and Avalon Dexter took him home
1
Simon Templar lighted another cigarette, took a sip of his latest and most anemic-looking highball, and reflected with considerable gloom that if the vanquishing of villains required any man like himself to endure certain unpleasantnesses and discomforts there must be a lot of more attractive and entertaining places to endure them in than a joint with a name like Cookie's Cellar, situated in a rejuvenated basement in the East Fifties of New York City, USA.
Such, for instance, as any reasonably busy boiler factory in any moderately insalubrious zone of reconversion.
For instance, in the boiler factory he would not have been offered Little Neck clams to whet his appetite. But then, after succumbing to the temptation, he would not have been faced with a soup plate full of water enlivened with a few fragments of weary ice among which floated, half submerged, four immature bivalves which had long ago decided that the struggle for existence was not worth it. In the boiler factory, he would not have been able to order a rare filet mignon; but then, he would probably have had a real appreciation of the lunch in his plastic pail.
In the boiler factory there might have been a continual cacophony of loud and nerve-racking noises; but it was very doubtful whether they could have achieved such pinnacles of excruciating ingenuity as were being scaled by the five frenetic sons of rhythm who were blowing and thumping their boogie-woogie beat on the orchestra dais. There might have been smoke and stench in the air; but they would have been relatively crisp and fresh compared with the peculiarly flat sickly staleness of the vaporized distillate of cigars, perfume, and sweat that flowed through the happy lungs of Cookie's clientele.
There might have been plenty of undecorative and even vicious men to look at; but they would not have been undecorative and vicious in the sleek snide soft way of the chair-polishing champions who had discovered that only suckers work. There might have been a notable dearth of beautiful women who wore too little, drank too much, and chattered too shrilly; and it would have been a damn good thing.
But Simon Templar, who was known as the Saint in sundry interesting records, sat there with the patience of a much more conventional sanctity, seeming completely untouched by the idea that a no-girl no-champagne customer taking up a strategic table all by himself in that jam-packed bedlam might not be the management's conception of a heaven-sent ghost...
"Will there be anything else, sir?" asked a melancholy waiter suggestively; and the Saint stretched his long elegantly tailored legs as best he could in the few square inches allotted to him.
"No," he said. "But leave me your address, and if there is I'll write you a postcard."
The melancholy one flashed him a dark glance which suggested that his probable Sicilian ancestry was tempted to answer for him. But the same glance took in the supple width of the Saint's shoulders, and the rakish fighting lines of a face that was quite differently handsome from other good-looking faces that had sometimes strayed into Cookie's Cellar, and the hopeful mockery of translucent blue eyes which had a disconcerting air of being actively interested in trouble as a fine art; and for some reason he changed his mind. Whereby he revealed himself as the possessor of a sound instinct of self-preservation, if nothing else.
For those rather pleasantly piratical features had probably drifted in and out of more major forms of trouble than those of any other adventurer of this century. Newspaper reproductions of them had looked out from under headlines that would have been dismissed as a pulp writer's fantasy before the man whom they accoladed as the Robin Hood of modern crime arrived to make them real. Other versions of them could have been found in the police files of five continents, accompanied by stories and suspicions of stories that were no less startling if much more dull in literacy style; the only thing lacking, from the jaundiced viewpoint of Authority, was a record of any captures and convictions. There were certain individual paladins of the Law, notably such as Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal, of Scotland Yard, and Inspector John Henry Fernack, of New York's Centre Street, whose pet personal nightmares were haunted by that impudent smile; and there were certain evil men who had thought that their schemes were too clever to be touched by justice who had seen those mocking blue eyes with the laughter chilling out of them, the last thing before they died.
And now so many of those things were only memories, and the Saint had new enemies and other battles to think of, and he sat in Cookie's Cellar with as much right and reason as any law-abiding citizen. Perhaps even with more; for he was lucky enough never to have heard of the place before a man named Hamilton in Washington had mentioned it on the phone some days before.
Which was why Simon was there now with absolutely no intention of succumbing to the campaign of discouragement which had been waged against him by the head waiter, the melancholy waiter, the chef, and the chemist who measured out eyedroppers of cut liquor behind the scenes.
