The Saint Sees It Through s-26 Page 15

  Avalon said: "Huh?"

  The Saint took another grip on himself, brought his con­scious mind up from whirling in dark chasms, lifted it with every ounce of will power he could command.

  "Sorry, I wandered. ... The pitch was made. 'How would you like to make some extra money, chum, and here's a hundred on account. Just go to 903 Bubbling Well Road and say Benny sent you. Bring back the packages you'll be given, bring them here, and collect some more money.' ... So our lad does it. Now the sale and distribution of the dope won't bring in enough to pay the overhead of a really big-scale setup like this, so Operation B goes into effect. A doctor can supply patients with narcotics, can turn them into hopheads more safely than anybody else. Then, by shutting off the supply, he can get almost anything in return for more dope to ease the craving. Blackmail —or services. That's where Dean's Warehouse and Docking Company is tied up with Operation A, or Shanghai. The hop-heads knock it over, bring in the sheaves—of furs, jewels, whis­key, whatnot. Or a bank is held up, instead. Or anything. A whole empire of crime begins to spread out from one central system."

  The Saint sighed. He was weary. Avalon took his hand in hers.

  "So that's it," she said. "That explains a lot of things I didn't understand before. Why they'd go overboard for some creep who knew the difference between port and starboard and noth­ing else."

  They were still keeping their voices very low, as if they were in a room full of ears.

  "This is all new to you?" Simon asked expressionlessly.

  "Why do you ask that?"

  "I thought I would. I've told you all this because it doesn't matter now how much anybody knows I know."

  The Saint's fingers had almost finished with the odd metal shape in his pocket. And the message which had begun to spell itself slothfully out from it by some multi-dimensional alchemy between his fingertips and his remembrance began to sear his brain with a lambent reality that cauterized the last limp tissues of vagueness out of his awakening.

  He felt his own grip biting into her flesh.

  "Avalon," he said, in a voice that came from a long way off in the dark "You've been in this up to the neck from the begin­ning. You might even have started a lot of it—for all of us—by that parting crack of yours about the Saint after I socked Zeller­mann. But the play-acting is over, and I must know something now."

  "What, darling?" she asked; and her voice was so easy in contrast to his own that he knew where he had to keep his own sanities together.

  "I must know which side you're on, Avalon. Even if you haven't had any sense—even if it's all words of one syllable now. Are you going all the way with me, or is this just an excursion?"

  It seemed as if she stiffened beside him for an instant, and then softened so that she was closer and more real than ever before.

  Her voice came from a great distance also in the darkness between them.

  "You damn fool," she said. "I worship the ground you walk on. I want you more than I ever wanted anyone in my whole life, or ever will."

  They were both very quiet then, as if something had been said which should never have been put into words.

  And there were other sounds far away, faint frettings against the monotonous rolling of the sea.

  The Saint's fingers touched the hard sharp metal in his trou­ser pocket for one last assurance, and brought it out. He said very matter-of-factly: "Can you find a match, Avalon?"

  She was in movement all around him, and he kept still; and then there was a sudden hurtful flare of light that flickered agonisingly over the scrap of embossed metal that he had taken out of pocket and held towards her in the palm of his hand.

  "No," he said, without any inflection. "Not mine. Pat Hogan must have stuck his badge into my pocket as a last desperate resort—as a clue or a signal of some kind. He never knew me from Adam. But he was an undercover man in this racket for the Treasury Department."

  2

  The match flickered once more and went out, leaving him with the moulding of her face stamped on his memory. And he knew that that was not only printed by one match, but by more lights than he had seen in many years.

  "How long have you known that?" she asked.

