The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series) Page 17

  Zellermann held his cigarette with the ash unbroken in his left hand, and his right hand dropped into the side pocket of his beautifully tailored coat. Aside from the lightning switch of his bleached grey eyes, that was his only movement. But it was quite adequate for what it meant.

  The Saint didn’t even seem to notice it.

  He was Tom Simons again, perfectly and entirely, for the few steps that he had to take. They seemed to stretch out for an infinity of distance and an eternity of time, but no one who watched him could have seen how every cell and fibre of him was wrung out in the achievement of that convincing unconsciousness of their importance He lurched quite clumsily in his walk, and his stare trying to hold Zellermann was blank and glazed—and those were the easiest tricks in his act.

  “’Ullo, Doc,” he mouthed. “Wot abaht one fer the road?”

  He was in a dream where every second seemed to take a week to crawl by, and you could stop overnight to analyse every inching flicker of event.

  He saw Zellermann relax fractionally, even embark on the mental prologue to an elaborate clinical evaluation of drug reactions. He saw Cookie and Kay Natello rising and turning toward him with a mixture of uncertainty and fear and hope. He saw everything, without looking directly at any of it.

  “You must be made out of iron, Tom,” Zellermann said admiringly, and as if he had learned the formula from a book. “You just about put us all under the table. We were going to bed.”

  The Saint staggered closer to him.

  “I bin to bed once,” he said. “But I’m thirsty, honester-gawd. Coudden I ’ave just one more drop before closing time?”

  Then his wandering gaze seemed to catch sight of Hogan for the first time.

  “Swelp me,” he said, “that’s ’im! The—’oo ’it me! All tied up shipshape so ’e ’as ter be’yve. Just lemme ’ave one crack at ’im—”

  “Patrick just had too much to drink,” Zellermann said. “We’re trying to get him to bed…”

  He actually moved closer, suavely and with almost contemptuous skill, interposing himself between Simon and the uglier details of his specialised treatment for intoxication.

  The Saint blinked at him blearily, swaying another step and two steps nearer.

  It looked fine and perfect until the doctor’s glance suddenly switched and hardened on a point beyond the Saint’s shoulder, and the whole calm patronising balance of his body hardened with it as if it had been nipped in an interstellar frost.

  And even then, only one precise unit of him moved—the hand that still rested in his coat pocket. But that movement was still as adequate and eloquent as it had been the first time.

  Simon didn’t need any manuals or blueprints to work it out. He knew, with that endless impersonality of comprehension, that Avalon Dexter had started to follow him into the room, and that Zellermann had seen her, and that the shining wheels that ran in Zellermann’s brain had spun an instantaneous web together and that rightly or wrongly the web had enough tensile strength in Zellermann’s mind for Zellermann to work on it.

  The Saint’s own movement actually followed and resulted from Zellermann’s, and yet it was like the clicking of a switch and the awakening of a light, so that it was almost simultaneous.

  He heard the splitting blast of Zellermann’s gun in the same quantum as he was aware of stumbling sideways and straightening his left arm so that the bone handle of the carving knife dropped into the curved fingers of his waiting left hand, and then he was aware of a searing pang in his left arm and a shocking blow that spun him half around, but he had his balance again in the same transposition, and his right hand took the haft of the knife as it dropped and drew it clear of the sleeve and turned it and drove it straight with the same continued gesture into Zellermann’s chest, just a little to one side of the breastbone and a hand’s breadth below the carnation in his button hole.

  Then he left the knife there where it stuck and took Zellermann’s automatic away as the doctor’s fingers loosened on it, ripping it clear of the pocket at about the moment when Zellermann’s shoulders rolled on the floor, and fired again and again while he was still rising and Cookie was starting toward him with her broad muscular hands reaching out and Natello was still swinging back the hot curling-iron that she had been playing with.

  They were the first women that Simon Templar had ever killed, and he did it rather carefully and conscientiously, in the pellucid knowledge of what they were and what they had done, and to his own absolute judicial satisfaction, shooting Kay Natello three inches above her hollow navel and Cookie in the same umbilical bull’s-eye, as closely as he could estimate it through her adipose camouflage.

  4

  Hamilton said almost plaintively, “Couldn’t you arrange to leave more than one prisoner, just once in a while?”

  “Could you arrange to have people stop attacking me?” asked the Saint. “Self-defence is so tempting. Besides, think how much I save the country on trials and attorneys. I ought to get a rebate on my income tax for it.”

  “I’ll speak to the President about it right away.”

  “Anyway, I left you the kingpin—and I think he’s got the kind of imagination that’ll do some real suffering while he’s waiting for his turn in the death house. I feel rather happy about that—which is why I left him.”

  “Before your tender heart gets you into any more trouble,” Hamilton said, “you’d better get out of there if you can. I’ll talk to you again in New York. I’ve got another job for you.”

  “You always have,” said the Saint. “I’ll get out. Hogan can hold the fort long enough.”

