The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series) Page 4

  “You mean if they have a secret craving to tear the clothes off a nurse or throw a plate of soup at a waiter, they can be accommodated—at a fancy tariff.”

  “Something like that, I guess. Dr Zellermann says that all mental troubles come from people being thwarted by some convention that doesn’t agree with their particular personality. So the cure is to take the restriction away—like taking a tight shoe off a corn. He says that everyone ought to do just what their instincts and impulses tell them, and then everything would be lovely.”

  “I noticed he wasn’t repressing any of his impulses,” Simon remarked.

  The girl shrugged.

  “You’re always meeting that sort of creep in this sort of business. I ought to have been able to handle him. But what the hell. It just wasn’t my night to be tactful.”

  “You’d met him before, of course.”

  “Oh, yes. He’s always hanging around the joint. Cookie introduced him the other night. He’s one of her pets.”

  “So I gathered. Is it Love, or is he treating her? I should think a little deep digging into her mind would really be something.”

  “You said it, brother. I wouldn’t want to go in there without an armoured diving suit.”

  He cocked a quiet eye at her.

  “She’s a bitch, isn’t she?”

  “She is.”

  “Everybody’s back-slapper and good egg, with a heart of garbage and scrap iron.”

  “That’s about it. But people like her.”

  “They would.” He sipped his drink. “She gave me rather a funny feeling. It sounds so melodramatic, but she’s the first woman I ever saw who made me feel that she was completely and frighteningly evil. It’s a sort of psychic feeling, and I got it all by myself.”

  “You’re not kidding. She can be frightening.”

  “I can see her carrying a whip in a white-slave trading post, or running a baby farm and strangling the little bastards and burying them in the back yard.”

  Avalon laughed.

  “You mightn’t be so far wrong. She’s been around town for years, but nobody seems to know much about her background before that. She may have done all those things before she found a safer way of making the same money.”

  Simon brooded for a little while.

  “And yet,” he said, “the waiter was telling me about all the public-spirited work she does for the sailors.”

  “You mean Cookie’s Canteen?…Yes, she makes great character with that.”

  “Is it one of those Seamen’s Missions?”

  “No, it’s all her own. She hands out coffee and cake and sandwiches, and there’s a juke box and hostesses and entertainment.”

  “You’ve been there, I suppose.”

  “I’ve sung there two or three times. It’s on Fiftieth Street near Ninth Avenue—not exactly a ritzy neighbourhood, but the boys go there.”

  He put a frown and a smile together, and said, “You mean she doesn’t make anything out of it? Has she got a weakness for philanthropy between poisonings, or does it pay off in publicity, or does she dote on those fine, virile uninhibited sailor boys?”

  “It could be all of those. Or perhaps she’s got one last leathery little piece of conscience tucked away somewhere, and it takes care of that and makes her feel really fine. Or am I being a wee bit romantic? I don’t know. And what’s more, I don’t have to care any more, thank God.”

  “You’re quite happy about it?”

  “I’m happy anyway. I met you. Build me another drink.”

  He took their glasses over to the side table where the supplies were, and poured and mixed. He felt more than ever that the evening had been illumined by a lucky star. He could put casual questions and be casually flippant about everything, but he had learned quite a lot in a few hours. And Cookie’s Canteen loomed in his thoughts like a great big milestone. Before he was finished with it he would want more serious answers about that irreconcilable benevolence. He would know much more about it and it would have to make sense to him. And he had a soft and exciting feeling that he had already taken more than the first step on the unmarked trail that he was trying to find.

  He brought the drinks back to the couch, and sat down again, taking his time over the finding and preparation of a cigarette.

  “I’m still wondering,” she said, “what anyone like you would be doing in a joint like that.”

  “I have to see how the other half lives. I’d been out with some dull people, and I’d just gotten rid of them, and I felt like having a drink, and I happened to be passing by, so I just stopped in.”

  None of it was true, but it was good enough.

  “Then,” he said, “I heard you sing.”

  “How did you like it?”

  “Very much.”

  “I saw you before I went on,” she said. “I was singing for you.”

  He struck a match, and went on looking at her between glances at the flame and his kindling cigarette.

  He said lightly, “I never knew I was so fascinating.”

  “I’m afraid you are. And I expect you’ve been told all about it before.”

  “You wouldn’t like me if you knew me.”

  “Why not?”

  “My glamour would dwindle. I brush my teeth just like anyone else, and sometimes I burp.”

  “You haven’t seen me without my make-up.”

  He inspected her again critically.

  “I might survive it.”

  “And I’m lazy and untidy, and I have expensive tastes.”

  “I,” he said, “am not a respectable citizen. I shoot people and I open safes. I’m not popular. People send me bombs through the mail, and policemen are always looking for an excuse to arrest me. There isn’t any peace and stability where I’m around.”

  “I’m not so peaceful and stable myself,” she said seriously. “But I saw you once, and I’ve never forgotten you. I’ve read everything about you—as much as there is to read. I simply knew I was going to meet you one day, even if it took years and years. That’s all. Well, now I’ve met you, and you’re stuck with it.”

