Saint in New York by Leslie Charteris

at the gush of blood that broke from the
severed arteries; and while he stared, something flashed across his
vision like a streak of quicksilver, and he heard Ualino cry out.
    That was about as much as anybody saw or
understood. Somehow, without a struggle, the Saint was free; and a
steel blade flashed in his hand. It swept upwards in front of him in a terrible
arc; and Ualino clutched at his stomach and sank down, with his knees
buckling under him and a ghastly crim son tide bursting between his fingers.
… Nobody else had time to move. The sheer astounding speed of
it numbed even the
most instinctive processes of thought—they might as easily have met and parried a flash of lightning… .
And then the knife swept on upwards,
and the hilt of it struck the electric light bulb over the table and brought
utter darkness with an explosion like a gun.
    Simon leapt for the window.
    A hand touched his arm, and his knife drew
back again for a vicious thrust. And then, with a sudden effort, he
checked it in mid-flight… .
    For the hand did not tighten its grip.
Halting in the black dark, with the shouts and blunderings of
infuriated men roaring around him, his nostrils caught a faint breath of
perfume. Something cold and metallic touched his hand, and instinc tively his
fingers closed round it and recognized it for the butt of an automatic. And
then the light touch on his sleeve was gone; and with the trigger guard between
his teeth he sprang to the windowsill and reached upwards and outwards into space.

Chapter 4
    How Simon Templar Read Newspapers,
and Mr. Papulos Hit the Skids
     
    He lay out on the tiles at a perilous
downward angle of forty-five
degrees, as he had swung himself straight up from the windowsill, with his feet stretched towards the sky and only
the grip of his hands in the gutter holding him. from an imminent nosedive to squishy death. Directly
below him he could see the torsos and bullet heads of two gorillas
illumi nated in the light of a match held by
a third, as they leaned out from the
window and raked the dark ground below with straining, startled eyes. Their voices floated up to him like the music of checked hounds to a fox that has crossed
its own scent.
    “He must of gone that way.”
    “Better get down an’ see he don’t take
the car.”
    “Take the car hell—I got the keys
here.”
    The craning bodies heaved up again and vanished
back into the
room. He heard the quick thumping of their feet and the crash of the door; and then for a space another silence settled
on the Long Island night.
    Simon shifted the weight on his aching
shoulders and grinned
gently under the stars. In its unassuming way it had been a tense moment, but the advantage of the unexpected was still with him. The minds of most men run on
well-charted rails, and perhaps the mind of the professional killer in
times of sudden death has fewer sidetracks
than any other. To the four raging
and bewildered thugs who were even then pound ing down the stairs to guard their precious car and comb the surrounding
meadows, it was as inconceivable as it had been to Inspector Fernack that any man in the Saint’s position, with the untrammelled use of his limbs, should be
interested in any other diversion than that of boring a hole through the
horizon with the utmost assiduousness and dispatch. But like Inspector Fernack, the four public enemies who
fell into this grievous error were enjoying their first encounter with that dazzling recklessness which made Simon Templar an
incalcu lable variant in any
equation.
    With infinite caution the Saint began to manoeuvre
himself sideways along the roof.
    It was a gymnastic exercise for which no
rules had been de vised in any manual of the art. He had circled up to the
roof in that position because it was quicker than any other; and, once he was
up there, it was practically impossible to reverse it. Nor would he have gained
anything if he had by some in credible contortions managed to get his feet
down to