  He cradled the telephone and looked at the Federal man again. He said, “It’s all yours, Patrick. Washington wants me out of the limelight. As usual…By the way, is the name really Hogan?”

  The other nodded. Simon had done all that he could for him: he would be able to hold the fort. And other forts again. His face was still pale and drawn and slimy, but there was no uncertainty in it. It was a good face, moulded on real foundations, and durable.

  “Sure,” he said. “Hogan’s the name. But I was born in New Jersey, and I have to work like hell on the brogue.”

  He was studying the Saint while he talked, quite frankly and openly, but with a quiet respect that was a natural part of his reversion from the character part he had been playing, sitting very laxly but squarely in an arm-chair with the glass of brandy that Simon had poured for him, conserving and gathering his strength. He said, “You had me fooled. Your Cockney’s a lot better. And that make-up—it is make-up, isn’t it?”

  “I hope so,” said the Saint with a smile. “I’d hate to look like this for the rest of my life.”

  “I didn’t expect anything like this when I left my badge in your pocket. I was just clutching at a straw. I figured it was a thousand to one it wouldn’t do me any good. I thought you were just another drunken sailor—in fact, I let you pick me up just for that, so I could watch what this gang would do with you.”

  The Saint laughed a little.

  Avalon Dexter finished binding up his arm with torn strips of another of Cookie’s expensive sheets. She was very cool and efficient about it. He moved his arm and tested the bandage approvingly, then he began to wriggle into his jacket again. Zellermann’s one shot had missed the bone: the bullet had passed clean through, and the flesh wound would take care of itself.

  He said, “Thanks, darling.”

  She helped him with his coat.

  He said, “Go on quoting me as just another drunken sailor, Pat. You don’t even have to bring me into this finale. The witnesses won’t talk. So Tom Simons woke up, and was drunk and sore and scared, and scrammed the hell out. He went back to his ship, and nobody cares about him, anyway. Let him go. Because I am going anyway, while you take the phone and start calling to your squads to take care of the bodies.”

  “What about Miss Dexter?” Hogan asked practically.

  “She was scared too, and she scrammed independently.
You know about her and how they were trying to use her. Leave her out of it if you can, but if you need her we’ve got her address in New York. I’ll steal one of the cars and take her back with me. Hamilton will okay it. The police in New York were warned long ago, it seems—when Zellermann tried to frame me at 21, they went through a performance to make Zellermann think he’d gotten me out of the way, but they turned me loose at once.”

  “Okay, Saint. When you call that Imperative exchange in Washington, I say Uncle anyhow. But I can look after this. And—thank you.”

  They shook hands around. Hogan stayed seated in his chair. He could keep going. He was still full of questions, but he was too well trained to ask them.

  “Let’s get together one day,” said the Saint, and meant it just like that.

  He went out with Avalon.

  They talked very ordinarily and quietly on the drive back, as if they had known each other for a long while, which they had, while the dawn lightened slowly around them and drew out the cool sweetness of the dew on the peaceful fields. The red-gold casque of her hair was pillowed on his shoulder as they slipped into the rousing murmur of Manhattan in the bright sunlight of another day.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  This was the last Saint novel to be written solely by Leslie Charteris; from hereon in, until he started collaborating with other writers, he would concentrate on writing short stories and novellas.

  The book itself was first published by Doubleday in November 1946, and Charteris, who by then was well known for his flippancy, was realistic about its prospects; writing in A Letter from the Saint, a letter-based subscription service he ran for a short while in the mid-1940s, he said:

  It is not the most sensational book I have ever written, but we hope that this will be overlooked in the general rejoicing over the fact that I have got out a book at all. I cannot tell you how gratified I am to be able to strike this small spark in the long literary night, and I hope you will all rush out at once and buy it. The title is The Saint Sees it Through, and at the old pre-war price of two bucks, when everything else you can think of has gone up, I can only think that it is one of the greatest bargains you can find today.

  Give it to your friends for Christmas. Have the pages separated and use them to repair your living-room, instead of the ordinary wallpaper which is so hard to get. Tear them up and use them for confetti. Give them to your children for cutting out paper dolls. Use them for door stops, for squashing cockroaches, for holding down the lid of the pressure cooker. Mount stamp collections in them. Soak the ink out of the pages and boil it down to make your own shoe polish. Let Junior chew up the pages to make spit balls. Use them for bait to lure the termites out of the walls so that you can get them with the DDT. Break them up and use them for kindling. Put copies in the Chic Sale and save your Sears Roebuck catalogue. Split the sheets with a razor and use them for Kleenex. Keep several copies handy for throwing at cats on the back fence, or to climb up on to reach the top shelves of the closet.

  Do anything you like with them, but for Chris’sake buy thousands of copies so that I can pay some of my bills.

