and Simon Templar went visiting
1
Simon woke up with the squeal of the telephone bell splitting his eardrums. He reached out a blind hand for it and said: "Hullo."
"Hullo," it said. "Mr. Templar?"
The voice was quite familiar, although its inflection was totally different from the way he had heard it last. It was still excessively precise and perfectionist; but whereas before it had had the precision of a spray of machine-gun slugs, now it had the mellifluous authority of a mechanical unit in a production tine.
"Speaking," said the Saint.
"I hope I didn't wake you up."
"Oh, no."
Simon glanced at his wrist watch. It was just after twelve.
"This is Dr. Ernst Zellermann," said the telephone.
"So I gathered," said the Saint. "How are you?"
"Mr. Templar, I owe you an apology. I had too much to drink last night. I'm usually a good drinker, and I have no idea why it should have affected me that way. But my behavior was inexcusable. My language — I would prefer to forget. I deserved just what happened to me. In your place, I would have done exactly what you did."
The voice was rich and crisp with candor. It was the kind of voice that knew what it was talking about, and automatically inspired respect. The professional voice. It was a voice which naturally invited you to bring it your troubles, on which it was naturally comfortable to lean.
Simon extracted a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table.
"I knew you wouldn't mind," he said amiably. "After all, I was only carrying out your own principles. You did what your instincts told you — and I let my instincts talk to me."
"Exactly. You are perfectly adjusted. I congratulate you for it. And I can only say I am sorry that our acquaintance should have begun like that."
"Think nothing of it, dear wart. Any other time you feel instinctive we'll try it out again."
"Mr. Templar, I'm more sorry than I can tell you. Because I have a confession to make. I happen to be one of your greatest admirers. I have read a great deal about you, and I've always thought of you as the ideal exponent of those principles you were referring to. The man who never hesitated to defy convention when he knew he was right. I am as detached about my own encounter with you as if I were a chemist who had been blown up while he was experimenting with an explosive. Even at my own expense, I have proved myself right. That is the scientific attitude."
"There should be more of it," said the Saint gravely.
"Mr. Templar, if you could take that attitude yourself, I wish you would give me the privilege of meeting you in more normal circumstances."
The Saint exhaled a long streamer of smoke towards the ceiling.
"I'm kind of busy," he said.
"Of course, you would be. Let me see. This is Thursday. You are probably going away for the weekend."
"I might be."
"Of course, your plans would be indefinite. Why don't we leave it like this? My number is in the telephone book. If by chance you are still in town on Saturday, would you be generous enough to call me? If you are not too busy, we might have lunch together. How is that?"
Simon thought for a moment, and knew that there was only one answer.
"Okay," he said. "I'll call you."
"I shall be at your disposal."
"And by the way," Simon said gently, "how did you know my phone number?"
"Miss Dexter was kind enough to tell me where you were staying," said the clipped persuasive voice. "I called her first, of course, to apologise to her... Mr. Templar, I shall enjoy resuming our acquaintance."
"I hope you will," said the Saint.
He put the handpiece back, and lay stretched out on his back for a while with his hands clasped behind his head and his cigarette cocked between his lips, staring uncritically at the opposite cornice.
He had several things to think about, and it was a queer way to be reminded of them — or some of them — item by item, while he was waking himself up and trying to focus his mind on something else.
He remembered everything about Cookie's Cellar, and Cookie, and Dr. Ernst Zellermann, and everything else that he had to remember; but beyond that there was Avalon Dexter, and with her the memory went into a strange separateness like a remembered dream, unreal and incredible and yet sharper than reality and belief. A tawny mane and straight eyes and soft lips. A voice singing. And a voice saying: "I was singing for you... the things I fell in love with you for..."
And saying: "Don't go..."
No, that was the dream, and that hadn't happened.
He dragged the telephone book out from under the bedside table, and thumbed through it for a number.
The hotel operator said: "Thank you, sir."
He listened to the burr of dialling.
Avalon Dexter said: "Hullo."
"This is me," he said.
"How nice for you." Her voice was sleepy, but the warm laughter was still there. "This is me, too,"
"I dreamed about you," he said.
"What happened?"
"I woke up."
"Why don't you go back to sleep?"
"I wish I could."
"So do I. I dreamed about you, too."
"No," he said. "We were both dreaming."
"I'd still like to go back to sleep. But creeps keep calling me up."
"Like Zellermann, for instance?"
"Yes. Did he call you?"
"Sure. Very apologetic. He wants me to have lunch with him."
"He wants us to have lunch with him."
"On those terms, I'll play."
"So will I. But then, why do we have to have him along?"
"Because he might pick up the check."
"You're ridiculous," she said.
He heard her yawn. She sounded very snug. He could almost see her long hair spread out on the pillow.
"I'll buy you a cocktail in a few hours," he said, "and prove it."
"I love you," she said.
"But I wasn't fooling about anything else I said last night. Don't accept any other invitations. Don't go to any strange places. Don't believe anything you're told. After you got yourself thought about with me last night, anything could happen. So please be careful."
"I will."
"I'll call you back."
"If you don't," she said, "I'll haunt you."
He hung up.
But it had happened. And the dream was real, and it~was all true, and it was good that way. He worked with his cigarette for a while.
Then he took the telephone again, and called room service. He ordered corned beef hash and eggs, toast and marmalade and coffee. He felt good. Then he revived the operator and said: "After that you can get me a call to Washington. Imperative five, five hundred. Extension five. Take your time."
He was towelling himself after a swift stinging shower when the bell rang.
"Hamilton," said the receiver dryly. "I hope you aren't getting me up."
"This was your idea," said the Saint. "I have cased the joint, as we used to say in the soap operas. I have inspected your creeps. I'm busy."
"What else?"
"I met the most wonderful girl in the world."
"You do that every week."
"This is a different week."
"This is a priority, line. You can tell me about your love life in a letter."
"Her name is Avalon Dexter, and she's in the directory. She's a singer, and until the small hours of this morning she was working for Cookie."
"Which side is she on?"
"I only just met her," said the Saint, with unreal impersonality. "But they saw her with me. Will you remember that, if anything funny happens to me — or to her?... I met Zellermann, too. Rather violently, I'm afraid. But he's a sweet and forgiving soul. He wants to buy me a lunch."
"What did you buy last night?" Hamilton asked suspiciously.
"You'll see it on my expense account — I don't think it'll mean raising the income tax rate more than five per cent," said the Saint, and hung up.
He ate his brunch at leisure, and saved his coffee to go with a definitive cigarette.