"Are you waiting for somebody, sir?" asked the melancholy waiter, obtruding himself again with a new variation on his primary motif; and the Saint nodded.
"I'm waiting for Cookie. When does she do her stuff?"
"It ain't hardly ever the same twice," said the man sadly. "Sometimes it's earlier and sometimes it's later, if you know what I mean."
"I catch the drift," said the Saint kindly.
The orchestra finally blew and banged itself to a standstill, and its component entities mopped their brows and began to dwindle away through a rear exit. The relief of relative quiet was something like the end of a barrage.
At the entrance across the room Simon could see a party of salesmen and their lighter moments expostulating with the head waiter, who was shrugging all the way down to his outspread hands with the unmistakable gesture of all head waiters who are trying to explain to an obtuse audience that when there is simply no room for any more tables there is simply no room for any more tables.
The melancholy waiter did not miss it either.
"Would you like your check, sir?" he inquired.
He put it down on the table to ease the decision.
Simon shook his head blandly.
"Not," he said firmly, "until I've heard Cookie. How could I look my friends in the eye if I went home before that? Could I stand up in front of the Kiwanis Club in Terre Haute and confess that I'd been to New York, and been to Cookie's Cellar, and never heard her sing? Could I face—"
"She may be late," the waiter interrupted bleakly. "She is, most nights."
"I know," Simon acknowledged. "You told me. Lately, she's been later than she was earlier. If you know what I mean."
"Well, she's got that there canteen, where she entertains the sailors — and," added the glum one, with a certain additionally defensive awe, "for free."
"A noble deed," said the Saint, and noticed the total on the check in front of him with an involuntary twinge. "Remind me to be a sailor in my next incarnation."
"Sir?"
"I see the spotlights are coming on. Is this going to be Cookie?"
"Naw. She don't go on till last."
"Well, then she must be on her way now. Would you like to move a little to the left? I can still see some of the stage."
The waiter dissolved disconsolately into the shadows, and Simon settled back again with a sigh. After having suffered so much, a little more would hardly make any difference.
A curly-haired young man in a white tuxedo appeared at the microphone and boomed through the expectant hush: "Ladies and gentlemen — Cookie's Cellar — welcomes you again — and proudly presents — that sweet singer of sweet songs... Miss — Avalon — Dexter! Let's all give her a nice big hand."
We all gave her a nice big hand, and Simon took another mouthful of his diluted ice-water and braced himself for the worst as the curly-haired young man sat down at the piano and rippled through the introductory bars of the latest popular pain. In the course of a reluctant but fairly extensive education in the various saloons and bistros of the metropolis, the Saint had learned to expect very little uplift, either vocal or visible, from sweet singers of sweet songs. Especially when they were merely thrown in as a secondary attraction to bridge a gap between the dance music and the star act, in pursuance of the best proven policy of night club management, which discovered long ago that the one foolproof way to flatter the intellectual level of the average habitué is to give him neither the need nor the opportunity to make any audible conversation. But the Saint felt fairly young, in fairly good health, and fairly strong enough to take anything that Cookie's Cellar could dish out, for one night at least, buttressing himself with the knowledge that he was doing it for his Country...
And then suddenly all that was gone, as if the thoughts had never crossed his mind, and he was looking and listening in complete stillness.
And wondering why he had never done that before.
The girl stood under the single tinted spotlight in a simple white dress of elaborate perfection, cut and draped with artful artlessness to caress every line of a figure that could have worn anything or nothing with equal grace.
She sang:
"For it's a long long time
From May to December,
And the days grow short
When you reach November..."
She had reddish-golden-brown hair that hung long over her shoulders and was cut straight across above large brown eyes that had the slightly oriental and yet not-oriental cast that stems from some of the peoples of eastern Europe. Her mouth was level and clean-cut, with a rich lower lip that warmed all her face with a promise of inward reality that could be deeper and more enduring than any ordinary prettiness.
Her voice had the harmonic richness of a cello, sustained with perfect mastery, sculptured with flawless diction, clear and pure as a bell.
