The Saint Sees It Through s-26
The Saint Sees It Through
( Saint - 26 )
Leslie Charteris
A new opium ring was flooding the country with all the misery, vice, and murder that go with the illicit traffic in drugs. How could Dr. Zellermann, the Park Avenue psychiatrist, be linked with the distribution of the dope? What did New York's bawdiest rendezvous for seamen, Cookie's Canteen, have to do with it?
And where did 903 Bubbling Well Road, Shanghai enter the picture? It was the business of Simon Templar (The Saint) to find the answers to these questions. It was his job to track down and bring to justice the "top brass" of the criminal organization that made these connections profitable.
But, the Saint was sick—love-sick. He had been so ever since he first laid eyes on lovely Avalon Dexter. She was utterly desirable; her laughter was like "bells at twilight"; and honesty seemed to look out of her eyes! The Saint "had it bad."
Most important, Avalon was in a position to help him immeasurably with his mission. However, she might be one of the international gang he had vowed to smash! Templar had to be sure. His life was at stake!
THE DOCTOR WAS A PHONY,
AND COOKIE WAS A CROOK—
but what about the girl with the
bell-like voice? The Saint had to know!
A new opium ring was flooding the country with all the misery, vice, and murder that go with the illicit traffic in drugs. How could Dr. Zellermann, the Park Avenue psychiatrist, be linked with the distribution of the dope? What did New York's bawdiest rendezvous for seamen, Cookie's Canteen, have to do with it?
And where did 903 Bubbling Well Road, Shanghai enter the picture? It was the business of Simon Templar (The Saint) to find the answers to these questions. It was his job to track down and bring to justice the "top brass" of the criminal organization that made these connections profitable.
But, the Saint was sick—love-sick. He had been so ever since he first laid eyes on lovely Avalon Dexter. She was utterly desirable; her laughter was like "bells at twilight"; and honesty seemed to look out of her eyes! The Saint "had it bad."
Most important, Avalon was in a position to help him immeasurably with his mission. However, she might be one of the international gang he had vowed to smash! Templar had to be sure. His life was at stake!
THE SAINT
SEES IT THROUGH
BY
Leslie Charteris
Author of The Saint in New York, etc.
THE SAINT SEES IT THROUGH
Copyright, 1946, by Leslie Charteris
CAST OF CHARACTERS
SIMON TEMPLAR ("THE SAINT")
Deadly foe of the "Ungodly." His code is harsh but just and applies to all criminals—whether they be men or women!
AVALON DEXTER
Has so perfect a figure that she can wear anything— or nothing—with equal grace. Is she for the Saint? Or is she allied with a vicious, world-wide gang of criminals? The Saint is not sure.
DR. ERNST ZELLERMANN
Tall, silky-haired, Park Avenue psychiatrist. Has ". . . one of those fat smiles that somehow remind the Saint of fresh shrimps." An habitue of Cookie's Cellar.
COOKIE
A mammoth woman. Proprietress of "Cookie's Cellar" and "Cookie's Canteen." "Everybody's back-slapper and good egg, with a heart of garbage and scrap iron!"
FERDINAND PAIRFIELD
Golden-haired surrealistic artist who works for Cookie. "He" paints his fingernails with a violet tinted lacquer.
KAY NATELLO
Slatternly writer of lewd lyrics that Cookie sings. Has a "voice like a nutmeg grater on tin cans ..."
PATRICK HOGAN
A simple seaman who is "... painting the town with a roscoe in his pants." Knocks the Saint cold with a single smashing blow to the jaw!
1.
How Simon Templar spent a Night Out,
and Avalon Dexter took him Home.
Simon Templar lighted another cigarette, took a sip of his latest and most anemic-looking highball, and reflected with considerable gloom that if the vanquishing of villains required any man like himself to endure certain unpleasantnesses and discomforts there must be a lot of more attractive and entertaining places to endure them in than a joint with a name like Cookie's Cellar, situated in a rejuvenated basement in the East Fifties of New York City, USA.
Such, for instance, as any reasonably busy boiler factory in any moderately insalubrious zone of reconversion.
For instance, in the boiler factory he would not have been offered Little Neck clams to whet his appetite. But then, after succumbing to the temptation, he would not have been faced with a soup plate full of water enlivened with a few fragments of weary ice among which floated, half submerged, four immature bivalves which had long ago decided that the struggle for existence was not worth it. In the boiler factory, he would not have been able to order a rare filet mignon; but then, he would probably have had a real appreciation of the lunch in his plastic pail.
In the boiler factory there might have been a continual cacophony of loud and nerve-racking noises; but it was very doubtful whether they could have achieved such pinnacles of excruciating ingenuity as were being scaled by the five frenetic sons of rhythm who were blowing and thumping their boogie-woogie beat on the orchestra dais. There might have been smoke and stench in the air; but they would have been relatively crisp and fresh compared with the peculiarly flat sickly staleness of the vaporized distillate of cigars, perfume, and sweat that flowed through the happy lungs of Cookie's clientele.
