The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series) Page 14

  And the Parkway stretching ahead, and the soothing murmurs of movement.

  And Avalon with the friendliness and the passion meeting at her mouth, and the music always in her voice.

  And the great hospitality of Cookie and Zellermann, and the glances that went between them.

  And the headlights reaching out to suck in the road.

  And Avalon…

  The Saint slept.

  He woke up presently out of a light dream mist in which sane thought and diaphanous fantasy had blended so softly and lightly that it seemed like a puzzle in clairvoyance to separate them.

  Then, as you sat still and probed for them, they slipped away elusively and faded at the last finger-tip of apprehension, so that it was like searching for shadows with a lantern, and in the end there was nothing at all except time gone by and the headlights still drinking up the road—a road over which pools of thin white fog loomed intermittently and leapt and swallowed them and were gone like a dream.

  The Saint lighted a cigarette and glanced at the pale precise sharply-graven profile of Dr Zellermann on his left.

  “We’re nearly there,” Zellermann said, as if there had been no hiatus at all.

  Houses and hedges rose at the headlights, dodged adroitly, and were left behind. Southampton, Long Island, slept in peace, exposing nothing in common with its parent town of Southampton, England—not bombed, not scarred by war, and not knowing the other battle that swept through it in the sleek car that Dr Zellermann drove.

  They touched the end of Main Street, turned right, and then left again presently, and then after a little while they swung into a driveway and stopped. Simon knew where they were—somewhere in the long line of ambitious beach-fronted houses which had expanded along that coast.

  Cookie’s summer hide-away may have been only a shanty in new shanty town, but her description of it as “a little shack” was rather modest. Dr Zellermann let them in with a key, and found light switches with familiar assurance. They went through a panelled hall with quite a broad oak staircase, and into a living-room that was almost as big as Cookie’s Cellar—which didn’t make a barn of it either. But it was still a large room, with tall French windows on the ocean side and glass tables and big square-cut modern couches, all of it reflecting the kind of fast-moneyed life which Simon could easily associate with the profits of a joint like Cookie’s. And probably also, reflecting, he thought in a flash of intuition the interior decorating ideas of Ferdinand Pairfield—after the apotheosis of Kay Natello he doubted whether any of the members of Cookie’s clique would be allowed to withhold their talents from practical application.

  Zellermann slid aside a pair of pale green mirrors with geometrical designs frosted on them, disclosing a bar alcove with three chrome-legged stools in front and a professional array of bottles forming a relief mural behind. He stepped through the flap in the counter and said, “How about a drink?”

  “Sure, an’ that must have been what me throat was tryin’ to tell me,” said Hogan with a prodigious yawn, “when I was dreamin’ about the Suez Canal on the way.”

  “I’ll get some ice,” said Natello, in the same lifeless twang, as if she was used to being useful and didn’t think about it any more.

  “And I’ll help ye, if ye’ll lead the way.”

  They went out. Simon sat on one of the stools, put one elbow on the bar, and pushed back his disreputable cap. Zellermann set out a row of glasses, disregarded the finely representative stock behind him, and brought up a bottle of Old MacSporran Genuine Jersey City Scotch Whisky from under the bar and began to measure out doses.

  “Are you and Patrick on the same ship?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Naow,” said the Saint. “We met in Murmansk.”

  “Of course. I should have remembered. He’s going to Singapore and you’re headed for Shanghai.”

  “That’s right, guv’nor.”

  “Have you known Patrick long?”

  “Only since the larst bar we was in. In Murmansk, that was.”

  “Until you met at the Canteen tonight.”

  “That’s right. An’ I ses to ’im, Gor-blimy, I ses, I’ve seen you before, an’ ’e ses to me, Gor-blimy, ’e ses—”

  Simon went on with this.

  Dr Zellermann finished his general pouring, turned for a liqueur glass, and unobtrusively selected himself a bottle of Benedictine from the display shelves.

  “A very fine instinctive type,” he said suavely. “Quite unrepressed, given to violent mental and physical expression, but essentially sequacious under the right guidance.”

  The Saint rubbed his eyes.

  “Blimey, guv’nor,” he said, “yer carn’t arf tork, can yer? Strike me pink!”

  He subsided into abashment when this miracle failed to occur, and devoted himself to the exotic nuances of Old MacSporran as soon as Hogan and Natello returned with sufficient ice to numb his palate into by-passing its more caustic overtones. He had a gift of being able to let time slide over him while he pretended to be linked with it, so that nobody noticed that his presence was somewhere else while he sat where he was. He was able to pass that knack on to Tom Simons, without making any change in the character he had created. But he had no important recollections of the next hour and more. He knew that Dr Zellermann was a flawless temporary host, dispensing adequate drams of MacSporran while he sipped Benedictine; that Patrick Hogan sang “Danny Boy” and “Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?” in a very uncertain tenor, and that Kay Natello made her original drink last all the time, with her head obligingly tilted on to Hogan’s shoulder and a rapt expression on her sallow face as if she had been mentally composing an elegy on the death of a gonococcus.

  And then there was a rush of machinery on the drive, and an involuntary lull, and the thud of the front door, and footsteps, and the barge-like entrance of Cookie. Followed by Avalon Dexter.

  Followed, after another moment, by Ferdinand Pairfield, who had apparently been swept up en route. But Simon paid scarcely any attention to him.