She sang:
"And these few precious days
I'd spend with you;
These golden days
I'd spend with you."
The song died into silence; and there was a perceptible space of breath before the silence boiled into a crash of applause that the accompanist, this time, did not have to lead. And then the tawny hair was waving as the girl bowed and tossed her head and laughed; and then the piano was strumming again; and then the girl was singing again, something light and rhythmic, but still with that shining accuracy that made each note like a bubble of crystal; and then more applause, and the Saint was applauding with it, and then she was singing something else that was slow and indigo and could never have been important until she put heart and understanding into it and blended them with consummate artistry; and then again; and then once more, with the rattle and thunder of demand like waves breaking between the bars of melody, and the tawny mane tossing and her generous lips smiling; and then suddenly no more, and she was gone, and the spell was broken, and the noise was empty and so gave up; and the Saint took a long swallow of scarcely flavored ice-water and wondered what had happened to him.
And that was nothing to do with why he was sitting in a high-class clip joint like Cookie's Cellar, drinking solutions of Peter Dawson that had been emasculated to the point where they should have been marketed under the new brand name of Phyllis Dawson.
He looked at the dead charred end of a cigarette that he had forgotten a long time ago, and put it down and lighted another.
He had come there to see what happened, and he had certainly seen what happened.
The young piano-player was at the mike again, beaming his very professional beam.
He was saying: "And now — ladies and gentlemen — we bring you — the lady you've all been waiting for — in person — the one and only..."
"Lookie, lookie, lookie," said the Saint to himself, very obviously, but with the very definite idea of helping himself back to reality "here comes Cookie."
2
As a raucous yowl of acclamation drowned out the climax of the announcement, Simon took another look at the table near the dais from which Cookie arose, if not exactly like Venus from the foam, at least like an inspired hippopotamus from a succulent wallow.
It was a table which he had observed during a previous casual survey of the room, without recognising Cookie herself as the third person who had joined it — a fact which the melancholy waiter, doubtless with malice aforethought, had carefully refrained from pointing out to him. But the two other people at it he had been able to place on the flimsier pages of a scrap-book memory.
The more feminine of the two, who wore the trousers, could be identified as a creature whose entrance to life had been handicapped by the name of Ferdinand Pairfield. To compensate for this, Mr. Pairfield had acquired a rather beautifully modeled face crowned with a mop of strikingly golden hair which waved with the regularity of corrugated metal, a pair of exquisitely plucked eyebrows arching over long-lashed soulful eyes, a sensuously chiseled mouth that always looked pink and shining as if it had been freshly skinned, and a variety of personal idiosyncrasies of the type which cause robustly ordinary men to wrinkle their nostrils. Simon Templar had no such common-place reactions to personal whimsy: he had enough internal equanimity to concede any human being the right to indulge in any caprice that looked like fun to him, provided the caprice was confined to the home and did not discombobulate the general populace: but he did have a rather abstract personal objection to Ferdinand Pairfield. He disliked Mr. Pairfield because Mr. Pairfield had elected to be an artist, and moreover to be a very dextrous and proficient artist whose draughtsmanship would have won the approval of Dürer or Da Vinci. There was only one thing wrong with the Art of Ferdinand Pairfield. At some point in his development he had come under the influence of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Ultimate Googooism; with the result that he had never since then been able to paint a woman except with breasts that came out like bureau drawers, apexed with nipples that took the form of rattlesnakes, put-and-take tops, bottle-openers, shoe-horns, faucets, bologna sausage, or very small Packard limousines.
The other half of the duo was a gaunt stringy-haired woman with hungry eyes and orange lipstick, whom he identified as Kay Natello, one of the more luminous of the most luminiscent modern poets. The best he could remember about her was a quote from a recent volume of hers, which might as well be reprinted here in lieu of more expensive descriptions:
FLOWERS I love the beauty of flowers, germinated in decay and excrement, with soft slimy worms crawling caressingly among the tender roots. So even I carry within me decay and excrement: and worms crawl caressingly among the tender roots of my love.
