The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series) Page 12

  James Prather’s cock-lobster eyes regarded Mr Smith with a sort of frantic intensity.

  “But…but…but…”

  Harrison said, “I see. Maybe you’d better come along with us, Mr Prather.”

  Prather, it was quite obvious, searched his conscience, his capabilities, and appraised his ingenuity. He looked at Harrison. He looked at Smith, and his thoughts retreated into the inside of his own mind. From somewhere he gathered a certain nervous courage, and he set his mouth in a quivering line.

  “I don’t know what you’re after, but I do know one thing. I can stand on my constitutional rights. Unless you have any formal charges to bring against me, I don’t have to say anything to you. Good day, gentlemen.”

  “Well,” Harrison said.

  “Ho-hum,” Smith said.

  The two young men got lazily to their feet and eyed the jittering Prather without expression for a long time. Then they went away. Prather was also on his way as soon as he could get into a jacket and grab a hat. He flagged a taxi in front of the apartment house, and directed the driver to Dr Zellermann’s Park Avenue offices.

  Zellermann was not happy to see him. His long face would have made ice-cubes seem like fire-crackers. He chose his words carefully, as if he were picking each one out of a hat.

  “And so you led them directly to me, Mr Prather, I consider this a very ill-advised move on your part.”

  “I didn’t lead them to you. I wasn’t followed.”

  “May I ask just how you know that? In your present condition you wouldn’t see an elephant following you.” Dr Zellermann picked up his phone, and dialled a number. “Bring two of your boys with you immediately.”

  “What…what are you going to do?” Prather asked. He repeated the question three times.

  Dr Zellermann made a triangle with the thumb and forefingers of his two white hands, and rested his chin upon the apex. He looked at James Prather as if he were a subject being discussed by a class in zoology.

  “One of the principal aims of this particular organisation, as you know, is to take care of our own. You, inadvertently, have placed us in a position where you are in danger—physically, morally, and legally. We believe that it is to the interests of the organisation to protect you. That was the purpose of my call.”

  “You mean then you’re not—”

  “Going to—”

  “Well…uh…”

  “Liquidate you? My dear Mr Prather, please! As I said before, our prime motivation in these present circumstances is to take care of our own. While we are waiting, I want you to tell me exactly what you told the Government men.”

  James Prather’s mind was a roil of emotions. Uppermost, of course, was the instinct of self-preservation. He not only had no desire to die, but his every thought was directed strictly toward keeping himself alive. He cast into his mind for motives, inferences, and implications in Dr Zellermann’s attitude which might be at odds with that inherent drive which is born into every man.

  “I didn’t tell them anything. They seemed to know more than you could possibly expect them to. When their questions reached a certain point, I did what I had to, and that was to clam up.”

  “What exactly did they seem to know about?”

  “They mentioned Jeffries and Hyman. They knew that they’d visited me and brought me something from Shanghai. And they asked me if I knew 903 Bubbling Well Road.”

  “Which of course you denied.”

  “Naturally. But how would they know about Jeffries and Hyman?”

  Zellermann spread his hands.

  “Who can tell? Seamen with money get drunk, sometimes they get into trouble. There are all kinds of situations in which they might talk. Luckily, however, they have nothing to talk about—except yourself. And you would never be indiscreet.”

  Prather swallowed.

  “Of course not. I know I’m worried. But if you don’t let me down—”

  Dr Zellermann nodded.

  “I knew we could depend upon you, Mr Prather.”

  And then silence fell. Dr Zellermann seemed to have said all that he wished to say, and James Prather was afraid to say anything more. They sat quietly, not meeting each other’s eye. They sat like this for an undeterminable time, and their tableau was disturbed by Dr Zellermann’s blonde secretary, with the sleeked-back hair, who stuck her head into the office and said,

  “Mr Carpenter to see you with two friends.”

  “Show them in.”

  The trio who entered the office were large hard-eyed men, pushing middle-age. They had one characteristic in common: they were ready to take orders and carry them out.

  “Mr Carpenter—Mr Prather.”

