The Saint Sees It Through s-26 Page 2

  The other half of the duo was a gaunt stringy-haired woman with hungry eyes and orange lipstick, whom he identified as Kay Natello, one of the more luminous of the most luminiscent modern poets. The best he could remember about her was a quote from a recent volume of hers, which might as well be reprinted here in lieu of more expensive descriptions:

  FLOWERS

  I love the beauty of flowers,

  germinated in decay and excrement,

  with soft slimy worms

  crawling

  caressingly

  among the tender

  roots.

  So even I carry within me

  decay and excrement:

  and worms

  crawl

  caressingly

  among the tender roots of my

  love.

  Between them they made a rather fine couple; and Simon realised how Cookie could have been the idol of both of them, if there were any foundation to the casual whispers he had been able to hear about her since he discovered that she was des­tined to enter his life whether he wanted it or not.

  He looked for Cookie again, remembering that he was not there for fun.

  She was sitting at the piano now, thumping the keys almost inaudibly while she waited, for the informed applause to die away, with a broad and prodigiously hospitable smile on her large face.

  She must have weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. The expansive grossness of her features was slightly minimised by a pompadoured convict coiffure which reduced the breadth of her face for as long as it lasted, but below that she was built like a corseted barrel. Her Brobdingnagian bosom bloused up from a skin of appalling sequins that shimmered down in recognisable ridges over the steatopygous scaffolding that encased her hips. As much as any other feature you noticed the hands that whacked uninhibitedly over the keyboard: large, splay-fingered, muscular, even with the incongruous vermilion lacquer on the nails they never looked like a woman's hands. They were the hands of a stevedore, a wrestler, or—for that matter—a strangler. They had a crude sexless power that nar­rowed down through the otherwise ludicrous excesses of her figure to give a sudden sharp and frightening meaning to the brash big-hearted bonhomie of her smile.

  It was a strange and consciously exaggerated sensation that went through the Saint as he analysed her. He knew that some of it came from the electric contrast with the impression that Avalon Dexter had left on him. But he could make use of that unforeseen standard without letting it destroy his judgment, just as he could enlarge upon intuition only to see the details more clearly. He knew that there were not enough ingredients in the highballs he had drunk there to warp his intelligence, and he had never in his life been given to hysterical imaginings. And yet with complete dispassionate sanity, and no matter where it might go from there, he knew that for perhaps the first time in a life that had been crossed by many evil men he had seen a truly and eternally evil woman.

  Just for a moment that feeling went over him like a dark wave; and then he was quite cool and detached again, watching her make a perfunctory adjustment to the microphone mounted in front of her.

  "Hullo, everybody," she said in a deep commanding voice. "Sorry I'm late, but I've been taking care of some of our boys who don't get too much glory these days. I'm speaking of the plain ordinary heroes who man our merchant ships. They don't wear any brass buttons or gold braid, but war or no war they stay right on the job. The Merchant Navy!"

  There was a clatter of approbation to show that the assembled revellers appreciated the Merchant Navy. It left no room for doubt that the hearts of Cookie's customers would always be in the right place, provided the place was far enough from the deck of an oil tanker to give them a nice perspective.

  Cookie heaved herself up from the piano bench and pointed a dramatic finger across the room.

  "And I want you to meet two of the finest men that ever sailed the seven seas," she roared. "Patrick Hogan and Axel Indermar. Take a bow, boys!"

  The spotlight plastered two squirming youths at a side table, who scrambled awkwardly and unwillingly to their feet. Amid more spirited clapping, the spotlight switched back to Cookie as she sat down again and thumped out a few bars of Anchors Aweigh with a wide grin which charmingly deprecated her own share in bringing the convoy home.

  "And now," she said, with a cascade of arpeggios, "as a tribute to our guests of honor, let's start with Testy Old William, the Nautical Man."

  Overlapping a loyal diminuendo of anticipatory sniggers and applause from the initiated, she broadened her big jolly smile and launched into her first number.

