The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series) Page 8

  “May I smoke?”

  “Sure,” Sam said.

  The Saint took out his cigarette-case, that case which had special properties that had before now helped him out of tighter spots than this. Not that the case seemed to differ from any similar case made of gold and embellished with a tasteful amount of precious gems. No, it seemed functional in design, if a bit on the ornate side. And functional it was; for one of its edges could be used as a razor. The toughest beard would fall before that redoubtable keenness. Not only was it a weapon for cutting bonds or throats, it contained ammunition which could be applied in sundry ways to the confusion of the Ungodly.

  Interspersed among his regular brand were other special cigarettes which could blind, frighten, and fling into chaos such unsavoury members of the human race as the Saint wished to blind, frighten, or fling into chaotic action. Each of these explosive tubes consisted almost entirely of magnesium.

  His sensitive fingers felt among the case’s cargo to light upon a bona-fide smoke, which he lighted. He puffed a blue cloud at the ceiling and placed the case in a convenient jacket pocket. There might be use for it later. In doing so, he felt the outline of the small knife, Belle, which nestled in her case up his sleeve.

  He eyed Sam Jeffries with that devilish carelessness that had made his name not only a by-word but a guide to independence.

  “What do you mean, what now?”

  “Well,” Sam said, “I didn’t recognise you at first. But after we was in the cab, see, I says, ‘Sam, that’s the Saint,’ I says. And I asks myself what would the Saint want of the likes of us, and I gets no answer, see. So then I says to myself it’d be a good idea maybe if I didn’t take no chances, so I hauls out my rod.”

  “Which fails to comfort me,” the Saint murmured. His inaudible sigh of relief was let out carefully and imperceptibly. His mind was concerned with one beautiful thought. Sam Jeffries hadn’t expected him to show up.

  Avalon hadn’t, then, tipped them off. If she were one of the Ungodly, she would have warned the two sailor boys. But she hadn’t, and that made for singing in the veins.

  He caught up his sudden joy in two mental hands and looked at it. It could be a treacherous kind of joy, going off half-cocked at the most stupid stimuli. Suppose she had warned Sam Jeffries. Would he be clever enough to put on an act of this sort? Perhaps not but perhaps yes, too. At any rate, Avalon might have been clever enough to instigate such an act.

  So the whole situation solved nothing, as far as his estimate of Avalon was concerned. And it was becoming increasingly important that he arrive at a correct estimate of her intents and purposes.

  For himself he had no fear. These were young men—boys, really, in experience—whom he could overpower, escape from or capture if he chose to do so. But if Avalon were in this with him, his actions might explode along a certain line; if she were not, they would certainly explode along other and more uncomfortable lines.

  Not that the end result would be affected. The Saint felt that he was travelling along the right road. As soon as the sea came into the picture, he was convinced that at long last he was approaching the goal.

  For he had mental visions of ships sailing out of New York harbour, through the Canals, Panama or Suez, heading west or east, but always with the Orient at one end of the run. Small ships, 3,000-ton freighters, carrying cargo to Calcutta; big ships, 20,000-ton liners of the restless deep, taking men and women to build a new world from the shattered remains.

  And on these ships he saw men—boys from Glasgow, oldsters from the Bronx, trim officers from Liverpool—with an idea: “Benny sent me.”

  That Open Sesame formula of speakeasy days applied here, too. Benny sent me. The grilled door opened, you could libate at the bar, the house was yours. Every prospect pleased, and only the liquor was vile. Here, too, and now. Benny sent me. An agent passed over a parcel, it was stowed away, returned to New York and eventually to Benny.

  Benny, in this case, being James Prather.

  Maybe. In any case, it was vital to learn what these boys knew. What cares had they while sailing the seven (Seven? the Saint could think of nine, offhand) seas? What errands run, what messages carried? Were they unwitting or willing tools of—of whom?

  That was the question.

  And so the Saint said, in an effort to relax Sam Jeffries’ upraised black brows and Joe Hyman’s corrugated forehead, “Do you want to see my union card?”