He had a lot of things to think about, and he only began trying to co-ordinate them when the coffee was clean and nutty on his palate, and the smoke was crisp on his tongue and drifting in aromatic clouds before his face.
Now there was Cookie's Canteen to think about. And that might be something else again.
Now the dreaming was over, and this was another day.
He went to the closet, hauled out a suitcase, and threw it on the bed. Out of the suitcase he took a bulging briefcase. The briefcase was a particularly distinguished piece of luggage, for into its contents had gone an amount of ingenuity, corruption, deception, seduction, and simple larceny which in itself could have supplied the backgrounds for a couple of dozen stories.
Within its hand-sewn compartments was a collection of documents in blank which represented the cream of many years of research. On its selection of letterheads could be written letters purporting to emanate from almost any institution between the Dozey Dairy Company of Kansas City and the Dominican Embassy in Ankara. An assortment of visiting cards in two or three crowded pockets was prepared to identify anybody from the Mayor of Jericho to Sam Schiletti, outside plumbing contractor, of Exterior Falls, Oregon. There were passports with the watermarks of a dozen governments — driving licenses, pilot's licences, ration books, credit cards, birth certificates, warrants, identification cards, passes, permits, memberships, and authorisations enough to establish anyone in any role from a Bulgarian tight-rope walker to a wholesale fish merchant from Grimsby. And along with them there was a unique symposium of portraits of the Saint, flattering and unflattering, striking and nondescript, natural and disguised — together with a miscellany of stamps, seals, dies, and stickers which any properly conditioned bureaucrat would have drooled with ecstasy to behold. It was an outfit that would have been worth a fortune to any modern brigand, and it had been worth exactly that much to the Saint before.
He sat down at the desk and worked for an unhurried hour, at the end of which time he had all the necessary documents to authenticate an entirely imaginary seaman by the name of Tom Simons, of the British Merchant Marine. He folded and refolded them several times, rubbed the edges with a nail file, smeared them with cigarette ash, sprinkled them with water and a couple of drops of coffee, and walked over them several times until they were convincingly soiled and worn.
Then he finished dressing and went out. He took a Fifth Avenue bus to Washington Square, and walked from there down through the gray shabby streets of the lower east side until he found the kind of store he was looking for.
He couldn't help the natural elegance of his normal appearance, but the proprietor eyed him curiously when he announced himself as a buyer and not a seller.
"I've got a character part in a play," he explained, "and this was the only way I could think of to get the right kind of clothes."
That story increased his expenses by at least a hundred per cent; but he came out at the end of an hour with an untidy parcel containing a complete outfit of well-worn apparel that would establish the character of Tom Simons against any kind of scrutiny.
He took a taxi back to the Algonquin.
There were two telephone messages.
Miss Dexter phoned, and would call again about seven o'clock.
Miss Natello phoned.
Simon arched his brows over the second message, and smiled a little thinly before he tore it up. The ungodly were certainly working. Fundamentally he didn't mind that, but the persistence of the coverage took up the slack in his nerves. And it wasn't because he was thinking about himself.
He called Avalon's number, but there was no answer.
There are meaningless gulfs of time in real life which never occur in well-constructed stories — hours in which nothing is happening, nothing is about to happen, nothing is likely to happen, and nothing does happen. The difference is that in a story they can be so brightly and lightly skimmed over, simply by starting a fresh paragraph with some such inspired sentence as "Simon Templar went downstairs again for a drink, and Wolcott Gibbs waved to him across the lobby, and they spent a couple of congenial hours lamenting the sad standards of the current season on Broadway."
Simon Templar went downstairs again for a drink, and Wolcott Gibbs waved to him across the lobby, and they spent a couple of congenial hours lamenting the sad standards of the current season on Broadway; and all the time Simon was watching the clock and wondering what held back the hands.
It was fifteen hours, or minutes, after seven when the call came.
"Merry Christmas," she said.
"And a happy new year to you," he said. "What goes?"
"Darling," she said, "I forgot that I had a date with my arranger to go over some new songs. So I had to rush out. What are you doing?"
"Having too many drinks with Wolcott Gibbs."
"Give him my love."
"I will."
"Darling," she said, "there's a hotel man from Chicago in town — he used to come and hear me bellow when I was at the Pump Room — and he wants me to go to dinner. And I've got to find myself another job."
He felt empty inside, and unreasonably resentful, and angry because he knew it was unreasonable.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"So am I. I do want to see you, really."
"Have you met this creep before?"
"Oh, yes. Lots of times. He's quite harmless — just a bit dreary. But he might have a job for me, and I've got to earn an honest living somehow. Don't worry — I haven't forgotten what you told me about being careful. By the way, you'll be glad to hear Cookie called me."
"She did?"
"Yes. Very apologetic, and begging me to drop in and see her."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know. I hate the joint and I hate her, but she knows everybody in town and she isn't a good enemy to have. I'll see what happens tonight... What are you going to be doing later?"
"Probably carousing in some gilded cesspool, surrounded by concubines and champagne."
"I ought to be able to get rid of this creep at a sensible hour, and I would like to see you."
"Why don't you call me when you get through? I'll probably be home. If I'm not, leave a number."
"I will." Her voice was wistful. "Don't be too gay with those concubines."
Simon went back to his table. He felt even emptier inside. It had been such a beautiful dream. He didn't know whether to feel foolish, or cynical, or just careless. But he didn't want to feel any of those things. It was a persistent irritation, like a piece of gravel in a shoe.
"What are you doing this evening?" Gibbs asked him.
"Having another drink."
"I've got to get some dinner before I go to that opening. Why don't you join me?"
"I'd like to." Simon drained his glass. He said casually: "Avalon Dexter sent you her love."
"Oh, do you know her? She's a grand gal. A swell person. One of the few honest-to-God people in that racket."
There was no doubt about the spontaneous warmth of Wolcott's voice. And measured against his professional exposure to all the chatter and gossip of the show world, it wasn't a comment that could be easily dismissed. The back of Simon's brain went on puzzling.
2
The Saint watched Mr. Gibbs depart, and gently tested the air around his tonsils. It felt dry. He moved to the cusp of the bar and proceeded to contemplate his nebulous dissatisfactions. He ordered more of the insidious product of the house of Dawson and meditated upon the subject of Dr. Ernst Zellermann, that white-maned, black-browed high priest of the unconscious mind.
Why, Simon asked himself, should a man apologise for sticking his face in the way of a fast travelling fist? Why should Dr. Z wish to further his acquaintance of the Saint, who had not only knocked him tail over teakettle but had taken his charming companion home? How, for that matter, did Dr. Z know that Avalon Dexter might have the telephone number of Simon Templar?
