The Beauty Specialist
I
The fact that Simon Templar had never heard of the "Z-Man" was merely a tremendous proof that the Z-Man himself, his victims and the police authorities had joined forces in a monumental conspiracy of silence, For the Saint invariably had a zephyr finger on the pulse of the underworld, and the various forms of fun and frolic that went on in the ranks of the ungodly without his knowledge were so few that for all practical purposes they might have been regarded as nonexistent.
He was lunching alone at the Dorchester Grill when the first ripple of new adventure irrigated the dusty dryness of a particularly arid spell. He had been ruminating on the perfidious dullness of the cloudy day when the grillroom was suddenly supplied with its own sunshine. A girl had entered.
She was alone. She was tall and trim waisted and as graceful as a dancer, and the soft waves of her fair golden hair rippled in the gentle stir of air caused by her own motion. Exquisitely dressed, devastatingly sure of herself, she was escorted to a vacant table in a sudden hush of awed admiration that enveloped a world-famous film producer, two visiting bishops, three cosmopolitan millionaires, a music-hall comedian, a couple of ancient marquises and about fifty other minor celebrities, in a simultaneous speechlessness of homage. Simon Templar, who had as many human instincts as any of the aforesaid, would have stared at her anyway; but somehow he found himself watching her with even more than that natural curiosity and interest. And a faint tentative tingle went through him as he realized why.
For an instant, when he had first raised his eyes and seen her, he had wondered if Patricia Holm had missed an appointment of her own and had come to join him. This girl was surprisingly like Pat; the same height, the same fair grace, the same radiant charm. There was something vaguely familiar about her face too; and now the Saint was no longer reminded of Pat. He wondered who she was, and he was not the kind of man to be satisfied with wondering.
"Tell me, Alphonse," he murmured to the waiter who was hovering about him like a ministering angel, "who is the vision in smoke blue at that table over there?"
The waiter looked across the room.
"That, sir," he said, with a certain visible contempt for such ignorance, "is Miss Beatrice Avery."
Simon wrinkled his brow.
"The name strikes a chord but fails to connect."
"Miss Avery is a film star, sir."
"So she is. I've seen photographs of her here and there."
"Her latest picture, Love, the Swindler is the best thing she's done," volunteered the waiter dreamily. "Have you seen it, sir?"
"Fortunately, no," answered the Saint, glancing with some pain at the waiter's enraptured face, and then averting his own. "Swindlers have never interested me — much."
The waiter departed, hurt, and Simon continued to watch the girl at the other table. It was only a transient interest which held him, his inevitable interest in any exceptionally beautiful girl, coupled with the additional fact, perhaps, that Beatrice Avery was certainly a great deal like Pat… And then in an instant, as if an invisible magic wand had been waved, his interest became concrete and vital. He flipped out his cigarette case and put a smoke between his lips. Nobody could have guessed that his attention was more than casually attracted as he lighted the cigarette and inhaled deeply; the sudden lambent glint that came into his blue eyes was masked behind their lazy lids and the filmy curtain of smoke that trickled from his nostrils. But in that instant he knew with the blissful certainty of experience that the syncopated clarions of adventure had sounded in the room, even if no other ears were tuned to hear them.
As the girl had seated herself a waiter had deftly removed the "reserved" card which had been conspicuously displayed on the table, and the cloud of obsequiously fluttering chefs de restaurant, maitres d'hotel, waiters, commis and miscellaneous bus boys had faded away. Evidently she had intimated that she was not yet ready to order. The girl had then given the grillroom a thoughtful once-over as she removed her gloves and lighted a cigarette. These trifling details Simon had noticed while his own waiter was burbling about Love, the Swindler. All very proper and correct — and commonplace. But that which followed was not commonplace at ail. Beatrice Avery's cigarette suddenly dropped from her fingers to the floor, and the colour drained out of her face until the patches of rouge on her cheeks and bright-tinted lips stood out in vivid contrast to the deathly pallor of her skin. Her eyes grew wide and glazed with terror, and she stared at the table as though a snake had suddenly appeared through a hole in the snowy cloth.
