Then he lighted a cigarette with extreme thoughtfulness, digesting the new and incontrovertible fact that Patrick Hogan, that simple spontaneous child of nature, was painting the town with a roscoe in his pants.
3
Cookie sat down with them, and Hogan said, “This is me friend Tom Simons, a foine sailor an’ an old goat with the gals. We were drunk together in Murmansk—or I was drunk anyway.”
“How do you do, Tom,” Cookie said.
“Mustn’t grumble,” said the Saint, “’O’s yerself?”
“Tired. And I’ve still got two shows to do at my own place.”
“I certainly did enjoy ’earing yer sing, ma’m.”
“This your first visit?”
“Yus, ma’m.”
“Call me Cookie. Everyone does.”
“Yus, ma’m.”
“I bet it won’t be his last,” Hogan said. “Eh, Tom?”
“Not arf it won’t,” said the Saint. “If you’ll ’ave me. But I dunno as I’ll ’ave a lot more charnces on this trip.”
Cookie took out a pack of cigarettes, offered them, and lit one for herself. She looked at the Saint again.
“Aren’t you staying long?” she added conversationally.
“Naow. Back on board by supper-time on Tuesday, them’s the orders—an’ we only drops the ’ook yesterdye. Be a s’ilor an’ see the world—I don’t think.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Aow, it’s orl in the dye’s work, ma’m. But I ses ter meself, I’m goin’ ter see New York while I got the charnce, by crikey.”
“Where are you heading for next?”
“Through the canal an’ strite to Shanghai. Then back from there to ’Frisco. Then—”
“Say, Cookie,” interrupted Hogan brazenly, “how’s about a drop of real liquor for a couple o’ good friends who’ve dried their throats to a cinder with cheerin’ for ye?”
She took a deep man-sized drag at her cigarette, flicked ash from it on to the table, and glanced at the Saint again with expressionless and impersonal calculation.
“I might find you a drop,” she said.
She stood up and started away, and Patrick Hogan nudged the Saint with one of his broad disarming winks as they followed her.
“What did I tell ye, Tom?”
“Cor,” said the Saint appreciatively, “you ain’t arf a one.”
They went through a door at the side of the service bar, which took them into a kitchen that might once have been bustling and redolent with the concoction of rare dishes for the delectation of gourmets. Now it looked bare and drab and forlorn. There was no one there. A centre table was piled with loaves of bread and stacks of sliced ham and cheese, and littered with crumbs and scraps. Cases of Coke and pop were pyramided in one corner. The only thing on the stove was an enormous steaming coffee pot, and a mass of dirty cups and plates raised sections of their anatomy, like vestiges of a sunken armada, out of the lake of greasy water in the sink.
Cookie led the way into another room that opened off the kitchen. It was so tiny that it must once have seen duty as a store-room. Now it barely had space for a couple of plain chairs, a waste-basket, a battered filing cabinet, and a scarred desk scattered with bills and papers. Kay Natello sat at the desk, in front of an antique typewriter, pecking out an address on an envelope with two claw-like fingers.
“Hullo, Kay,” Hogan said familiarly. “An’ how’s me swateheart tonight?”
“We’re just going to have a quick one,” Cookie said. “Be a darling and find us some glasses, Kay, will you?”
Kay Natello got up and went out into the kitchen, and Cookie opened a drawer of the desk and pulled out a half-empty bottle of Scotch. Natello came back with four wet glasses and put them on the desk.
“This is Tom Simons—Kay Natello,” Cookie said. “Tom’s only just got in, and he’s sailing again on Tuesday.”
“Too bad,” said Natello.
“We all ’ave ter work, Miss,” Simon said modestly. “At least we got plenty o’ grub an’ a nice clean bed ter sleep in, as long as it don’t sink under us.”
Cookie finished pouring four powerful slugs, and picked up one of them.
“Well, boys,” she said. “Down the hatch.”
The drinks duly went down the hatch.
“You were sailing soon, too, weren’t you, Pat?” asked Natello.
