The Saint Sees It Through s-26

by Leslie Charteris

  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 down­town. 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 further on towards 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.

  And the Parkway stretching ahead, and the soothing mur­murs of movement.

  And Avalon with the friendliness and the passion meeting at her mouth, and the music always in her voice.

  And the great hospitality of Cookie and Zellermann, and the glances that went between them.

  And the headlights reaching out to suck in the road.

  And Avalon ...

  The Saint slept.

  He woke up presently out of a light dream mist in which sane thought and diaphanous fantasy had blended so softly and lightly that it seemed like a puzzle in clairvoyance to separate them.

  Then, as you sat still and probed for them, they slipped away elusively and faded at the last fingertip of apprehension, so that it was like searching for shadows with a lantern; and in the end there was nothing at all except time gone by and the headlights still drinking up the road—a road over which pools of thin white fog loomed intermittently and leapt and swallowed them and were gone like the dream.

  The Saint lighted a cigarette and glanced at the pale precise sharply graven profile of Dr. Zellermann on his left.

  "We're nearly there," Zellermann said, as if there had been no hiatus at all.

  Houses and hedges rose at the headlights, dodged adroitly, and were left behind. Southampton, Long Island
, slept in peace, exposing nothing in common with its parent town of South­ampton, England—not bombed, not scarred by war, and not knowing the other battle that swept through it in the sleek car that Dr. Zellermann drove.

  They touched the end of Main Street, turned right and then left again presently, and then after a little while they swung into a driveway and stopped. Simon knew where they were— somewhere in the long line of ambitious beach-fronted houses which had expanded along that coast.

  Cookie's summer hideaway may have been only a shanty in new shanty town, but her description of it as "a little shack" was rather modest. Dr. Zellermann let them in with a key, and found light switches with familiar assurance. They went through a panelled hall with quite a broad oak staircase, and into a living-room" that was almost as big as Cookie's Cellar— which didn't make a barn of it either. But it was still a large room, with tall french windows on the ocean side and glass tables and big square-cut modern couches, all of it reflecting the kind of fast-moneyed life which Simon could easily associate with the profits of a joint like Cookie's. And probably also re­flecting, he thought in a flash of intuition, the interior decorating ideas of Ferdinand Pairfield—after the apotheosis of Kay Natello he doubted whether any of the members of Cookie's clique would be allowed to withhold their talents from practical application.

  Zellermann slid aside a pair of pale green mirrors with geometrical designs frosted on them, disclosing a bar alcove with three chrome-legged stools in front and a professional array of bottles forming a relief mural behind. He stepped through the flap in the counter and said: "How about a drink?"

  "Sure, an' that must have been what me throat was tryin' to tell me," said Hogan with a prodigious yawn, "when I was dreamin' about the Suez Canal on the way."

  "I'll get some ice," said Natello, in the same lifeless twang, as if she was used to being useful and didn't think about it any more.

  "And I'll help ye, if ye'll lead the way."

  They went out. Simon sat on one of the stools, put one elbow on the bar, and pushed back his disreputable cap. Zellermann set out a row of glasses, disregarded the finely representative stock behind him, and brought up a bottle of Old MacSporran Genuine Jersey City Scotch Whiskey from under the bar and began to measure out doses.

  "Are you and Patrick on the same ship?" he asked pleasantly.

  "Naow," said the Saint. "We met in Murmansk."

  "Of course. I should have remembered. He's going to Singa­pore and you're headed for Shanghai."

  "That's right, guv'nor."

  "Have you known Patrick long?"

  "On'y since the larst bar we was in. In Murmansk, that was."

  "Until you met at the Canteen tonight."

  "That's right. An' I ses to 'im, Gorblimy, I ses, I've seen you before; an' 'e ses to me, Gorblimy, 'e ses——"

  Simon went on with this.

  Dr. Zellermann finished his general pouring, turned for a liqueur glass, and unobtrusively selected himself a bottle of Benedictine from the display shelves.

  "A very fine instinctive type," he said suavely. "Quite unre­pressed, given to violent mental and physical expression, but essentially sequacious under the right guidance."

  The Saint rubbed his eyes.

  "Blimey, guv'nor," he said, "yer carn't arf tork, can yer? Strike me pink!"

  He subsided into abashment when this miracle failed to occur, " and devoted himself to the exotic nuances of Old MacSporran as soon as Hogan and Natello returned with sufficient ice to numb his palate into bypassing its more caustic overtones. He had a gift of being able to let time slide over him while he pretended to be linked with it, so that nobody noticed that his presence was somewhere else while he sat where he was. He was able to pass that knack on to Tom Simons, without making any change in the character he had created. But he had no im­portant recollections of the next hour and more. He knew that Dr. Zellermann was a flawless temporary host, dispensing ade­quate drams of MacSporran while he sipped Benedictine; that Patrick Hogan sang Danny Boy and Did Your Mother Come from Ireland? in a very uncertain tenor; and that Kay Natello made her original drink last all the time, with her head oblig­ingly tilted on to Hogan's shoulder and a rapt expression on her sallow face as if she had been mentally composing an elegy on the death of a gonococcus.