Simon hadn't the remotest idea what it was all about. That was the common factor of most adventures — you usually didn't until you were well into them. The difference between the Saint and most other men was that most other men were satisfied to wonder and let it go at that; whereas the Saint had to find out. And Simon Templar had discovered after some years of experiment that the most direct way of finding anything out was to go and ask somebody who knew. Characteristically he didn't hesitate for a second. Almost without any conscious decision on his part his seventy-two inches of lean, debonair immaculacy had unfolded from their chair and were sauntering across to Beatrice Avery's table; and he was smiling down at her with sapphire lights twinkling in gay blue eyes that few women had ever been able to resist.
"Could you use an unemployed knight-errant?" he murmured.
The girl seemed to shrink back. Some of the colour had returned to her face, but her eyes were more terrified than ever. He could see at close quarters that her resemblance to Pat was purely superficial. She had none of that calm ethereal tranquillity that was Pat's very own. She opened her bag as if she was too dazed and desperate to have grasped what he was saying.
"I didn't expect you so soon," she said breathlessly.
He was a bit slow on the repartee for two reasons. First he was wondering why she had expected him at all; and secondly he was searching the square of snowy whiteness with its gleaming glass and silver for some explanation of the frozen horror that he had seen in her face. Everything was in order except for the fact that a knife and two forks were out of their correct places and laid in a peculiar zigzag. Even the most fastidious stickler for table ceremony would hardly have registered quite so much horror at that displacement of feeding tools, and Beatrice Avery looked like the healthily unceremonious kind of girl who wouldn't have cared a hoot if all the knives and forks and spoons were end up in a flowerpot in the middle of the table.
"I came over as soon as you sent out the distress signals," Simon began and then he stopped short out of sheer incredulous startlement.
The girl had taken something from her bag, and she was looking at him with such an expression that the words died a natural death on his lips. She had conquered her fear; and instead of the terror that had been there before her eyes were charged with so much loathing and hatred and disgust that Simon Templar knew just what it felt like to be one of those wriggly things with too many legs that make their abode under flat stones. The reaction was so amazing and unexpected that for once in his life the Saint was at a loss for words. He invariably had such a totally different effect on beauteous damsels in distress that his self-esteem as though it had been hit by a coal truck.
"I have nothing whatever to say to you." The girl suddenly thrust a bulky envelope into his hand and rose. "But if you have any regard at all for my feelings please return at once to your own table."
Her voice was low and musical, but it had in it the bitter chill of an arctic night. She didn't even look at him again, or she would have seen the utter bewilderment in his eyes. She closed her red mouth very tightly and walked with a steady tread and long, exquisitely graceful legs towards the exit. Simon was convinced that she had never done anything half so fine before the camera.
He stood and watched her out of sight and then returned slowly to his own table in a kind of seething fog. The manhattan he had ordered earlier had arrived, and he drank it quickly. He felt that he needed it. And then in a hazy quest for enlightenment he took another look at the envelope which she had left in his paralyzed hands. It was not sealed; and the numbed feeling in the pit of his stomach tightened as he glanced into it.
"Well, well, well!" he murmured softly.
His tanned face hardened into bronze lines of puzzled concentration, with his eyes steadied into fragments of blued steel against the sunburned background, for the envelope was stuffed full with Bank of England notes for one hundred pounds apiece.
He withdrew the ends and flicked his thumb over them. Without careful counting he calculated that the wad contained about a hundred bills — ten thousand genuine and indisputable pounds. After his recent experience and in spite of the manhattan he was in no condition to resist shocks of that kind. Boodle he had seen in his time, boodle in liberal quantities and many different forms, but he had always worked for it. He had never seen it come winging into his hands when he wasn't even looking for it, like pigeons going home to roost. At any other time he would have been inclined to accept it as one of the many inexplicable beneficences of his devoted guardian angel; but he didn't feel like that now.
