The Saint Sees It Through (6 page)

“You mightn’t be so far wrong. She’s been
around town
for years, but nobody seems to know much about her back
ground before that. She may
have done all those things before
she found
a safer way of making the same money.”

Simon
brooded for a little while.

“And yet,” he said, “the
waiter was telling me about all the
public-spirited work she does for the
sailors.”

“You mean Cookie’s Canteen? … Yes,
she makes great
character with that.”

“Is it one of those
Seamen’s Missions?”

“No, it’s all her own. She hands out
coffee and coke and
sandwiches, and there’s a juke box and hostesses and
enter
tainment.”

“You’ve
been there, I suppose.”

“I’ve sung there two or three times. It’s
on Fiftieth Street
near Ninth Avenue—not exactly a ritzy neighbourhood, but
the boys go there.”

He put a frown and a smile together, and said:
“You mean she doesn’t make anything out of it? Has she got a weakness for
philanthropy between poisonings, or does it pay off in
publicity, or does
she just dote on those fine virile uninhibited
sailor boys?”

“It could be all of those. Or perhaps
she’s got one last
leathery little piece of conscience tucked away
somewhere, and
it takes care of that and makes her feel really fine. Or
am I
being a wee bit romantic? I don’t know. And what’s more, I
don’t have
to care any more, thank God.”

“You’re
quite happy about it?”

“I’m
happy anyway. I met you. Build me another drink.”

He took their glasses over to the side table
where the supplies
were,
and poured and mixed. He felt more than ever that the
evening had been illumined by a lucky star. He could put casual
questions and be casually flippant about
everything, but he had
learned quite
a lot in a few hours. And Cookie’s Canteen
loomed in his thoughts like a great big milestone. Before he was
finished with it he would want more serious
answers about that
irreconcilable
benevolence. He would know much more about
it and it would have to make sense to him. And he had a soft and exciting
feeling that he had already taken more than the
first step on the unmarked trail that he was trying to find.

He brought the drinks back to the couch, and
sat down again,
taking his time over the finding and preparation of a
cigarette.

“I’m still wondering,” she said,
“what anyone like you would
be doing in a joint like that.”

“I have to see how the other half lives.
I’d been out with some
dull people, and I’d just gotten rid of them,
and I felt like
having a drink, and I happened to be passing by, so I
just
stopped in.”

None of it
was true, but it was good enough.

“Then,”
he said, “I heard you sing.”

“How
did you like it?”

“Very
much.”

“I saw you before I went on,” she
said. “I was singing for
you.”

He struck a match, and went on looking at her
between
glances at the flame and his kindling cigarette.

He said
lightly: “I never knew I was so fascinating.”

“I’m afraid you are. And I expect you’ve
been told all about
it before.”

“You
wouldn’t like me if you knew me.”

“Why
not?”

“My glamour would dwindle. I brush my
teeth just like
anyone else; and sometimes I burp.”

“You
haven’t seen me without my make-up.”

He
inspected her again critically.

“I
might survive it.”

“And
I’m lazy and untidy and I have expensive tastes.”

“I,” he said, “am not a
respectable citizen. I shoot people and
I open safes. I’m not
popular. People send me bombs through
the mail, and policemen are always
looking for an excuse to
arrest me. There isn’t any peace and stability
where I’m
around.”

“I’m not so peaceful and stable
myself,” she said seriously.
“But I saw you once, and I’ve
never forgotten you. I’ve read
. everything about you—as much as there is to
read. I simply
knew I was going to meet you one day, even if it took
years
and years. That’s all. Well, now I’ve met you, and you’re
stuck with
it.”

She could say things like that, in a way that
nobody else
could have said them and gotten away with it. The Saint
had
met most kinds of coquetry and invitation, and he had had
to dodge
the anthropophagous pursuit of a few hungry women;
but this was none of
those things. She looked him in the face
when she said it, and
she said it straight out as if it was the
most natural thing to
say because it was just the truth; but there
was a little speck of
laughter in each of her eyes at the same time, as if she wondered what he would
think of it and didn’t
care very much what he thought.

He said:
“You’re very frank.”

“You won’t believe me,” she said,
“but I never told anyone
anything like this before in my life. So if
you think I’m com
pletely crazy you’re probably right.”

He blew smoke slowly through his lips and
gazed at her,
smiling a little but not very much. It was rather nice to
gaze
at her like that, with the subdued lamplight on her bronze
head, and
feel that it was the most obvious and inescapable
thing for them to be
doing.

This was absurd, of course; but some absurdities
were more
sure than any commonplace probabilities.

He picked up his glass again. He had to say
something, and
he didn’t know what it would be.

The
door-bell beat him to it.

The shrill tinny sound ripped shockingly
through his silence,
but the lift of his brows was microscopic. And
her answering
grimace was just as slight.

“Excuse
me,” she said.

She got up and went down the long hall
corridor. He heard
the door open, and heard a tuneless contralto voice that
twanged
like a flat guitar string.