Beyond the faintest shadow of pale doubt, Brother Zellermann was mixed up in this situation. And since the situation was now the object of the Saint's eagle eyeing, the type-case psychiatrist should come in for his share of scrutiny. And there was nothing to do but scrutinize...
Simon tossed off everything in his glass but a tired ice cube and went out into the night. The doorman flicked one glance at the debonair figure who walked as if he never touched the ground, and almost dislocated three vertebrae as he snapped to attention.
"Taxi, sir?"
"Thanks," said the Saint, and a piece of silver changed hands. The doorman earned this by crooking a finger at a waiting cab driver. And in another moment Simon Templar was on his way to the Park Avenue address of Dr. Zellermann.
It was one of those impulsive moves of unplanned exploration that the Saint loved best. It had all the fascination of potential surprises, all the intriguing vistas of an advance into new untrodden country, all the uncertainty of dipping the first fork into a plate of roadside eating stew. You went out into the wide world and made your plans as you went along and hoped the gods of adventure would be good to you.
Simon relaxed hopefully all the way uptown until the taxi decanted him in front of the windowed monolith wherein Dr. Ernst Zellermann laved the libido.
A light burned on the twelfth floor, and that was entrée even though the lobby roster placed Dr. Zellermann on the eighteenth floor. Simon entered the elevator, signed "John Paul Jones" on the form for nocturnal visitors, said "Twelve" to the ancient lackey, and was levitated on greased runners.
He walked toward the lighted doorway, an emporium of Swedish masseurs, but wheeled on silent feet as soon as the elevator doors closed and went up six flights as swiftly and as silently as the elevator had ascended. The lock on Zellermann's door gave him little trouble, snicking open to reveal a waiting room of considerable proportions.
The pencil beam of his flashlight told him that the man who decorated this restful room knew the value of the pause that relaxes. "This is your home," the room said. "Welcome. You like this chair? It was made for you. The prints? Nice, aren't they? Nothing like the country. And isn't that soft green of the walls pleasant to the eye? Lean back and relax. The doctor will see you presently, as a friend. What else, in these surroundings?"
The Saint tipped his mental hat and looked around for more informative detail. This wasn't much. The receptionist's desk gave up nothing but some paper and pencils, a half pack of cigarettes, a lipstick, and a copy of Trembling Romances. Three names were written on an appointment pad on the desk top.
He went into the consultation room, which was severely furnished with plain furniture. A couch lay against one wall, the large desk was backed against an opaque window, and the walls were free of pictorial distractions.
Yet this, too, was a restful room. The green of the reception room walls had been continued here, and despite the almost monastic simplicity of the décor, this room invited you to relax. Simon had no doubt that a patient lying on the couch, with Dr. Zellermann discreetly in the background gloom, would drag from the censored files of memory much early minutiae, the stuff of which human beings are made.
But where were the files? The office safe?
Surely it was necessary to keep records, and surely the records of ordinary daily business need not be hidden. The secretary must need a card file of patients, notations, statements of accounts, and what not.
Once more the pencil beam slid around the office, and snapped out. Then the Saint moved silently — compared to him, a shadow would have seemed to be wearing clogs — back into the reception room. His flash made an earnest scrutiny of the receptionist's corner and froze on a small protuberance. Simon's fingers were on it in a second. He pulled, then lifted — and a section of wall slid upward to reveal a filing cabinet, a small safe, and a typewriter.
The Saint sighed as he saw the aperture revealed no liquid goods. Tension always made him thirsty, and breaking and entering always raised his tension a notch.
As he reached for the top drawer of the file to see what he could see, the telephone on the reception desk gave out a shrill demand. The Saint's reflexes sent a hand toward it, which hovered over the instrument while he considered the situation. More than likely, somebody had called a wrong number. It was about that time in the evening when party goers reach the point where it seems a good idea to call somebody, and the somebody is often determined by spinning the dial at random.
If it happens to be your telephone that rings, and you struggle out of pleasant dreams to curse any dizzy friend who would call you at that hour, and you say "Hello" in churlish tones, some oafish voice is likely as not to give you a song and a dance about being a telephone tester, and would you please stand three feet away from the phone and say "Methodist Episcopalian" or some such phrase, for which you get the horse laugh when you pick up the phone again.
This is considered top-hole wit in some circles.
If this were the case, Simon reflected, no harm could be done by answering. But what harm in any case? he asked himself, and lifted the receiver.
"Hullo."
"Ernst?" asked a sharp and vaguely familiar voice. "I'm glad you came early. I'll be there immediately. Something has arisen in connection with Gamaliel Foley."
Click. The caller hung up. That click was echoed by the Saint's memory, and he directed his flashlight at the appointment pad to confirm it. There it was, sandwiched between the names of Mrs. Gerald Meldon and James Prather, Gamaliel Foley.
The Saint was torn between two desires. One was to remain and eavesdrop on the approaching meeting of Dr. Z and his caller with the vaguely familiar voice; the other was to find Gamaliel Foley and learn what he could learn. The latter procedure seemed more practical, since the office offered singularly few conveniences for eavesdropping; but Simon was saddened by the knowledge that he would never know what happened when the conferees learned that it was not Dr. Zellermann who had answered the call.
He replaced the wall panel and went away. On the twelfth floor he summoned the elevator, and he wasn't certain whether or not he hoped he wouldn't encounter Park Avenue's psyche soother. It might have been an interesting passage at charms, for the doctor could give persiflage with the best. But no such contretemps occurred on the way out; and Simon walked the block to Lexington Avenue and repaired to a drugstore stocked with greater New York's multiple set of telephone directories.
He found his man, noted the Brooklyn address, and hailed a taxicab.
For a short while Simon Templar gave himself over to trying to remember a face belonging to the voice that had spoken with such urgency on the telephone. The owner of the voice was excited, which would distort the voice to some extent; and there was the further possibility that Simon had never heard the voice over the telephone before, which would add further distortion to remembered cadences and tonal qualities.
His worst enemies could not call Simon Templar methodical. His method was to stab — but to stab unerringly — in the dark. This characteristic, possessed to such an incredible degree by the Saint, had wrought confusion among those same worst enemies on more occasions than can be recorded here — and the list wouldn't sound plausible, anyway.
So, after a few unsatisfactory sallies into the realm of Things To Be Remembered, he gave up and leaned back to enjoy the ride through the streets of Brooklyn. He filed away the incident under unfinished business and completely relaxed. He gave no thought to his coming encounter with Gamaliel Foley, of which name there was only one in all New York's directories, for he had no referent. Foley, so far as he was concerned, might as well be Adam, or Zoroaster — he had met neither.