  Simon Templar only had to hear the first three lines to know that her act was exactly what he would have expected—a reper­toire of the type of ballad which is known as "sophisticated" to people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated. Certain­ly it dealt with sundry variations on the facts of life which would have puzzled a clear-thinking farm hand.

  It was first-class material of its kind, clever and penetrating to the thinnest edge of utter vulgarity; and she squeezed every last innuendo out of it as well as several others which had no more basis than a well-timed leer and the personal psychoses of the audience. There was no doubt that she was popular: the room was obviously peppered with a clique of regular admir­ers who seemed to know all her songs by heart, and who burst into ecstatic laughter whenever she approached a particularly classic line. Consequently, some of her finest gems were blan­keted with informed hilarity—a fact which must have saved many an innocent intruder much embarrassment. But she was good: she had good material, she could sell it; she could get away with almost anything behind that big friendly bawdy boys-in-the-lavatory-together smile, and beyond any question she had more than enough of that special kind of showmanly bludgeoning personality that can pound an audience into sub­mission and force them to admit that they have been wonder­fully entertained whether they enjoyed it or not.

  And the Saint hated her.

  He hated her from a great distance; not because of that first terrible but immaterial intuition, which was already slipping away into the dimmer backgrounds of his mind, nor in the very least because he was a prude, which he was not.

  He hated her because dominantly, sneakingly, overwhelming­ly, phony-wittily, brazenly, expertly, loudly, unscrupulously, popularly, callously, and evilly, with each more ribald and ris­que number that she dug out of her perfertile gut, she was de­stroying and dissecting into more tattered shreds a few moments of sweetness and sincerity that a tawny-maned nobody named Avalon Dexter had been able to impose even on the tired and tawdry cafe aristocracy who packed the joint. . . .

  "I brought you a double, sir," said the melancholy waiter, looming before him again in all the pride of a new tactic. "Will that be all right?"

  "That," said the Saint, "must have been what I was waiting for all evening."

  He controlled the pouring of water into the glass, and tasted the trace of liquid in the bottom. It had a positive flavor of Scotch whisky which was nostalgically fascinating. He con­served it respectfully on his palate while Cookie blared into an­other encore, and looked around to see whether by any chance there might be a loose tawny mane anywhere within sight.

  And, almost miraculously, there was.

  She must have slipped out through another door, but the edge of the spotlight beam clipped her head for an instant as she bent to sit down. And that was the instant when the Saint was looking.

  The detail that registered on him most clearly was the table where she sat. It was another ringside table only two spaces away from him, and it happened to be one table which had never been out of the corner of his eye since he had accepted his own place. For it was the table of the one man whom he had really come there to see.

  It gave him a queer feeling, somehow, after all that, to see her sitting down at the table of Dr. Ernst Zellermann.

  Not that he had anything solid at all to hold against Dr. Zellermann—yet. The worst he could have substantially sai
d about Dr. Zellermann was that he was a phony psychiatrist. And even then he would have been taking gross chances on the adjective. Dr. Zellermann was a lawful M.D. and a self-an­nounced psychiatrist, but the Saint had no real grounds to in­sult the quality of his psychiatry. If he had been cornered on it, at that moment, he could only have said that he called Dr. Zellermann a phony merely on account of his Park Avenue address, his publicity, and a rough idea of his list of patients, who were almost exclusively recruited from a social stratum which is notorious for lavishing its diamond-studded devotion on all manner of mountebanks, yogis, charlatans, and magna-quacks.

  He could have given equally unreasonable reasons why he thought Dr. Zellermann looked like a quack. But he would have had to admit that there were no proven anthropological laws to prevent a psychiatrist from being tall and spare and erect, with a full head of prematurely white and silky hair that contrasted with his smooth taut-skinned face. There was no intellectual impossibility about his wide thin-lipped mouth, his long thin aristocratic nose, or the piercing gray eyes so fascinat­ingly deep-set between high cheekbones and heavy black brows. It was no reflection on his professional qualifications if he hap­pened to look exactly like any Hollywood casting director's or hypochondriac society matron's conception of a great psychi­atrist. But to the Saint's unfortunate skepticism it was just too good to be true, and he had thought so ever since he had ob­served the doctor sitting in austere solitude like himself.