Between them they made a rather fine couple; and Simon realised how Cookie could have been the idol of both of them, if there were any foundation to the casual whispers he had been able to hear about her since he discovered that she was destined to enter his life whether he wanted it or not.
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 narrowed 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 repertoire of the type of ballad which is known as "sophisticated" to people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated. Certainly 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 admirers 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 blanketed 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 submission and force them to admit that they have been wonderfully 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, overwhelmingly, 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 destroying 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 conserved it respectfully on his palate while Cookie blared into another 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-announced psychiatrist, but the Saint had no real grounds to insult 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 magnaquacks.
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 happened to look exactly like any Hollywood casting director's or hypochondriac society matron's conception of a great psychiatrist. But to the Saint's unfortunate skepticism it was just too good to be true, and he had thought so ever since he had observed 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 performance, completely ignoring Cookie's progressively less subtle 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 conspicuous. 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 pyramided 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 suggestions the vulturine wizard was mouthing into her ear, without being able to wonder if her negative was merely a technical postponement. He estimated, as cold-bloodedly 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...
And he still asked nothing more of the night than a passable excuse to demonstrate his distaste for Dr. Ernst Zellermann and all his works.
And this just happened to be the heaven-saved night which would provide it.
As Cookie reached the climax of her last and most lurid ditty, and with a sense of supremely fine predestination, the Saint saw Avalon Dexter's hand swing hard and flatly at the learned doctor's smoothly shaven cheek. The actual sound of the slap was drowned in the ecstatic shrieks of the cognoscenti who were anticipating the tag couplet which their indeterminate ancestors had howled over in the First World War; but to Simon Templar, with his eyes on nothing else, the movement alone would have been enough. Even if he had not seen the girl start to rise, and the great psychologist reach out and grab her wrist.
He saw Zellermann yank her back on to her chair with a vicious wrench, and carefully put out his cigarette.
"Nunc dimittis," said the Saint, with a feeling of ineffable beatitude creeping through his arteries like balm; "O Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace..."
He stood up quietly, and threaded his way through the intervening tables with the grace of a stalking panther, up to the side of Dr. Ernst Zellermann. It made no difference to him that while he was on his way Cookie had finished her last number, and all the lights had gone on again while she was taking her final bows. He had no particular views at all about an audience or a lack of it. There was no room in his soul for anything but the transcendent bliss of what he was going to do.
Almost dreamily, he gathered the lapels of the doctor's dinner jacket in his left hand and raised the startled man to his feet.
"You really shouldn't do things like that," he said in a tone of kindly remonstrance.
Dr. Zellermann stared into sapphire blue eyes that seemed to be laughing in a rather strange way, and some premonitive terror may have inspired the wild swing that he tried to launch in reply.
This, however, is mere abstract speculation. The recordable fact is that Simon's forearm deflected its fury quite effortlessly into empty air. But with due gratitude for the encouragement, the Saint proceeded to hit Dr. Zellermann rather carefully in the eye. Then, after steadying the healer of complexes once more by his coat lapels, he let them go in order to smash an equally careful left midway between Dr. Zellermann's nose and chin.
The psychiatrist went backwards and sat down suddenly in the middle of a grand clatter of glass and china; and Simon Templar gazed at him with deep scientific concern. "Well, well, well," he murmured. "What perfectly awful reflexes!"
3
For one fabulous moment there was a stillness and silence such as Cookie's Cellar could seldom have experienced during business hours; and then the background noises broke out again in a new key and tempo, orchestrated with a multiplying rattle of chairs as the patrons in the farther recesses stood up for a better view, and threaded with an ominous bass theme of the larger waiters converging purposefully upon the centre of excitement.
The Saint seemed so unconcerned that he might almost have been unaware of having caused any disturbance at all.
He said to Avalon Dexter: "I'm terribly sorry — I hope you didn't get anything spilt on you."
There was an unexpected inconsistency of expression in the way she looked at him. There were the remains of pardonable astonishment in it, and a definite shadowing of fear; but beyond that there was an infinitesimal curve in the parted lips which held an incongruous hint of delight.