  And then there was a rush of machinery on the drive, and an involuntary lull, and the thud of the front door, and foot­steps, and the barge-like entrance of Cookie. Followed by Ava­lon Dexter.

  Followed, after another moment, by Ferdinand Pairfield, who had apparently been swept up enroute. But Simon paid scarcely any attention to him.

  His eyes were on Avalon.

  Her glance skimmed the room, and she saw Zellermann. She checked for the barest instant—it was so slight that it could have made no impression on anyone else. But the Saint was watch­ing, and he saw it. And then she was still smiling, but her vivacity was skilled and watchful. Or so it seemed to him.

  "Oh, company," she said, and flopped down on the sofa where Hogan and Natello were ensconced, and began chattering brightly and trivially to Hogan about night clubs and songs and bands.

  Zellermann poured two drinks behind the bar, choosing the best bottles, and brought them out. He handed one to Cookie on his way, and carried the other over to Avalon.

  "Since we have to be guests together," he said ingratiatingly, "couldn't we stop feuding and forgive each other?"

  Avalon had to look up at him because he was on the arm of the sofa next to her.

  "I'm being framed," she announced, very brightly. She dropped her voice after the general statement, but the Saint was still listening. She said: "I'll stop feuding and forgive you if you'll just get off my arm."

  She went on bibbering to Hogan about musical trivia.

  Simon Templar seized the opportunity to slip behind the bar, single out a bottle of Peter Dawson, and pour himself a night­cap that would last.

  When he looked for Zellermann again, the doctor was stand­ing beside Cookie with his attentive and invariable smile.

  Patrick Hogan was trying to show Avalon how to sing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.

  Zellermann was saying. ". . . tomorrow will be soon enough."

  "There's plenty of time," Cookie said.

  They started towards the bar.

  Mr. Pairfield had already drifted over there in a rather for­lorn way—perhaps because nobody was offering him any im­mediate appreciation, and perhaps because of an understandable reluctance to invite any more of Hogan's uninhibited hostility. He had made another distasteful survey of the Saint's well-aged uncouthness, and averted his pure pretty face to review the color scheme of fluids and labels on the background shelves.

  "I wonder," he muttered, with almost pathetic audibility, "if I'm in the mood for some Crème Violette?"

  Simon didn't violently detest Mr. Pairfield, and all his in­stincts were against wasting gratuitous abuse on such creatures; but he was irrevocably playing a part, and he was still sure that Hogan was the star to which his wagon had to stay hitched until a better form of traction came along,

  "Wot?" he said sourly. "Ain't there no Cream Pansiette 'ere?"

  Mr. Pairfield was emboldened by his surroundings to tilt an offended nose.

  He said superciliously: "I beg your pardon?"

  "You 'eard," growled the Saint trenchantly, in the time-honored formula of Cockney repartee. "You ain't got clorf ears."

  That was when Cookie and Dr. Zellermann arrived.

  Cookie said overwhelmingly: "Ferdy, don't be so sensitive. Tom's got a right to enjoy himself——"

  Dr. Zellermann sidled behind the bar and leaned over towards the Saint and said with his monastic charm: "You know, in my studies of psychology nothing has ever fascinated me so much as the symbolism of the sailor. Of course you've heard all that stuff about the 'girl in every port' and 'what shall we do with the drunken sailor?' and so on. Really a fine synopsis of the natural impetuous life. But why? . . . You have a proverb which says
there is no smoke without fire. Then where is the fire? The sailor—the sea. The sea, which once covered the whole earth. The sea, out of which our earliest protoplasmic ancestors first crawled to begin the primitive life which you and I are now enlarging ..."

  The Saint gaped at him with adoring incomprehension.

  Cookie was absent-mindedly pouring herself another year or two of Old MacSporran, and saying to Mr. Pairfield: "Now for God's sake, Ferdy, have some Violette and stop fussing. And then you can be a good boy and see if the beds are all ready, there's a dear."

  "Now take your own case, Tom," Zellermann was pursuing engagingly. "When you get to Shanghai, for instance——"

  There was a sudden mild crash as Patrick Hogan spilled two glasses and an ashtray off the table in front of him in the act of hoisting himself to his feet.

  "I'm goin' to the little sailor boy's room," he proclaimed loudly.

  "Second door on your right down the hall," said Kay Natello, as if she had been reciting it all her life.

  "Run along, Ferdy," Cookie was saying with a certain kind­ness, "and see if you can't think what we ought to do about those pictures in the dining-room."

  "Iver since I was born," Hogan challenged the whole world, "a little sailor boy's room has been in the sea. An' what was good enough for Nelson is good enough for me."

  He hauled the drapes away from one of the french windows and began fumbling stubbornly with the door latch.

  Pairfield the Unconvincible went over to help him, drew the curtains together again, and then slipped timidly out into the garden after him.

  "When you get to Shanghai," Zellermann resumed blandly, "as soon as you go ashore, the first thing you'll want is a drink, and after that a girl. During your stay there you'll probably have many drinks and many girls. But you will have no furtive feeling about these girls, as you would have at home. On the contrary, you'll boast about them. Because you are a sailor, and therefore girls are your traditional privilege. Have you been to Shanghai before?"