, while it had protected his brain from fatal injury on several occasions, had by its disproportionate density of bone left so little space for the development of grey matter that he had been doomed from the beginning to linger in the very lowest ranks even of that unintellectual profession; but at the same time it lent to Hoppy’s character a magnificent simplicity which the Saint found irresistible. Simon could understand that Hoppy might easily have been lured across the Atlantic by exaggerated rumours of an outbreak of armed banditry in London; but that was not all he wanted to know.
    “My heart bleeds for you, Hoppy,” he murmured. “But what made you think I had anything worth stealing?”
    “Well, boss,” explained MY. Uniatz apologetically, “it’s like dis. I get interdooced to a guy who knows annudder guy who’s bein’ blackmailed, an’ dis guy wants me to get back whatever it is he’s bein’ blackmailed wit’ an’ maybe bump off de guy who’s got it. So I’m told to rent an apartment here, an’ I got de one next door to you—it’s a swell apartment, wit’ a bathroom an’ everyt’ing. Dat’s how I’m able to come in de building wit’out de janitor stoppin’ me an’ askin’ who I wanna see.”
    Simon blew out a thoughtful streamer of smoke —he had overlooked that method of slipping through his defenses.
    “Didn’t they tell you my name?” he asked.
    “Sure. But all dey tell me is it’s a Mr. Templar,