The Saint Sees It Through (15 page)

He could see Avalon’s clenched fists, just
below the rim of
the table, and from the corner of his eye he noted
Prather’s
bug-eyed interest.

Jake directed a calm, steady, brown-eyed gaze
at Simon
Templar.

“Get
out of here. Now.”

Simon didn’t seem to push his chair back. He
seemed only
to come to an astonished attention. But in that
straightening mo
tion, his chair was somehow a good three inches back from
the edge
of the table and he could come to his feet without
being hampered.

“Yes?”
he drawled with hopeful interest. “How jolly. Ask
your boss to come
out and explain.”

“The boss don’t need to explain,”
said the spokesman. “We’ll
do all the explainin’ necessary.”

“Then
suppose you do, my lad.”

“What
is this all about, Jake?” Avalon asked.

“The boss don’t want him here, that’s
all. And we’ll throw
him out if he don’t scram.” Jake turned
back to the Saint.
“Look,
chum, we ain’t anxious to spread your pretty face all around like gravy. But we
can, and will, if’n you don’t beat it.
And
don’t come back.”

The Saint
gestured at the table.

“You can see I
haven’t finished
my drink. Nor has my lady
friend.”

“She
can stay. It’s just you that’s goin’.”

The Saint smiled mockingly. “It is always a mystery to me
how human beings can become so misguided as to
assume impossibilities. I should think anybody would know I’m not going
out
of here without Miss Dexter. She has an inflexible rule; namely, ‘I’m gonna
leave with the guy what brung me.’ Name
ly,
yours truly.”

“Can the gab,” Jake said. “You
goin’ out on your feet, or
would you rather pick up teeth as you crawl
out?”

Jake didn’t seem to be angry, or impatient. He was merely giving
the Saint a choice. Like: do you want your nails filed
round or pointed?

Simon got
lazily to his feet.

“Sorry, Mr. Prather,” he said.
“I was just getting interested
-in our conversation. Be with you in a
moment. The children,
you know. They get annoying at times and have to be cut back
to size… . Jake, you shouldn’t be such a
naughty boy, really
you shouldn’t. Papa’s told you before about
interrupting your
elders. Run along and play
now, and you won’t be chastised.”

Jake nodded at his cohorts, and they moved at
once. The
Saint’s first lightning move was to remove one from the
fray with a short right jab that travelled no more than three inches
but
carried 180 pounds of muscled steel in motion behind it.

The aproned bruiser folded his bulk
against the wall between
the widespread feet of one of Ferdinand Pairfield’s figures and
sat there with a vacuous mouth and eyes which,
had they been
stained, could have served as church windows.

In this move, however, Simon’s attention was distracted for
the fraction of a second from Jake, and that was
enough. Jake
made a flying leap over
one corner of the table and clasped the
Saint around his waist with a fervor that would have reduced
Jake’s girl friend to panting acquiescence.

This threw the Saint slightly off balance,
and the waiter tried
to take advantage of this by kicking Simon in
the groin.

The Saint twisted, caught the man’s ankle
with his free
hand, wrenched his other hand loose and began to unscrew
the man’s leg from the knee joint. Several welkins split asunder as the victim
howled like a wounded wolf. Presently, within the
space of time
required to bat an eye, there was a most satisfying
crack as the leg
came unjointed at the hip, and the Saint turned
his full attention to
the leech-like Jake.

He went about that worthy’s demolishment with a detached and
unhurried calm. A left to the chin to straighten him up, a right to the stomach
to bend him in the middle, another left,
another
right, and Jake gave the appearance of a polite man with the stomach ache
bowing to a friend.

One devastating right to the button, and
Jake slid across the
stamp-sized dance floor on his back. He came to a gentle stop
and lay gazing empty-eyed at the ceiling.

Sounds came from the back, sounds indicating a
gathering
of fresh forces. The Saint turned to Avalon.

“Shall
we go, darling?” he drawled.
 

2

Which was
all highly entertaining, not to say invigorating and
healthful, Simon reflected later; but it added very little progress
towards the main objective.

Certainly
he had been given evidence that his attention was
unwelcome to sundry
members of the Ungodly; but that was
hardly a novel phenomenon in his
interfering life. Once the
Saint had exhibited any definite interest in
their affairs, and
had been identified, the Ungodly could invariably be
relied on
to
experience some misgivings, which might lead rather logically
to mayhem. Certainly the proffered mayhem had
recoiled, as
it usually did, upon the
initiators, who would doubtless ap
proach
this form of exercise more circumspectly next time; but
that could hardly be called progress. It just meant
that the
Saint himself would have to
be more careful.

He had failed to learn any more about Mr.
Prather’s precise
place in the picture, or the relationship of the other
characters
who flitted in and out of the convolutions of the
impalpable
organization which he was trying to unravel—or, for that
matter,
about Avalon’s real place in the whole crooked cos
mogony.

Simon forced himself ruthlessly to remember
that… . With all their intimacy, their swift and complete companionship, he
still knew nothing. Nothing but what he felt; and better men
than he
had come to disaster from not drawing the distinction
between belief and
knowledge. The Saint had many vanities,
but one of them had
never been the arrogant confidence that
sometime, somewhere,
there could not be among the ranks of
the Ungodly a man or a woman who would
have the ability
to make a sucker out of him. He had waited for that all
his life;
and he was still waiting, with the same cold and
tormenting
vigilance.