There might have been plenty of undecorative and even vicious men to look at; but they would not have been undecorative and vicious in the sleek snide soft way of the chair-polishing champions who had discovered that only suckers work. There might have been a notable dearth of beautiful women who wore too little, drank too much, and chattered too shrilly; and it would have been a damn good thing.
But Simon Templar, who was known as the Saint in sundry interesting records, sat there with the patience of a much more conventional sanctity, seeming completely untouched by the idea that a no-girl no-champagne customer taking up a strategic table all by himself in that jampacked bedlam might not be the management's conception of a heaven-sent ghost. . . .
"Will there be anything else, sir?" asked a melancholy waiter suggestively; and the Saint stretched his long elegantly tailored legs as best he could in the few square inches allotted to him.
"No," he said. "But leave me your address, and if there is I'll write you a postcard."
The melancholy one flashed him a dark glance which suggested that his probable Sicilian ancestry was tempted to answer for him. But the same glance took in the supple width of the Saint's shoulders, and the rakish fighting lines of a face that was quite differently handsome from other good-looking faces that had sometimes strayed into Cookie's Cellar, and the hopeful mockery of translucent blue eyes which had a disconcerting air of being actively interested in trouble as a fine art; and for some reason he changed his mind. Whereby he revealed himself as the possessor of a sound instinct of self-preservation, if nothing else.
For those rather pleasantly piratical features had probably drifted in and out of more major forms of trouble than those of any other adventurer of this century. Newspaper reproductions of them had looked out from under headlines that would have been dismissed as a pulp writer's fantasy before the man whom they accoladed as the Robin Hood of modern crime arrived to make them real. Other versions of them could have been found in the police files of five continents, accompanied by stories and suspicions of stories that were no less startling if much more dull in literacy style; the only thing lacking, from the jaundiced viewpoint of Authority,
was a record of any captures and convictions. There were certain individual paladins of the Law, notably such as Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, of Scotland Yard, and Inspector John Henry Fernack, of New York's Centre Street, whose pet personal nightmares were haunted by that impudent smile; and there were certain evil men who had thought that their schemes were too clever to be touched by justice who had seen those mocking blue eyes with the laughter chilling out of them, the last thing before they died.
And now so many of those things were only memories, and the Saint had new enemies and other battles to think of, and he sat in Cookie's Cellar with as much right and reason as any law-abiding citizen. Perhaps even with more; for he was lucky enough never to have heard of the place before a man named Hamilton in Washington had mentioned it on the phone some days before.
Which was why Simon was there now with absolutely no intention of succumbing to the campaign of discouragement which had been waged against him by the head waiter, the melancholy waiter, the chef, and the chemist who measured out eyedroppers of cut liquor behind the scenes.
"Are you waiting for somebody, sir?" asked the melancholy waiter, obtruding himself again with a new variation on his primary motif; and the Saint nodded.
"I'm waiting for Cookie. When does she do her stuff?"
"It ain't hardly ever the same twice," said the man sadly. "Sometimes it's earlier and sometimes it's later, if you know what I mean."
"I catch the drift," said the Saint kindly.
The orchestra finally blew and banged itself to a standstill, and its component entities mopped their brows and began to dwindle away through a rear exit. The relief of relative quiet was something like the end of a barrage.
At the entrance across the room Simon could see a party of salesmen and their lighter moments expostulating with the head waiter, who was shrugging all the way down to his outspread hands with the unmistakable gesture of all head waiters who are trying to explain to an obtuse audience that when there is simply no room for any more tables there is simply no room for any more tables.
The melancholy waiter did not miss it either.
"Would you like your check, sir?" he inquired.
He put it down on the table to ease the decision.
Simon shook his head blandly.
"Not," he said firmly, "until I've heard Cookie. How could I look my friends in the eye if I went home before that? Could I stand up in front of the Kiwanis Club in Terre Haute and confess that I'd been to New York, and been to Cookie's Cellar, and never heard her sing? Could I face——"
"She may be late," the waiter interrupted bleakly. "She is, most nights."
"I know," Simon acknowledged. "You told me. Lately, she's been later than she was earlier. If you know what I mean."
"Well, she's got that there canteen, where she entertains the sailors—and," added the glum one, with a certain additionally defensive awe, "for free."
"A noble deed," said the Saint, and noticed the total on the check in front of him with an involuntary twinge. "Remind me to be a sailor in my next incarnation."
"Sir?"
"I see the spotlights are coming on. Is this going to be Cookie?"
"Naw. She don't go on till last."
"Well, then she must be on her way now. Would you like to move a little to the left? I can still see some of the stage."
The waiter dissolved disconsolately into the shadows, and Simon settled back again with a sigh. After having suffered so much, a little more would hardly make any difference.
A curly-haired young man in a white tuxedo appeared at the microphone and boomed through the expectant hush: "Ladies and gentlemen—Cookie's Cellar—welcomes you again—and proudly presents—that sweet singer of sweet songs: . . . Miss —Avalon—Dexter! Let's all give her a nice big hand."
