The Saint Sees It Through s-26 Page 14

  "Naow. This'll be the fust time." Simon leered at the doctor familiarly. "But don't fergit—yer promised ter gimme some phone numbers."

  "I won't forget," Zellermann reassured him, with all the soothing earnestness that he would have tendered to a patient with an AA Dun & Bradstreet. "Although most of them have probably changed since the war. However, I will put you in touch with a friend of mine who'll take good care of you. I know you'll find him, because I heard from him just the other day."

  "Knows all the numbers, does 'e?"

  "All of them. A very interesting fellow. He used to send me art pieces for my collection. As a matter of fact, you might be able to bring some back for me—he wrote me that he had several things that I wanted, if he could only send them."

  The Saint took another drink while he weighed what chance he should take. And he knew that he had to take it. The invita­tion might not come again.

  "Too 'ot fer the post office, eh?" he ventured encouragingly.

  "Not at all. I think you'd find them very dull. But there are still so many restrictions about importing antiques——"

  "Just an honest spot o' smuggling wot?" The Saint screwed up one eye in another ponderous wink. "Well, guv'nor, Tom Simons is yer man. To 'ell wiv the customs, that's wot I always sye."

  Dr. Zellermann stared at him contemplatively.

  At which second the window curtains flew apart like the portals of some explosive genesis, permitting the irruptive re­turn of Ferdinand Pairfield accompanied by a bloodcurdling wail of horrific anguish which had started in the outside dis­tance and arrived in the room with him before anyone else had been able to identify and classify it.

  Mr. Pairfield was a remarkable sight, too. He was practically naked. His coat and shirt had been split down the back, so that the two halves of them hung and flapped like limp wings around his wrists. His trousers had completely disappeared, thus reveal­ing that he wore pale jade silk drawers with his initials em­broidered on them.

  He ran to Cookie like a little boy running to his mother.

  "Cookie!" he bawled. "That dreadful man! He tore my clothes, and he—he threw me into—into a lot of poison ivy!"

  In that immortal moment, before anyone else could say any­thing, Patrick Hogan strode through the window like a vic­torious hooligan, beaming across every inch of his irresponsible pug-nosed face.

  "Shure, an' I was just waitin' for the chance," he said joyfully. He lurched over to the bar, still with the same broad grin, and put his left hand on the Saint's shoulder and turned him a little. "But as for you, Tom me boy, ye're no pal o' mine to have sent him afther me, bad cess to ye; an' if that's your idea of a joke, here's something that oughta tickle ye——"

  Without the slightest additional warning, and while he was still grinning and stirring the Saint's shoulder with his other hand, his right fist rammed upwards at the Saint's jaw. Simon Templar was caught where he sat, flat back and relaxed and utterly off his guard. There was an evanescent splash of multi­coloured flares in the centre of his head, and then a restful blackness in which sleep seemed the most natural occupation.

  5.

  How Ferdinand Pairfield was Surprised,

  and Simon Templar left Him.

  He woke up in a very gradual and laborious way that was like dragging his mind out of a quagmire, so that although he knew in advance that he had been knocked out there was a lot of other history to struggle through before he got to thinking about that. He remembered everything that he had been through since the beginning of the story—Cookie's Cellar and Sutton Place South, the Algonquin and a cheap secondhand clothing store, Cookie's Canteen and a drive out to Southampton. He remembered people—Cookie, Natello, Pairfield, a melancholy waiter, even Wolcott Gibbs. And a girl called Avalon. And a hostess in Cookie's Canteen, and Patrick Hogan who had so much breezy fun and carried a gun on his hip—and who had Socked him. And Dr. Ernst Zellermann with his clean white hair and ascetic features and persuasive voice, betraying himself with his long ponderous words and the incurable cumbersome Teutonic groping for far-fetched philosophical generalisations which belonged so obviously in a germanic institute of Geopo­litik. Zellermann, who was a phony refugee and a genuine master of the most painstakingly efficient technique that the same germanic thoroughness had ever evolved. Zellermann, who was the prime reason why the Saint had ever entered that circle at all. . . .