  She could say things like that, in a way that nobody else could have said them and gotten away with it. The Saint had met most kinds of coquetry and invitation, and he had had to dodge the anthropophagous pursuit of a few hungry women, but this was none of those things. She looked him in the face when she said it, and she said it straight out as if it was the most natural thing to say because it was just the truth, but there was a little speck of laughter in each of her eyes at the same time, as if she wondered what he would think of it and didn’t care very much what he thought.

  He said, “You’re very frank.”

  “You won’t believe me,” she said, “but I never told anyone anything like this before in my life. So if you think I’m completely crazy you’re probably right.”

  He blew smoke slowly through his lips and gazed at her, smiling a little but not very much. It was rather nice to gaze at her like that, with the subdued lamplight on her bronze head, and feel that it was the most obvious and inescapable thing for them to be doing.

  This was absurd, of course, but some absurdities were more sure than any commonplace probabilities.

  He picked up his glass again. He had to say something, and he didn’t know what it would be.

  The door-bell beat him to it.

  The shrill, tinny sound ripped shockingly through his silence, but the lift of his brows was microscopic. And her answering grimace was just as slight.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  She got up and went down the long hall corridor. He heard the door open, and heard a tuneless contralto voice that twanged like a flat guitar string.

  “Hullo, darling!—oh, I’m so glad I didn’t get you out of bed. Could I bring the body in for a second?”

  There was the briefest flash of a pause, and Avalon said, “Oh, sure.”

  The door latched, and there was movement.

  The raw clock-spring voice said
audibly, “I’m not butting in, am I?”

  Avalon said flatly, “Of course not. Don’t be silly.”

  Then they were in the room.

  The Saint unfolded himself off the couch.

  “Mr Templar,” Avalon said. “Miss Natello. Simon—Kay.”

  “How do you do?” said the Saint, for want of a better phrase.

  “Come in, Kay,” Avalon said. “Sit down and make yourself miserable. Have a drink? You know what this night life is like. The evening’s only just started. What goes on in the big city?”

  Her gay babble was just a little bit forced, and perhaps only the Saint’s ears would have noticed it.

  Kay Natello stayed in the entrance, plucking her orange-painted mouth with the forefinger and thumb of one hand. Under her thick sprawling eyebrows, her haunted eyes stared at the Saint with thoughtful intensity.

  “Mr Templar,” she said. “Yes, you were at Cookie’s.”

  “I was there,” said the Saint vaguely, “for a while.”

  “I saw you.”

  “Quite a big night, wasn’t it?” Avalon said. She sank back on to the settee. “Come on in and have a drink and tell us your troubles. Simon, fix something for her.”

  “I won’t stay,” Kay Natello said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

  She hauled her angular bony frame out of its lean-to position against the entrance arch as gauchely as she put her spoken sentences together.

  “Don’t be so ridiculous,” Avalon said. She was impatiently hospitable—or hospitably impatient. “We were just talking. What did you come in for, if you didn’t want to stay for a few minutes?”

  “I had a message for you,” Kay Natello said. “If Mr Templar would excuse us…”

  “If it’s from Cookie, Mr Templar was part of the ruckus, so it won’t hurt him to hear it.”

  The other woman went on pinching her lower lip with skeletal fingers. Her shadowed eyes went back to the Saint with completely measurable blankness, and back to Avalon again.

  “All right,” she said. “I didn’t mean to crash in here at all, really, but Cookie made such a fuss about it. You know how she is. She was a bit tight, and she lost her temper. Now she’s getting tighter because she shouldn’t have. She’d like to forget the whole thing. If you could…sort of…make it up with her…”

  “If she feels like that,” Avalon said, with that paralysing smiling directness which was all her own, “why didn’t she come here herself?”

  “She’s too tight now. You know how she gets. But I know she’s sorry.”

  “Well, when she sobers up, she can call me. She knows where I live.”

  “I know how you feel, darling. I only stopped in because she begged me to…I’ll run along now.”

  Avalon stood up again.

  “Okay,” she said, with friendly exhaustion. “I’ve taken a lot from Cookie before, but tonight was just too much—that’s all. Why don’t you beat some sense into her one of these times when she’s receptive?”

  “You know how she is,” Kay Natello said, in that metallic monotone. “I’m sorry.”

  She hitched her wrap up once again around her scrawny shoulders, and her hollow eyes took a last deliberate drag at the Saint.

  “Good night, Mr Templar,” she said. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “It was nice meeting you,” Simon replied, with the utmost politeness.

  He crossed to the side table again and half refilled his glass while he was left alone, and turned back to meet Avalon Dexter as the outer door closed and her skirts swished through the entrance of the room again.

  “Well?” She was smiling at him, as he was convinced now that nobody else could smile. “How do you like that?”

  “I don’t,” he said soberly.