  Hodder & Stoughton published a first edition in July 1947, but, other than subsequent paperback editions, there have been no great numbers of reprints or new editions. By the end of the decade Charteris was tiring of the Saint and keen to expand his writing into areas that didn’t involve Simon Templar, and this attitude was starting to be mirrored by his audience, who, post-war, perhaps had other things on their mind.

  Foreign editions are few and far between; Charteris’s French publisher, Fayard, being first off the mark with Le Saint, Cookie et cie in 1948, closely followed by the Dutch translation, De Saint en de zangeres in 1950. The remarkable international sales of the first Saint TV series prompted editions in Denmark (Helgenen ordner paragrafferne) in 1970, Finland (Pyhimyksen kolme naista) in 1967, and Norway (Helgenen overtar) in 1965. Also inspired by the first TV series was Slovenian publisher Mladinska Knjiga who decided to test the market for Saint books in Slovenia by publishing a translation of this book under the title Svetnik spregleda vse in 1962. Quite why they chose this particular title to test the water when so many of the earlier volumes would seem to have been a wiser choice is lost in the mists of time, but the fact that this is the only Saint book ever translated into Slovenian says all you need to know about how successful it was. Or not.

  The book is one of the few full-length Saint novels to be adapted for The Saint with Roger Moore; it first aired on Sunday 10 March 1963 during the first season of the show.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”

  —Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview

  Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.

  He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years earlier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.

  “I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1

  One of his favourite things to read was a magazine called Chums. “The Best and Brightest Paper for Boys” (if you believe the adverts) was a monthly paper full of swashbuckling adventure stories aimed at boys, encouraging them to be honourable and moral and perhaps even “upright citizens with furled umbrellas.”2 Undoubtedly these types of stories would influence his later work.

  When his parents split up shortly after the end of World War I, Charteris accompanied his mother and brother back to England, where he was sent to Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was then a very stereotypical English public school, and it struggled to cope with this multilingual mixed-race boy just into his teens who’d already seen more of the world than many of his peers would see in their lifetimes. He was an outsider.

  He left Rossall in 1924. Keen to pursue a creative career, he decided to study art in Paris—after all, that was where the great artists went—but soon found that the life of a literally starving artist didn’t appeal. He continued writing, firing off speculative stories to magazines, and it was the sale of a short story to Windsor Magazine that saved him from penury.

  He returned to London in 1925, as his parents—particularly his father—wanted him to become a lawyer, and he was sent to study law at Cambridge University. In the mid-1920s, Cambridge was full of Bright Young Things—aristocrats and bohemians somewhat typified in the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies—and again the mixed-race Bowyer-Yin found that he didn’t fit in. He was an outsider who preferred to make his own way in the world and wasn’t one of the privileged upper class. It didn’t help that he found his studies boring and decided it was more fun contemplating ways to circumvent the law. This inspired him to write a novel, and when publishers Ward Lock & Co. offered him a three-book deal on the strength of it, he abandoned his studies to pursue a writing career.

  When his father learnt of this, he was not impressed, as he considered writers to be “rogues and vagabonds.” Charteris would later recall that “I wanted to be a writer, he wanted me to become a lawyer. I was stubborn, he said I would end up in the gutter. So I left home. Later on, when I had a little success, we were recon
ciled by letter, but I never saw him again.”3

  X Esquire, his first novel, appeared in April 1927. The lead character, X Esquire, is a mysterious hero, hunting down and killing the businessmen trying to wipe out Britain by distributing quantities of free poisoned cigarettes. His second novel, The White Rider, was published the following spring, and in one memorable scene shows the hero chasing after his damsel in distress, only for him to overtake the villains, leap into their car…and promptly faint.

  These two plot highlights may go some way to explaining Charteris’s comment on Meet—the Tiger!, published in September 1928, that “it was only the third book I’d written, and the best, I would say, for it was that the first two were even worse.”4

  Twenty-one-year-old authors are naturally self-critical. Despite reasonably good reviews, the Saint didn’t set the world on fire, and Charteris moved on to a new hero for his next book. This was The Bandit, an adventure story featuring Ramon Francisco De Castilla y Espronceda Manrique, published in the summer of 1929 after its serialisation in the Empire News, a now long-forgotten Sunday newspaper. But sales of The Bandit were less than impressive, and Charteris began to question his choice of career. It was all very well writing—but if nobody wants to read what you write, what’s the point?

  “I had to succeed, because before me loomed the only alternative, the dreadful penalty of failure…the routine office hours, the five-day week…the lethal assimilation into the ranks of honest, hard-working, conformist, God-fearing pillars of the community.”5

  However his fortunes—and the Saint’s—were about to change. In late 1928, Leslie had met Monty Haydon, a London-based editor who was looking for writers to pen stories for his new paper, The Thriller—“The Paper with a Thousand Thrills.” Charteris later recalled that “he said he was starting a new magazine, had read one of my books and would like some stories from me. I couldn’t have been more grateful, both from the point of view of vanity and finance!”6