  That was how Simon had to build it back, filling in the cer­tainties where there had been questions before, in a dull plod­ding climb out of the fog.

  He didn't open his eyes at once because there was a sort of ache between his temples which made him screw up his brows in protest, or as a counter-irritant; and that made opening the eyes an independent operation to be plotted and toiled over. It came to him out of this that he had been knocked out before, seldom with a bare fist, but several times with divers blunt instruments; but the return to consciousness had never been so lagging and sluggish as this. He had been drugged before, and this was more like that.

  After that stage, and deriving from it, there was a period of great quiet, in which he reviewed other things. He tested his sensations for the drag or the pressure of a gun anywhere on him, and remembered that he had held so strictly to his created character that he had set out unarmed. Still without moving, he let his skin give him tactile confirmation of the clothes in which he had left the Algonquin. The only doubt he had about his make-up concerned the gray of his hair and eyebrows, which was provided by talcum powder and could have been brushed out. His face coloring was a dye and not a grease paint, and his straggly moustache had been put on hair by hair with water­proof gum—both of them were secure against ordinary risks.

  Then after a while he knew why he was thinking along these lines. Because somebody was washing his face. Or dabbing it with a cold wet cloth. Somebody was also shaking him by the shoulder and calling a name that he knew perfectly well.

  "Tom! . . . Tom!"

  A curiously low voice, for anyone who was trying to call him. But a voice that he knew, too. And a faint fragrance in the air that had been in his nostrils before, some other time when he had heard the voice.

  He decided to try opening his eyes, and finally he made it. But there was no difference. Only blackness swimming around him. And he knew that his eyes were open.

  He wondered whether he had gone blind.

  His head hurt very much, and the shaking at his shoulder made him dizzy. He wished it would all go away.

  "Tom! Wake up!"

  A voice that filled out words like a cello; a voice and a frag­rance that would be in his memory always.

  "Avalon darling," he murmured sleepily, "I love you very much, but can't you do anything about your insomnia?"

  Then everything was utterly still, except for the far faint lulling whisper of the sea.

  It seemed like a good time to go to sleep again.

  Then there was a face soft against his cheek, moving; and a dampness that was not the wet cloth, but warmer; and the fragrance sweeter and stronger in his senses; and arms and hands clinging and pressing; and the same voice talking and making sounds that merged with the slow soft roll of the sea, and breaking strangely where there were no waves breaking, and speaking and stirring, and this was something that happened a million years ago but had only been waiting a million years to happen, and he had to do something about it even if it meant smashing his way out of an iron vise that was holding him in that absurd and intolerable suspension, and there was the sweetness and the voice saying: "Simon, darling . . . Oh, darling, my darling . . . Simon, wake up, Simon!"

  And the voice saying: "I didn't know—I'm such a dope, but I should have . . . Simon, darling, wake up! ... Simon, wake up. . . ."

  And then he was awake.

  A moment of clarity drifted towards him like a child's bal­loon, and he caught it and held on to it and everything was quite clear again while he held it.

  He said very carefully: "Avalon, I left a message for you that I'd see
you tomorrow. Well, this is tomorrow. Only I can't see you. That's silly, isn't it?"

  She said: "I had to put the light out again because I didn't want it to show under the door. . . . Simon, dear, wake up! Don't go to sleep again!"

  He said: "Why did you come here anyway?"

  "Because that creep I was with knew Cookie, and she'd apologised, and she was being as nice as she can be, and I have to work and Hollywood came into the picture, and it seemed like the only graceful thing to do, and I can't fight the whole night club racket, and . . . Simon, you must stay awake!"

  "I am awake," he said. "Tell me what happened."

  "After Pat hit you, Cookie said that it wasn't your fault that Ferdy went after him—he went by himself, or she sent him, or something. And he was broken-hearted. So we all put you to bed, and everything broke up. Zellermann said that you'd sleep it off——"

  "I bet he did. But I never had to sleep off a crack on the jaw before."

  "Pat's a strong guy. He carried you upstairs all by himself."

