The Saint Sees It Through

THE
  
SAINT

SEES
  
IT
  
THROUGH

BY

Leslie Charteris

Author of The Saint in New York, etc.

AVON PUBLISHING CO., INC.

NEW YORK

Published
by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

THE SAINT SEES IT THROUGH

Copyright,
1946, by Leslie Charteris

Avon Reprint Edition

Copyright, 1951, by Avon Publishing Co,, Inc.

COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED

This
 
Avon
  
book
 
contains
 
the
  
entire
 
text
 
as
published in the
original edition.

• PRINTED IN U.S.A. •

CONTENTS

 
1.
   
How Simon Templar Spent a Night Out,
    
and Avalon Dexter Took
Him Home.

 
2.
 
How Dr. Zellermann Used the Telephone
     
arid Simon Templar
Went Visiting.

 
3.
 
How Mr. Prather Said Little, and Dr. Ze-
     
lermann Said Even
Less.

 
4.
 
How
 
Simon
 
Templar
 
Dressed
 
Up,
 
and
     
Duly Went to a Party.

 
5.
 
How Ferdinand Pairfield Was Surprised,
    
and Simon Templar Left
Him.

CAST OF
CHARACTERS

SIMON TEMPLAR
(“THE SAINT”)

Deadly foe of the “Ungodly.” His code is harsh but
just and applies to all criminals—whether they be
men or women!

AVALON
DEXTER

Has so
perfect a figure that she can wear anything—
or nothing—with
equal grace. Is she
for
the Saint?
Or is she allied with
a vicious, world-wide gang of
criminals? The Saint is not sure.

DR. ERNST ZELLERMANN

Tall, silky-haired, Park Avenue psychiatrist. Has
“…
one of those fat smiles that somehow remind
the Saint of fresh shrimps.” An
habitue of Cookie’s
Cellar.

COOKIE

A mammoth
woman. Proprietress of “Cookie’s Cel
lar” and
“Cookie’s Canteen.” “Everybody’s back-slapper and good egg, with
a heart of garbage and scrap iron!”

FERDINAND PAIRFIELD

Golden-haired
  
surrealistic
 
artist
 
who
 
works
 
for
Cookie. “He” paints his
fingernails with a violet
tinted lacquer.

KAY
NATELLO

Slatternly
writer of lewd lyrics that Cookie sings.
Has
a “voice like a nutmeg grater on tin cans …”

PATRICK
HOGAN

A simple seaman who is
“…
painting the town
with a
roscoe in his pants.” Knocks the Saint cold
with a single
smashing blow to the jaw!

1.

How Simon Templar spent a Night Out,

and Avalon Dexter took him Home.

Simon Templar lighted another cigarette, took a sip of his latest and
most anemic-looking highball, and reflected with considerable gloom that if
the vanquishing of villains required any man
like himself to
endure certain unpleasantnesses and discomforts
there must be a lot
of more attractive and entertaining places to
endure them in than
a joint with a name like Cookie’s Cellar,
situated in a
rejuvenated basement in the East Fifties of New
York City, USA.

Such, for instance, as any reasonably busy boiler factory in any
moderately insalubrious zone of reconversion.

For instance, in the boiler factory he would not have been
offered Little Neck clams to whet his appetite.
But then, after
succumbing to the
temptation, he would not have been faced with a soup plate full of water
enlivened with a few fragments
of weary ice among which floated, half
submerged, four im
mature bivalves which had
long ago decided that the struggle for existence was not worth it. In the
boiler factory, he would not have been able to order a rare filet mignon; but
then, he
would probably have had a
real appreciation of the lunch in his plastic pail.

In the boiler factory there might have been
a continual cacophony of loud and nerve-racking noises; but it was very
doubtful
whether they could have achieved such pinnacles of
excruciating ingenuity as were being scaled by the five frenetic sons of rhythm
who were blowing and thumping their boogie-woogie beat
on the
orchestra dais. There might have been smoke and stench
in
the air;
but they would have been relatively crisp and fresh
compared with the
peculiarly flat sickly staleness of the vapor
ized distillate of
cigars, perfume, and sweat that flowed through
the happy lungs of Cookie’s clientele.

There might have been plenty of undecorative
and even
vicious men to look at; but they would not have been
undeco
rative and vicious in the sleek snide soft way of the chair-polishing
champions who had discovered that only suckers work. There might have been a
notable dearth of beautiful
women who wore too little, drank too much,
and chattered too
shrilly; and it would have been a damn good thing.

But Simon Templar, who was known as the
Saint in sundry
interesting records, sat there with the patience of a much
more
conventional sanctity, seeming completely untouched by the
idea that
a no-girl no-champagne customer taking up a strategic table all by himself in
that jampacked bedlam might not be the
management’s
conception of a heaven-sent ghost… .

“Will there be anything else, sir?”
asked a melancholy waiter suggestively; and the Saint stretched his long
elegantly tailored
legs as best he could in the few square inches allotted
to him.

“No,” he said. “But leave me
your address, and if there is I’ll
write you a postcard.”

The melancholy one flashed him a dark glance
which sug
gested that his probable Sicilian ancestry was tempted
to answer
for him.
But the same glance took in the supple width of the
Saint’s shoulders, and the rakish fighting lines of a face that was
quite differently handsome from other
good-looking faces that had sometimes strayed into Cookie’s Cellar, and the
hopeful mockery of translucent blue eyes which had a disconcerting air
of being actively interested in trouble as a fine
art; and for some
reason he changed
his mind. Whereby he revealed himself as
the possessor of a sound instinct of self-preservation, if nothing
else.

For those rather pleasantly piratical features had probably
drifted in and out of more major forms of trouble
than those of
any other adventurer of this century. Newspaper
reproductions
of them had looked out from
under headlines that would have
been
dismissed as a pulp writer’s fantasy before the man whom
they accoladed as the Robin Hood of modern crime
arrived to make them real. Other versions of them could have been found
in the police files of five continents,
accompanied by stories and
suspicions
of stories that were no less startling if much more
dull in literacy style; the only thing lacking,
from the jaundiced
viewpoint of
Authority, was a record of any captures and con
victions. There were
certain individual paladins of the Law,
notably
such as Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, of Scotland
Yard, and
Inspector John Henry Fernack, of New York’s Cen
tre Street, whose pet personal nightmares were haunted by that
impudent smile; and there were certain evil men
who had
thought that their schemes
were too clever to be touched by
justice
who had seen those mocking blue eyes with the laughter
chilling out of them, the last thing before they
died.