  The two men shook hands. Prather was nervous, Carpenter matter of fact.

  “Mr Prather,” Dr Zellermann continued, “has unfortunately attracted some undesirable attention. It’s up to us to see that he comes to no harm in the hands of the authorities. Mr Carpenter, you know what to do.”

  Prather stood up.

  “Dr Zellermann, I can’t thank you enough. I—”

  Dr Zellermann waved away his protestations of good will.

  “Nonsense. One looks out for one’s own.”

  James Prather twiddled his thumbs nervously as the long black car wound through traffic for an hour or more and left behind the city limits of New York. At long intervals farmhouses appeared on each side, and it may be presumed that birds sang in the trees nearby. Prather had no ear for our feathered friends and no eyes for rustic architecture. He sat rigidly in the back seat between the two nameless companions of Mr Carpenter, while that gentleman drove expertly and swiftly to their unrevealed destination. The others initiated no trivial conversation, and Mr Prather was in no mood to start any himself.

  When they had travelled another hour, Carpenter swung down a narrow side road, whose pavement gave way presently to a sandy surface. Another turning brought them into a lane which was distinguished by car tracks and overhanging maples. After a half-mile’s travel along this road, Carpenter stopped the car. He got out.

  “This way,” he said.

  Prather, not without inner misgivings, followed the big man through a barbed-wire fence, across a pasture, and deep into a green orchard of apple trees.

  “Where are you taking me?” Prather asked in a small voice.

  Carpenter turned to face him.

  “No place,” he said. “You’re here.”

  He took an automatic from under his left arm and pointed it at Prather’s chest. The first shot would have been enough, but Carpenter, a conscientious man, gave him a second bullet to make certain.

  2

  The man who went down the back stairs of the Algonquin Hotel and slipped quickly and inconspicuously through the lobby from the service door could never have been mistaken for the debonair and immaculate Mr Templar who had lately become accepted as one of the brighter landmarks of that possessive caravanserai. He wore heavy black shoes that were cracked and stained and down at heel, heavy black wool socks drooping untidily over his ankles, dark blue trousers with baggy knees and a shiny seat, a soiled white shirt with a dark tie knotted and twisted like an old rope, a dark blue reefer jacket that was wrinkled across the shoulders, patched in one elbow and threadbare at the cuffs, and a vaguely nautical peaked cap without insignia that looked as if it was used to combining the functions of head-gear and brass polisher. His shoulders sagged and his chest slouched, so that he didn’t seem very tall. His complexion was ruddy and weather-beaten. What could be seen of his hair was a drab grey that matched his bushy eyebrows and straggly moustache and the close-cropped fringe of beard around his chin.

  He was out of the hotel so quickly that nobody really noticed him, but he was not bothered about being seen. If any leg-men of the Ungodly were watching for him in the lobby, he was quite sure that they would patiently continue to sit and watch. The man who had become Tom Simons right down to his grimy finger-nails was prepared to submit his creation to any ocular inspe
ction—including that of the door-keeper at Cookie’s Canteen.

  The door-keeper, who was a woman with dyed red hair and a face like a dyspeptic camel, examined his identification papers and gave him a stock smile which displayed many large teeth tastefully mounted in gold.

  “Glad to have you with us, Mr Simons,” she said. “Go right in and make yourself at home.”

  The Saint went in.

  He found himself in a big barren room which had probably once been a restaurant, for one side of it was still broken up into upholstered booths. The rest of the furnishings were less ornamental, consisting of plain bare wooden tables and chairs, all of them scarred from much service. On the side opposite the booths there was a low dais with little more than enough room for the grand piano that stood on it. The walls were plastered with posters of female nubility and cartoons from Esquire. Near the entrance there was a rack of tattered popular magazines. At the back of the room there was a service bar from behind which two very wavy-haired young men in their shirt-sleeves were dispensing sandwiches and bottles of non-alcoholic throat irrigation. A juke box blared inexorably through the hit parade.