“Next week. Off to South Africa, India, Singapore, and back the same way.”
“We’ll miss you,” said Cookie. “What about you, Tom—are you going to England?”
“Shanghai,” said the Saint, wiping his droopy moustache. “Through the canal an’ back to ’Frisco.”
Cookie poured herself another drink, and downed it at one gulp like a dose of medicine. Perhaps that was what it was for her.
“I’ve got to leave you,” she announced. “Got my next show to do.”
She helped herself to another small jolt, as an afterthought, just in case she had made a mistake and cheated herself on the last one. The effect on her was not even noticeable. Her small piggy eyes summarised the Saint with the quick covert shrewdness of an adept Fifty-second Street head waiter taking the measure of a new customer. She said with perfectly timed spontaneity, “Look, why don’t you boys come over to the Cellar when you get through here? On the house.”
Hogan thumped her heartily on the back without even jarring her.
“Darlin’, what did ye think we were waitin’ for? Sure, we’ll be there shoutin’ for ye. Won’t we, Tom?”
“Crikey,” said the Saint, with a wistful break in his voice. “You ain’t arf giving us a time, ma’m. I mean, Cookie.”
“That’s fine,” Cookie said. “Then I’ll be expecting you. Kay, you take care of them and bring them along. See you all later.”
She gathered her foundation around her, gave a last hesitant glance at the Scotch bottle, and made a resolute exit like a hippopotamus taking off to answer the call of spring.
Kay Natello took care of them.
Simon didn’t keep very close track of the caretaking, but the general trend of it was quite simple. After the Scotch was finished and they left the Canteen, it involved stopping at a great many bars on the way and having a drink or two in each of them. Hogan acquired more blarney and boisterousness as it went on: he said that Kay was his girl, and an Irishman’s girl was his castle, or something that sounded like that. He beamingly offered to pulverise various persons whom he suspected of dissenting from his opinions about Oliver Cromwell, Michael Collins, De Valera, and Kay Natello. Simon Templar did his best to keep in time with the mood, and surreptitiously dribbled as many drinks as he could into the nearest cuspidor. Through it all, Kay Natello only became more stringy and more removed. She responded to Pat Hogan’s elephantine flirtations when she remembered to; in between, she was more like a YWCA chaperon trying to keep up with the girls. Simon was quite relieved that she didn’t at any point offer to break into significant vers libre…But it still seemed to take a long time to reach Cookie’s Cellar.
Once they were there, however, it was a repetition of the night before from another viewpoint. This time, the Saint was one of the reluctant heroes under the spotlight. Cookie sang the same kind of songs, giving and receiving the same enthusiasm.
After one of the more turbid numbers, Kay Natello nudged the Saint and said proudly, “I wrote that for her.”
“Cor!” said the Saint respectfully.
That was only a mild expression of what he thought. The idea of a poetess of Kay Natello’s school composing those kinds of lyrics in her lighter moments had an austere magnificence which he hoped to dwell on some quiet evening when he had nothing else at all to do.
It was like the night before again, with a difference, because Avalon Dexter was there.
She wasn’t there to work. She was just another customer, wearing a simple afternoon dress, sitting at a table at the back of the room, but he saw her long tawny hair dance as she talked and looked around.
It gave him a queer sensation to watch her like that and have her glance pass over him in complete unawareness. It was like being invisible.
And it also gave him a sort of guilty feeling, as though he was hiding and spying on her. Which at that moment he was.
The man with her was slightly rotund and slightly bald. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and he had a round and pleasant pink face that looked very clean and freshly barbered. He was not, you could tell very quickly, another Dr Zellermann in his manual recreations. He behaved like a nice wholesome middle-aged man who was enjoying the company he was in. Any impartial observer would have conceded that he was entitled to that, and quite undeserving the unreasonable malignance with which Simon regarded him. Simon knew it was unreasonable, but that didn’t blunt the stab of resentment that went through him when he saw her chattering so gaily with this complacent jerk. He was surprised at his own symptoms, and not too pleased about them either.