When the cab driver stopped at the address the Saint had given, Simon got out and walked back two blocks to the address he wanted. This was an apartment house of fairly respectable mien, a blocky building rising angularly into some hundred feet of midnight air. Its face was pocked with windows lighted at intervals, and its whole demeanor was one of middle-class stolidity.
He searched the name plates beside the door, found Foley on the eighth floor. The Saint sighed again. This was his night for climbing stairs. He rang a bell at random on the eleventh floor, and when the door buzzed, slipped inside. He went up the carpeted stairway, ticking off what the residents had had for dinner as he went. First floor, lamb, fish, and something that might have been beef stew; second floor, cabbage; third floor, ham flavored with odors of second floor's cabbage; and so on.
He noted a strip of light at the bottom of Foley's door. He wouldn't be getting the man out of bed, then. Just what he would say, Simon had no idea. He always left such considerations to the inspiration of the moment. He put knuckles to the door.
There was no sound of a man getting out of a chair to grump to the door in answer to a late summons. There was no sound at all. The Saint knocked again. Still no sound. He tried the door. It opened on to a living room modestly furnished with medium-priced overstuffed pieces.
"Hullo," Simon called softly. "Foley?"
He stepped inside, closed the door. No one was in the living room. On the far side was a door leading into a kitchen, the other no doubt led into the bedroom. He turned the kitchen light on, looked about, switched off the light and knocked on the bedroom door. He opened it, flicked the light switch.
There was someone here, all right — or had been. What was here now was not a person, it was a corpse. It sprawled on the rug, face down, and blood had seeped from the back to the dark green carpet. It was — had been — a man.
Without disturbing the body any more than necessary, Simon gathered certain data. He had been young, somewhere in his thirties; he was a white-collar worker, neat, clean; he bore identification cards which named him Gamaliel Bradford Foley, member of the Seamen's Union.
The body bore no information which would link this man with Dr. Ernst Zellermann. Nor did the apartment, for that matter. The Saint searched it expertly, so that it seemed as if nothing had been disturbed, yet every possible hiding place had been thoroughly explored. Foley, it seemed, was about to become engaged to a Miss Martha Lane, Simon gathered from a letter which he shamelessly read. The comely face which smiled from a picture on Foley's dresser was probably her likeness.
Since no other information was to be gathered here, the Saint left. He walked a half dozen blocks to a crowded all-night drugstore and went into an empty phone booth, where he dialled Brooklyn police.
He told the desk sergeant that at such and such an address "you will find one Gamaliel Foley, F-o-l-e-y, deceased. You'll recognise him by the knife he's wearing — in his back."
3
At the crack of ten-thirty the next morning, Avalon Dexter's call brought him groggily from sleep.
"It's horribly early," she said, "but I couldn't wait any longer to find but if you're all right."
"Am I?" the Saint asked.
"I think you're wonderful. When do you want to see me?"
"As soon as possible. Yesterday, for example. Did you have a good time last night?"
"Miserable. And you?"
"Well, I wouldn't call it exciting. I thought about you at odd moments."
"Yes, I know," she said. "Whenever you did, I turned warm all over, and wriggled."
"Must have been disconcerting to your escort."
She laughed, bells at twilight.
"It cost me a job, I think. He'd peer at me every time it happened. I think he concluded it was St. Vitus. The job was in Cleveland, anyway."
"Some of the best people live in Cleveland," Simon said.
"But you don't, so I didn't go."
"Ordinarily, I'd have a nice fast comeback for such a leading remark, but I seem to have trouble finding any words at all."
"You could say 'I love you.' "
"I love you," Simon said.
"Me, too, kid."
"This being Friday," Simon said, "what do you say we go calling on people after we have brunched together, and then let the rest of the day take care of itself?"
"That scrambling sound," she said, "is eggs in my kitchen. So hurry."
"Thirty minutes," said the Saint, and hung up.
He had never needed thirty minutes to shave, shower, and dress, but he needed to make a call.
Hamilton said: "What kind of a jam are you in this time?"
"If you can get anything on one Gamaliel Bradford Foley," the Saint said, "it might be useful. I'd do it myself, but you. can do it faster, and I expect to be sort of busy on other things."
"What sort of things?"
"I'm going to read the papers, and take my girl calling."
"The same girl?"
"But definitely," said the Saint.
"What have you learned?"
"Nothing," the Saint said, "that is of any specific use to us, but the wind is full of straws. I'm watching to see how they fall."
"I trust you know the difference between straws and hay," Hamilton said somewhat darkly, and rang off.
Simon picked up a paper on the way out of the hotel, and found the death of Gamaliel Bradford Foley recorded in two paragraphs on an inside page.
DEATH LOOKS IN ON TOP SEAMEN'S UNION OFFICIAL
Gamaliel Bradford Foley, secretary of the Seamen's Union. Local 978 (AFL). was found stabbed to death in his Brooklyn apartment early this morning by police. A telephone tip — "You'll recognize him by the knife he's wearing, in his back" — sent patrol car 12 to the scene. Officers J. R. McCutcheon and I. P. Wright found the corpse in the apartment bedroom, with a butcher knife in its back. An arrest is expected any moment. Inspector Fernack told reporters today.
It wasn't a smile that twisted the Saint's sensitive mouth as the taxi took him to Avalon's place — it was a grimace of skepticism. "An arrest is expected any moment." He shrugged. The police certainly knew no more than himself — not as much, as a matter of fact. He knew of the connection, however nebulous, between Foley and Dr. Zellermann. How could the police expect an arrest?
Ah, well. That was the sort of thing reporters put on copy paper. City editors had to be considered, too. If you, as a reporter, phoned your desk with a story, you wanted something to lead into a follow-up yarn, and "arrest expected" certainly indicated more to come.
Avalon met him in a housecoat of greenish blue that in a strange and not understandable way was completely right for her. She turned up her face and he kissed her on the mouth, that mouth so full of promise. They said nothing.
She led him to a divan, where he sat wordless with her beside him. Her tawny hair was shot with glints of gold. Her eyes, he noted in passing, were dark, yet alight. He thought of a title by Dale Jennings: "Chaos Has Dark Eyes."
She said: "Hullo, boy."
He grinned.
"I burgle joints and discover bodies. I am not a respectable character. You wouldn't like me if you knew me."
"I know you," she said. "I like you. I'll demonstrate — later."
She got up, went into the kitchen, and brought back a bottle of beer.
"I hope you belong to the beer-for-breakfast school."
"There's nothing like it, unless it's Black Velvet. But that's for special breakfasts."