  "Only since I found the badge and figured it out," he said. "But that's long enough . . . Until then, I'm afraid I was off with some very wrong ideas. When I picked him up at the Can­teen this evening I happened to see that he was going heeled— he had a gun in his hip pocket—and I began wondering. I've been listening to his rather shaky brogue all night, and watch­ing him sell the blarney to Kay Natello, who never could be a sailor's swateheart no matter what else; and I knew before we left town that there was something screwy in the setup . . . But I had everything else wrong. I had Hogan figured as one of the Ungodly, and I thought he was playing his game against me."

  "If he wasn't," she said, "why did he pick on you and knock you out?"

  "To get me out of the way. He didn't know who I was. I was playing the part of a blabber-mouthed drunken sailor, and just doing it too damn well. I was doing everything I could to make myself interesting to Cookie and Zellermann anyhow. I was banging around in the dark, and I happened to hit a nail on the head by mentioning Shanghai. So I was something to work on. And I was being worked on, the last thing I remember. But Hogan didn't want me being propositioned. His job was to get the goods on this gang, so he wanted to be propositioned himself. I might have been too drunk to remember; or I might have refused to testify. So he had to create a good interruption and break it up. And he did a lovely job, considering the spot he was in."

  "I'm getting some of my faith back," she said. "If a govern­ment man knocks you cold, that's legitimate; but you can't let anybody else do it. Not if I'm going to love you."

  He smiled very fractionally in the gloom, and his hand lay on her wrist in a touch that was not quite a caress, but something to which nothing had to be added and from which nothing could be taken away.

  "And now," he said, "I suppose you're wondering where I belong in this, and why Hogan doesn't know me."

  "I didn't ask you."

  "I might as well tell you. Hogan is doing his best, and so is the Department over him; but this thing goes too far over the world, into too many countries and too many jurisdictions. Only an organisation that's just as international can cope with it. There is such a thing, and I'm part of it. That's all I'm allowed to say."

  "And meanwhile," she said, with a coldness that was not really her, "why isn't Pat in bed? And why did he leave you his badge?"

  "Either because he's still trying to wring the last drop out of his act, or because he's trying to do some more dangerous snoop­ing. Either because he hoped he could tip me off to keep my mouth shut and give him a chance, or because he knew he was facing the high jump and if he made a bad landing he hoped I might get some word out for him." The Saint stood up. "Either way, I'm going to find out."

  He heard and felt the rustle of her quick movement out of his sight; and then she was in front of him, face to face, and her arms around him and his hands under the soft eaves of her hair.

  "Simon—are you all right now?"

  "I'm as much use as I'll ever be tonight." His smile was still invisible through the darkness, and in some ways he was glad of it. His touch was strong and tender together. He said: "And Pat did his best, and I'm sure nothing is going to wait for him."

  He kissed her again and held her against him; and he re­membered a great many things, perhaps too many, and perhaps too many of them were not with her. But none of that mattered any more.

  He let her go presently, and in time it had only been a mo­ment.

  "I suppose," he said, "you wouldn't happen to have any ar­tillery in your weekend kit? A machine-gun might be useful; but if you're travelling light a small stiletto would help."

  "I haven't anything better than a pair of nail scissors."

  "I'm afraid," Simon said sadly, "it might be hard to persuade Zellermann to sit still for that."

  Ligh
t slashed through the room like a stealthy blade as he found the door handle and opened it.

  The corridor outside was dim and lifeless; but as he stepped out into it the sea murmurs were left in the room behind him, and the other stirrings of sound that had crept through to him in there resolved themselves into their own individual pattern— a rumble and twitter of muffled voices and movement down­stairs. There was no movement that could be identified and no single word that could be picked out; but they had a pitch and a rhythm of deadly deliberation that spilled feathery icicles along his spine. He knew very well now why Avalon hadn't been able to sleep, and why she had come looking for Pat Hogan or Tom Simons or anyone else solid and ordinary and potentially safe and wholesome. As she had said, they weren't the sort of noises that people made if they were just trying to go on with a party. You couldn't put a finger on any one solitary thing about them; but if you had a certain kind of sensitivity, you knew . . . There was a quality of evil and terror that could set a pace and a key even in confused and distant mutterings.

