The Saint Sees It Through (3 page)

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 nar
rowed 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 clearly. 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 honor, 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
reper
toire of the type of ballad which is known as “sophisticated”
to
people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated. Certain
ly 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 admir
ers 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 blan
keted 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 sub
mission and force them
to admit that they have been wonder
fully 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,
overwhelming
ly, phony-wittily, brazenly, expertly, loudly,
unscrupulously,
popularly, callously, and evilly, with each more ribald
and risque number that she dug out of her perfertile gut, she was de
stroying
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 cafe
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 flavor of
Scotch whisky which was nostalgically fascinating. He
con
served it respectfully on his palate
while Cookie blared into an
other
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 ringside 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 M.D. and a self-an
nounced psychiatrist, but the Saint had no real
grounds to in
sult 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 magna-
quacks.

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 gray eyes
so fascinatingly deep-set between high cheekbones and heavy black brows.
It was no
reflection on his professional qualifications if he hap
pened to
look exactly like any Hollywood casting director’s or
hypochondriac
society matron’s conception of a great psychi
atrist. But to the Saint’s unfortunate
skepticism it was just too good to be true, and he had thought so ever since he
had ob
served 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 behavior
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 see 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
businessman 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 per
formance, completely ignoring Cookie’s progressively
less sub
tle 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
con
spicuous. 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
himself that his ideas about Avalon Dexter were
merely pyra
mided 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 sug
gestions
the vulturine wizard was mouthing into her ear, with
out being able to wonder if her negative was merely a technical
postponement. He estimated, as coldbloodedly 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… .