Cookie finished at last, with Hogan and the Saint competing in the uproariousness of their appreciation. The melancholy waiter brought some more drinks, bowed down into profounder misery by the knowledge that this was one table which he dared not discourage, and that at the same time it was one table where the tip would certainly be no compensation. Cookie ploughed through the room, stopping to give jovial greeting to various tables, and surged on to the bar, where there were other members of her following to be saluted, and the bartender had been trained to have three ounces of Scotch waiting for her with a cube of ice in it.
It was twenty minutes before she breasted back to her own table, and then she had Dr Ernst Zellermann in tow.
Cookie introduced him, and mopped her face and reached for the first drink that arrived.
“Tom’s sailing on Tuesday,” she said. “Shanghai.”
The Saint had already begun to let it look as if his liquor consumption was catching up with him. He lurched in his chair, spilt some of his drink, and gave a wink that was getting heavy and bleary.
“Gonna find aht if it’s true abaht China,” he said.
“I may be able to tell you a few places to go,” Zellermann said smoothly. “I spent quite a time there once—in the good days before the war.”
He looked very noble and full of unfathomable memories, and Simon Templar, dimly returning his gaze, felt coldly and accurately like a specimen on a dissecting table.
Zellermann picked up his glass and turned to Cookie with the utmost charm.
“You know,” he said, “I don’t know why you don’t invite more people like Mr Hogan and Mr Simons out to Long Island. After all, they deserve to be entertained much more than I do.”
“That’s an idea,” Cookie said. “How about it, boys? I’ve got a little shack on the beach at Southampton. We close this joint on Sundays, anyhow. Why don’t you come along? I’ll see that you’re back in town on Monday. You can swim in the ocean and get some sun on the beach, and we’ll make a party of it and it won’t cost you a cent. Dr Zellermann and I will drive you out as soon as we’ve closed this place. We’ll have a grand week-end. I’ll have company for you, too. The most attractive girl you’ve ever seen.”
Simon was much too drunk to catch the glance that flashed between them—or at least he had been able to convince everyone of that.
“Dexter is coming along,” Cookie said.
4
The Saint mumbled something about seeing a man about a dog, and was able to get out alone. There was a telephone booth near the entrance. He called the Algonquin and asked for Avalon.
Miss Dexter was not there at the moment, as he knew, but could they take a message?
“When is she likely to get it?” he asked.
“I couldn’t say, sir, but she’s been calling in about every half-hour. She seems to be expecting a message. Is this Mr Templar?”
The Saint held his breath for a moment, and took a lightning decision.
“Yes.”
“I know she’s asked whether you called. Can she call you back?”
The Saint said, “I’m afraid she can’t reach me, but tell her I’ll see her tomorrow.”
Nothing could have been more true than that, even if she didn’t understand it, and somehow it made him feel better with himself. It meant something to know that she had hoped he would find a way to get in touch with her—no matter why. She would not know that he had been back to the Algonquin since his “arrest,” for that had been taken care of, and she must continue to believe that he was locked up somewhere down-town. But she had asked…
Both of them had become hooked to an unwinding chain that was going somewhere on its own. Only it happened to be the same chain for both of them. It seemed as if the hand of destiny was in that—Simon didn’t want to think any more, just then, about what that destiny might be.
When he got back to the table, everything had been settled. Patrick Hogan proclaimed that when his great-grandfather sailed for America, all the luggage he had was in his coat pockets, and he could do anything that his great-grandfather could do. He was certain that, next to his great-grandfather and himself, his pal Tom Simons was just as expert at light travelling.
“I can take you in my car,” Zellermann said convivially. ‘There’s plenty of room.”
Simon didn’t doubt it was a car you could play badminton in.
“I’ll have to stay till the bitter end,” said Cookie, “and Dexter will probably want to pick up some things. I’ll bring her.”
It was worked out just as easily and rapidly as that. But Simon knew that aside from the hospitable cooperation, Avalon Dexter was not intended to know that Dr Zellermann would be a member of the house party. Or he hoped he knew it.