She said in a rather foolish and meaningless way: "Thank you—"
Then the vanguard of the sedative squad was at the Saint's side, in the person of a captain whose face looked as if it had known rougher employment than smirking welcomes and farewells to transient suckers.
He was a fairly weighty man, and his tuxedo was tight across his shoulders. He grasped the Saint's arm and said without any professional servility: "What's this all about?"
"Just a little apache dance routine," Simon said pleasantly."Unscheduled addition to the floor show. I've been practising it quite a while. Would you like me to show you, or would you rather let go my arm?"
The bouncer captain, with the Saint's biceps palpably under his fingers and the Saint's very cool blue eyes on him, seemed to experience a shred of indecision.
Avalon Dexter's clear voice said: "Take it easy, Joe."
Simon gently eased his arm away in the act of searching for a cigarette, and gazed interestedly at Dr. Zellermann, who was trying to unwrap himself from a tablecloth with which he had become entangled in the course of his descent.
"Unfortunately," he explained, "my partner hasn't practised so much, and his timing is all off. It's too bad he had to fall down and hurt his face, but accidents will happen."
Dr. Zellermann got to his feet, assisted by one of the larger waiters, who thoughtfully kept hold of him under the guise of continuing his support.
With his patriarchal locks dishevelled, one eye closed, and a smear of blood smudged down from one corner of his mouth, Dr. Zellermann was not in the least beautiful or benign. In fact, for a man who claimed to adjust the mental disorders of others, he showed a lamentable lack of psychic balance. He spoke to and about the Saint, in very precise English mingled with a few recherché foreign epithets and expletives; and Simon was saddened to learn from the discourse that the doctor was clearly the victim of several psychoses, inclined towards paranoia, subject to perverse delusions, and afflicted with obsessive coprophilia. Simon realised that the symptoms might have been aggravated by some recent shock, and he was considering the case with clinical impartiality when Cookie herself surged through the ring of bystanders.
Simon had never thought she was beautiful, but now he saw for himself how ugly she could look. The big practised smile was gone, and her mouth was as hard and functional as a trap. Her eyes were bright, watchfully venomous, and coldly capable. For that moment, in spite of the complete oppositeness of all the associations, Simon felt that she had the identical bearing of a hard-boiled matron preparing to quell trouble in a tough reform school.
"What's this all about?" she demanded, using what began to sound like the house formula.
"This insolent swine," Zellermann said, gathering his words with a vicious precision that made them come out as if he were spitting bullets, "attacked me for no reason at all—"
"Or only one little reason," said the Saint easily. "Because I saw you grab Miss Dexter's arm, and I thought you were getting much too rough."
"Because she slapped me!"
"For a very good reason, chum. I saw it."
Cookie's wet marble eyes flicked from face to face with the alertness of a crouched cat surrounded by sparrows. Now she turned on the girl.
"I see," she rasped. "What have you been drinking, Avalon?"
Simon admired the blushless pot-and-kettle majesty of that, for at close quarters Cookie was enveloped in a rich aroma of whisky which probably contributed some of the beady glaze to her malevolent stare.
"Really, Cookie," he said earnestly, "anyone who wanted to get tight on the drinks you serve here would have to have been working on it since breakfast."
"Nobody asked you to come here," Cookie threw at him, and went on to Avalon: "I'd like to know what the hell makes you think you've got a right to insult my customers—"
It was not a pretty scene, even though the Saint's aversion to that kind of limelight was greatly tempered by the happy memory of his knuckles crushing Dr. Zellermann's lips against his teeth. But he felt much more embarrassed for Avalon. The puzzling hint of a smile had left her lips altogether, and something else was coming into her eyes that Cookie should have been smart enough to recognise even if she was too alcoholic for ordinary discretion.
He said quietly: "The customer insulted her, Cookie—"
"You dirty liar!" shouted Zellermann.
"— and he had it coming to him," Simon went on in the same tone. "I saw it all happen. Why not just throw him out and let's go on with the fun?"
"You mind your own goddam business!" Cookie blazed at him purply. Again she turned to the girl. "You drunken slut — I've had just about enough of your airs and graces and bull—"
That was it. Avalon's lips came together for an instant, and the suppressed blaze flashed like dynamite in her eyes.
