The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  He smiled very fractionally in the gloom, and his hand lay on her wrist in a touch that was not quite a caress, but something to which nothing had to be added and from which nothing could be taken away.

  “And now,” he said, “I suppose you’re wondering where I belong in this, and why Hogan doesn’t know me.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “I might as well tell you. Hogan is doing his best, and so is the Department over him, but this thing goes too far over the world, into too many countries, and too many jurisdictions. Only an organisation that’s just as international can cope with it. There is such a thing, and I’m part of it. That’s all I’m allowed to say.”

  “And meanwhile,” she said, with a coldness that was not really her, “why isn’t Pat in bed? And why did he leave you his badge?”

  “Either because he’s still trying to wring the last drop out of his act, or because he’s trying to do some more dangerous snooping. Either because he hoped he could tip me off to keep my mouth shut and give him a chance, or because he knew he was facing the high jump and if he made a bad landing he hoped I might get some word out for him.” The Saint stood up. “Either way, I’m going to find out.”

  He heard and felt the rustle of her quick movement out of his sight, and then she was in front of him, face to face, and her arms around him and his hand under the soft eaves of her hair.

  “Simon—are you all right now?”

  “I’m as much use as I’ll ever be tonight.”

  His smile was still invisible through the darkness, and in some ways he was glad of it. His touch was strong and tender together. He said, “And Pat did his best, and I’m sure nothing is going to wait for him.”

  He kissed her again and held her against him, and he remembered a great many things, perhaps too many, and perhaps too many of them were not with her. But none of that mattered any more.

  He let her go presently, and in time it had only been a moment.

  “I suppose,” he said, “you wouldn’t happen to have any artillery in your week-end kit? A machine-gun might be useful, but if you’re travelling light a small stiletto would help.”

  “I haven’t anything better than a pair of nail scissors.”

  “I’m afraid,” Simon said sadly, “it might be hard to persuade Zellermann to sit still for that.”

  Light slashed through the room like a stealthy blade as he found the door handle and opened it.

  The corridor outside was dim and lifeless, but as he stepped out into it the sea murmurs were left in the room behind him, and the other stirrings of sound that had crept through to him in there resolved themselves into their own individual pattern—a rumble and twitter of muffled voices and movement downstairs. There was no movement that could be identified and no single word that could be picked out, but they had a pitch and a rhythm of deadly deliberation that spilled feathery icicles along his spine. He knew very well now why Avalon hadn’t been able to sleep, and why she had come looking for Pat Hogan or Tom Simons or anyone else solid and ordinary and potentially safe and wholesome. As she had said, they weren’t the sort of noises that people made if they were just trying to go on with a party. You couldn’t put a finger on any one solitary thing about them, but if you had a certain kind of sensitivity, you knew…There was a quality of evil and terror that could set a pace and a key even in confused and distant mutterings.

  It made the Saint feel strangely naked and ineffectual as he moved toward it, with the whirling but no longer dizzy hollowness left in his head by the drug, and the unaccustomed formality of his muscular coordinations, and the cold knowledge that he had nothing to fight with but his own uncertain strength and uprooted wits. But Patrick Hogan—or whatever his real name was—had exposed himself in just as lonely a way for the job that he had to do, and his gun couldn’t have helped him much, or the sounds below would have been different. And other men on more obvious battle-fronts had done what they could with what they had, because wars didn’t wait.

  He didn’t feel particularly glorious or heroic about it: it was much more a coldly predestined task that had to be finished. It didn’t seem to spread any emotion on the fact that it could easily and probably be his own finish too. It was just an automatic and irresistible mechanism of placing one foot in front of another on a necessary path from which there was no turning back, although the mind could sit away and watch its own housing walking voluntarily toward oblivion.

  And this was it, and he was it, for one trivial tremendous moment, himself, personally—the corny outlaw who redeemed himself in the last reel.

  It was quite funny, and a lot of fun, in the way he was thinking.

  He was moving like a cat, his ears travelling far ahead of his feet, and a new sound began to intrude upon them. A sound of voices. One voice detached itself from the two that were in converse, and a bell rang inside the Saint’s head with brazen clangour.

  It was the voice that had called Dr Zellermann on the night the Saint had broken into the office.

  And it was the voice of Ferdinand Pairfield.

  Lightly and quickly, Simon pulled Avalon toward the closed door through which seeped the words of Dr Zellermann and the fair Ferdinand.

  “I won’t do it,” Ferdinand said. “That is your job, and you must complete it. You really must, Ernst.”

  The Saint was shocked. This voice wasn’t fluttery, seeming always ready to trail off into a graceful gesture. This voice was venomous, reminding one of a beautiful little coral snake, looking like a pretty bracelet, coiled to strike and inject the poison that is more deadly, drop for drop, than that of the King Cobra. Here was no witless fag with a penchant for Crème Violette: here was a creature who could command in terms of death.