  It made the Saint feel strangely naked and ineffectual as he moved towards it, with the whirling but no longer dizzy hol­lowness left in his head by the drug, and the unaccustomed formality of his muscular co-ordinations, and the cold knowl­edge that he had nothing to fight with but his own uncertain strength and uprooted wits. But Patrick Hogan—or whatever his real name was—had exposed himself in just as lonely a way for the job that he had to do; and his gun couldn't have helped him much, or the sounds below would have been different. And other men on more obvious battlefronts had done what they could with what they had, because wars didn't wait.

  He didn't feel particularly glorious or heroic about it: it was much more a coldly predestined task that had to be finished. It didn't seem to spread any emotion on the fact that it could easily and probably be his own finish too. It was just an automatic and irresistible mechanism of placing one foot in front of another on a necessary path from which there was no turning back, al­though the mind could sit away and watch its own housing walking voluntarily toward oblivion.

  And this was it, and he was it, for one trivial tremendous moment, himself, personally—the corny outlaw who redeemed himself in the last reel.

  It was quite funny, and a lot of fun, in the way he was think­ing.

  He was moving like a cat, his ears travelling far ahead of his feet, and a new sound began to intrude upon them. A sound of voices. One voice detached itself from the two that were in converse, and a bell rang inside the Saint's head with brazen clangor.

  It was the voice that had called Dr. Zellermann on the night the Saint had broken into the office.

  And it was the voice of Ferdinand Pairfield.

  Lightly and quickly, Simon pulled Avalon toward the closed door through which seeped the words of Dr. Zellermann and the fair Ferdinand.

  "I won't do it," Ferdinand said. "That is your job, and you must complete it. You really must, Ernst."

  The Saint was shocked. This voice wasn't fluttery, seeming always ready to trail off into a graceful gesture. This voice was venomous, reminding one of a beautiful little coral snake, look­ing like a pretty bracelet, coiled to strike and inject the poison that is more deadly, drop by drop, than that of the King Cobra, Here was no witless fag with a penchant for Crème Violette; here was a creature who could command in terms of death.

  The Saint's brain gave one last dizzy lurch, and then settled into a clear thin stratospheric stillness as the last disjointed fragments of the picture he had been working for fell into mesh. In some strange way that one incongruous touch had reconciled all other incongruities—the freakish fellowship of Dr. Zeller­mann with Cookie and Kay Natello, of all of them with Sam Jeffries and Joe Hyman, even the association with the lobster-eyed James Prather and the uninhibited Mrs. Gerald Meldon. His own mistake had been in accepting as merely another piece of the formula the one ingredient which was actually the cata­lyst for them all. It was a weird and yet strangely soothing sen­sation to realise at last, with the utter certainty of psychic con­firmation, that the man he had been looking for, the anchor thread of the whole fantastic web, was Mr. Ferdinand Pairfield.

  3

  Simon became aware of Avalon's fingers cramping on his arm, and knew that her perceptions were stumbling after his, less surely for one thing because she still lacked so much background that he had not been able to sketch for her, but following him more in mad surmise than with the integrated sureness that directed him.

  He pressed his hand over hers and went on listening, as Pairfield said: "It'd be dreadful to lose you, but of course you know how much the FBI would like to know the truth about why you became a refugee from Vienna. I've taken care of you all this time, but I can't go on doing it forever. If you let me down and anything happens—"

  "I don't want to let you down, Ferdinand," Zellermann said; and through all the measured confidence of his accents Simon had a vision of the smooth brow shining like damp ivory. "But our methods are getting nowhere. I think he'll die before he tells us what he knows."

  "He'd better not," Ferdinand said in the same deadly bell-like voice. "I want all the information he has. And I shall not assist you. You know the sight of torture and pain sickens me. I should simply die."

  "You didn't seem particularly affected in the case of Foley."

