The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series) Read online

  THE ADVENTURES OF THE SAINT

  Enter the Saint (1930), The Saint Closes the Case (1930), The Avenging Saint (1930), Featuring the Saint (1931), Alias the Saint (1931), The Saint Meets His Match (1931), The Saint Versus Scotland Yard (1932), The Saint’s Getaway (1932), The Saint and Mr Teal (1933), The Brighter Buccaneer (1933), The Saint in London (1934), The Saint Intervenes (1934), The Saint Goes On (1934), The Saint in New York (1935), Saint Overboard (1936), The Saint in Action (1937), The Saint Bids Diamonds (1937), The Saint Plays with Fire (1938), Follow the Saint (1938), The Happy Highwayman (1939), The Saint in Miami (1940), The Saint Goes West (1942), The Saint Steps In (1943), The Saint on Guard (1944), The Saint Sees It Through (1946), Call for the Saint (1948), Saint Errant (1948), The Saint in Europe (1953), The Saint on the Spanish Main (1955), The Saint Around the World (1956), Thanks to the Saint (1957), Señor Saint (1958), Saint to the Rescue (1959), Trust the Saint (1962), The Saint in the Sun (1963), Vendetta for the Saint (1964), The Saint on TV (1968), The Saint Returns (1968), The Saint and the Fiction Makers (1968), The Saint Abroad (1969), The Saint in Pursuit (1970), The Saint and the People Importers (1971), Catch the Saint (1975), The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (1976), Send for the Saint (1977), The Saint in Trouble (1978), The Saint and the Templar Treasure (1978), Count On the Saint (1980), Salvage for the Saint (1983)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2014 Interfund (London) Ltd.

  Foreword © 2014 Spider Robinson

  Publication History and Author Biography © 2014 Ian Dickerson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477842850

  ISBN-10: 1477842853

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  CHAPTER ONE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR SPENT A NIGHT OUT, AND AVALON DEXTER TOOK HIM HOME

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER TWO: HOW DR ZELLERMANN USED THE TELEPHONE AND SIMON TEMPLAR WENT VISITING

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER THREE: HOW MR PRATHER SAID LITTLE, AND DR ZELLERMANN SAID EVEN LESS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER FOUR: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DRESSED UP, AND DULY WENT TO A PARTY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER FIVE: HOW FERDINAND PAIRFIELD WAS SURPRISED, AND SIMON TEMPLAR LEFT HIM

  1

  2

  3

  4

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

  THE SAINT CLUB

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original edition and includes vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation that might differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, allowing only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  In a career that has had its share of honours and great privileges, few have been as personally meaningful to me as this: the honour and privilege of having words of mine placed within a book by the immortal Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, a.k.a. Leslie Charteris. So far, only being asked to collaborate posthumously with Robert A. Heinlein has been more flattering and validating.

  Mr Heinlein wrote the first book I ever read, Rocket Ship Galileo, at age 6. But it wasn’t long after that before some kind librarian handed me my first Saint book, The Brighter Buccaneer, and it had a similar impact on me. It contained, for instance, a song lyric I can still quote from memory, nearly sixty years later:

  And if red blood runs thin with years

  —by God! if I must die—

  I’ll kiss red lips, and drink red wine,

  And let the rest go by, my son

  And let the rest go by…

  Those lines just keep getting better with the passage of time. As do they all; it is no accident that the hero of my novel Mindkiller is named Norman Kent, after the unforgettable title character of the Saint novel The Saint Closes the Case.

  At this remove, I can no longer recall what it was like not to be a Saint fan. It was the second time in my life that I ever made note of the author’s name, went back to the library, and said, “Do you have any more by this guy?”

  And by the time their copious supply ran out, I had discovered secondhand bookstores. I still have most of my original copies of the saga, and my copy of The Saint Sees It Through is a 1962 paperback from a New York publisher that imaginatively called itself Fiction Publishing Company, and charged fifty cents for the book. Even at 1962 prices, it was a steal. (I suspect their rights to the title may have been just a teensy bit clouded.) The New York Times said of it, “Never a dull moment.”

  For one thing, it is one of the last of the cascade of Saint books which was written entirely, teeth and toenails, by Mr Charteris himself, rather than by one of the several writers, perfectly competent craftsmen one and all, who tackled the character under his supervision after he himself decided that enough was a great plenty. (A decision I support more and more as my own favorite characters begin to reach ages scarcely distinguishable from my own. Robert Heinlein said, “It is amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired.”)

  I’ve never read a Saint book I didn’t enjoy, regardless of actual author, for Mr Charteris created a character and a template and most of all, a sensibility that…well, I suppose it’s possible that someone could screw up just about anything. But happily, to my knowledge, nobody ever did let down the Saint.

  At least, not until Hollywood got hold of him. The only Saint film I can stand to watch again is The Saint in New York, starring Louis Hayward as Mr Templar, with a good script adapted from Mr Charteris’s novel by Charles Kaufman and Mortimer Offner. It was the first of RKO’s eight Saint films, released in 1938, and unfortunately, Mr Hayward did not play the Saint again until 1953, having been replaced by the wildly miscast George Sanders and later by Hugh Sinclair. In all fairness, neither actor got a script as good as Mr Hayward had. (I look forward with cautious optimism to the newest Saint TV series, starring Adam Rayner: he seems to me better cast than either Roger Moore or Ian Ogilvy. I admit I wince a bit at the prospect of Patricia Holm as a martial arts expert—but it’s certainly no worse than Robert Downey Jr. portraying Sherlock Holmes as one, and we’ve managed to survive that.)

  But upon accepting the assignment to produce this foreword, I naturally made haste to reread The Saint Sees It Through with close attention. I wanted to find and draw to your attention some special excellence of this particular book, some aspect in which it stood out even in the large and distinguished family of its related volumes.

  No easy task. Ingenious plot, constructed with the intricacy and technical elegance of a Swiss watch? Check. Characters as colorful as an explosion in a rainbow factory, yet as believable as yo
ur Aunt Matilda? Check. Startling and thrilling surprises that seem utterly inevitable in retrospect? Check. Interesting insights into criminal psychology? Check. All absolutely predictable in anything written by the master.

  Approximately two-thirds of the way through, on page 102 of my ancient paperback copy, I found what I was looking for: what the late great Anthony Boucher once called “a pun of singular terror and beauty.”

  I have acquired a small reputation as a punster myself—but no atrocity I have ever perpetrated comes close to matching the one that lurks in wait for you in this volume. Believe me, you’ll know it when you come to it. It is spoken by a character obviously created purely to deliver that line: a New York cab driver who plays no other part in the story. New York City itself might have been created just to birth this one abomination, and if so, it was a good investment.

  After all, as John Lennon famously said, the success of a pun is in the “oy” of the beholder. I hope you will enjoy The Saint Sees It Through as much, and for as long, as I have.

  —Spider Robinson

  CHAPTER ONE:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR SPENT A NIGHT OUT, AND AVALON DEXTER TOOK HIM HOME

  1

  Simon Templar lighted another cigarette, took a sip of his latest and most anaemic-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 bi-valves 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 vaporised 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 jam-packed 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 literary style; the only thing lacking, from the jaundiced view-point 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 eye-droppers 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 nob
le 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 all 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 nightclub management, which discovered long ago that the one foolproof way to flatter the intellectual level of the average habitué 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.