"Isn't this?"
"Well, not quite, you must admit."
"Yes, I must admit." She gave him a smile, a short kiss. "Excuse me while I make eggs perform."
He sipped his beer and wondered about Mrs. Gerald Meldon, whose Park Avenue address he had decided to visit. Gerald Meldon was a name to conjure with in Wall Street. He was at one time the Boy Wonder of the mart. If he went for a stock, it signalled a rush of hangers-on. This had caused him to operate under pseudonyms, which the Saint considered having a touch of swank — a stock-market operator using phony names. If Meldon were known to be dumping a stock, this was another signal. Everybody who could get hold of the information, dumped his. The stock usually went down.
It had been Gerald Meldon, the son — obviously — of a rich father, who had made collegiate history by dressing in white coveralls, driving along Fifth Avenue, and stealing all the street lamp bulbs one afternoon. It had been Gerald Meldon who had been chosen by Grantland Rice as All-American tackle from Harvard, accent and all.
The Saint knew nothing of Mrs. Gerald Meldon, but he could understand that reasons might exist why she should seek psychiatric help from Dr. Z. Well, he would see what he would see.
It was easy enough to find Meldon's address in the directory, and after breakfast that was what he did.
When he and Avalon arrived there later — she was now in a tailored suit of tan gabardine — the first thing he saw caused him to clutch her arm.
"Sorry," he muttered, "but my eyes have suddenly gone back on me."
She put a hand on his. Her dark eyes clouded.
"What is it, darling?"
"I'm seeing things. It must have been the beer."
She followed his gaze.
"I'm seeing things, too."
"Surely not what I'm seeing. Describe to me carefully what you think you see."
"Well, there's a kind of liveried slave on the end of a dog leash. Then, on the other end of the leash is a mink coat, and inside the coat is a dachshund. The man is leading the dog — or vice versa — from, er, pillar to post."
The Saint sighed explosively.
"If you see it, too, there's nothing wrong with me, I guess."
The sad-faced little dog led the liveried attendant nearer. The dog wagged its tail at them, the attendant elevated his nose a trifle.
"Doesn't the little beast find that a trifle warm, this time of year?" he asked the attendant.
"It isn't a question of warmth, sir, it's — ah, shall we say face? He's a Meldon property, you know."
Simon could detect no trace of irony in tone or attitude.
"But — mink? A trifle on the ostentatious side?"
"What else, sir?" asked the gentleman's gentleman.
The Saint rang the doorbell. He and Avalon were presently shown into the drawing room, furnished in chrome and leather, lightened by three excellent Monets, hooded in red velvet drapes. Mrs. Meldon came to them there.
She was most unexpected. She did not conform. She was beautiful, but not in the fashion affected by the house. Hers was an ancient beauty, recorded by Milton, sung by Sappho. She was tall and dark. Her hair reminded you of Egyptian princesses — black and straight, outlining a dark face that kings might have fought for. She walked with an easy flowing motion in high heels that accentuated a most amazing pair of slim ankles and exciting legs. These latter were bare and brown.
Her dress was of some simple stuff, a throwaway factor until you saw how it highlighted such items as should be highlighted. It clung with loving care to her hips, it strutted where it should strut. She had a placid smile, dark eyes brightened with amusement, and a firm handshake.
Her voice held overtones of curiosity. "You wanted to see me?"
The Saint introduced himself.
"I am Arch Williams, a researcher for Time magazine. This is my wife."
"Quite a dish," Mrs. Meldon said. "I'll bet you play hell with visiting firemen. I'm very happy to meet you. Drink? Of course. You look the types."
Her teeth, the Saint noted, were very white. She rang a bell with a brown hand. A servant appeared.
"Move the big bar in here, Walker." To the Saint: "Those monkey suits kill me. Gerry thinks they're necessary. Prestige, you know." She made the phrase sound like unacceptable language from a lady. "Time, hmm? What do you want from me? Never mind, yet. Wait'll we get a drink. You have lovely legs, Mrs. Williams."
"Thank you."
"Oh, don't thank me. I had nothing to do with it. But they are pretty. I hope your husband appreciates them. So many don't."
The Saint said nothing. He wanted to watch.
"I think he appreciates them," Avalon murmured. "Don't you, dear?"
Simon smiled.
"So many don't," Mrs. Meldon said. "You can pour yourself into a sheer tube of a dress, like mine, and a husband will look at you, glance at his watch, and give you hell for being thirty minutes late. My God, how do men expect us to make ourselves — Oh, here are the drinks. Name your poison."
When they had drinks, Mrs. Meldon gave the Saint a slow smile.
"Well, Mr. Researcher, what now?"
"I have been assigned to find out what I can about Dr. Ernst Zellermann. We're going to pick a Doc of the Year. No slowpoke, medicine, you know."
Mrs. Meldon stared at him.
"My God, you talk in that style! Don't you find it nauseating?"
"I quit," Simon said. "But could I ask you a few questions, Mrs. Meldon? We've picked some possible subjects from the professional standpoint, and it's my job to find out what their patients think of. them."
"Why pick on me?"
"You're a patient of Dr. Zellermann's?".
"Well — uh, yes."
The Saint filed her hesitation away for future reference.
"How do you like him?" he asked.
"He's rather colossal, in a nauseating way."
"So? I should think a feeling of that sort would hamper the — er — rapport between doctor and patient."
"Oh, it does," she said, "no end. He wishes I'd like him. A phony, he."
"Really? I thought he was quite reputable."
"What is reputable?" Mrs. Meldon countered. "Is it what empty-headed bitches say, who are suckers for a patriarchal look and soft hands? Is it what some jerk says — 'Five hundred dollars I paid, for a single interview' — after he's stung? He has an M.D., so what? I know an abortionist who has one."
"It helps," said the Saint.
"What do you want to know about him?" Mrs. Meldon asked. "When he was three years old in Vienna, a butcher slapped his hands because he reached for a sausage. As a result he puts his nurse in a blue smock. He won't have a white uniform around him. He doesn't know this, of course. He has no idea that the butcher's white apron caused a psychic trauma. He says he insists on blue uniforms because they gladden the eye."
"He begins to sound like not our kind of man," the Saint put in.
"Oh, go ahead and pick him," said the Egyptian princess. "Who the hell cares? He wouldn't be the first mass of psychic trauma picked as an outstanding jerk. No inhibitions, says he. It's a little tough on somebody who's put inhibitions by the board lo these many moons to go to him as a patient. Shooting fish down a barrel, I calls it. Another drink? Of course. Mix it yourself."