And yet, when he called Avalon the next
morning, there was nothing cold in his mind when her voice answered.

“Good
morning,” he said.

“Good morning, darling,” she said,
and her voice woke up
with it. “How are you today?”

“Excited.”

“What
about?”

“Because
I’ve got a date for lunch.”

“Oh.”
The voice died again.

He laughed.

“With
a beautiful girl … named Avalon.”

“Oh.”
Such a different inflection. As if the sun came out
again. “You’re a
beast. I’ve a good mind not to be there.”

“There are arguments against it,” he
admitted. “For one thing, we can’t be alone.”

“You mean the restaurant has to let
other people in? We could fix that. Come over here, and I’ll make an
omelette.”

“I’d like that much better. But it
wouldn’t work. I’ve still
got a date. And you’re going to keep it with me. We’re having
lunch with Zellermann.”

“Did
you call him?”

“He called me again, and I didn’t see
how I could get out
of it. As a matter of fact, I decided I didn’t want to.
So much
persistence
is starting to intrigue me. And I do want to know
more about him. And I don’t think he can do much to me
in 21.”

“Is
that where we’re going?”

“Yes. I’ll pick you up at
twelve o’clock.”

“I’ll
put on my silliest hat.”

“If you do,” said the Saint, “I’ll be called away
in the middle
of lunch and leave you with
him.”

They were on time to the minute, but when
Simon asked
for the table he was told that Zellermann was already
waiting
for them.

The doctor stood up as they threaded a way
between tables to his. Simon noted with some satisfaction that Zellermann’s
lips were still considerably swollen, although the fact would
not have
been so obvious to anyone who was not acquainted
with the medicine
man’s mouth in its normal state.

He looked very much the Park Avenue psychiatrist—tall,
leonine, carelessly but faultlessly dressed, with
one of those fat
smiles that somehow
reminded the Saint of fresh shrimps.

“My dear Mr. Templar. And Miss Dexter.
So glad you could
manage the time. Won’t you sit down?”

They did,
and he did.

Dr. Zellermann displayed as much charm as a
bee tree has
honey.

“Miss
Dexter, I feel that I must apologise for the other night.
I am inclined to forget that universal adjustment
to my psy
chological patterns has not
yet been made.”

“Don’t
let it worry you,” Avalon said. “You paid for it.”

A slight flush tinted the doctor’s face as he
looked at the
Saint.

“My
apologies to you, too, sir.”

Simon
grinned. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

Dr.
Zellermann flushed deeper, then smiled,

“But that’s all
forgotten. We can be friendly together, and
have a pleasant
lunch. I like to eat here. The cuisine is excellent,
the service——
”

There was more of this. Considerably more. The
Saint let
his eyes
rove over the dining room which clattered discreetly
with glass and silverware. Waiters went unobtrusively from table to
table. Those with trays held the Saint’s eyes.

Dr. Zellermann finished his euology of the restaurant, followed
Simon’s gaze.

“Oh, a
drink, a drink by all means. Waiter!”

The waiter, so completely different from
those sampled by the
Saint in Cookie’s the day before, came to
their table as if he
had crawled four miles over broken glass.

“May I
serve you, sir?”

“Martinis,
Manhattans?” the doctor inquired.

The Saint and Avalon ordered double
Manhattans, the doctor
a Martini, and the waiter genuflected away.

“So nice of you to invite us,” the Saint said across the
table.
“A free lunch, as my drunken
uncle used to say, is a free lunch.”

Dr.
Zellermann smiled.

“I somehow feel that you haven’t quite
had your share of
free lunches, Mr. Templar. I feel that you have quite a
few
coming to you.”

“Ah?”
Simon queried.

He looked at Avalon immediately after he’d
tossed the mono
syllabic interrogation at the doctor. She sat quietly,
with her
gold-brown hair immaculate, her brown eyes wide, her
small
but definite
chin pushed forward in a questing motion. At that
moment, the Saint would have wagered anything he ever
hoped to have that this green-clad, trim, slim,
smartly turned
out girl knew nothing
about the problem that was taking up
most
of his time.

“In my work as a psychiatrist,” the snowy-maned doctor
explained, “I have learned a number of
things. One of the main
factors I take into consideration in the
evaluation of a person
ality is whether that
person is behind in the receipt of rewards. Each individual, as far as I have
been able to discover, has put
more
into life than he ever gets out.”

“Not according to what I was
taught,” Avalon said. “You get what you pay for. You get out of life,
or a job, or a pail,
or any damned thing, what you put into it,
and no more.
Otherwise, it’s perpetual motion.”

“Ah, no,” Dr. Zellermann said.
“If that were true, the sum
total of all human effort would produce
energies equal only
to
the sum total of all human effort. That would make change,
impossible. Yet we progress. The human race lives
better, eats
better, drinks better,
each year. This indicates something. Those
who are trying to cause the race to better itself—and they are
less than the sum total of human beings, if not a
minority—
must
be putting in more than they ever get out. If the
law of
equational returns is true, then it
is quite obvious that a num
ber of
persons are dying before their time.”