The Saint Sees It Through s-26

by Leslie Charteris

  "I," he said, "am not a respectable citizen. I shoot people and I open safes. I'm not popular. People send me bombs through the mail, and policemen are always looking for an excuse to arrest me. There isn't any peace and stability where I'm around."

  "I'm not so peaceful and stable myself," she said seriously. "But I saw you once, and I've never forgotten you. I've read . everything about you—as much as there is to read. I simply knew I was going to meet you one day, even if it took years and years. That's all. Well, now I've met you, and you're stuck with it."

  She could say things like that, in a way that nobody else could have said them and gotten away with it. The Saint had met most kinds of coquetry and invitation, and he had had to dodge the anthropophagous pursuit of a few hungry women; but this was none of those things. She looked him in the face when she said it, and she said it straight out as if it was the most natural thing to say because it was just the truth; but there was a little speck of laughter in each of her eyes at the same time, as if she wondered what he would think of it and didn't care very much what he thought.

  He said: "You're very frank."

  "You won't believe me," she said, "but I never told anyone anything like this before in my life. So if you think I'm com­pletely crazy you're probably right."

  He blew smoke slowly through his lips and gazed at her, smiling a little but not very much. It was rather nice to gaze at her like that, with the subdued lamplight on her bronze head, and feel that it was the most obvious and inescapable thing for them to be doing.

  This was absurd, of course; but some absurdities were more sure than any commonplace probabilities.

  He picked up his glass again. He had to say something, and he didn't know what it would be.

  The door-bell beat him to it.

  The shrill tinny sound ripped shockingly through his silence, but the lift of his brows was microscopic. And her answering grimace was just as slight.

  "Excuse me," she said.

  She got up and went down the long hall corridor. He heard the door open, and heard a tuneless contralto voice that twanged like a flat guitar string.

  "Hullo, darling!—oh, I'm so glad I didn't get you out of bed. Could I bring the body in for a second?"

  There was the briefest flash of a pause, and Avalon said: "Oh, sure."

  The door latched, and there was movement.

  The raw clockspring voice said audibly: "I'm not butting in, am I?"

  Avalon said flatly: "Of course not. Don't be silly."

  Then they were in the room.

  The Saint unfolded himself off the couch.

  "Mr. Templar," Avalon said. "Miss Natello. Simon—Kay."

  "How do you do," said the Saint, for want of a better phrase.

  "Come in, Kay," Avalon said. "Sit down and make yourself miserable. Have a drink? You know what this night life is like. The evening's only just started. What goes on in the big city?"

  Her gay babble was just a little bit forced, and perhaps only the Saint's ears would have heard it.

  Kay Natello stayed in the entrance, plucking her orange-painted mouth with the forefinger and thumb of one hand. Under her thick sprawling eyebrows, her haunted eyes stared at the Saint with thoughtful intensity.

  "Mr. Templar," she said. "Yes, you were at Cookie's."

  "I was there," said the Saint vaguely, "for a while."

  "I saw you."

  "Quite a big night, wasn't it?" Avalon said. She sank back on to the settee. "Come on in and have a drink and tell us your troubles. Simon, fix something for her."

  "I won't stay," Kay Natello said. "I didn't know you had company."

  She hauled her angular bony frame out of its lean-to position against the entrance arch as gauchely as she put her spoken sentences together.

  "Don't be so ridiculous," Avalon said. She was impatiently hospitable—or hospitably impatient. "We were just talking. What did you come in for, if you didn't want to stay for a few minutes ?"

  "I had a message for you," Kay Natello said. "If Mr. Templar would excuse us ... ?"

  "If it's from Cookie, Mr. Templar was part of the ruckus, so it won't hurt him to hear it."

  The other woman went on pinching her lower lip with skeletal fingers. Her shadowed eyes went back to the Saint with completely measurable blankness, and back to Avalon again.

  "All right," she said. "I didn't mean to crash in here at all, really, but Cookie made such a fuss about it. You know how she is. She was a bit tight, and she lost her temper. Now she's getting tighter because she shouldn't have. She'd like to forget the whole thing. If you could . . . sort of ... make it up with her . . ."

  "If she feels like that," Avalon said, with that paralysing smiling directness which was all her own, "why didn't she come here herself?"

  "She's too tight now. You know how she gets. But I know she's sorry."

  "Well, when she sobers up, she can call me. She knows where I live."

  "I know how you feel, darling. I only stopped in because she begged me to. ... I'll run along now."

  Avalon stood up again.

  "Okay," she said, with friendly exhaustion. "I've taken a lot from Cookie before, but tonight was just too much—that's all. Why don't you beat some sense into her one of these times when she's receptive?"

  "You know how she is," Kay Natello said, in that metallic monotone. "I'm sorry."

  She hitched her wrap up once again around her scrawny shoulders, and her hollow eyes took a last deliberate drag at the Saint.

  "Goodnight, Mr. Templar," she said. "It was nice meeting you."

  "It was nice meeting you," Simon replied, with the utmost politeness.

  He crossed to the side table again and half refilled his glass while he was left alone, and turned back to meet Avalon Dex­ter as the outer door closed and her skirts swished through the entrance of the room again.