She crossed her lovely legs in such a fashion that a good portion of thigh was visible. She didn't bother to pull down her dress. She seemed tired of the discussion, even a trifle embittered, and a pattern began to form in the Saint's mind. He put early conclusions aside in the interest of conviviality and mixed drinks.
"Tell me," he said, "how you expect to get psychiatric help from a man you hold in such disregard?"
She straightened up.
"Disregard? Nothing of the sort. He knows the patter, he has the desk-side manner. He can make you tell things about yourself you wouldn't tell yourself. Maybe it helps, I don't know. Yes, I must admit it does. It helped me to understand myself, whatever small consolation that may be. I don't want to understand myself. But Gerry insisted. He wants to keep up with things. Like mink coats on dogs."
"You would say, then, that your relations with Dr. Zellermann have been pleasant?"
She looked at him steadily as he handed her a drink. "Pleasant? What's that? Sometimes you get caught up in an emotion. Emotion is a driving power you can't ignore. When you get caught up in it, whatever you do seems pleasant at the time. Even if you curse yourself afterwards, and even if you don't dare talk about it."
"Do you mean, then, he isn't ethical?"
She twisted a smile.
"What's ethical? Is being human ethical? You're born human, you know. You can't help certain impulses. See Freud. Or Krafft-Ebing. To err is human."
"And he errs?"
"Of course he does. Even if he is a so-called witch doctor of the mind. Even if he has studied Adler and Brill and Jung and Jones. You don't change a character. All the things that went into making him what he is are unalterable. They've happened. Maybe some of his professors, or fellow psychiatrists, have helped him to evaluate those factors in their proper perspective, but he's still homo sapiens and subject to the ills they're heir to."
The Saint drank his drink, set the empty glass on the elaborate portable bar.
"We've taken enough of your time. Thanks for being so helpful."
Mrs. Meldon rose to her full and lovely height. "I'm no cross section on the man. Many more think he's wonderful than not. And in some ways," she said thoughtfully, "he's quite a guy, I guess."
The Saint did not ask what those ways were. He took himself and Avalon away, and hailed a taxi. When they were in it, and he had given the address of James Prather to the driver, he let himself consider Mrs. Meldon.
"Blackmail," he said finally.
"Ah, beg pardon?" Avalon murmured. "Understanding not."
"It's in the picture somewhere," he insisted. "I don't care how free from inhibition she may be, she wouldn't be as bitter as she was unless he's bleeding her in some fashion. How, is the question."
"I don't expect to be of any help," Avalon said meekly, "but I suspect the lady has played fast and loose at one time or another with the doctor — or others."
"Could be," Simon answered. "And you are a help, you know, just by being."
That line of thought occupied them shamelessly during the remainder of the ride.
James Prather they found to occupy an expensive flat in an expensive neighborhood. He gave them a rather nervous welcome, bade them be seated, and did not offer a drink. James Prather paced the floor in house slippers, smoking jacket, and fawn-colored slacks. He was a man middling thirty, with great blue eyes that reminded you of a lobster. His chin was a hue, neither pale nor blue.
He twisted the question out between writhing fingers.
"Yes? What is it?"
The Saint represented himself again as a Time magazine man, and named the subject of his research.
"Yes, yes," Prather said. "What about Dr. Zellermann? What kind of a man, or what kind of a doctor?"
"Both," said the Saint.
"Ah, well—" The telephone rang. "Excuse me." Prather answered, listened intently for a moment. Then he shot a glance at the Saint. "Yes," he said. "Yes. I see. Goodbye."
He turned to Simon. "Will you please get out of here?"
The Saint watched Mr. Prather at first with a mild disdain, as if he were watching a caterpillar in somebody else's salad; then with mild amusement, as if he had discovered the owner of the salad to be his dipsomaniac Uncle Lemuel; then with concern, as if he had remembered that Uncle Lem was without issue, and might leave that handpainted cufflink to his only nephew; then with resignation, as if it were suddenly too late to rescue Uncle — or the caterpillar.
Simon motioned Avalon to a tasteful divan, and seated himself. His eyes were now mocking and gay, with blue lights. His smile was as carefree and light as a lark at dawn. He took a gold pencil and a pad from his pocket.
"You were saying," he prompted, "about Dr. Zellermann?"
James Prather's fingers were like intertwined pallid snakes, writhing in agony.
"Please," he begged. "You must go at once. I have no time for you now. Come back tomorrow, or next week. An important appointment, unexpected. Sorry, but—"
He went to the door, and held it open.
The Saint considered, and after due and deliberate consideration rose and helped Avalon to her feet.
"I'd like to come back," he told Prather at the door.
Prather nodded nervously, watched the Saint and Avalon walk toward the elevator for a few feet, then almost slammed the door. Simon pushed the elevator button, and just before the door opened, planted a swift kiss on her startled but quickly responsive mouth.
"Wait for me in the lobby, darling," he whispered, and handed her inside the car.
He took up a post of observation further down the hall, so that the elevator door was halfway between him and Prather's door. He suspected he would not have long to wait before something happened. What that something might be, he was unable to predict.
He thought of the false trails he had run down before he began to sniff around Cookie's Cellar. He wondered if this would turn out to be another. Each of his previous attempts to locate the object of his search had uncovered one or more nests of illegality.
One had led him to a sort of warehouse, a huge structure where vast numbers of bottles of bona fide liquors were made less intoxicating by the simple addition of faintly colored distilled water. All very healthful, no doubt, and tending to reduce the incidence of drunkenness among habitues of clip clubs like Cookie's — where, incidentally, one of the delivery trucks had led him. This wholesale watering of drinks had another humanitarian aspect: it saved work for the bartenders. Still, when he remembered the quality of Cookie's drinks, the Saint concluded that she and/or her bartenders had initiative along that same line. The Saint felt that there was room for reasonable doubt that the reduction of the alcoholic potency of the drinks stemmed from compassionate motives, cynical though that conclusion might be.
Another trail had dragged across it a herring that had turned out to be the numbers racket. During his brief examination of exponents of mathematical larceny, he had been led again, by one of the collectors, to Cookie's.
He had run down a couple of false leads that led nowhere except to the decision that this was a Mecca for the chiseller, and that some of almost everybody's best friends are petty crooks at bottom.
The Saint was looking for bigger game. Perhaps the rising elevator would bring some.
It regurgitated two young men who were beyond doubt fresh in from the sea. They wore shore clothes, but the sea was in their tanned faces, their hard hands, and the set of their legs, braced automatically for the roll of a deck. The Saint couldn't see their eyes in the hall's gloom, but he knew they would have the characteristic look of those who gaze habitually on circular horizons.
