The Saint Sees It Through s-26 Page 8

  "Cookie's!" he cried, and was quiet.

  The Saint suppressed a groan. He didn't like Cookie's— Canteen or Cellar. He'd never visited the Canteen, but his mind was made up.

  On the other hand——

  He considered the other hand. James Prather had seen him and Avalon leave with Sam and Joe. That fact would be re­ported, if the Saint's ideas on the situation were correct. Those receiving the report would in some way be tied up with Cookie's. Therefore, if they all turned up there in the late after­noon, before the crowd began to thicken, some overt action might be taken. Anything, he thought, to get this thing out in the open. Another point to be considered was Avalon. In the event of a fracas of any sort at Cookie's, she'd be more likely to declare her allegiance there than elsewhere.

  "Splendid," the Saint said, and Avalon's half-formed answer died in her throat.

  She might have been about to say all the obvious things: the place would be dull at this time of day, she didn't like it, it was a clip joint, haven of highgraders. But when the Saint spoke, she shot him a puzzled glance and was still.

  Simon gave instructions to the driver, and they took off on a new tack.

  "Why," Simon asked conversationally, "Cookie's?"

  "All the guys," Sam Jeffries said, "keep tellin' ya if ya want a swell time, go there, if ya belong to th' Merchant Marine. Free drinks, free eats, maybe even a girl trun in. Joe here be­lieves everything anybody tells "im."

  "Sometimes," Joe said, with the air of a great philosopher, "it turns out that way."

  "Yeh!" Sam snorted. "Remember in Kobe how that——"

  "Aw, that," Joe broke in. "He was ribbin' us."

  Simon slipped in smoothly and took the conversation over. "How is the Orient?"

  "Still shot to hell," Sam said. "Gonna be a long time before all them buildings go up again."

  "Did you hear about Cookie's, even there?"

  "Yeah, you know, guys on other ships."

  "And you've never been to Cookie's before?"

  "No."

  "Where did you go on this last trip?"

  While Sam launched a graphic account of their travels, Simon considered the fact that neither of these boys had been to Cookie's before. This seemed hardly in keeping with the pattern which Simon had begun to put together in his mind. He felt that the link must be somewhere between ships darting about the sea and Cookie's Cellar. James Prather?

  Or the late lamented Gamaliel Bradford Foley?

  Foley had been tied up with Dr. Zellermann. Dr. Zellermann with Cookie's, or some member of Cookie's entourage. There­fore a link existed somewhere.

  Anyway, here they were. Simon paid off the taxi, and they went inside. The place was almost deserted, but a few people were around.

  Among these were James Prather, talking to Kay Natello. Prather looked up at the party's entrance, narrowed his eyes and walked toward them.

  3.

  How Mr. Prather said little, and

  Dr. Zellermann said even less

  The Saint had never considered himself to be psychic. He had learned that by adding the factors of a situation he could fore­cast the probable moment when Death would leer at him over a gunsight, or ride the business end of a club, or sing through the air on the point of a knife. He had learned that, when he sub­consciously placed such factors in their proper alignment and came up with a subconscious answer, his adrenal glands went quickly into action with a suddenness that brought a tingling to the back of his neck and the tips of his fingers.

  He did not regard this sensation as the result of a psychic gander into the immediate future, nor as the brushing of the back of his neck by an ectoplasmic hand once belonging to the goose-over-a-grave school of premonitory shuddering. The tin­gle he felt when James Prather followed his bulging eyes across the deserted floor of Cookie's Cellar was, he knew, the result of his adrenals sitting up and taking notice.

  For Simon had added the factors, and their sum total was danger. Not that he expected explosive action at the moment. He could have written the dialogue to come almost word for word. These characters weren't certain where and how the Saint fitted into the picture. Their motivation at the moment was the desire for such knowledge, and they would go about satisfying that desire in a fashion designed to be subtle and offhand.

  Nobody would say, yet: "Just what the hell are you doing here?"

  The Saint said under his breath to Avalon: "Get a table. Yonder bucko would have words with me. I'll join you."