"That's fine," she said. "Because I've had just about enough of you and your creep joint. And as far as I'm concerned you can take your joint and your job and stuff them both."
She whirled away; and then after only one step she turned back, just as abruptly, her skirts and her hair swooping around her. And as she turned she was really smiling.
"That is," she added sweetly, "if the Saint doesn't do it for you."
Then she was gone, sidling quickly between the tables; and there was a new stillness in the immediate vicinity.
In the local silence, the Saint put a match to his neglected cigarette.
Now he understood the paradoxical ingredient in Avalon's expression when she first saw him. And her revelation flared him into an equally paradoxical mixture of wariness and high amusement. But the barest lift of one eyebrow was the only response that could be seen in his face.
Cookie's stare had come back to him, and stayed there. When she spoke to him again her voice had no more geniality than before, and yet there was still a different note in it.
"What's your name?"
"Simon Templar," he said, with no more pointedness than if he had said "John Smith."
The effect, however, was a little different.
The muscular captain took a step back from him, and said with unconscious solemnity: "Jesus!"
Dr. Ernst Zellermann stopped mopping his mouth with a reddening handkerchief, and kept still like a pointer.
Cookie kept still too, with her gross face frozen in the last expression it had worn, and her eyes so anchored that they looked almost rigid.
The Saint said peaceably: "It's nice to have met you all, but if somebody would give me my check I'd like to get some fresh air."
The melancholy waiter was at his side like a lugubrious genie, holding up the check by the time he had finished his sentence.
"Now, just a minute, Mr. Templar." Cookie's voice came through again with the sticky transparency of honey poured over a file. "These little things do happen in night clubs, and we all understand them. I didn't mean to be rude to you — I was just upset. Won't you sit down and have a drink with me?"
"No, thank you," said the Saint calmly. "I've already had several of your drinks, and I want to get my tummy pumped out before goldfish start breeding in it."
He peeled a bill off his roll and handed it to the waiter with a gesture which dismissed the change.
"Of course you thought you were doing the right thing," Cookie persisted. "But if you only knew the trouble I've had with that little tramp, I'm sure—"
"I'm quite sure," said the Saint, with the utmost charm, "that I'd take Avalon's suggestion — and throw Dr. Zellermann in for a bonus."
He turned on his heel and sauntered away — he seemed tired of the whole thing and full of time to spare, but that effect was an illusion. He wanted very much indeed to catch Avalon Dexter before he lost her, and his long lazy stride took him to the door without a wasted movement.
The check-room girl was helping him into his coat when Ferdinand Pairfield, on his way to the gents' room, edged past him at a nervous distance that was not without a certain coy concupiscence. The Saint reached out and took his hand.
"Don't you think that nail polish is a bit on the garish side, Ferdy?" he asked gravely. "Something with a tinge of violet in it would look much cuter on you."
Mr. Pairfield giggled, and disengaged his fingers as shyly and reluctantly as a debutante.
"Oh, you!" he carolled.
Slightly shaken, Simon let himself out and went up the short flight of steps to the street.
Avalon Dexter was on the sidewalk, talking to the doorman as he held the door of a taxi for her. Even with her back to him, the Saint couldn't have mistaken the long bronze hair that hung over the shoulders of her light wolf coat. She got into the cab as he reached the street level; and before the doorman could close the door Simon took two steps across the pavement, ducked under the man's startled nose, and sat down beside her.
He held out a quarter, and the door closed.
She gazed at him in silence.
He gazed at her, smiling.
"Good morning," she said. "This is cosy."
"I thought I might buy you a drink somewhere," he said, "and wash the taste of that dump out of our mouths."
"Thanks," she said. "But I've had all I can stand of creep joints for one night."
"Then may I see you home?"
Her candid eyes considered him for a bare moment.
"Why not?"
She gave the driver an address on Sutton Place South.
"Do you make all that money?" Simon asked interestedly, as they moved off.
"The place I've got isn't so expensive. And I work pretty regularly. At least," she added, "I used to."
"I hope I didn't louse everything up for you."