  "Oh, but I was! When I stuck that knife in him, I almost fainted. It was thrilling! But that's another case in point. It should have been unnecessary for me to do it. You knew that he was toying with the idea of selling us out, and blackmailing us to boot. You should have handled it."

  The Saint could almost see Zellermann shrug.

  "You won't come and help us?"

  "I simply couldn't. Get down there again. I want that infor­mation immediately."

  Simon pulled Avalon away from the door, and they fled on cat feet down the corridor and stood very still pressed against the wall. Dr. Zellermann came out of Ferdinand's room and went downstairs without a glance in their direction.

  Now the Saint had purpose. Each task in its turn, and the silencing of the golden boy was first. He strode to the door and flung it open. Ferdinand, clad in a pale cerise dressing gown, turned and saw the Saint.

  He looked up casually and a little irritably, as if he only ex­pected to see Zellermann coming back with an afterthought excuse. When he saw the Saint, his expression remained out­wardly unchanged. His reaction came from deep under his skin, instead of being the muscular contortion of a moment's shock. It came out as a dew of sweat on his face that swelled into an established wetness; and only after that was established his pretty face went pinched and pallid with terror. He didn't have to say anything to make a complete confession that he was answering his own questions as fast as they could spiral through his reeling mind, and that he knew that the answers were all his own and there was nothing he could say to anyone else, anywhere. He wasn't the first dilettante in history who had been caught up with by the raw facts of life in the midst of all the daffodils and dancing; and he would not be the last.

  The Saint felt almost sorry for him; but all the pity in the world didn't alter the absolute knowledge that Mr. Pairfield constituted a very real menace to the peace and quiet which Simon wanted for a few seconds more. Mr. Pairfield's eyes in­flated themselves like a pair of small blowfish at what they divined; his mouth dropped open, and his throat tightened in the preliminary formation of a scream. These were only the immediate reflex responses blossoming out of the trough of ter­ror that was already there, but they were no less urgent and dangerous for that. Something had to be done about them, and there was really only one thing to do.

  Simon put out his left hand and grasped the lapels of Mr. Pairfield's dainty silk dressing-gown together, and drew him closer with a sympathetic smile.

  "Ferdy," he said, "don't you know that it's time for all good little girls to be asleep?"

  And with that his right fist rocketed up to impinge on Mr. Pairfield's aesthetic chin, and sleep
duly followed. . . .

  Simon slid an arm under him as he crumpled, and carried him back into the room and dumped him on the bed. It was a nice encouraging thing to discover and prove that he still had that much strength and vitality in him, even though he knew very well that the power and agility that were required to anes­thetise Ferdinand Pairfield would not necessarily be enough to cope with anyone who was at least averagely tough of mind and body. It made him feel a new sureness of himself and a new hope that slipped looseningly and warmingly into his limbs as he tore one of Cookie's fine percale sheets into wide ribbons to tie Ferdinand's wrists and ankles to the bed and then to stuff into his slackly open mouth and gag him.

  He found himself working with the swift efficiency of second nature; and that was a good feeling too, to be aware of the old deftness and certainty flowing into his own movements with increasing ease all the time, and the gossamer bubble of his wakefulness holding and not breaking but growing more clear and durable with each passing minute..

  He finished, and then made a quick search of the room and the person of his test specimen, looking for one thing only; but it seemed that Mr. Pairfield's wanderings into wickedness hadn't taken the course of acquiring any of the useful armaments of evil. No doubt he was glad to delegate all such crudities to underlings. The Saint ended his brief quest still weaponless; yet he gave it up with a glance at Avalon that had all the carefree lights of supreme laughter in its blue brilliance.

  "Knock 'em off one by one," he remarked—"as the bishop said as he surveyed the new line-up of thespian talent at the Follies. That's our motto. Shall we move on to the next experi­ment?"

  Their hands touched momentarily; and then he was out of the room and on his way down the stairs.