“Blondie! Pineapple at Tony Maschio’s Barber Shop on Seventh — nothin’ left but a grease-spot!”
Kessler put his cards face down on the table and stood up slowly.
He said very simply: “Dear, sweet Jesus!”
Green looked up at him with elaborately skeptical disdain. “Every time I get a swell hand,” he muttered plaintively, “something happens so you have an excuse to run out on me.”
Kessler, moving towards the door, yipped: “Come on.”
Nicholas, sometimes “St. Nick,” Green was thirty-six — with the smooth tanned skin, bright China-blue eyes of twenty, the snowy white hair of sixty. He was tall and slim and angular, and his more or less severe taste in clothes was violently relieved by a predilection for flaming-red neckties.
His nickname derived from his rather odd ideas about philanthropy. He had been at one time or another a tent-show actor, a newspaperman, gambler, gun-runner, private detective and a few more ill-assorted whatnots, and that wide experience had given him decidedly revolutionary convictions as to who was deserving and who was not.
A stroke of luck combined with one of his occasional flashes of precise intuition had enabled him to snatch a fortune from a falling stock-market and for three years he had used his money and the power it carried to do most of the things young millionaires don’t do. He numbered legmen, Park Avenue debutantes, pickpockets, touts, bank robbers and bank presidents, wardheelers and international confidence-men among his wide and varied circle of friends, and he had played Santa Claus to more than a few of them at one time or another. He found the devious twistings and turnings of politics, the complicated intrigues of the New York underworld exciting, spent more, of his time in night courts than in night-clubs and was a great deal prouder of his accuracy with a Colt .45 than he was of his polo.
He got up and followed Blondie Kessler out of the Reporters’ Room and down the corridor. In his car — a black and shiny and powerful coupe — they careened around the corner and roared north. Green swerved to miss a sleepily meandering cab by inches, asked:
“Now, about this Maschio?”