"Oh, no. I'll get something else. I was due for a change anyway. I couldn't have taken much more of Cookie without going completely nuts. And I can't think of any happier finale than tonight."
Simon stretched out to rest his heels on the folding seat opposite him, and drew another eighth of an inch off his cigarette.
He said idly: "That was quite an exit line of yours."
"They got the idea, did they?"
"Very definitely. You could have heard a pin drop. I heard one."
"I'd give a lot to have seen Cookie's face."
"She looked rather like a frog that was being goosed by an electric eel."
The girl laughed quickly; and then she stopped laughing.
"I hope I didn't louse everything up for you.''
"Oh, no." He doubled her tone exactly as she had doubled his. "But it was just a little unexpected."
"For a great detective, you've certainly got an awful memory."
He arched an eyebrow at her.
"Have I?"
"Do you remember the first crossing of the Hindenburg — the year before it blew up?" She was looking straight ahead, and he saw her profile intermittently as the dimmed street lights touched it. "You were on board — I saw your picture in a newsreel when you arrived. Of course, I'd seen pictures of you before, but that reminded me. And then a couple of nights later you were in a place called the Bali, opposite El Morocco. Jim Moriarty had it — before he had the Barberry Room. I was bellowing with the band there, and you came in and sat at the bar." She shrugged, and laughed again. "I must have made a tremendous impression."
He didn't remember. He never did remember, and he never ceased to regret it. But it was one of those things.
He said lamely: "I'm sorry — that was a lot of years ago, and I was crashing all over town and seeing so many people, and I can't have been noticing much."
"Oh, well," she said, with a stage sigh. "Dexter the Forgotten Girl. What a life!... And I thought you came to my rescue tonight because you remembered. But all the time you were taken up with so many people that you never even saw me."
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I must have been taken up with too many people. And I'll never forgive any of them."
She looked at him, and her smile was teasing and gay, and her eyes were straight and friendly with it, so that it was all only chatter and she was not even trying to sell him anything; and he could only smile back and think how much better it could have been if he remembered.
"Maybe you don't know how lucky you were," she said.
"Maybe I don't," he said.
And it was a curious thing that he only half understood what he was saying, or only half meant what he said; it was only a throwaway line until after it was spoken, and then it was something that could never be thrown away.
This was something that had never been in his mind at all when he abandoned himself to the simple enjoyment of smacking Dr. Ernst Zellermann in the smooch.
He lighted another cigarette with no less care than he had devoted to the other operation, and said nothing more until the taxi drew up outside a black and white painted brick building on the river side of Sutton Place South. He got out and helped her out, and she said: "Come in for a minute and let me fix you a real drink."
"That's just what I needed," he said, and paid off the taxi, and strolled up beside her as casually as if they had known, each other for a hundred years, and it was just like that, and that was how it was.
4
The living-room was at the back. It was big and quiet and comfortable. There was a phonoradio and a record cabinet, and a big bookcase, and another tier of shelves stacked with sheet music, and a baby piano. The far end of it was solid with tall windows.
"There's a sort of garden outside," she said. "And the other end of it falls straight down on to East River Drive, and there's nothing beyond that but the river, so it's almost rustic. It only took me about three years to find it."
He nodded.
"It looks like three well-spent years."
He felt at home there, and easily relaxed. Even the endless undertones of traffic were almost lost there, so that the city they had just left might have been a hundred miles away.
He strolled by the bookcase, scanning the titles. They were a patchwork mixture, ranging from The African Queen to The Wind in the Willows, from Robert Nathan to Emil Ludwig, from Each to the Other to Innocent Merriment. But they made a pattern, and in a little while he found it.
He said: "You like some nice reading."
"I have to do something with my feeble brain every so often. I may be just another night-club singer, but I did go to Smith College and I did graduate from University of California, so I can't help it if I want to take my mind off creep joints sometimes. It's really a great handicap."
He smiled.
"I know what you mean."
He prowled on, came to the piano, set his drink on it, and sat down. His fingers rippled over the keys, idly and aimlessly, and then crept into the refrain of September Song.
She sat on the couch, looking at him, with her own glass in her hand.