  Now he had other reasons for disliking Dr. Zellermann, and they were not at all conjectural.

  For it rapidly became obvious that Dr. Ernst Zellermann's personal behavior pattern was not confined to the high planes of ascetic detachment which one would have expected of such a perfectly groomed mahatma. On the contrary, he was quite brazenly a man who liked to see thigh to thigh with his companions. He was the inveterate layer of hands on knees, the persistent mauler of arms, shoulders, or any other flesh that could be conveniently touched. He liked to put heads together and mutter into ears. He leaned and clawed, in fact, in spite of his crisply patriarchal appearance, exactly like any tired businessman who hoped that his wife would believe that he really had been kept late at the office.

  Simon Templar sat and watched every scintilla of the performance, completely ignoring Cookie's progressively less sub­tle encores, with a concentrated and increasing resentment which made him fidget in his chair.

  He tried, idealistically, to remind himself that he was only there to look around, and certainly not to make himself con­spicuous. The argument seemed a little watery and uninspired. He tried, realistically, to remember that he could easily have made similar gestures himself, given the opportunity; and why was it romantic if he did it and revolting if somebody else did? This was manifestly a cerebral cul-de-sac. He almost persuaded himself that his ideas about Avalon Dexter were merely pyra­mided on the impact of her professional personality, and what gave him any right to imagine that the advances of Dr. Zeller­mann might be unwelcome?—especially if there might be a diamond ring or a nice piece of fur at the inevitable conclusion of them. And this very clearly made no sense at all.

  He watched the girl deftly shrug off one paw after another, without ever being able to feel that she was merely showing a mechanical adroitness designed to build up ultimate desire. He saw her shake her head vigorously in response to whatever sug­gestions the vulturine wizard was mouthing into her ear, with­out being able to wonder if her negative was merely a technical postponement. He estimated, as coldbloodedly as it was possible for him to do it, in that twilight where no one else might have been able to see anything, the growing strain that crept into her face, and the mixture of shame and anger that clouded her eyes as she fought off Zellermann as unobtrusively as any woman could have done. . . .

  And he still asked nothing more of the night than a passable excuse to demonstrate his distaste for Dr. Ernst Zellermann and all his works.

  And this just happened to be the heaven-saved night which would provide it.

  As Cookie reached the climax of her last and most lurid ditty, and with a sense of supremely fine predestination, the Saint saw Avalon Dexter's hand swing hard and flatly at the learned doctor's smoothly shaven cheek. The actual sound of the slap was drowned in the ecstatic shrieks of the cognoscenti who were anticipating the tag couplet which their indetermi­nate ancestors had howled over in the First World War; but to Simon Templar, with his eyes on nothing else, the move­ment alone would have been enough. Even if he had not seen the girl start to rise, and the great psychologist reach out and grab her wrist.

  He saw Zellermann yank her back on to her chair with a vicious wrench, and carefully put out his cigarette.

  "Nunc dimittis," said the Saint, with a feeling of ineffable beatitude creeping through his arteries like balm; "O Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. . . ."

  He stood up quietly, and threaded his way through the intervening tables with the grace of a stalking panther, up to the side of Dr. Ernst Zellermann. It made no difference to him that while he was on his way Cookie had finished her last number, and all the lights had gone on again while she was taking her final bows. He had no particular views at all about an audience or a lack of it. There was no room in his soul for anything but the transcendent bliss of what he was going to do.

  Almost dreamily, he gathered the lapels of the doctor's din­ner jacket in his left hand and raised the startled man to his feet.