He had some confirmation of that when they were leaving. Avalon seemed to be on her way back from the powder room when they started out. There was a rather lost and apart expression on her face that no one else might have seen. Zellermann half stopped her.
“Good evening, Avalon,” he said, half formally and half engagingly.
“How are you?” Avalon said, very brightly and very cheerfully and without a pause, so that before he could have said anything else she was neatly past him and gone.
Zellermann stood looking after her without a ripple of reaction, his face as smooth as a head of marble.
Simon recalled that he had also hit Dr Zellermann in the eye, and realised that some momentary inaccuracy had made him fail to leave any souvenir contusion on the eyelid. All he could detect, in the brighter light of the foyer, was a small area of matt surface just above the cheekbone. Dr Zellermann’s peripalpebral ecchymosis, clearly, had received the most skilled medical and cosmetic treatment.
The encounter had made Hogan and the Saint drift farther on toward the door, and Kay Natello had excused herself on a farewell visit to the powder room. It was a chance that might not recur very quickly.
Simon said, “Pat, ’oo is this Dexter jine?”
“She used to work here, Tom me boy, an’ a swate singer she was too. That was her just went by. But you’ll meet her when we get to Southampton. An’ if Cookie says she’s for you, ye’re in luck.”
“She’s a corker, orl right,” said the Saint. “If that’s ’oo yer mean. Although she wouldn’t ’ave much time fer an ole goat like me. Clarss, that’s wot she is…”
He staggered just a little, and put his arm around Hogan’s broad shoulders, and decided to take a chance on Hogan’s unpredictable pugnacity.
“But if it comes ter that, mite, wot djer see in an ole sack o’ bones like that there Natello?”
Hogan laughed loudly and clung to him for mutual support.
“She’s okay, Tom,” he said generously. “An’ she’s a friend of Cookie’s, an’ she’s me swateheart. Is it her fault if she’s an old sack o’ bones? She reminds me of me old Aunt Eileen, an’ she’s been kindness itself to me iver since we met, so I’ll fight any man that says she’s not the toast ’o the town.”
That was how they piled into Dr Zellermann’s car, which was
not only big enough to play badminton in but could probably have accommodated a social set of tennis as well.
Hogan and Natello sat in the back, and after a few lines of noisy repartee seemed to get close together and go to sleep. Dr Zellermann steered them out over the Triborough Bridge with surgical care and precision, while he chatted urbanely about the sea and world commerce and logistics and the noble part that was being played by such unsung paladins of reconversion as Tom Simons. The Saint sat beside him, making the right answers as best he could improvise them, and remembering Avalon Dexter and many various things.
Apparently, as he had worked it out, Avalon’s arrival at Southampton to find Zellermann there already was meant to be a surprise for her. Apparently, then, there was an idea extant that she wouldn’t have accepted the invitation if she had known Zellermann would be there. Certainly she had brushed him off coolly enough that night, with merely conventional politeness. That was what any ordinary person would think.
But Simon Templar was still alive for no more fundamental reason than that he had never thought what any ordinary person would think—or was intended to think. So that he could stand far back and see that if he were the Ungodly and he wanted to hook Simon Templar, he might easily play the cards something like that.
And why had Avalon accepted the invitation anyhow?
The Saint’s lips hardened over the reminder that he always had to think like that. He had had to do it for so long that it was a habit now. And now, for the first time in an infinitude of years, he was conscious of it again.
And it wasn’t any fun at all, and there was no pleasure at all in the knowledge of his own wisdom and vigilance, because this was Avalon, and this wasn’t the way he wanted to think about Avalon.
Avalon with her russet locks tossing like the woods of New England in the fall, and her brown eyes that laughed so readily and looked so straight.
But Patrick Hogan with his ingenuous joviality and the gun on his hip. Patrick Hogan with his uninhibited young sailor’s zest for a spree, and his cheerful acceptance of Kay Natello. Patrick Hogan, whom the Saint had hooked so deftly as a sponsor—who had been so very willing to be hooked.
The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series) Page 13