We all gave her a nice big hand, and Simon took another mouthful of his diluted ice-water and braced himself for the worst as the curly-haired young man sat down at the piano and rippled through the introductory bars of the latest popular pain. In the course of a reluctant but fairly extensive education in the various saloons and bistros of the metropolis, the Saint had learned to expect very little uplift, either vocal or visible, from sweet singers of sweet songs. Especially when they were merely thrown in as a secondary attraction to bridge a gap between the dance music and the star act, in pursuance of the best proven policy of night club management, which discovered long ago that the one foolproof way to flatter the intellectual level of the average habitue is to give him neither the need nor the opportunity to make any audible conversation. But the Saint felt fairly young, in fairly good health, and fairly strong enough to take anything that Cookie's Cellar could dish out, for one night at least, buttressing himself with the knowledge that he was doing it for his Country. . . .
And then suddenly all that was gone, as if the thoughts had never crossed his mind, and he was looking and listening in complete stillness.
And wondering why he had never done that before.
The girl stood under the single tinted spotlight in a simple white dress of elaborate perfection, cut and draped with artful artlessness to caress every line of a figure that could have worn anything or nothing with equal grace.
She sang:
"For it's a long long time
From May to December,
And the days grow short
When you reach November . . ."
She had reddish-golden-brown hair that hung long over her shoulders and was cut straight across above large brown eyes that had the slightly oriental and yet not-oriental cast that stems from some of the peoples of eastern Europe. Her mouth was level and clean-cut, with a rich lower lip that warmed all her face with a promise of inward reality that could be deeper and more enduring than any ordinary prettiness.
Her voice had the harmonic richness of a cello, sustained with perfect mastery, sculptured with flawless diction, clear and pure as a bell.
She sang:
"And these few precious days
I'd spend with you;
These golden days
I'd spend with you."
The song died into silence; and there was a perceptible space of breath before the silence boiled into a crash of applause that the accompanist, this time, did not have to lead. And then the tawny hair was waving as the girl bowed and tossed her head and laughed; and then the piano was strumming again; and then the girl was singing again, something light and rhythmic, but still with that shining accuracy that made each note like a bubble of crystal; and then more applause, and the Saint was applauding with it, and then she was singing something else that was slow and indigo and could never have been important until she put heart and understanding into it and blended them with consummate artistry; and then again; and then once more, with the rattle and thunder of demand like waves breaking between the bars of melody, and the tawny mane tossing and her generous lips smiling; and then suddenly no more, and she was gone, and the spell was broken, and the noise was empty and so gave up; and the Saint took a long swallow of scarcely flavored ice-water and wondered what had happened to him.
And that was nothing to do with why he was sitting in a high-class clip joint like Cookie's Cellar, drinking solutions of Peter Dawson that had been emasculated to the point where they should have been marketed under the new brand name of Phyllis Dawson.
He looked at the dead charred end of a cigarette that he had forgotten a long time ago, and put it down and lighted another.
He had come there to see what happened, and he had certainly seen what happened.
The young piano-player was at the mike again, beaming his very professional beam.
He was saying: "And now—ladies and gentlemen—we bring you—the lady you've all been waiting for—in person—the one and only . . ."
"Lookie, lookie, lookie," said the Saint to himself, very obviously, but with the very definite idea of helping himself back to reality "here comes Cookie."
2
As a raucous yowl
of acclamation drowned out the climax of the announcement, Simon took another look at the table near the dais from which Cookie arose, if not exactly like Venus from the foam, at least like an inspired hippopotamus from a succulent wallow.
It was a table which he had observed during a previous casual survey of the room, without recognising Cookie herself as the third person who had joined it—a fact which the melancholy waiter, doubtless with malice aforethought, had carefully refrained from pointing out to him. But the two other people at it he had been able to place on the flimsier pages of a scrap-book memory.
The more feminine of the two, who wore the trousers, could be identified as a creature whose entrance to life had been handicapped by the name of Ferdinand Pairfield. To compensate for this, Mr. Pairfield had acquired a rather beautifully modeled face crowned with a mop of strikingly golden hair which waved with the regularity of corrugated metal, a pair of exquisitely plucked eyebrows arching over long-lashed soulful eyes, a sensuously chiseled mouth that always looked pink and shining as if it had been freshly skinned, and a variety of personal idiosyncrasies of the type which cause robustly ordinary men to wrinkle their nostrils. Simon Templar had no such common-place reactions to personal whimsy: he had enough internal equanimity to concede any human being the right to indulge in any caprice that looked like fun to him, provided the caprice was confined to the home and did not discombobulate the general populace: but he did have a rather abstract personal objection to Ferdinand Pairfield. He disliked Mr. Pairfield because Mr. Pairfield had elected to be an artist, and moreover to be a very dextrous and proficient artist whose draughtsmanship would have won the approval of Dürer or Da Vinci. There was only one thing wrong with the Art of Ferdinand Pairfield. At some point in his development he had come under the influence of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Ultimate Googooism; with the result that he had never since then been able to paint a woman except with breasts that came out like bureau drawers, apexed with nipples that took the form of rattlesnakes, put-and-take tops, bottle-openers, shoe-horns, faucets, bologna sausage, or very small Packard limousines.