He couldn't get that look of hers out of his mind. It hurt his pride that she could have mistaken him for the common and vulgar agent of some equally common and vulgar blackmailer. It seemed obvious enough that that was what had happened… But was it? Simon didn't know exactly how many dazzling figures it took to write down Beatrice Avery's annual income, but he knew that film stars were burdened with hardly less colossal living expenses, for they have to scintillate off the screen as well as on or else risk submersion in the fathomless swamps of public forgetfulness. And the Saint doubted very much if Beatrice Avery, for all her fabulous salary, could afford to whack out ten thousand pounds as if it were chicken feed. A sum like that spoke for a grade of blackmail that could hardly be called common or vulgar: it hinted at something so dark and ugly that his imagination instinctively tried to turn away from it. He didn't like to believe that such a golden goddess could have anything in her past that she would pay so much to keep secret. It made him feel queerly grim and angry.
He finished his lunch, paid his bill and then looked up the name of Beatrice Avery in the telephone directory. Her address appeared as 21 Parkside Court, Marble Arch. Simon made a mental note of it, paid a call in Piccadilly and then strolled along to his own apartment in Cornwall House.
"Anybody called, Sam?" he inquired of the wooden-faced janitor; and Sam Outrell detected a faintly thoughtful note in the Saint's voice.
"Were you expecting somebody, sir?"
"I'm always expecting somebody. But this afternoon, in particular, I shall expect a lady, gloriously fair and graceful, with wavy golden hair—"
"I know, sir. You mean Miss Holm."
"No, I don't mean Miss Holm," said Simon as he strolled to the elevator. "The lady's name, Sam, is Miss Avery. If she appears before you with my name on her rosebud lips shoot her straight up."
He was whisked to his floor, and as he let himself into his apartment he found Hoppy Uniatz in the living room's best easy chair with his feet on the table. Mr Uniatz was chewing the ragged end of a cigar, and there was an expression on his battle-scarred face which indicated that all was right with the world. The empty whisky bottle on the table may have contributed its own modest quota to this happy state of affairs.
"Hi, boss," said Mr Uniatz cordially. "Where ya bin?"
Simon spun his hat across the room.
"Lunching at the Dorchester."
"I got no time for dem fancy places," said Mt Uniatz disparagingly. "Dose pansy dishes ain't nut'n to eat. Now yesterday I find a swell jernt where a guy can get a kosher hamboiger wit' fried onions an' all de fixin's—"
"I wondered why that cigar was so overpowering," said the Saint, moving carefully out of range of Mt Uniatz's breathing. "I'm not sure yet, Hoppy, but there are indications that fun and games hover in the middle distance."
"Who's dat, boss?" asked Mr Uniatz, struggling valiantly to get his grey matter flowing.
This was no small effort, for nature had only provided him with a very small quantity, and even this was of a glue-like consistency.
"You may be right about the Dorchester," said the Saint sourly as he eased himself into a chair. "Anyway, it didn't do me much good. A charming young lady gave me ten thousand quid and the dirtiest look of the century. Tell me, Hoppy, has anything happened to my face to make it look as if I'd blackmail charming young ladies?"
"You look okay to me, boss," said Mr Uniatz blankly. "Who is dis dame?"
Remembering Mr Uniatz's mental disadvantages, Simon told his story in simple one-syllable words that would have sent the director of children's hour programs delirious with delight. He had had so much practice in that difficult exercise that Mr Uniatz, in spite of the limitations of his cerebral system, finally grasped the basic facts.
"De goil t'inks you are some udder guy," he said brightly.
"You put it in a nutshell, Hoppy," said the Saint admiringly.
"De guy who puts de black on her."
"Precisely."
"De guy," persisted Hoppy, working nobly to get all his facts in order, "who is playing games in de distance."
The Saint sighed and was bracing himself to go into further laborious explanations when the sound of the telephone bell spared him the ordeal. He went to the instrument.
"Two visitors for you, sir, but they ain't ladies," said Sam Outrell hurriedly.
"Give me two guesses."
"You ain't got time for guessin', sir," interrupted the janitor. "It's Mr Teal, and he's lookin' madasell, and he went straight up without letting me call you first. He'll be there any minute—"
"Don't worry, Sam," said the Saint imperturbably. "I'm not leaving. Go out and get Mr Teal some chewing gum, and we'll have a party."
The doorbell rang violently, and Simon Templar hung up the telephone and went out to admit his favourite visitor. And the absolute truth is that he hadn't a cloud on his conscience or any suspicion that the visit would be more than a routine call.