  "You really shouldn't do things like that," he said in a tone of kindly remonstrance.

  Dr. Zellermann stared into sapphire blue eyes that seemed to be laughing in a rather strange way, and some premonitive terror may have inspired the wild swing that he tried to launch in reply.

  This, however, is mere abstract speculation. The recordable fact is that Simon's forearm deflected its fury quite effortlessly into empty air. But with due gratitude for the encouragement, the Saint proceeded to hit Dr. Zellermann rather carefully in the eye. Then, after steadying the healer of complexes once more by his coat lapels, he let them go in order to smash an equally careful left midway between Dr. Zellermann's nose and chin.

  The psychiatrist went backwards and sat down suddenly in the middle of a grand clatter of glass and china; and Simon Templar gazed at him with deep scientific concern. "Well, well, well," he murmured. "What perfectly awful reflexes!"

  3

  For one fabulous moment there was a stillness and silence such as Cookie's Cellar could seldom have experienced during business hours; and then the background noises broke out again in a new key and tempo, orchestrated with a multiplying rattle of chairs as the patrons in the farther recesses stood up for a better view, and threaded with an ominous bass theme of the larger waiters converging purposefully upon the centre of excitement.

  The Saint seemed so unconcerned that he might almost have been unaware of having caused any disturbance at all.

  He said to Avalon Dexter: "I'm terribly sorry—I hope you didn't get anything spilt on you."

  There was an unexpected inconsistency of expression in the way she looked at him. There were the remains of pardonable astonishment in it, and a definite shadowing of fear; but beyond that there was an infinitesimal curve in the parted lips which held an incongruous hint of delight.

  She said in a rather foolish and meaningless way: "Thank you——"

  Then the vanguard of the sedative squad was at the Saint's side, in the person of a captain whose face looked as if it had known rougher employment than smirking welcomes and farewells to transient suckers.

  He was a fairly weighty man, and his tuxedo was tight across his shoulders. He grasped the Saint's arm and said with­out any professional servility: "What's this all about?"

  "Just a little apache dance routine," Simon said pleasantly."Unscheduled addition to the floor show. I've been practising it quite a while. Would you like me to show you, or would you rather let go my arm?"

  The bouncer captain, with the Saint's biceps palpably under his fingers a
nd the Saint's very cool blue eyes on him, seemed to experience a shred of indecision.

  Avalon Dexter's clear voice said: "Take it easy, Joe."

  Simon gently eased his arm away in the act of searching for a cigarette, and gazed interestedly at Dr. Zellermann, who was trying to unwrap himself from a tablecloth with which he had become entangled in the course of his descent.

  "Unfortunately," he explained, "my partner hasn't practised so much, and his timing is all off. It's too bad he had to fall down and hurt his face, but accidents will happen."

  Dr. Zellermann got to his feet, assisted by one of the larger waiters, who thoughtfully kept hold of him under the guise of continuing his support.

  With his patriarchal locks dishevelled, one eye closed, and a smear of blood smudged down from one corner of his mouth, Dr. Zellermann was not in the least beautiful or benign. In fact, for a man who claimed to adjust the mental disorders of others, he showed a lamentable lack of psychic balance. He spoke to and about the Saint, in very precise English mingled with a few recherche foreign epithets and expletives; and Simon was saddened to learn from the discourse that the doctor was clearly the victim of several psychoses, inclined towards para­noia, subject to perverse delusions, and afflicted with obsessive coprophilia. Simon realised that the symptoms might have been aggravated by some recent shock, and he was considering the case with clinical impartiality when Cookie herself surged through the ring of bystanders.

  Simon had never thought she was beautiful, but now he saw for himself how ugly she could look. The big practised smile was gone, and her mouth was as hard and functional as a trap. Her eyes were bright, watchfully venomous, and coldly capable. For that moment, in spite of the complete oppositeness of all the associations, Simon felt that she had the identical bearing of a hard-boiled matron preparing to quell trouble in a tough reform school.