The Saint Sees it Through (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  And wondering why he had never done that before.

  The girl stood under the single tinted spotlight in a simple white dress of elaborate perfection, cut and draped with artful artlessness to caress every line of a figure that could have worn anything or nothing with equal grace.

  She sang:

  “For it’s a long, long time

  From May to December,

  And the days grow short

  When you reach November…”

  She had reddish-golden-brown hair that hung long over her shoulders and was cut straight across above large brown eyes that had the slightly oriental and yet not-oriental cast that stems from some of the peoples of eastern Europe. Her mouth was level and clean-cut, with a rich lower lip that warmed all her face with a promise of inward reality that could be deeper and more enduring than any ordinary prettiness.

  Her voice had the harmonic richness of a cello, sustained with perfect mastery, sculptured with flawless diction, clear and pure as a bell.

  She sang:

  “And these few precious days

  I’d spend with you;

  These golden days

  I’d spend with you.”

  The song died into silence, and there was a perceptible space of breath before the silence boiled into a crash of applause that the accompanist, this time, did not have to lead. And then the tawny hair was waving as the girl bowed and tossed her head and laughed; and then the piano was strumming again; and then the girl was singing again, something light and rhythmic, but still with that shining accuracy that made each note like a bubble of crystal; and then more applause, and the Saint was applauding with it, and then she was singing something else that was slow and indigo and could never have been important until she put heart and understanding into it and blended them with consummate artistry; and then once more, with the rattle and thunder of demand like waves breaking between the bars of melody, and the tawny mane tossing and her generous lips smiling; and then suddenly no more, and she was gone, and the spell was broken, and the noise was empty and so gave up, and the Saint took a long swallow of scarcely flavoured ice-water and wondered what had happened to him.

  And that was nothing to do with why he was sitting in a high-class clip joint like Cookie’s Cellar, drinking solutions of Peter Dawson that had been emasculated to the point where they should have been marketed under the new brand name of Phyllis Dawson.

  He looked at the dead charred end of a cigarette that he had forgotten a long time ago, and put it down and lighted another.

  He had come there to see what happened, and he had certainly seen what happened.

  The young piano-player was at the mike again, beaming his very professional beam.

  He was saying: “And now…ladies and gentlemen…we bring you…the lady you’ve all been waiting for…in person…the one and only…”

  “Lookie, lookie, lookie,” said the Saint to himself, very obviously, but with the very definite idea of helping himself back to reality, “here comes Cookie.”

  2

  As a raucous yowl of acclamation drowned out the climax of the announcement, Simon took another look at the table near the dais from which Cookie arose, if not exactly like Venus from the foam, at least like an inspired hippopotamus from a succulent wallow.

  It was a table which he had observed during a previous casual survey of the room, without recognising Cookie herself as the third person who had joined it—a fact which the melancholy waiter, doubtless with malice aforethought, had carefully refrained from pointing out to him. But the two other people at it he had been able to place on the flimsier pages of a scrap-book memory.

  The more feminine of the two, who wore the trousers, could be identified as a creature whose entrance to life had been handicapped by the name of Ferdinand Pairfield. To compensate for this, Mr Pairfield had acquired a rather beautifully modelled face crowned with a mop of strikingly golden hair which waved with the regularity of corrugated metal, a pair of exquisitely plucked eyebrows arching over long-lashed soulful eyes, a sensuously chiselled mouth that always looked pink and shining as if it had been freshly skinned, and a variety of personal idiosyncrasies of the type which cause robustly ordinary men to wrinkle their nostrils. Simon Templar had no such commonplace reactions to personal whimsy; he had enough internal equanimity to concede any human being the right to indulge in any caprice that looked like fun to him, provided the caprice was confined to the home and did not discombobulate the general populace: but he did have a rather abstract personal objection to Ferdinand Pairfield. He disliked Mr Pairfield because Mr Pairfield had elected to be an artist, and moreover to be a very dexterous and proficient artist whose draughtsmanship would have won the approval of Dürer or Da Vinci. There was only one thing wrong with the Art of Ferdinand Pairfield. At some point in his development he had come under the influence of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Ultimate Googooism, with the result that he had never since then been able to paint a woman except with breasts that came out like bureau drawers, apexed with nipples that took the form of rattlesnakes, put-and-take tops, bottle-openers, shoe-horns, faucets, bologna sausage, or very small Packard limousines.

  The other half of the duo was a gaunt, stringy-haired woman with hungry eyes and orange lipstick, whom he identified as Kay Natello, one of the more luminous of the most luminescent modern poets. The best he could remember about her was a quote from a recent volume of hers, which might as well be reprinted here in lieu of more expensive descriptions:

  FLOWERS

  I love the beauty of flowers,

  germinated in decay and excrement,

  with soft slimy worms

  crawling

  caressingly

  among the tender

  roots.

  So even I carry within me

  decay and excrement,

  and worms

  crawl

  caressingly

  among the tender roots of my

  love.

  Between them they made a rather fine couple, and Simon realised how Cookie could have been the idol of both of them, if there were any foundation to the casual whispers he had been able to hear about her since he discovered that she was destined to enter his life whether he wanted it or not.

