The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series) Page 5

  “Mr Templar, if you could take that attitude yourself, I wish you would give me the privilege of meeting you in more normal circumstances.”

  The Saint exhaled a long streamer of smoke towards the ceiling.

  “I’m kind of busy,” he said.

  “Of course, you would be. Let me see. This is Thursday. You are probably going away for the week-end.”

  “I might be.”

  “Of course, your plans would be indefinite. Why don’t we leave it like this? My number is in the telephone book. If by chance you are still in town on Saturday, would you be generous enough to call me? If you are not too busy, we might have lunch together. How is that?”

  Simon thought for a moment, and knew that there was only one answer.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  “I shall be at your disposal.”

  “And by the way,” Simon said gently, “how did you know my phone number?”

  “Miss Dexter was kind enough to tell me where you were staying,” said the clipped persuasive voice. “I called her first, of course, to apologise to her…Mr Templar, I shall enjoy resuming our acquaintance.”

  “I hope you will,” said the Saint.

  He put the handpiece back, and lay stretched out on his back for a while with his hands clasped behind his head and his cigarette cocked between his lips, staring uncritically at the opposite cornice.

  He had several things to think about, and it was a queer way to be reminded of them—or some of them—item by item, while he was waking himself up and trying to focus his mind on something else.

  He remembered everything about Cookie’s Cellar, and Cookie, and Dr Ernst Zellermann, and everything else that he had to remember, but beyond that there was Avalon Dexter, and with her the memory went into a strange separateness like a remembered dream, unreal and incredible and yet sharper than reality and belief. A tawny mane and straight eyes and soft lips. A voice singing. And a voice saying, “I was singing for you…the things I fell in love with you for…”

  And saying, “Don’t go…”

  No, that was the dream, and that hadn’t happened.

  He dragged the telephone book out from under the bedside table, and thumbed through it for a number.

  The hotel operator said, “Thank you, sir.”

  He listened to the burr of dialling.

  Avalon Dexter said, “Hullo.”

  “This is me,” he said.

  “How nice for you.” Her voice was sleepy, but the warm laughter was still there. “This is me, too.”

  “I dreamed about you,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “I woke up.”

  ‘‘Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

  “I wish I could.”

  “So do I. I dreamed about you, too.”

  “No,” he said. “We were both dreaming.”

  “I’d still like to go back to sleep. But creeps keep calling me up.”

  “Like Zellermann, for instance?”

  “Yes. Did he call you?”

  “Sure. Very apologetic. He wants me to have lunch with him.”

  “He wants us to have lunch with him.”

  “On those terms, I’ll play.”

  “So will I. But then, why do we have to have him along?”

  “Because he might pick up the check.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” she said.

  He heard her yawn. She sounded very snug. He could almost see her long hair spread out on the pillow.

  “I’ll buy you a cocktail in a few hours,” he said, “and prove it.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “But I wasn’t fooling about anything else I said last night. Don’t accept any other invitations. Don’t go to any strange places. Don’t believe anything you’re told. After you got yourself thought about with me last night, anything could happen. So please be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “If you don’t,” she said, “I’ll haunt you.”

  He hung up.

  But it had happened. And the dream was real, and it was all true, and it was good that way. He worked with his cigarette for a while.

  Then he took the telephone again, and called room service. He ordered corned beef hash and eggs, toast and marmalade, and coffee. He felt good. Then he revived the operator and said, “After that you can get me a call to Washington. Imperative five, five hundred. Extension five. Take your time.”

  He was towelling himself after a swift stinging shower when the bell rang.

  “Hamilton,” said the receiver dryly. “I hope you aren’t getting me up.”

  “This was your idea,” said the Saint. “I have cased the joint, as we used to say in the soap operas. I have inspected your creeps. I’m busy.”

  “What else?”

  “I met the most wonderful girl in the world.”

  “You do that every week.”

  “This is a different week.”