  "I've been slugged by strong guys before. Believe it or not. But it never felt like this afterwards. I feel as if I'd been drugged."

  "You could have been. You were drinking."

  "I was cheat-drinking. I poured the last one myself. But Zel­lermann could have slipped something into my glass."

  "I suppose he could have, in the commotion . . . Stay awake, Simon. You must!"

  "I'm still awake. That's how I know. If I'd had it all, you wouldn't have been able to rouse me now. Hogan stopped that by slugging me. But Zellermann still thought I'd sleep it off. I would have, too, if you hadn't worked on me."

  "Simon, are you making sense now?"

  "I'm- doing everything in the wide world I can." It was still an unforgettable effort to speak concisely and intelligibly. "Give me a chance, baby. I'm working at it. I never was drunk to­night. I sound like it now, but I wasn't."

  She was close to him and holding him, her face against his, as if she was trying to transmit her life and wakefulness to him from every inch of her body.

  It seemed like a long time; and through all of it he was working through fluctuating waves of awareness to cling on to the wandering balloon that was his only actual link to this other world that he had to keep touch with against all the cruel vio­lation of a dream and the fumes of a drug that kept creeping back to try and steal away his will.

  She said after a few seconds or a thousand years: "Darling, you shouldn't have dressed up with that moustache." He knew that he had to shut out the note in her voice that hung between a sob and a hysterical giggle. "It tickles," she said.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "Remind me to get rid of it. Any time when I know what I'm doing."

  She roused up beside him.

  "Darling, you won't go off again now, will you?"

  "No." He rolled over and rolled up. The movement sent his head whirling away from his body on a weird trajectory that revolted his stomach. He caught it somehow as it came back, and held it firmly in his hands. He said meticulously: "Look. You were dabbing my face with a wet cloth when I came to. You got the wet cloth from somewhere. Where?"

  "There's a bathroom. Here."

  Her fingers slid into his hand. He went stumbling through the dark where she led him, as if his limbs didn't belong to him any more.

  Then he was alone for a while.

  A while during which he used every trick and help that his experience could lend to him. Plus an overdose of aspirin from a bottle which he found in a cabinet over the washbowl.

  Plus an effort of will that tore every nerve in his body to shreds and put it painstakingly together again. He never quite knew how he accomplished that. Part of it came from the native resilience of a perfect physique in pluperfect condition, the in­estimable reserves of a phenomenal athlete who hadn't been out of training for sixteen years. Part of it came from an uncon­querable power of mind that would have torn every cell of its habitation apart and remodelled it to achieve the resuscitation that had to be achieved. The Saint didn't know, and had no sort of inward power to waste on analysing it. He only knew that it took every atom of inward power that he could gouge out of himself, and left him feeling as if he had been drawn through a steam wringer at the end. But he had done what he had set himself to do; and he knew that also.

  He didn't even know how long it took; but he knew he had done it when he was finished.

  He knew it when he turned out the light in the bathroom and ventured back into the dark to find Avalon, feeling strange­ly light and vacuous in his bones, but with his mind queerly cool and alive, as if the discipline had purged and polished it to stratospheric limpidity and translucence.

  He knew it when she was still waiting for him, and their hands met in the blackness that was not blind any more, and they sat side by side on the edge of a bed, and he could touch the warmth of her hair and say: "It's okay now, Avalon. Honestly. Everything's under control. Now tell me——"

  "How did you do it?" she asked, huskily, and close to him, but not leaning on him. "Why were you putting on the act, and what are you doing here?"

  "I bought myself a costume and some war-paint," he said lightly, "and here I am, because I was invited. The important thing is—what were you doing, trying to wake me up in the middle of the night?"

  "I was afraid," she said, very quietly now.

  He could feel the tenseness of her like a strung wire beside him; but he said nothing, keeping her hand steadily in his hand and his shoulder lightly against hers, until she went on.

  "I told you why I came here."

  "I remember."