  This had not the desired effect on Joe’s forehead, but Sam grinned sheepishly.

  “That you’re her agent? Naw, I guess not. Maybe I was a little quick on the draw, but I seen times when to be slow was to be too damned slow. Look, Mister, I’m sorry, I guess. What say we forget it?”

  “Would you like to shake left-handed,” Simon asked pleasantly, “or would you like to put away that postage stamp pistol?”

  Sam dropped it into his jacket pocket, grinned anew, and gave Simon a hand that was hard as iron.

  “Less just have fun, Saint.”

  “A pleasure, Sam.”

  Avalon went “Phew!” in an explosive release of tension.

  “Pardon my nerves,” she said, “but these unorthodox introductions have a tendency to throw me.”

  Joe looked at everybody at once, a feat that did strange things to his round face.

  “Ya mean this guy’s d’Saint? Th’ guy what diddles cops an’ crooks too, all to once? ’Zat who he is?”

  Sam Jeffries gazed patiently at his shipmate.

  “Look, we been talkin’ for fifteen minutes about who he is, while we run up three bucks on the meter and’ll wind up in the drink if we don’t tell the guy where to go, so shaddup.”

  “I didn’t mean nothin,’ ” Joe murmured. “But hell’s—hully criminy, I mean—the Saint!”

  “So he’s th’ Saint, so what? Right now he’s a guy goin’ along to put a few belts away. Got any arguments?”

  “Naw, but it’s like—well, you know, well, hell, I mean—”

  “Shaddup.” To Avalon, Sam said, “Uh, Miss Dexter, we asked you to come along with us, ’n it seems to me this oughta be your party. Whyn’t you tell th’ helmsman where to throw out the anchor?”

  Avalon looked at the Saint. He looked away. She turned to Joe, who was still wandering around in wonder at the Saint’s being present.

  “I’ll go wherever Joe wants to go.”

  She was rewarded by one of the most complete smiles she had ever seen.

  Not that Joe reminded you of a vaudeville comic hamming romantic embarrassment; there was no calculation in his pleasure. It was just that: pure pleasure. His round face took on a glow that made it like a lamp in a mine tunnel.

  The Saint took his eyes away from the back window, through which he had been scrutinising traffic in their wake, and let them rest on Joe. Where would Joe want to go? The Stork? 21? Leon and Eddie’s? Or some waterfront joint—Bill’s Place, or some such.

  It seemed that Joe was going to require some time to decide. He was obviously accustomed to having decisions made for him: “Swab the deck,” “Coil that rope,” “Kick that guy in the kidneys.” Here was responsibility, and he wasn’t quite ready for it. If Avalon had simply told him to jump out of the cab window, there was no doubt in the world that he would have done it. He might have asked if she wanted him to do a jack-knife or a belly-buster, but his final action would have been to drape himself on the asphalt. But now there was a choice concerned, he was so pleased at having his opinion asked that the fact of the choice slipped his mind.

  He sat grinning for so long that Sam jabbed him with, “Well?”

  Joe blinked. His grin faded slowly, like sky writing on a gentle breeze.

  “Huh? Oh. Well, gosh, I don’t care.”

  The Saint was becoming very fond of Joe. Here was a boy who would give out like a defective slot machine if manipulated properly.

  “She ast ya,” Sam said patiently. “So you don’t care. We keep flitting around behind this meter till ya make up ya min
d? Name some place, any place!”

  Joe blinked, and you could almost hear unused mental machinery begin to rattle and clank. The machinery ground to a stop. His face once more was like a harvest moon.

  “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 dip joint, haven of high-graders. 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, ya 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 members 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 was James Prather, talking to Kay Natello. Prather looked up at the party’s entrance, narrowed his eyes, and walked toward them.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  HOW MR PRATHER SAID LITTLE, AND DR ZELLERMANN SAID EVEN LESS

  1

  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 agonised 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 have been traditionally passed down through the years, and one of these 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. H
er 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 touches 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.