  The Saint’s brain gave one last dizzy lurch, and then settled into a clear thin stratospheric stillness as the last disjointed fragments of the picture he had been working for fell into mesh. In some strange way that one incongruous touch had reconciled all other incongruities—the freakish fellowship of Dr Zellermann with Cookie and Kay Natello, of all of them with Sam Jeffries and Joe Hyman, even the association with the lobster-eyed James Prather and the uninhibited Mrs Gerald Meldon. His own mistake had been in accepting as merely another piece of the formula the one ingredient which was actually the catalyst for them all. It was a weird and yet strangely soothing sensation to realise at last, with the utter certainty of psychic confirmation, that the man he had been looking for, the anchor thread of the whole fantastic web, was Mr Ferdinand Pairfield.

  3

  Simon became aware of Avalon’s fingers cramping on his arm, and knew that her perceptions were stumbling after his, less surely for one thing because she still lacked so much background that he had not been able to sketch for her, but following him more in mad surmise than with the integrated sureness that directed him.

  He pressed his hand over hers and went on listening, as Pairfield said, “It’d be dreadful to lose you, but of course you know how much the FBI would like to know the truth about why you became a refugee from Vienna. I’ve taken care of you all this time, but I can’t go on doing it forever. If you let me down and any thing happens—”

  “I don’t want to let you down, Ferdinand,” Zellermann said, and through all the measured confidence of his accents Simon had a vision of the smooth brow shining like damp ivory. “But our methods are getting nowhere. I think he’ll die before he tells us what he knows.”

  “He’d better not,” Ferdinand said in the same deadly bell-like voice. “I want all the information he has. And I shall not assist you. You know the sight of torture and pain sickens me. I should simply die.”

  “You didn’t seem particularly affected in the case of Foley.”

  “Oh, but I was! When I stuck that knife in him, I almost fainted. It was thrilling! But that’s another case in point. It should have been unnecessary for me to do it. You knew that he was toying with the idea of selling us out, and blackmailing us to boot. You should have handled it.�
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  The Saint could almost see Zellermann shrug.

  “You won’t come and help us?”

  “I simply couldn’t. Get down there again. I want that information immediately.”

  Simon pulled Avalon away from the door, and they fled on cat feet down the corridor and stood very still pressed against the wall. Dr Zellermann came out of Ferdinand’s room and went downstairs without a glance in their direction.

  Now the Saint had purpose. Each task in its turn, and the silencing of the golden boy was first. He strode to the door and flung it open. Ferdinand, clad in a pale cerise dressing-gown, turned and saw the Saint.

  He looked up casually and a little irritably, as if he only expected to see Zellermann coming back with an afterthought excuse. When he saw the Saint, his expression remained outwardly unchanged. His reaction came from deep under his skin, instead of being the muscular contortion of a moment’s shock. It came out as a dew of sweat on his face that swelled into an established wetness, and only after that was established his pretty face went pinched and pallid with terror. He didn’t have to say anything to make a complete confession that he was answering his own questions as fast as they could spiral through his reeling mind, and that he knew that the answers were all his own and there was nothing he could say to anyone else, anywhere. He wasn’t the first dilettante in history who had been caught up with by the raw facts of life in the midst of all the daffodils and dancing, and he would not be the last.

  The Saint felt almost sorry for him, but all the pity in the world didn’t alter the absolute knowledge that Mr Pairfield constituted a very real menace to the peace and quiet which Simon wanted for a few seconds more. Mr Pairfield’s eyes inflated themselves like a pair of small blowfish at what they divined, his mouth dropped open, and his throat tightened in the preliminary formation of a scream. These were only the immediate reflex responses blossoming out of the trough of terror that was already there, but they were no less urgent and dangerous for that. Something had to be done about them, and there was really only one thing to do.

  Simon put out his left hand and grasped the lapels of Mr Pairfield’s dainty silk dressing-gown together, and drew him closer with a sympathetic smile.

  “Ferdy,” he said, “don’t you know that it’s time for all good little girls to be asleep?”

  And with that his right fist rocketed up to impinge on Mr Pairfield’s aesthetic chin, and sleep duly followed.

  Simon slid an arm under him as he crumpled, and carried him back into the room and dumped him on the bed. It was a nice encouraging thing to discover and prove that he still had that much strength and vitality in him, even though he knew very well that the power and agility that were required to anaesthetise Ferdinand Pairfield would not necessarily be enough to cope with anyone who was at least averagely tough of mind and body. It made him feel a new sureness of himself and a new hope that slipped looseningly and warmingly into his limbs as he tore one of Cookie’s fine percale sheets into wide ribbons to tie Ferdinand’s wrists and ankles to the bed, and then to stuff into his slackly open mouth and gag him.

  He found himself working with the swift efficiency of second nature, and that was a good feeling too, to be aware of the old deftness and certainty flowing into his own movements with increasing ease all the time, and the gossamer bubble of his wakefulness holding and not breaking but growing more clear and durable with each passing minute.

  He finished, and then made a quick search of the room and the person of his test specimen, looking for one thing only, but it seemed that Mr Pairfield’s wanderings into wickedness hadn’t taken the course of acquiring any of the useful armaments of evil. No doubt he was glad to delegate all such crudities to underlings. The Saint ended his brief quest still weaponless, yet he gave it up with a glance at Avalon that had all the carefree lights of supreme laughter in its blue brilliance.