  “This is a priority line. You can tell me about your love life in a letter.”

  “Her name is Avalon Dexter, and she’s in the directory. She’s a singer, and until the small hours of this morning she was working for Cookie.”

  “Which side is she on?”

  “I only just met her,” said the Saint, with unreal impersonality. “But they saw her with me. Will you remember that, if anything funny happens to me—or to her?…I met Zellermann, too. Rather violently, I’m afraid. But he’s a sweet and forgiving soul. He wants to buy me a lunch.”

  “What did you buy last night?” Hamilton asked suspiciously.

  “You’ll see it on my expense account—I don’t think it’ll mean raising the income tax rate more than five per cent,” said the Saint, and hung up.

  He ate his brunch at leisure, and saved his coffee to go with a definitive cigarette.

  He had a lot of things to think about, and he only began trying to co-ordinate them when the coffee was clean and nutty on his palate, and the smoke was crisp on his tongue and drifting in aromatic clouds before his face.

  Now there was Cookie’s Canteen to think about. And that might be something else again.

  Now the dreaming was over, and this was another day.

  He went to the closet, hauled out a suit-case, and threw it on the bed. Out of the suit-case he took a bulging brief-case. The brief-case was a particularly distinguished piece of luggage, for into its contents had gone an amount of ingenuity, corruption, deception, seduction, and simple larceny which in itself could have supplied the backgrounds for a couple of dozen stories.

  Within its hand-sewn compartments was a collection of documents in blank which represented the cream of many years of research. On its selection of letterheads could be written letters purporting to emanate from almost any institution between the Dozey Dairy Company of Kansas City and the Dominican Embassy in Ankara. An assortment of visiting cards in two or three crowded pockets was prepared to identify anybody from the Mayor of Jericho to Sam Schiletti, outside plumbing contractor, of Exterior Falls, Oregon. There were passports with the watermarks of a dozen governments—driving licences, pilot’s licences, ration books, credit cards, birth certificates, warrants, identification cards, passes, permits, memberships, and authorisations enough to establish anyone in any role from a Bulgarian tightrope walker to a wholesale fish merchant from Grimsby. And along with them there was a unique symposium of portraits of the Saint, flattering and unflattering, striking and nondescript, natural and disguised—together with a miscellany of stamps, seals, dies, and stickers which any properly conditioned bureaucrat would have drooled with ecstasy to behold. It was an outfit that would have been worth a fortune to any modern brigand, and it had been worth exactly that much to the Saint before.

  He sat down at the desk and worked for an unhurried hour, at the end of which time he had all the necessary documents to authenticate an entirely imaginary seaman by the name of Tom Simons, of the British Merchant Mar
ine. He folded and refolded them several times, rubbed the edges with a nail file, smeared them with cigarette ash, sprinkled them with water and a couple of drops of coffee, and walked over them several times until they were convincingly soiled and worn.

  Then he finished dressing and went out. He took a Fifth Avenue bus to Washington Square, and walked from there down through the grey shabby streets of the lower east side until he found the kind of store he was looking for.

  He couldn’t help the natural elegance of his normal appearance, but the proprietor eyed him curiously when he announced himself as a buyer and not a seller.

  “I’ve got a character part in a play,” he explained, “and this was the only way I could think of to get the right kind of clothes.”

  That story increased his expenses by at least a hundred per cent, but he came out at the end of an hour with an untidy parcel containing a complete outfit of well-worn apparel that would establish the character of Tom Simons against any kind of scrutiny.

  He took a taxi back to the Algonquin.

  There were two telephone messages.

  Miss Dexter phoned, and would call again about seven o’clock.

  Miss Natello phoned.

  Simon arched his brows over the second message, and smiled a little thinly before he tore it up. The ungodly were certainly working. Fundamentally he didn’t mind that, but the persistence of the coverage took up the slack in his nerves. And it wasn’t because he was thinking about himself.

