The Saint Sees It Through (22 page)

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 spon
sor—who had
been so very willing to be hooked.

And the Parkway stretching ahead, and the
soothing mur
murs 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 South
ampton,
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 re
flecting, he thought
in a flash of intuition, the interior decorat
ing 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 geo
metrical 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 Singa
pore 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 pre
tended 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
im
portant recollections of the next hour and more. He knew that
Dr.
Zellermann was a flawless temporary host, dispensing ade
quate 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 oblig
ingly 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
foot
steps, 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 watch
ing, 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 stand
ing 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 for
lorn way—perhaps because nobody was offering him any im
mediate
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 Cr
è
me Violette?”

Simon didn’t violently detest Mr. Pairfield,
and all his in
stincts
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
…”