  "I had a scare when I saw Zellermann. Nobody had said any­thing about him, which they could hardly have helped doing unless they were holding out on purpose. But I didn't want to be silly, so I just tried to pass it off. You heard me. And I thought, Ferdy didn't count at all, and you and Pat were two outside guys who couldn't have been mixed up in anything, and nothing much could happen while you were around. But I was scared, in a silly way, inside. And then, when Pat picked on you for no reason at all, it all came up again."

  "I know," said the Saint. "And then?"

  "Then I just tried to talk myself out of it, but I didn't get very far with that. But us Dexters never know when to say Uncle ... So then I went to bed when everybody else did, when Pat had broken everything up anyway. I thought I could go to sleep and forget it; but I couldn't ... I just lay awake and listened. . . . And nobody else seemed to go to bed. No­body tried to open my door, which I'd locked, being a bright girl; but every time I was nearly asleep I could hear people creeping about and muttering. And it never sounded like the sort of noises they'd make if they were just trying to go on with a party. And I went on being afraid all the time. I'm a very imaginative character, don't you think?"

  "No," he said. "Not any more than you should be."

  "So finally I thought I just had to talk to somebody safe and ordinary again, and I thought you and Pat were the best bet there was. I didn't know what on earth I'd have said to you when I got here, but I'd have thought of something. I always can, being an old hardened expert. . . . But when I crept in here, and had the light on for a moment, and Pat hadn't been to bed at all, and you seemed to be out for keeps as Zellermann said you would be—I suppose I had a moment of panic. So ... Simon, will you forget me being so stupid? I'm not usually like this. But it's sort of ridiculous, after everything that's gone on, for this to be you."

  The Saint seemed to have arms vaguely attached to his body, one of them pressing her against him and the other lying across his lap and becoming conscious of something sharp-edged and metallic in his pocket—something that was definably not small change creased into a fold of his trousers. Something that both­ered his forearm and his thigh together, so that he put his hand into his pocket to fumble and identify it, while he was talking. . . . He still had to cling on to every item of his hard-won clarity, inch upon inch.

  He said: "Avalon, I've got to tell you two or three thin
gs as sharply as I can make it. I'll fill in the details later, when we have time. If we have time. But probably you can do that for yourself anyway."

  She said: "Yes, darling."

  "If you can't, you'll have to take my word for it. We're right in the middle of a situation where human life is cheaper than the air. I'm going to try to make sense, and I want you to listen closely. I'm sure I can't do it twice."

  "I won't interrupt," she said.

  The Saint fastened his mind on what he wanted to say. He forced himself with tremendous effort to expand the phrase "Benny sent me" into a broad picture.

  "The relationship between 903 Bubbling Well Road in Shang­hai and Dean's Dock and Warehouse Company in Brooklyn is not apparent on any map. But it's there. I know it. I came along on this clambake to snap the cord that ties those two locations together. This joint is where one end of it is anchored. You've got to see the theory before you can understand the problem."

  He rested for a moment. It was still harder than he would have believed to marshal his thoughts.

  "Once there was a man who got an idea. For the sake of con­venience let's call him Dr. Ernst Zellermann, though it may be somebody else. His idea was utterly simple: If you can supply a man with narcotics you can make him into a tool. The war shot the dope-smuggling racket into its proper hell, but revival on a large scale was forecast when Hiroshima became a subject for history books. And that's where 903 Bubbling Well Road entered the picture."

  He paused again.

  "Let's assume that some person or persons glaumed on to the bulk of available opium in the Orient. Collaborationists, almost certainly. They established a headquarters, stored their supplies, and awaited the inevitable ending of hostilities. They knew that merchant ships would soon be coming, and that many of these ships would have touched at New York. So Dr. Z collects a pal or two and sets up a place here. For the sake of clarity let's call it Cookie's Canteen. Merchant seamen are invited, everything free, even a roll of hay with whatever hostess a boy can promote. Our likely character is wined and dined at Cookie's Cellar, everything still on the house. If he exhibits certain desirable larcenous tendencies—which would be revealed under questioning by a clever psychiatrist—the pitch is made. And the Mad Hatter said plaintively: 'It was the best butter——"