He finished abruptly, picked up his drink again, and crossed the room to sit down beside her.
"What do you know about Zellermann?" he asked.
"Nothing much. He's one of these Park Avenue medicinemen. I think he's supposed to be a refugee from Vienna — he got out just before the Nazis moved in. But he didn't lose much. As a matter of fact, he made quite a big hit around here. I haven't been to his office, but I'm told it looks like something off a Hollywood set. His appointment book looks like a page out of the Social Register, and there's a beautifully carved blonde nurse-receptionist who'd probably give most of his male patients a complex if they didn't have any to start with. He's got a private sanitarium in Connecticut, too, which is supposed to be quite a place. The inmates get rid of their inhibitions by doing exactly what they please and then paying for any special damage."
"You mean if they have a secret craving to tear the clothes off a nurse or throw a plate of soup at a waiter, they can be accommodated — at a fancy tariff."
"Something like that, I guess. Dr. Zellermann says that all mental troubles come from people being thwarted by some convention that doesn't agree with their particular personality. So the cure is to take the restriction away — like taking a tight shoe off a corn. He says that everyone ought to do just what their instincts and impulses tell them, and then everything would be lovely.
"I notice he wasn't repressing any of his impulses," Simon remarked.
The girl shrugged.
"You're always meeting that sort of creep in this sort of business. I ought to have been able to handle him. But what the hell. It just wasn't my night to be tactful."
"You'd met him before, of course."
"Oh, yes. He's always hanging around the joint. Cookie introduced him the other night. He's one of her pets."
"So I gathered. Is it Love, or is he treating her? I should think a little deep digging into her mind would really be something."
"You said it, brother. I wouldn't want to go in there without an armored diving suit."
He cocked a quiet eye at her.
"She's a bitch, isn't she?"
"She is."
"Everybody's backslapper and good egg, with a heart of garbage and scrap iron."
"That's about it. But people like her."
"They would." He sipped his drink. "She gave me rather a funny feeling. It sounds so melodramatic, but she's the first woman I ever saw who made me feel that she was completely and frighteningly evil. It's a sort of psychic feeling, and I got it all by myself."
"You're not kidding. She can be frightening."
"I can see her carrying a whip in a white-slave trading post, or running a baby farm and strangling the little bastards and burying them in the back yard."
Avalon laughed.
"You mightn't be so far wrong. She's been around town for years, but nobody seems to know much about her background 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 entertainment."
"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 completely 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 Dexter 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.
"Then," she said, "you didn't just happen to be at Cookie's tonight by accident."
"Maybe not," he said.
"For Heaven's sake, sit down," she said. "What is this — a jitterbug contest? You and Kay ought to get married. You could have so much fun."
He smiled at her again, and left one final swallow in his glass.
"I've got to be running along. But I'm not fooling. I really wish to hell that nobody who had any connection with Cookie had seen me here. And now, to use your own words, you're stuck with it."
She looked at him with all the superficial vivacity thrown off, seriously, from steady footholds of maturity. And like everything else she did that was unexpected, after she had done it it was impossible to have expected anything else.
"You mean it might be — unhealthy?"
"I don't want to sound scary, but... yes."
"I'm not scared. But don't you think you might tell me why?"
He shook his head.
"I can't, right now. I've told you more than I should have already, as a matter of fact. But I had to warn you. Beyond that, the less you know, the safer you'll be. And I may. be exaggerating. You can probably brush it off. You recognised me from a picture you saw once, and you were good and mad, so you threw out that parting crack just to make trouble. Then I picked you up outside, and you thought I'd been nice, so you just bought me a drink. That's the only connection we have."
"Well, so it is. But if this is something exciting, like the things I fell in love with you for, why can't I be in on it?"
"Because you sing much too nicely, and the ungodly are awful unmusical."
"Oh, fish," she said.
He grinned, and finished his drink, and put down the glass.
"Throw me out, Avalon," he said. "In another minute dawn is going to be breaking, and I'm going to shudder when I hear the crash."
And this was it, this was the impossible and inevitable, and he knew all at once now that it could never have been any other way.
She said: "Don't go."