  He called Avalon’s number, but there was no answer.

  There are meaningless gulfs of time in real life which never occur in well-constructed stories—hours in which nothing is happening, nothing is about to happen, nothing is likely to happen, and nothing does happen. The difference is that in a story they can be so brightly and lightly skimmed over, simply by starting a fresh paragraph with some such inspired sentence as “Simon Templar went downstairs again for a drink, and Wolcott Gibbs waved to him across the lobby, and they spent a couple of congenial hours lamenting the sad standards of the current season on Broadway.”

  Simon Templar went downstairs again for a drink, and Wolcott Gibbs waved to him across the lobby, and they spent a couple of congenial hours lamenting the sad standards of the current season on Broadway, and all the time Simon was watching the clock and wondering what held back the hands.

  It was fifteen hours, or minutes, after seven when the call came.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said.

  “And a Happy New Year to you,” he said. “What goes?”

  “Darling,” she said, “I forgot that I had a date with my arranger to go over some new songs. So I had to rush out. What are you doing?”

  “Having too many drinks with Wolcott Gibbs.”

  “Give him my love.”

  “I will.”

  “Darling,” she said, “there’s a hotel man from Chicago in town—he used to come and hear me bellow when I was at the Pump Room—and he wants me to go to dinner. And I’ve got to find myself another job.”

  He felt empty inside, and unreasonably resentful, and angry because he knew it was unreasonable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “So am I. I do want to see you, really.”

  “Have you met this creep before?”

  “Oh, yes. Lots of times. He’s quite harmless—just a bit dreary. But he might have a job for me, and I’ve got to earn an honest living somehow. Don’t worry—I haven’t forgotten what you told me about being careful. By the way, you’ll be glad to hear Cookie called me.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes. Very apologetic, and begging me to drop in and see her.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I hate the joint and I hate her, but she knows everybody in town and she isn’t a good enemy to have. I’ll see what happens tonight…What are you going to be doing later?”

  “Probably carousing in some gilded cesspool, surrounded by concubines and champagne.”

  “I ought to be able to get rid of this creep at a sensible hour, and I would like to see you.”

  “Why don’t you call me when you get through? I’ll probably be home. If I’m not, leave a number.”

  “I will.” Her voice was wistful. “Don’t be too gay with those concubines.”

  Simon went back to his table. He felt even emptier inside. It had been such a beautiful dream. He didn’t know whether to feel foolish, or cynical, or just careless. But he didn’t want to feel any of those things. It was a persistent irritation, like a piece of gravel in a shoe.

  “What are you doing this evening?” Gibbs asked him.

  “Having another drink.”

  “I’ve got to get some dinner before I go to that opening. Why don’t you join me?”

  “I’d like to.” Simon drained his glass. He said casually, “Avalon Dexter sent you her love.”

  “Oh, do you know her? She’s a grand gal. A swell person. One of the few honest-to-God people in that racket.”

  There was no doubt about the spontaneous warmth of Wolcott’s voice. And measured against his professional exposure to all the chatter and gossip of the show world, it wasn’t a comment that could be easily dismissed. The back of Simon’s brain went on puzzling.

  2

  The Saint watched Mr Gibbs depart, and gently tested the air around his tonsils. It felt dry. He moved to the cusp of the bar and proceeded to contemplate his nebulous dissatisfactions.

  He ordered more of the odious product of the house of Dawson and meditated upon the subject of Dr Ernst Zellermann, that white-maned, black-browed high priest of the unconscious mind.

  Why, Simon asked himself, should a man apologise for sticking his face in the way of a fast travelling fist? Why should Dr Z wish to further his acquaintance of the Saint, who had not only knocked him tail over tea-kettle but had taken his charming companion home? How, for that matter, did Dr Z know that Avalon Dexter might have the telephone number of Simon Templar?