  “Knock ’em off one by one,” he remarked, “as the bishop said as he surveyed the new line-up of thespian talent of the Follies. That’s our motto. Shall we move on to the next experiment?”

  Their hands touched momentarily, and then he was out of the room and on his way down the stairs.

  On his way, with the new chill, ugly knowledge that the palpitating fright of Ferdinand Pairfield could only have been germinated by something that had been there in that house before any board creaked and Pairfield had thrown his door open and seen the Saint. And that that something, whatever form, it took, could only be deadly for the Federal man who had called himself Patrick Hogan—if it hadn’t been conclusively deadly already.

  Or if simple death might not be much better than what could be going on.

  Simon was at the foot of the stairs, in the hall, with the front door only a few steps away, and Avalon was still close beside him. Escape would have been easy for them. But he knew without even wordless asking that neither of them had thought of that. Her eyes were steady and quiet and only inquiring as they met his again. The sounds that came through the solid closed door of the living-room were strangely distorted and dreadful in their muffled distortion.

  The Saint saw her throat move as she listened and looked at him, but her gaze was only waiting, always.

  Their hands met and held that time, for an instant, and something quirked over his lips that could have been a smile, but wasn’t. Then he left her.

  He didn’t go to the living-room door, but vanished the other way, toward the kitchen.

  In a few seconds more he was back, and he brought with him a stag-handled carving knife. The blade was strong and gleaming, and he tested it with his thumb before he slid it up his left sleeve and held it there with the pressure of a bent elbow against the flat of the blade.

  His lips almost touched her ear, and he spoke in a voice that was only the echo of a whisper.

  “Get on your horse, darling,” he said. “Sneak out of here and grab one of the cars outside while I keep ’em busy. Drive into town and recruit some large healthy cops. Bring ’em back just as fast as you can. And have breakfast with me.”

  She only shook her head. Her long hair brushed his mouth.

  He couldn’t argue with her there.

  He left her and hoped that she would go, and knew that she wouldn’t. He was glad and yet bitter about that, but it was a confusion of things that he could only take as they broke over him and save to be struggled with some other time.

  He had to end this other thing first, no matter how.

  He went to the door that the sounds came through and stooped to put an eye to the keyhole for a second’s preview of what he had to walk into. And it was curious that while his face turned to stone his only detached mental reaction was that it was merely exactly what he had imagined in a distant nightmare of unbearable understanding. He had that unreal sensation of being a long way off from all of it, away somewhere, even while the nerve endings curdled under his skin and he began to move under an impetus that was altogether instinctive and altogether quixotic and absurd.

  Even while he heard the air-conditioned voice of Dr Ernst Zellermann, cool and persuasive like the voice of a society psychoanalyst in a darkened consulting-room, the only distinct articulate sound that he caught and held afterwards, saying, “Why not be reasonable, Patrick, and get it into your head that I must go on until you tell me exactly how much you’ve been able to accomplish with your masquerade?”

  The keyhole glimpse wiped out into a full picture as Simon opened the door.

  It was something that would haunt him all his life, something that belonged in a Grand Guignol school of outlandish horror, that was so much worse because the mind had heard all about it long ago, and long ago dismissed it as a ghoulish fantasy. Now it was real after all, and the reality had a chill intellectual impact that was capable of leaving scars on the memory of even such a man as the Saint, who thought he had already seen most variations of what there was to be seen in the pathology of macabre dreadfulness.

  The figure of Dr Zellermann, standing poised and cool wi
th his smooth silver locks and fine ascetic profile and a long cigarette clipped in his sensitive fingers and treasuring half an inch of unshaken ash, was a stock item in its way. So was the figure of Patrick Hogan, bound hand and foot in a chair, with the sweat of agony running down into his eyes and the lower half of his face covered with the gag through which some of those horrible formless strangled sounds had come. It was the two women squatting beside him—Cookie with her crude bloated face no longer wearing its artificial smile, and Natello with the sallow skin stretched tight over the bones of her skull and her haggard eyes smouldering with a light of weird absorption. The women, and what they were doing…

  And this was the reality of half-remembered legend-histories of Messalina, of tales of the Tuareg women commissioned to the ritual torture of their captives, of witches out of a dim universal folk-lore bent to the consummation of some black sacrament of pain. This was what gave a sudden dimension and articulation to his ambiguous impressions of Cookie and Natello, just as in their separate ways the performance seemed to breathe blood and life into them, hardening and enrooting the slobbish grossness of Cookie and illuminating Natello’s starved ethereal gawkiness—even throwing a pale reflection of its hot heathen glow on Zellermann’s satanically connoisseurish frigidity. This, that somehow crystallised and focused all the twisted negations and perversions that were inherent in the philosophy they served. This new scientific and persuasive barbarism, aptly and symbolically framed in the gleaming chrome-plated jungle of a Pairfield-decorated parlour…

  But for Simon Templar it was a symbol too, and more than that it was a trial and evidence and verdict, and a sentence that only waited for an execution that would be a pride and a clean pleasure to remember with the ugliness that began it.

  He walked into the room empty-handed, with the carving knife in his sleeve held by the pressure of his bent left arm.