  His eyes were on Avalon.

  Her glance skimmed the room, and she saw Zellermann. She checked for the barest instant—it was so slight that it could have made no impression on anyone else. But the Saint was watching, and he saw it. And then she was still smiling, but her vivacity was skilled and watchful. Or so it seemed to him.

  “Oh, company,” she said, and flopped down on the sofa where Hogan and Natello were ensconced, and began chattering brightly and trivially to Hogan about night-clubs and songs and bands.

  Zellermann poured two drinks behind the bar, choosing the best bottles, and brought them out. He handed one to Cookie on his way, and carried the other over to Avalon.

  “Since we have to be guests together,” he said ingratiatingly, “couldn’t we stop feuding and forgive each other?”

  Avalon had to look up to him because he was on the arm of the sofa next to her.

  “I’m being framed,” she announced, very brightly. She dropped her voice after the general statement, but the Saint was still listening. She said, “I’ll stop feuding and forgive you if you’ll just get off my arm.”

  She went on bibbering to Hogan about musical trivia.

  Simon Templar seized the opportunity to slip behind the bar, single out a bottle of Peter Dawson, and pour himself a nightcap that would last.

  When he looked for Zellermann again, the doctor was standing beside Cookie with his attentive and invariable smile.

  Patrick Hogan was trying to show Avalon how to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

  Zellermann was saying, “…tomorrow will be soon enough.”

  “There’s plenty of time,” Cookie said.

  They started toward the bar.

  Mr Pairfield had already drifted over there in a rather forlorn way—perhaps because nobody was offering him any immediate appreciation, and perhaps because of an understandable reluctance to invite any more of Hogan’s uninhibited hostility. He had made another distasteful survey
of the Saint’s well-aged uncouthness, and averted his pure pretty face to review the colour scheme of fluids and labels on the background shelves.

  “I wonder,” he muttered, with almost pathetic audibility, “if I’m in the mood for some Crème Violette?”‘

  Simon didn’t violently detest Mr Pairfield, and all his instincts were against wasting gratuitous abuse on such creatures, but he was irrevocably playing a part, and he was still sure that Hogan was the star to which his wagon had to stay hitched until a better form of traction came along.

  “Wot?” he said sourly. “Ain’t there no Cream Pansiette ’ere?”

  Mr Pairfield was emboldened by his surroundings to tilt an offended nose.

  He said superciliously, “I beg your pardon?”

  “You ’eard,” growled the Saint trenchantly, in the time-honoured formula of Cockney repartee. “You ain’t got clorf ears.”

  That was when Cookie and Dr Zellermann arrived.

  Cookie said overwhelmingly, “Ferdy, don’t be so sensitive. Tom’s got a right to enjoy himself—”

  Dr Zellermann sidled behind the bar and leaned over toward the Saint and said with his monastic charm, “You know, in my studies of psychology nothing has ever fascinated me so much as the symbolism of the sailor. Of course you’ve heard all that stuff about the ‘girl in every port’ and ‘what shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ and so on. Really a fine synopsis of the natural impetuous life. But why?…You have a proverb which says there is no smoke without fire. Then where is the fire? The sailor—the sea. The sea, which once covered the whole earth. The sea, out of which our earliest protoplasmic ancestors first crawled to begin the primitive life which you and I are now enlarging…”

  The Saint gaped at him with adoring incomprehension.

  Cookie was absent-mindedly pouring herself another year or two of Old MacSporran, and saying to Mr Pairfield, “Now for God’s sake, Ferdy, have some Violette and stop fussing. And then you can be a good boy and see if the beds are all ready, there’s a dear.”

  “Now take your own case, Tom,” Zellermann was pursuing engagingly. “When you get to Shanghai, for instance—”

  There was a sudden mild crash as Patrick Hogan spilled two glasses and an ash-tray off the table in front of him in the act of hoisting himself to his feet.

  “I’m goin’ to the little sailor boy’s room,” he proclaimed loudly.

  “Second door on your right down the hall,” said Kay Natello, as if she had been reciting it all her life.

  “Run along, Ferdy,” Cookie was saying with a certain kindness, “and see if you can’t think what we ought to do about those pictures in the dining-room.”

  “Iver since I was born,” Hogan challenged the whole world, “a little sailor boy’s room has been in the sea. An’ what was good enough for Nelson is good enough for me.”

  He hauled the drapes away from one of the French windows and began fumbling stubbornly with the door-latch.

  Pairfield the Unconvincible went over to help him, drew the curtains together again, and then slipped timidly out into the garden after him.

  “When you get to Shanghai,” Zellermann resumed blandly, “as soon as you go ashore, the first thing you’ll want is a drink, and after that a girl. During your stay there you’ll probably have many drinks and many girls. But you will have no furtive feeling about these girls, as you would have at home. On the contrary, you’ll boast about them. Because you are a sailor, and therefore girls are your traditional privilege. Have you been to Shanghai before?”

  “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 blood-curdling 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 upward 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 multi-coloured flares in the centre of his head, and then a restful blackness in which sleep seemed the most natural occupation.

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  HOW FERDINAND PAIRFIELD WAS SURPRISED, AND SIMON TEMPLAR LEFT HIM

  1

  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 second-hand 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 cir
cle 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 grey of his hair and eyebrows, which was provided by talcum powder and could have been brushed out. His face colouring 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.