  Beyond the faintest shadow of pale doubt, Brother Zellermann was mixed up in this situation. And since the situation was now the object of the Saint’s eagle-eyeing, the type-case psychiatrist should come in for his share of scrutiny. And there was nothing to do but scrutinise…

  Simon tossed off everything in his glass but a tired ice cube, and went out into the night. The doorman flicked one glance at the debonair figure who walked as if he never touched the ground, and almost dislocated three vertebrae as he snapped to attention.

  “Taxi, sir?”

  “Thanks,” said the Saint, and a piece of silver changed hands. The doorman earned this by crooking a finger at a waiting cab driver. And in another moment Simon Templar was on his way to the Park Avenue address of Dr Zellermann.

  It was one of those impulsive moves of unplanned exploration that the Saint loved best. It had all the fascination of potential surprises, all the intriguing vistas of an advance into new untrodden country, all the uncertainty of dipping the first fork into a plate of roadside eating stew. You went out into the wide world and made your plans as you went along and hoped the gods of adventure would be good to you.

  Simon relaxed hopefully all the way up-town until the taxi decanted him in front of the windowed monolith wherein Dr Ernst Zellermann laved the libido.

  A light burned on the twelfth floor, and that was entrée even though the lobby roster placed Dr Zellermann on the eighteenth floor. Simon entered the elevator, signed “John Paul Jones” on the form for nocturnal visitors, said “Twelve” to the ancient lackey, and was levitated on greased runners.

  He walked toward the lighted doorway, an emporium of Swedish masseurs, but wheeled on silent feet as soon as the elevator doors closed and went up six flights as swiftly and as silently as the elevator had ascended. The lock on Zellermann’s door gave him little trouble, snicking open to reveal a waiting-room of considerable proportions.

  The pencil beam of his flashlight told him that the man who decorated this restful room knew
the value of the pause that relaxes. “This is your home,” the room said. “Welcome. You like this chair? It was made for you. The prints? Nice, aren’t they? Nothing like the country. And isn’t that soft green of the walls pleasant to the eye? Lean back and relax. The doctor will see you presently, as a friend. What else, in these surroundings?”

  The Saint tipped his mental hat and looked around for more informative detail. This wasn’t much. The receptionist’s desk gave up nothing but some paper and pencils, a half pack of cigarettes, a lipstick, and a copy of Trembling Romances. Three names were written on an appointment pad on the desk top.

  He went into the consultation room, which was severely furnished with plain furniture. A couch lay against one wall, the large desk was backed against an opaque window, and the walls were free of pictorial distractions.

  Yet this, too, was a restful room. The green of the reception-room walls had been continued here, and despite the almost monastic simplicity of the decor, this room invited you to relax. Simon had no doubt that a patient lying on the couch, with Dr Zellermann discreetly in the background gloom, would drag from the censored files of memory much early minutiae, the stuff of which human beings are made.

  But where were the files? The office safe?

  Surely it was necessary to keep records, and surely the records of ordinary daily business, need not be hidden. The secretary must need a card file of patients, notations, statements of accounts, and what not.

  Once more the pencil beam slid around the office, and snapped out. Then the Saint moved silently—compared to him, a shadow would have seemed to be wearing clogs—back into the reception room. His flash made an earnest scrutiny of the receptionist’s corner and froze on a small protuberance. Simon’s fingers were on it in a second. He pulled, then lifted—and a section of wall slid upward to reveal a filing cabinet, a small safe, and a typewriter.

  The Saint sighed as he saw the aperture revealed no liquid goods. Tension always made him thirsty, and breaking and entering always raised his tension a notch.

  As he reached for the top drawer of the file to see what he could see, the telephone on the reception desk gave out a shrill demand. The Saint’s reflexes sent a hand toward it, which hovered over the instrument while he considered the situation. More than likely, somebody had called a wrong number. It was about that time in the evening when party-goers reach the point where it seems a good idea to call somebody, and the somebody is often determined by spinning the dial at random.