  He looked for Cookie again, remembering that he was not there for fun.

  She was sitting at the piano now, thumping the keys almost inaudibly while she waited for the informed applause to die away, with a broad and prodigiously hospitable smile on her large face.

  She must have weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. The expansive grossness of her features was slightly minimised by a pompadoured convict coiffure which reduced the breadth of her face for as long as it lasted, but below that she was built like a corseted barrel. Her Brobdingnagian bosom bloused up from a skin of appalling sequins that shimmered down, in recognisable ridges over the steatopygous scaffolding that encased her hips. As much as any other feature you noticed the hands that whacked uninhibitedly over the keyboard: large, splay-fingered, muscular, even with the incongruous vermilion lacquer on the nails they never looked like a woman’s hands. They were the hands of a stevedore, a wrestler, or—for that matter—a strangler. They had a crude sexless power that narrowed down through the otherwise ludicrous excesses of her figure to give a sudden sharp and frightening meaning to the brash big-hearted bonhomie of her smile.

  It was a strange and consciously exaggerated sensation that went through the Saint as he analysed her. He knew that some of it came from the electric contrast with the impression that Avalon Dexter had left on him. But he could make use of that unforeseen standard without letting it destroy his judgment, just as he could enlarge upon intuition only to see the details more dearly. He knew that there were not enough ingredients in the highballs he had drunk there to warp his intelligence, and he had never in his life been given to hysterical imaginings. And yet with complete dispassionate sanity, and no matter where it might go from there, he knew that for perhaps the first
time in a life that had been crossed by many evil men he had seen a truly and eternally evil woman.

  Just for a moment that feeling went over him like a dark wave, and then he was quite cool and detached again, watching her make a perfunctory adjustment to the microphone mounted in front of her.

  “Hullo, everybody,” she said in a deep commanding voice. “Sorry I’m late, but I’ve been taking care of some of our boys who don’t get too much glory these days. I’m speaking of the plain ordinary heroes who man our merchant ships. They don’t wear any brass buttons or gold braid, but war or no war they stay right on the job. The Merchant Navy!”

  There was a clatter of approbation to show that the assembled revellers appreciated the Merchant Navy. It left no room for doubt that the hearts of Cookie’s customers would always be in the right place, provided the place was far enough from the deck of an oil tanker to give them a nice perspective.

  Cookie heaved herself up from the piano bench and pointed a dramatic finger across the room.

  “And I want you to meet two of the finest men that ever sailed the seven seas,” she roared. “Patrick Hogan and Axel Indermar. Take a bow, boys!”

  The spotlight plastered two squirming youths at a side table, who scrambled awkwardly and unwillingly to their feet. Amid more spirited clapping, the spotlight switched back to Cookie as she sat down again and thumped out a few bars of “Anchors Aweigh” with a wide grin which charmingly deprecated her own share in bringing the convoy home.

  “And now,” she said, with a cascade of arpeggios, “as a tribute to our guests of honour, let’s start with ‘Testy Old William, the Nautical Man.’ ”

  Overlapping a loyal diminuendo of anticipatory sniggers and applause from the initiated, she broadened her big jolly smile and launched into her first number.

  Simon Templar only had to hear the first three lines to know that her act was exactly what he would have expected—a repertoire of the type of ballad which is known as “sophisticated” to people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated. Certainly it dealt with sundry variations on the facts of life which would have puzzled a clear-thinking farm hand.

  It was first-class material of its kind, clever and penetrating to the thinnest edge of utter vulgarity, and she squeezed every last innuendo out of it as well as several others which had no more basis than a well-timed leer and the personal psychoses of the audience. There was no doubt that she was popular: the room was obviously peppered with a clique of regular admirers who seemed to know all her songs by heart, and who burst into ecstatic laughter whenever she approached a particularly classic line. Consequently, some of her finest gems were blanketed with informed hilarity—a fact which must have saved many an innocent intruder much embarrassment. But she was good; she had good material, she could sell it, she could get away with almost anything behind that big friendly bawdy boys-in-the-lavatory-together smile, and beyond any question she had more than enough of that special kind of showmanly bludgeoning personality that can pound an audience into submission and force them to admit that they have been wonderfully entertained whether they enjoyed it or not.

  And the Saint hated her.

  He hated her from a great distance, not because of that first terrible but immaterial intuition, which was already slipping away into the dimmer backgrounds of his mind, nor in the very least because he was a prude, which he was not.

  He hated her because dominantly, sneakingly, overwhelmingly, phony-wittily, brazenly, expertly, loudly, unscrupulously, popularly, callously, and evilly, with each more ribald and risqué number that she dug out of her perfertile gut, she was destroying and dissecting into more tattered shreds a few moments of sweetness and sincerity that a tawny-maned nobody named Avalon Dexter had been able to impose even on the tired and tawdry café aristocracy who packed the joint…

  “I brought you a double, sir,” said the melancholy waiter, looming before him again in all the pride of a new tactic. “Will that be all right?”

  “That,” said the Saint, “must have been what I was waiting for all evening.”