They walked without speaking to James Prather's door, thumbed the button, were admitted. The Saint moved catlike to the door, but listening brought nothing. The door was heavy, the walls designed to give privacy to the occupant. Simon sighed, summoned the elevator, and joined Avalon, who was sitting in one of those chairs that clutter the lobbies of apartment houses and gazing at the uninspiring wallpaper with a forlorn expression.
"I beg your pardon, Miss," he said, "but I was attracted by your beauty, and can't help asking you a question. I am a representative of Grimes Graphite, Inc — 'Grimes' gets the grime,' you know — and felt certain that you must use it. Is that what makes your skin glow so?"
"My mother before me, and her mother before her, rubbed their faces each night with Grimes's graphite. But I don't use it myself. I loathe it."
"That is hardly the point at issue, is it? We can use that line about your maternal progenitors, run a photo of yourself — do you ski? — no matter, we can fix that. And we might even be persuaded to raise the ante."
"You twisted my bankbook," Avalon said. "I'm your gal."
"Really?"
She smiled. "Really."
They looked at each other for a long moment, until several persons came through the front door in a group, of which the male members stared at Avalon with very obvious admiration. The Saint took her outside.
"An idea has slugged me," he said, "and I don't want you to be seen talking to me until we're ready. I just hope our sailor boys give me a couple of minutes to tell you."
"What are you talking about?" she demanded as he hailed a passing taxi.
He helped her in.
"Wait," he told the driver, and closed the glass panel separating the production end of the cab from the payload.
"I have a faint hunch," he told Avalon in a low voice. "Two young men will presently issue from that door. Possibly you saw them come in. Tanned, one in a freshly-pressed gray suit, the other in blue? Did they notice you?"
"Looked right through me."
"Don't be bitter, darling. They had big things on their minds. On their way down, they'll be free of care and ready to paint the town. On the way down, they'll remember you, and would be anxious to spend their newly-acquired wealth on you."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
By not so much as the twitch of a nerve end did the Saint reveal his thoughts. He had not talked too much; he never talked too much. But if Avalon were among the Ungodly — and his every red corpuscle stood up on its hind feet and howled at the thought — she would know whether he was breathing hard on the heels of truth or not. Her knowledge would then be communicated to the Boys Above.
He hoped, and was not prepared to admit even to himself how much he hoped, that his shadowy objectivity had no foundation in fact. But in his unorthodox plan of maneuvering, a failure to appraise situations and people with a fishy eye often led to the filling of mourners' benches. He'd helped to fill a few himself in his day.
And so the smile he gave Avalon was gay as confetti on New Year's Eve.
"I'm not so sure, old thing, that I myself know what I'm talking about. But if I do, those boys will come out of there with one single first desire: transportation to celebration. And I'd rather they kept greedy eyes off our cab." He opened the glass panel. "Pull up to the corner and wait," he told the driver.
With one of those lightning decisions that was the despair of his enemies and the envy of his friends, Simon Templar reorganised his offense. He wanted to talk to those two young men who had gone a-knocking at James Prather's door, but he didn't want them to know that he wanted to talk to them.
He looked gravely at Avalon.
"Will you do something for me?"
"I'll make a cake or slice a throat," she said softly. "Or cross Fortysecond and Broadway against the traffic light at Saturday noon."
"This is an even greater sacrifice," he said mockingly. "I want you to go back into that apartment house and do some lobbyloitering."
Avalon didn't frown, didn't raise her eyebrows. She meditated for the space of ten seconds. Then she raised her eyes to his.
"I get the pitch, except for one thing. Who are you?"
"Your agent, of course."
"Of course. So I manage to be seen when they come down, and will be here at the curb with them when you drive up. I'll be telling them I can't go with them, but you'll allow me to be persuaded, provided you come along. Then we all go off in your cab." She gave him a quick kiss. "I should fall for a ten percenter yet. Everything happens to me."
She was out and clicking along the sidewalk on slim heels. The Saint watched her for a moment and wondered. What a partner she would make! She had divined his scheme of action, and with no prompting. She had known, without words, what his plan was. All he had had to do was sketch the bare outlines, and she had filled in the details.
"Drive around the block," he told the driver.
It was on the third circumnavigation that the Saint saw Avalon and the two seamen at the curb in front of the apartment house. He amused himself with the idea that these were the only live persons he had seen on his rounds: all others had been members of the Bronx nobility walking their dogs.
"Stop there," he commanded, and the cab driver drew up with a satisfying squeal of rubber.
"Darling," the Saint said to Avalon, "I was afraid you'd have gone. I'm horribly late."
"Aren't you, just?" she said. "I was about to take off. Well, since you're here— By the way, these are Joe Hyman and Sam Jeffries. Joe is the one with the glint."
Simon shook hands.
"Simon Simplon, I," he said. "Hello, kids. Where away?"
Avalon looked dubious.
"I'm not sure you're invited on this jaunt, Simon. The boys and I were just setting out to give the town a reddish hue."
The Saint said: "But I'm your agent. You can't do anything without me."
She raised her eyebrow.
"Anything?"
"Well—"
The sailors snickered.
Avalon stamped a foot
"You know what I mean."
"Miss Dexter," Simon told her sternly, "according to law, I am your agent. Perhaps that phrase carries implications which need not be considered here. I still say that I should be able to advise you on your goings about."
She put a curl into her lip.
"Because you're my agent?"
"Lowly though that may be, yes."
Joe Hyman, stocky, gray-suited, and Sam Jeffries, tall in blue, shifted from one foot to the other.
The Saint could have kissed her. She showed that perfect combination of camaraderie and contempt, of distrust and declination, that a temperamental artist exhibits toward her agent.
"How do you do?" the Saint said, and shook hands.
Joe Hyman was inarticulate, with small hard hands. He shook as if his life depended upon it. Sam Jeffries gave the Saint a handful of limp bananas.
"We were just about to go out and put an edge on the town," Jeffries said.
The Saint appeared to consider.
"A sound idea, seems to me. Why don't we all do it?"
Each of the boys looked at Avalon. They obviously didn't relish extra company. She looked at them, then at the Saint. She shrugged. Sam Jeffries said, "Why not?"
So they all climbed into the Saint's cab. As Simon followed them into the interior, he glanced upward. He saw peering from a window the face of James Prather.
4
The first thing the Saint noticed, when he was seated in the jump seat — so he could watch through the rear window to see if they were being followed — was that Sam Jeffries had drawn from his pocket a snub-nosed revolver and pointed it unwaveringly at the vitals of Simon Templar.
"My goodness," the Saint ejaculated mildly.