  She sandwiched herself between Sam and Joe and piloted them to the far wall, which had been pleasantly blank before Ferdinand Pairfield had agonized upon it in pastel, and the Saint waited for Prather.

  "Just what the hell are you doing here?" Prather demanded.

  The Saint did not allow so much as the quiver of an eyelash to acknowledge his downfall as a prophet. His lazy smile and mocking blue eyes only indicated amusement at the gauche ap­proach. Prather flushed under the steady gaze, and his lobster-like eyes shifted away and back. In their shifting away, they touched on Joe Hyman and Sam Jeffries but showed no trace of recognition.

  "Comrade," the Saint said, "far back in the history of this country certain gentlemen flung powder and shot about in the cause of freedom. Such points as they won have been tradition­ally passed down through the years, and one of those points is the untrammelled right to visit such places as this, with its steel-trap economy, its bad air and worse drinks. Just why anyone in his right mind should like to exercise his right to such dubi­ous pleasure is beyond me, but there it is."

  "There's something fishy about this," Prather said in a sort of bewildered whine. "First, you come to my place with a song and dance about research. Then you follow me here. Why? I know who you are. You're the Saint. But I can't see why you followed me."

  "Follow you? Dear boy, I wouldn't follow you into the flossiest bagnio this side of Paradise. But now that you seem to have made such a lightning trip here, I'm happy to see you. Won't you join my party? I'm still gathering material."

  Prather regarded the table where Avalon parried verbs with Sam Jeffries with the concentration of a man sucking a piece of popcorn out of a cavity.

  "Thank you," he said with a grimness that was rather sur­prising. "I'll be glad to."

  Sam was on his life story, apparently having begun at the present, and was working backward.

  ". . . and there was this guy we had to see in Shanghai. Joe wanted to get drunk right off, but I says no we gotta see this guy before ..."

  He broke off, looked up. No flicker of recognition moved his brown face as he glanced incuriously at Prather. To the Saint, Sam said: "I was just tellin' Miss Dexter about our last trip."

  Something happened, but the Saint didn't catch it. It could have been a glance, a shake of the head, a kick in the ankle, from James Prather. For Sam suddenly froze. He didn't look at Prather, he didn't look at anybody, but you could see his thoughts and amiable chatter roll themselves up like armadillos and become impregnable and lifeless. All the warm lights went out of his eyes, and his smile became a fixed liability.

  His social immobility somehow conveyed itself to Joe, who underwent little change to achieve Sam's frozen state. Both young men rose to shake hands as the Saint performed intro­ductions, but, like Mudville on the night of Casey's disaster, there was no joy in them. Sam remained standing, long, lean, and brown.

  "Guess we better shove off, huh, Joe?"

  "Yeah," Joe said, meeting nobody's eye. "Guess so."

  "Don't run away, boys," Avalon said. But she said it per­functorily. She knew they were going. Her tone was a polite­ness, not an urging.

  "When the party's just starting?" said the Saint, He, too, knew they were going. A kick, a frown, a shake of the head. These had made the boys jittery.

  "Well, Saint," Sam said. "You know how it is. Just back from a long trip. We were kinda thinkin' of girls of our own. Course, I'll have to get one for Joe, here, but still——" He nodded at Avalon. "Thought we had
something there—uh, Miss. But seems she's staked out. So we'll blow."

  More handshakes, and they were gone.

  Kay Natello came over to greet them, and in that voice like a nutmeg grater on tin cans, asked, "What'll it be?"

  She didn't seem to be anxious to cut up old touchés with Simon, so he played it her way.

  "Old Foresters all around. Doubles," he added, remembering the strength of drinks at Cookie's.

  "Now," the Saint said when Kay had gone. "Tell me about Dr. Zellermann."

  "What is there to tell?"

  Prather didn't seem uncomfortable. There was, in his mind, nothing to tell. At least, he gave that impression.

  "He's a psychiatrist," he went on. "A good one, maybe. Any rate, he gets good prices."

  "Well," the Saint said. "Maybe we'd better drop him. Let's just have fun, kids."

  Avalon looked several volumes of unprintable material at the Saint and asked: "How do you propose to do that?"