  "Well?" She was smiling at him, as he was convinced now that nobody else could smile. "How do you like that?"

  "I don't," he said soberly.

  "Oh, she's as whacky as the rest of Cookie's clique," she said carelessly. "Don't pay any attention to her. It's just like Cookie to try and send an ambassador to do her apologising for her. It'd hurt too much if she ever had to do it herself. But just this once I'm not going to——"

  "I'm afraid you've missed something," Simon said, still soberly, and perhaps more deliberately. "Natello didn't come here to deliver Cookie's apologies. I've got to tell you that."

  Avalon Dexter carried her glass over to the side table.

  "Well, what did she come for?"

  "You went out with a beautiful exit line. Only it was just too good. That's why Cookie is so unhappy now. And that's why she had Natello drop in. To find out what kind of a hook-up there might be between us. It happens that there wasn't any." The Saint put his glass transiently to his mouth. "But that isn't what Natello found out."

  The break in her movements might have been no more than an absent-minded search for the right bottle.

  "So what?" she asked.

  "So I honestly didn't mean to involve you with anything," he said.

  She completed the reconstruction of a highball without any other hesitation; but when she turned to him again with the drink in her hand, the warm brown eyes with the flecks of laughter in them were as straight as he had always seen them.

  "Then," she said, "you didn't just happen to be at Cookie's tonight by accident."

  "Maybe not," he said.

  "For Heaven's sake, sit down," she said. "What is this—a jitterbug contest? You and Kay ought to get married. You could have so much fun."

  He smiled at her again, and left one final swallow in his glass.

  "I've got to be running along. But I'm not fooling. I really wish to hell that nobody who had any connection with Cookie had seen me here. And now, to use your own words, you're stuck with it."

  She looked at him with all the superficial vivacity thrown off, seriously, from steady footholds of maturity. And like everything
else she did that was unexpected, after she had done it it was impossible to have expected anything else.

  "You mean it might be—unhealthy?"

  "I don't want to sound scary, but . . . yes."

  "I'm not scared. But don't you think you might tell me why?"

  He shook his head.

  "I can't, right now. I've told you more than I should have already, as a matter of fact. But I had to warn you. Beyond that, the less you know, the safer you'll be. And I may. be exaggerating. You can probably brush it off. You recognised me from a picture you saw once, and you were good and mad, so you threw out that parting crack just to make trouble. Then I picked you up outside, and you thought I'd been nice, so you just bought me a drink. That's the only connection we have."

  "Well, so it is. But if this is something exciting, like the things I fell in love with you for, why can't I be in on it?"

  "Because you sing much too nicely, and the ungodly are awful unmusical."

  "Oh, fish," she said.

  He grinned, and finished his drink, and put down the glass.

  "Throw me out, Avalon," he said. "In another minute dawn is going to be breaking, and I'm going to shudder when I hear the crash."

  And this was it, this was the impossible and inevitable, and he knew all at once now that it could never have been any other way.

  She said: "Don't go."

  2.

  How Dr. Zellermann used the Telephone

  and Simon Templar went visiting.

  Simon woke up with the squeal of the telephone bell splitting his eardrums. He reached out a blind hand for it and said: "Hullo."

  "Hullo," it said. "Mr. Templar?"

  The voice was quite familiar, although its inflection was totally different from the way he had heard it last. It was still excessively precise and perfectionist; but whereas before it had had the precision of a spray of machine-gun slugs, now it had the mellifluous authority of a mechanical unit in a production tine.

  "Speaking," said the Saint.

  "I hope I didn't wake you up."

  "Oh, no."

  Simon glanced at his wrist watch. It was just after twelve.

  "This is Dr. Ernst Zellermann," said the telephone.

  "So I gathered," said the Saint. "How are you?"

  "Mr. Templar, I owe you an apology. I had too much to drink last night. I'm usually a good drinker, and I have no idea why it should have affected me that way. But my behavior was inexcusable. My language—I would prefer to forget. I de­served just what happened to me. In your place, I would have done exactly what you did."

  The voice was rich and crisp with candor. It was the kind of voice that knew what it was talking about, and automatically inspired respect. The professional voice. It was a voice which naturally invited you to bring it your troubles, on which it was naturally comfortable to lean.

  Simon extracted a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table.

  "I knew you wouldn't mind," he said amiably. "After all, I was only carrying out your own principles. You did what your instincts told you—and I let my instincts talk to me."

  "Exactly. You are perfectly adjusted. I congratulate you for it. And I can only say I am sorry that our acquaintance should have begun like that."

  "Think nothing of it, dear wart. Any other time you feel instinctive we'll try it out again."

  "Mr. Templar, I'm more sorry than I can tell you. Because I have a confession to make. I happen to be one of your greatest admirers. I have read a great deal about you, and I've always thought of you as the ideal exponent of those principles you were referring to. The man who never hesitated to defy con­vention when he knew he was right. I am as detached about my own encounter with you as if I were a chemist who had been blown up while he was experimenting with an explosive. Even at my own expense, I have proved myself right. That is the scientific attitude."

  "There should be more of it," said the Saint gravely.

  "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 weekend."

  "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 aga
in, 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 suitcase, and threw it on the bed. Out of the suitcase he took a bulging briefcase. The briefcase 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.