  He controlled the pouring of water into the glass, and tasted the trace of liquid in the bottom. It had a positive flavour of Scotch whisky which was nostalgically fascinating. He conserved it respectfully on his palate while Cookie blared into another encore, and looked around to see whether by any chance there might be a loose tawny mane anywhere within sight.

  And, almost miraculously, there was.

  She must have slipped out through another door, but the edge of the spotlight beam clipped her head for an instant as she bent to sit down. And that was the instant when the Saint was looking.

  The detail that registered on him most clearly, was the table where she sat. It was another ring-side table only two spaces away from him, and it happened to be one table which had never been out of the corner of his eye since he had accepted his own place. For it was the table of the one man whom he had really come there to see.

  It gave him a queer feeling, somehow, after all that, to see her sitting down at the table of Dr Ernst Zellermann.

  Not that he had anything solid at all to hold against Dr Zellermann—yet. The worst he could have substantially said about Dr Zellermann was that he was a phony psychiatrist. And even then he would have been taking gross chances on the adjective. Dr Zellermann was a lawful MD and a self-announced psychiatrist, but the Saint had no real grounds to insult the quality of his psychiatry. If he had been cornered on it, at that moment, he could only have said that he called Dr Zellermann a phony merely on account of his Park Avenue address, his publicity, and a rough idea of his list of patients, who were almost exclusively recruited from a social stratum which is notorious for lavishing its diamond-studded devotion on all manner of mountebanks, yogis, charlatans, and magnaquacks.

  He could have given equally unreasonable reasons why he thought Dr Zellermann looked like a quack. But he would have had to admit that there were no proven anthropological laws to prevent a psychiatrist from being tall and spare and erect, with a full head of prematurely white and silky hair that contrasted with his smooth taut-skinned face. There was no intellectual impossibility about his wide thin-lipped mouth, his long thin aristocratic nose, or the piercing grey eyes so fascinatingly deep-set between high cheekbones and heavy black brows. It was no reflection on his professional qualifications if he happened to look exactly like any Hollywood casting director’s or hypochondriac society matron’s conception of a great psychiatrist. But to the Saint’s unfortunate scepticism it was just too good to be true, and he had thought so ever since he had observed the doctor sitting in austere solitude like himself.

  Now he had other reasons for disliking Dr Zellermann, and they were not at all conjectural.

  For it rapidly became obvious that Dr Ernst Zellermann’s personal behaviour pattern was not confined to the high planes of ascetic detachment which one would have expected of such a perfectly-groomed mahatma. On the contrary, he was quite brazenly a man who liked to sit thigh to thigh with his companions. He was the inveterate layer of hands on knees, the persistent mauler of arms, shoulders, or any other flesh that could be conveniently touched. He liked to put heads together and mutter into ears. He leaned and clawed, in fact, in spite of his crisply patriarchal appearance, exactly like any tired business man who hoped that his wife would believe that he really had been kept late at the office.

  Simon Templar sat and watched every scintilla of the performance, completely ignoring Cookie’s progressively less subtle encores, with a concentrated and increasing resentment which made him fidget in his chair.

  He tried, idealistically, to remind himself that he was only there to look around, and certainly not to make himself conspicuous. The argument seemed a little watery and uninspired. He tried, realistically, to remember that he could easily have made similar gestures himself, given the opportunity, and why was it romantic if he did it and revolting if somebody else did? This was manifestly a cerebral cul-de-sac. He almost persuaded himse
lf that his ideas about Avalon Dexter were merely pyramided on the impact of her professional personality, and what gave him any right to imagine that the advances of Dr Zellermann might be unwelcome?—especially if there might be a diamond ring or a nice piece of fur at the inevitable conclusion of them. And this very clearly made no sense at all.

  He watched the girl deftly shrug off one paw after another, without ever being able to feel that she was merely showing a mechanical adroitness designed to build up ultimate desire. He saw her shake her head vigorously in response to whatever suggestions the vulturine wizard was mouthing into her ear, without being able to wonder if her negative was merely a technical postponement. He estimated, as cold-bloodedly as it was possible for him to do it, in that twilight where no one else might have been able to see anything, the growing strain that crept into her face, and the mixture of shame and anger that clouded her eyes as she fought off Zellermann as unobtrusively as any woman could have done…

  And he still asked nothing more of the night than a passable excuse to demonstrate his distaste for Dr Ernst Zellermann and all his works. And this just happened to be the heaven-sent night which would provide it.

  As Cookie reached the climax of her last and most lurid ditty, and with a sense of supremely fine predestination, the Saint saw Avalon Dexter’s hand swing hard and flatly at the learned doctor’s smoothly shaven cheek. The actual sound of the slap was drowned in the ecstatic shrieks of the cognoscenti who were anticipating the tag couplet which their indeterminate ancestors had howled over in the First World War, but to Simon Templar, with his eyes on nothing else, the movement alone would have been enough. Even if he had not seen the girl start to rise, and the great psychologist reach out and grab her wrist.

  He saw Zellermann yank her back on to her chair with a vicious wrench, and carefully put out his cigarette.

  “Nunc dimittis,” said the Saint, with a feeling of ineffable beatitude creeping through his arteries like balm, “O Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…”