  "By displaying my erudition, darling." The Saint smiled gently at her, and then bent attentive eyes on Prather as he said: "For instance. Do you know the word 'cougak'?"

  This brought no response. Simon sighed inwardly. Might as well get it out into the open, he thought. "It's the term applied to the bloom of a certain plant known as Pavarer somniferum. It's cultivated chiefly in Asia. After the poppy flowers, and the leaves fall off, the remaining pod develops a bloom, easily rubbed off with the fingers, called cougak. Then it is time to make the incision."

  "What are you talking about?" Avalon demanded.

  "Mr. Prather, I think," said the Saint.

  Prather blinked his overblue eyes at Simon.

  "I'm sorry, but I don't know what you mean."

  "It really doesn't matter," the Saint said. "Let's talk about something else."

  He noted that Kay Natello, who had been hovering in the middle distance, took her departure at this point and vanished through the archway at the back. Had there been a signal? If so, he hadn't caught it.

  "Mr. Prather," he said, "you must find life quite exhilarating. Contact with the major ports of the world, and all that."

  Prather stared, his eyes more lobster-like than usual.

  "What are you talking about?"

  There was no mistaking the honest bewilderment in the prominent blue eyes, and this gave the Saint pause. According to his ideas on the organization he was bucking, Prather would be one of the key men. Sam Jeffries had substantiated this no­tion, in his interrupted story to Avalon: ". . . and there was this guy we had to see in Shanghai."

  That fitted in with the whole theory of "Benny sent me." A contact was made here, instructions given, perhaps an advance made. Then the delivery of a package in the Orient or the Near East, which was returned to New York and duly turned over to James Prather or a prototype. All this made sense, made a pat­tern.

  But here was James Prather, obviously bewildered by the plainest kind of a lead. Was the man cleverer than he seemed? Was he putting on an act that could mislead that expert act-detector, the Saint? Or was he honestly in the dark about the Saint's meaning? And if he was, why was he here immediately after a visit from two sailors freshly back from the Orient?

  Mr. James Prather, it seemed, was in this picture somewhere, and it behooved the Saint to find out where.

  "Well," Simon said, "no matter. We have more important things to do, such as demolishing our—— But we have no drinks." He motioned to an aproned individual, who came to the table and assumed an attitude of servility. "Three more of the same. Old Forester."

  The waiter took the empty glasses and went away. The Saint turned his most winning smile on Prather.

  "I wasn't really shooting in the dark," he said. "But I guess my remarks weren't down the right alley."

  "Whatever you say," Prather replied, "I like. You have a good quality of voice. Though I don't see why you should spend any time with me."

  "Remember?" Simon asked. "I'm still doing research on Dr. Zellermann."

  Prather laughed. "I'd forgotten. Ah, here come our drinks."

  The waiter, an individual, like the village blacksmith, with brawny arms, came across the empty dance floor with a tray flattened on one upturned palm. It was obvious to the Saint's practiced eye that the man's whole mental attitude had changed. He had gone away trailing a fretful desire to please; he ap­proached with new-found independence.

  He was a stocky individual, broad of shoulder, lean of hip, heavy in the legs. His face was an eccentric oval, bejewelled with small turquoise eyes, crowned with an imposing nose that overhung a mouth of rather magnificent proportions. His chin was a thing of angles, on which you could hang a lantern.

  But the principal factor in his changed aspect was his inde­pendence. He carried the tray of drinks as though the nearest thing to his heart was the opportunity and reason to toss them into the face of a customer. Not only that, but each of the three glasses was that type known as "old fashioned."

  Each glass was short, wide of mouth, broad of base. And in each drink was a slice of orange and a cherry impaled on a tooth­pick.

  "Sorry," said the Saint as the waiter distributed the glasses, "but I ordered highballs, not Old Fashioneds."

  "Yeah?" said the waiter. "You trying to make trouble?"

  "No. I'm merely trying to get a drink."

  "Well, ya act like to me you're tryin' to make trouble. Ya order Old Fashioneds, 'n then ya yell about highballs. What's comin' off here?"

  "Nothing," Simon said patiently, "is coming off here. I'm simply trying to get what I ordered."