  The room was crowded with men of all ages, some in ordinary civilian clothes, some in costumes that tried nebulously to look like a sort of seafaring uniform. Some of the parties at the tables were engrossed in games of cards or checkers. Other men danced with the hostesses in a clear space in front of the piano, clumsily or stiffly or flashily according to type. The hostesses were mostly young and pert and passably good-looking. They wore aprons with star-dotted borders and Cookie’s Canteen embroidered across them. A few other smooth-skinned young men in identical aprons moved among the tables picking up empty bottles and dirty plates.

  Aside from the rather noticeably sleek fragility of the male helpers, the place was fairly typical of the numerous oases that had mushroomed across the country during the war to offer chaste and sheltered recreation to men of the services, in line with the current concept of tea and parlour games as the great spiritual need of a warrior between battles. But whereas practically all the prototypical estaminets were sponsored and protected by public organisations, Cookie’s Canteen was a strictly free-lance and unofficial and unendorsed post-war benevolence. And in all of that there were questions to which the Saint wanted many answers…

  He edged his way through the tables to the service bar and asked for a Coke. With the bottle in his hand, he turned back toward the room, scanning the crowd through the thick fog of smoke that hung under the low ceiling and wondering what his move should be.

  A girl in an apron stopped in front of him.

  “Hullo,” she said. “You got everything you, want?”

  “Yus, thank yer, Miss.”

  “Gee, you must be English.”

  “That’s right, Miss.” The Saint’s voice was hoarse and innocent. “Strite from Aldgate. ’Ow did yer guess?”

  “Oh, I’m getting so I can spot all the accents.”

  “Well now!” said the Saint admiringly.

  “This your first time here?”

  “Yus, Miss.”

  “When did you get to New York?”

  “Just got in larst night.”

  “Well, you didn’t take long to find us. Do you have any friends here?”

  “No, Miss…”

  The Saint was just saying it when a face caught his eye through the blue haze. The man was alone now in a booth which a couple of other seamen had just left, and as he shifted his seat and looked vacantly around the room the Saint saw him clearly and recognised him.

  He said suddenly, “Gor-blimy, yus I do! I know that chap dahn there. Excuse me, Miss—”

  He jostled away through the mob and squeezed unceremoniously into the booth, plonking his bottle down on the stained table top in front of him.

  “’Ullo, mite,” he said cheerfully. “I know I’ve seen you before. Your nime’s Patrick ’Ogan, ain’t it?”

  “Shure, Hogan’s the name,” said the other genially, giving him a square view of the unmistakable pug-nosed physiognomy which Simon had last seen impaled on the spotlight of Cookie’s Cellar. “An’ what’s yours?”

  “Tom Simons.”

  “I don’t remember, but think nothing of it. Where was it we met?”

  “Murmansk, I think—durin’ the war?”

  “It’s just as likely. Two weeks I’ve spent there on two trips, an’ divil a night sober.”

  It appeared that Hogan found this a happy and satisfactory condition, for he had obviously taken some steps already toward inoculating himself against the evils of sobriety. His voice was a little slurred, and his breath was warmed with spicier fluids than passed over the counter of Cookie’s Canteen.

  “This ’ere’s a bit off orl right, ain’t it?” Simon said, indicating the general surroundings with a wave of his bottle.

  “There’s nothing better in New York, Tom. An’ that Cookie—she’s a queen, for all she sings songs that’d make your own father blush.”

  “She is, is she?”

  “Shure she is, an’ I’ll fight any man that says she isn’t. Haven’t ye heard her before?”

  “Naow. Will she be ’ere ternight?”

  “Indeed she will. Any minute now. That’s what I come in for. If it wasn’t for her, I’d rather have a drink that’ll stay with me an’ a girl I can have to meself to roll in the hay. But Cookie can take care of that too if she’s a friend of yours.”

  He winked broadly, a happy pagan with a girl and a hang-over in every port.

  “Coo,” said the Saint, properly impressed. “And are yer a friend off ’ers?”