  “Oh, she’s as whacky as the rest of Cookie’s clique,” she said carelessly. “Don’t pay any attention to her. It’s just like Cookie to try and send an ambassador to do her apologising for her. It’d hurt too much if she ever had to do it herself. But just this once I’m not going—”

  “I’m afraid you’ve missed something,” Simon said, still soberly, and perhaps more deliberately. “Natello didn’t come here to deliver Cookie’s apologies. I’ve got to tell you that.”

  Avalon Dexter carried her glass over to the side table.

  “Well, what did she come for?”

  “You went out with a beautiful exit line. Only it was just too good. That’s why Cookie is so unhappy now. And that’s why she had Natello drop in. To find out what kind of a hook-up there might be between us. It happens that there wasn’t any.” The Saint put his glass transiently to his mouth. “But that isn’t what Natello found out.”

  The break in her movements might have been no more than an absent-minded search for the right bottle.

  “So what?” she asked.

  “So I honestly didn’t mean to involve you with anything,” he said.

  She completed the reconstruction of a high-ball without any other hesitation, but when she turned to him again with the drink in her hand, the warm brown eyes with the flecks of laughter in them were as straight as he had always seen them.

  “Then,” she said, “you didn’t just happen to be at Cookie’s tonight by accident.”

  “Maybe not,” he said.

  “For heaven’s sake, sit down,” she said. “What is this—a jitterbug contest? You and Kay ought to get married. You could have so much fun.”

  He smiled at her again, and left one final swallow in his glass.

  “I’ve got to be running along. But I’m not fooling. I really wish to hell that nobody who had any connection with Cookie had seen me here. And now, to use your own words, you’re stuck with it.”

  She looked at him with all the superficial vivacity thrown off, seriously, from steady footholds of maturity. And like everything else she did that was unexpected, after she had done it, it was impossible to have expected anything else.

  “You mean it might be—unhealthy?”

  “I don’t want to sound scary, but…yes.”

  “I’m not scared. But don’t you think you might tell me why?”

  He shook his head.

  “I can’t, right now. I’ve told you more than I should have already, as a matter of fact. But I had to warn you. Beyond that, the less you know, the safer you’ll be. And I may be exaggerating. You can probably brush it off. You recognised me from a picture you saw once, and you were good and mad, so you threw out that parting crack just to make trouble. Then I picked you up outside, and you thought I’d been nice, so you just bought me a drink. That’s the only connection we have.”

  “Well, so it is. But if this is something exciting, like the things I fell in love with you for, why can’t I be in on it?”

  “Because you sing much too nicely, and the ungodly are awful unmusical.”

  “Oh, fish,” she said.

  He grinned, and finished his drink, and put down the glass.

  “Throw me out, Avalon,” he said. “In another minute dawn is going to be breaking, and I’m going to shudder when I hear the crash.”

  And this was it, this was the impossible and inevitable, and he knew all at once now that it could never have been any other way.

  She said, “Don’t go.”

  CHAPTER TWO:

  HOW DR ZELLERMANN USED THE TELEPHONE AND SIMON TEMPLAR WENT VISITING

  1

  Simon woke up with the squeal of the telephone bell splitting his eardrums. He reached out a blind hand for it and said, “Hullo.”

  “Hullo,” it said. “Mr Templar?”

  The voice was quite familiar, although its inflexion was totally different from the way he had heard it last. It was still excessively precise and perfectionist, but whereas before it had had the precision of a spray of machine-gun slugs, now it had the mellifluous authority of a mechanical unit in a production line.

  “Speaking,” said the Saint.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

&nb
sp; “Oh, no.”

  Simon glanced at his wrist-watch. It was just after twelve.

  “This is Dr Ernst Zellermann,” said the telephone.

  “So I gathered,” said the Saint. “How are you?”

  “Mr Templar, I owe you an apology. I had too much to drink last night. I’m usually a good drinker, and I have no idea why it should have affected me that way. But my behaviour was inexcusable. My language—I would prefer to forget. I deserved just what happened to me. In your place, I would have done exactly what you did.”

  The voice was rich and crisp with candour. It was the kind of voice that knew what it was talking about, and automatically inspired respect. The professional voice. It was a voice which naturally invited you to bring it your troubles, on which it was naturally comfortable to lean.

  Simon extracted a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table.

  “I knew you wouldn’t mind,” he said amiably. “After all, I was only carrying out your own principles. You did what your instincts told you—and I let my instincts talk to me.”

  “Exactly. You are perfectly adjusted. I congratulate you for it. And I can only say I am sorry that our acquaintance should have begun like that.”

  “Think nothing of it, dear wart. Any other time you feel instinctive we’ll try it out again.”

  “Mr Templar, I’m more sorry than I can tell you. Because I have a confession to make. I happen to be one of your greatest admirers. I have read a great deal about you, and I’ve always thought of you as the ideal exponent of those principles you were referring to. The man who never hesitated to defy convention when he knew he was right. I am as detached about my own encounter with you as if I were a chemist who had been blown up while he was experimenting with an explosive. Even at my own expense, I have proved myself right. That is the scientific attitude.”

  “There should be more of it,” said the Saint gravely.