  "Ya realize I'll hafta pay for this, don't ya?" the waiter de­manded.

  "I'll pay for them," Simon said in the same gentle voice. "If you made a mistake, it won't cost you anything. Just bring us three Old Foresters—highballs."

  "And what's gonna happen to these drinks?"

  "That," the Saint said, "I don't know. You may rub them into the bartender's hair, for all of me."

  The waiter lifted his lip.

  "Lissen, the bartender's my brother-in-law."

  The Saint's lips tightened.

  "Then rub them into his back. Will you get our drinks?"

  The waiter stared sullenly for a moment.

  "Well, all right. But no more cracks about my brother-in-law, see?"

  He went away. The Saint watched him for a moment, de­cided against any action. His attention drifted from the waiter to the Pairfield murals.

  "It's an odd mind," he remarked, "that can contrive such unattractive innovations in the female form divine." He indi­cated a large sprawling figure on the far wall. "Take Gertie over there. Even if her hips did have Alemite lubrication points all over them, is it quite fair to let the whole world in on her secret?"

  "What I like," Avalon said, "is the hedge for hair. That pent­house effect throws me."

  "I'm sorry," James Prather said, "but I feel a little uncomfortable looking at those designs. This one over here, with each lock of hair ending in a hangman's knot. I——"

  He broke off, with an ineffectual gesture with his pale hands.

  "The poor man's Dali," murmured the Saint. "Here come our —what are those drinks?"

  They were pale green, in tall flared glasses, each with a twist of lime peel floating near the top.

  The Saint repeated his question to the sullen waiter.

  "Lissen," that character said. "I got no time to be runnin' back and forth for you. These here are Queen Georgianas, 'n if you don't want 'em, run 'em in your—" He glanced at Ava­lon, colored. "—well, rub 'em."

  "But I ordered," the Saint said very patiently, "Old Forest­ers. Highballs."

  " 'N if you're gonna be fussy," the waiter Said, "you're lucky to get anything. Wait a minute. Here comes the manager."

  The manager was thin, dapper, and dark, like George Raft in his halcyon days. He strode up to the table, took in the situa­tion with an expressionless look of his dark eyes, and turned them on the Saint.

  "Yes?" he said.r />
  "Whom do you have to know here?" Simon inquired. "I've been trying to get some bourbon for about thirty minutes."

  "Why don't you ask for it then?" suggested the manager.

  "Look," Simon said. "I don't mind buying your watered drinks at about three times the normal prices. All I want is the right flavor in the water. I do not want Queen Georgian as, or Old Fashioneds. I want Old Forester. It's a simple thing. All the waiter does is remember the order until he gets back to the bar. I'll write it out for him if he has a defective memory."

  "Nothin's wrong with my memory," the waiter growled. "Maybe you'd like these drinks in your puss, smart guy. You asked for Queen Georgianas, and you're gonna take 'em."

  Simon clenched his hands under the rim of the table.

  "Believe me," he said earnestly, "the last desire I have is to cause difficulty. If I must take these obscenities, I'll take them. But will you please, please get us a round of bourbon high­balls?"

  "Why don't you go away, if the service doesn't please you?" asked the George Raft manager.

  "The service," the Saint said, "leaves nothing to be desired, except everything."

  "Then why don't you just go away?" asked the manager.

  The Saint decided to be stubborn.

  "Why?"

  "No reason," the manager said. "We reserve the right to re­fuse service to anyone. Our sign says so."

  He indicated a sign above the bar.

  "And you are refusing me service?"

  "No. Not if you don't cause trouble."

  "And?"

  The manager nodded to the waiter. "Get him his drinks."

  "I'm not gonna serve him," the waiter said.

  The manager stamped a gleaming shoe. "Did you hear me?"

  The waiter went away.

  "Now," the Saint said, "where were we? Oh, yes, we were discussing," he said to the manager, "the more obscure aspects of suicide in American night clubs. Would you have anything to add to our data soon?"

  The manager smiled a crooked smile and departed. The Saint caught the eye of James Prather and formed a question: "Now that we've gone through the preliminary moves, shall we get down to business?"