  “You bet I am. Why, last Saturday she takes me an’ a friend o’ mine out to that fine club she has, an’ gives us all the drinks we can hold, an’ there we are livin’ like lords until daybreak, an’ she says any time we want to go back we can do the same. An’ if you’re a friend o’ mine, Tom, why, she’ll do the same for you.”

  “Lumme,” said the Saint hungrily. “Jer fink she would?”

  “Indeed she will. Though I’m surprised at an old man like you havin’ these ideas.”

  “I ain’t so old,” said the Saint aggrievedly. “And if it comes ter ’aving fun wif a jine—”

  A figure loomed over the table and mopped officiously over it with a checkered rag. The hand on the rag was pale and long-fingered, and Simon noticed that the finger-nails were painted with a violet-tinted lacquer.

  Hardly daring to believe that anything so good could be true, the Saint let his eyes travel up to the classical features and pleated golden hair of the owner of that exotic manicure.

  It was true. It was Ferdinand Pairfield.

  Mr Pairfield looked at the Saint, speculatively, but without a trace of recognition, discarded him, and smirked at the more youthful and rugged-looking Hogan.

  “Any complaints, boys?” he asked whimsically.

  “Yes,” Hogan said flatly, “I don’t like the help around here.”

  Mr Pairfield pouted.

  “Well, you don’t have to be rude,” he said huffily, and went away.

  “The only thing wrong with this place,” Hogan observed sourly, “is all those pretty boys. I dunno why they’d be lettin’ them in, but they’re always here.”

  Then the truculent expression vanished from his face as suddenly as it had come there, and he let out a shrill joyful war-cry.

  “Here she is, Tom,” he whooped. “Here’s Cookie!”

  The lights dimmed as he was speaking, giving focus to the single spotlight that picked up the bulbous figure of Cookie as she advanced to the front of the dais.

  Her face was wide open in the big hearty jolly beam that she wore to work. Throwing inaudible answers back to the barrage of cheers and whistling that greeted her, she manoeuvred her hips around the piano and settled them on the piano stool. Her ploughman’s hands pounded over the keyboard, and the Saint leaned back and prepared himself for another parade of her merchandise.

  “Good evening, ever
ybody,” she blared when she could be heard. “Here we are again, with a load of those songs your mothers never taught you. Tonight we’ll try and top them all—as usual. Hold on to your pants, boys, and let’s go!”

  She went.

  It was a performance much like the one that Simon had heard the night before, only much more so. She took sex into the sewer and brought it out again, dripping. She introduced verses and adlibs of the kind that are normally featured only at stag smokers of the rowdiest kind. But through it all she glowed with that great gargoyle joviality that made her everybody’s broad-minded big sister, and to the audience she had, much as the USO would have disapproved and the YMCA would have turned pale with horror, it was colossal. They hooted and roared and clapped and beat upon the tables, demanding more and more until her coarse homely face was glistening with the energy she was pouring out. And in key with his adopted character, and to make sure of retaining the esteem of Patrick Hogan, the Saint’s enthusiasm was as vociferous as any.

  It went on for a full three-quarters of an hour before Cookie gave up, and then Simon suspected that her principal reason was plain exhaustion. He realised that she was a leech for applause: she soaked it up like a sponge, it fed and warmed her, and she gave it back like a kind of transformed incandescence. But even her extravagant stamina had its limit.

  “That’s all for now,” she gasped. “You’ve worn me down to a shadow.”

  There was a howl of laughter.

  “Come back tomorrow night, and I’ll try to do better.”

  She stepped down off the platform to be hand-shaken and slapped on the back by a surge of admirers as the lights went up again.

  Patrick Hogan climbed to his feet, pushing the table out and almost upsetting it in his eagerness. He cupped his hands to his mouth and split the general hubbub with a stentorian shout.

  “Hey, Cookie.”

  His coat was rucked up to his hips from the way he had been sitting, and as he lurched there his right hip pocket was only a few inches from Simon’s face. Quite calmly and almost mechanically the Saint’s eyes traced the outlines of the object that bulged in the pocket under the rough cloth—even before he moved to catch a blue-black gleam of metal down in the slight gape of the opening.