“
Hul
lo,
darling!—oh,
I’m so glad I didn’t get you out of
bed. Could I bring the body in for a
second?”

There was the briefest flash of a pause, and
Avalon said:
“Oh, sure.”

The door
latched, and there was movement.

The raw clockspring voice said audibly: “I’m not butting in,
am I?”

Avalon said
flatly: “Of course not. Don’t be silly.”

Then they
were in the room.

The Saint
unfolded himself off the couch.

“Mr.
Templar,” Avalon said. “Miss Natello. Simon—Kay.”

“How do you do,” said
the Saint, for want of a better phrase.

“Come in, Kay,” Avalon said.
“Sit down and make yourself
miserable. Have a drink? You know what this
night life is
like.
The evening’s only just started. What goes on in the big
city?”

Her gay babble was just a little bit forced,
and perhaps only
the Saint’s ears would have heard it.

Kay Natello stayed in the entrance, plucking
her orange-
painted mouth with the forefinger and thumb of one hand.
Under her
thick sprawling eyebrows, her haunted eyes stared
at the Saint with
thoughtful intensity.

“Mr.
Templar,” she said. “Yes, you were at Cookie’s.”

“I was
there,” said the Saint vaguely, “for a while.”

“I saw
you.”

“Quite a big night, wasn’t it?”
Avalon said. She sank back
on to the settee. “Come on in and have a
drink and tell us
your troubles. Simon, fix something for her.”

“I won’t stay,” Kay Natello said. “I didn’t know
you had
company.”

She hauled her angular bony frame out of its
lean-to position
against the entrance arch as gauchely as she put her
spoken
sentences together.

“Don’t be so ridiculous,” Avalon
said. She was impatiently
hospitable—or hospitably impatient. “We
were just talking.
What did you come in for, if you didn’t want to stay for a
few minutes ?”

“I had a message for you,” Kay
Natello said. “If Mr. Templar
would excuse us
…
?”

“If it’s from Cookie, Mr. Templar was
part of the ruckus, so it won’t hurt him to hear it.”

The other woman went on pinching her lower lip
with
skeletal fingers. Her shadowed eyes went back to the Saint
with
completely measurable blankness, and back to Avalon
again.

“All right,” she said. “I
didn’t mean to crash in here at all,
really, but Cookie made such a fuss
about it. You know how
she is. She was a bit tight, and she lost her
temper. Now she’s
getting tighter because she shouldn’t have. She’d like to
forget
the whole thing. If you could … sort of
…
make it
up
with her …”

“If she feels like that,” Avalon
said, with that paralysing
smiling directness which was all her own,
“why didn’t she
come here herself?”

“She’s too tight now. You know how she
gets. But I know
she’s sorry.”

“Well, when she sobers up, she can call
me. She knows
where I live.”

“I know how you feel, darling. I only
stopped in because
she begged me to.
…
I’ll run
along now.”

Avalon
stood up again.

“Okay,” she said, with friendly
exhaustion. “I’ve taken a
lot from Cookie before, but tonight was just
too much—that’s
all. Why don’t you beat some sense into her one of these
times
when she’s receptive?”

“You know how she is,” Kay Natello
said, in that metallic
monotone. “I’m sorry.”

She hitched her wrap up once again around her
scrawny
shoulders, and her hollow eyes took a last deliberate drag at
the Saint.

“Goodnight, Mr. Templar,” she said. “It was nice meeting
you.”

“It was nice meeting you,” Simon
replied, with the utmost
politeness.

He crossed to the side table again and half
refilled his glass
while
he was left alone, and turned back to meet Avalon Dex
ter as the outer door closed and her skirts swished through the
entrance of the room again.

“Well?” She was smiling at him, as
he was convinced now
that nobody else could smile. “How do
you like that?”

“I
don’t,” he said soberly.

“Oh, she’s as
whacky as the rest of Cookie’s clique,” she said
carelessly. “Don’t pay any attention
to her. It’s just like Cookie
to try and send
an ambassador to do her apologising for her.
It’d hurt too much if she ever had to do it herself. But just
this once I’m not going to——
”

“I’m afraid you’ve missed
something,” Simon said, still
soberly, and perhaps more
deliberately. “Natello didn’t come
here to deliver
Cookie’s apologies. I’ve got to tell you that.”

Avalon
Dexter carried her glass over to the side table.

“Well,
what did she come for?”

“You went out with a beautiful exit line.
Only it was just
too good. That’s why Cookie is so unhappy now. And that’s
why she
had Natello drop in. To find out what kind of a
hook-up there might
be between us. It happens that there wasn’t
any.” The Saint
put his glass transiently to his mouth. “But
that isn’t what
Natello found out.”

The break in her movements might have been no
more than an absent-minded search for the right bottle.

“So
what?” she asked.

“So I honestly didn’t mean to involve
you with anything,”
he said.

She completed the reconstruction of a
highball without any
other hesitation; but when she turned to him
again with the drink in her hand, the warm brown eyes with the flecks of
laughter
in them were as straight as he had always seen them.