The revolver was held so that Avalon couldn't see it. She elevated exciting eyebrows. The Saint looked at her, then at Sam Jeffries. He shrugged. "The meter," he said, gesturing at his back. "It clicks and clicks."
The revolver seemed to waggle approbation.
Sam Jeffries eyed Simon for a long time.
"You're quite a guy, ain't you, bud?"
Simon shrugged.
"Oh — I wouldn't go that far."
"We think you're quite a guy," Sam insisted. "We've been told you're more'n that. You see, I recognized you. You've had too many photos printed in the papers — Saint."
Simon smiled, a devil-may-care smile, a smile as light as butterflies' worries.
"So? And now that we're putting everything on the barrelhead, why are you holding that cannon on me?"
Avalon gasped, and glanced sidewise.
"Well," Sam Jeffries said, "I guess it ain't necessary. I really wouldn't shoot you without'n you done more'n you've did."
Simon grinned.
"Thanks. Just to get the record straight, I really am this young lady's agent. She's a nightclub singer."
Stocky Joe Hyman said: "Huh?"
Sam Jeffries made a threatening motion at his pal.
" 'F she says she's a singer, she's a singer, see? 'N 'f he says he's her agent, well, shaddup, see?"
"I didn't mean nothing," Joe said.
"Well, Mister?" Sam said to Simon.
The Saint eyed the gun, the neat blue suit, the maroon tie, the long tanned face of Sam Jeffries. He began to move one hand toward his inner coat pocket.
"May I smoke?"
"Sure," Sam said.
The Saint took out his cigarette case, that case which had special properties that had before now helped him out of tighter spots than this. Not that the case seemed to differ from any similar case made of gold and embellished with a tasteful amount of precious gems. No, it seemed functional in design, if a bit on the ornate side. And functional it was; for one of its edges could be used as a razor. The toughest beard would fall before that redoubtable keenness. Not only was it a weapon for cutting bonds or throats, it contained ammunition which could be applied in sundry ways to the confusion of the Ungodly.
Interspersed among his regular brand were other special cigarettes which could blind, frighten, and fling into chaos such unsavory members of the human race as the Saint wished to blind, frighten, or fling into chaotic action. Each of these explosive tubes consisted almost entirely of magnesium.
His sensitive fingers felt among the case's cargo to light upon a bona fide smoke, which he lighted. He puffed a blue cloud at the ceiling and placed the case in a convenient jacket pocket. There might be use for it later. In doing so, he felt the outline of the small knife, Belle, which nestled in her case up his sleeve.
He eyed Sam Jeffries with that devilish carelessness that had made his name not only a by-word but a guide to independence.
"What do you mean, what now?"
"Well," Sam said, "I didn't recognize you at first. But after we was in the cab, see, I says, 'Sam, that's the Saint,' I says. And I asks myself what would the Saint want of the likes of us, and I gets no answer, see. So then I says to myself it'd be a good idea maybe if I didn't take no chances, so I hauls out my rod."
"Which fails to comfort me," the Saint murmured. His inaudible sigh of relief was let out carefully and imperceptibly. His mind was concerned with one beautiful thought: Sam Jeffries hadn't expected him to show up.
Avalon hadn't, then, tipped them off. If she were one of the Ungodly, she would have warned the two sailor boys. But she hadn't, and that made for singing in the veins.
He caught up his sudden joy in two mental hands and looked at it. It could be a treacherous kind of joy, going off half cocked at the most stupid stimuli. Suppose she had warned Sam Jeffries. Would he be clever enough to put on an act of this sort? Perhaps not but perhaps yes, too. At any rate, Avalon might have been clever enough to instigate such an act.
So the whole situation solved nothing, as far as his estimate of Avalon was concerned. And it was becoming increasingly important that he arrive at a correct estimate of her intents and purposes.
For himself he had no fear. These were young men — boys, really, in experience — whom he could overpower, escape from, or capture, if he chose to do so. But if Avalon were in this with him, his actions might explode along a certain line; if she were not, they would certainly explode along other and more uncomfortable lines.
Not that the end result would be affected. The Saint felt that he was travelling along the right road. As soon as the sea came into the picture, he was convinced that at long last he was approaching the goal.
For he had mental visions of ships sailing out of New York harbour, through the Canals, Panama or Suez, heading west or east, but always with the Orient at one end of the run. Small ships, 3000-ton freighters, carrying cargo to Calcutta; big ships, 20,000-ton liners of the restless deep, taking men and women to build a new world from the shattered remains.
And on these ships he saw men — boys from Glasgow, oldsters from the Bronx, trim officers from Liverpool — with an idea: "Benny sent me."
That Open Sesame formula of speakeasy days applied here, too. Benny sent me. The grilled door opened, you could libate at the bar, the house was yours. Every prospect pleased, and only the liquor was vile. Here, too, and now, Benny sent me. An agent passed over a parcel, it was stowed away, returned to New York and eventually to Benny.
Benny, in this case, being James Prather.
Maybe. In any case, it was vital to learn what these boys knew. What cares had they while sailing the seven (Seven? the Saint could think of nine, offhand) seas? What errands run, what messages carried? Where they unwitting or willing tools of — of whom?
That was the question.
And so the Saint said, in an effort to relax Sam Jeffries' upraised black brows and Joe Hyman's corrugated forehead: "Do you want to see my union card?"
This had not the desired effect on Joe's forehead, but Sam grinned sheepishly.
"That you're her agent? Naw, I guess not. Maybe I was a little quick on the draw, but I seen times when to be slow was to be too damned slow. Look, Mister, I'm sorry, I guess. What say we forget it?"
"Would you like to shake lefthanded," Simon asked pleasantly, "or would you like to put away that postage stamp pistol?"
Sam dropped it into his jacket pocket, grinned anew, and gave Simon a hand that was hard as iron.
"Less just have fun, Saint."
"A pleasure, Sam."
Avalon went "Phew!" in an explosive release of tension.
"Pardon my nerves," she said, "but these unorthodox introductions have a tendency to throw me."
Joe looked at everybody at once, a feat that did strange things to his round face.
"Ya mean this guy's d' Saint? Th' guy what diddles cops an' crooks too, all at once? 'Zat who he is?"
Sam Jeffries gazed patiently at his shipmate.
"Look, we been talkin' for fifteen minutes about who he is, while we run up three bucks on the meter and'll wind up in the drink if we don't tell the guy where to go, so shaddup."
"I didn't mean nothin'," Joe murmured. "But hell's — hully criminy, I mean — the Saint!"
"So he's th' Saint, so what? Right now he's a guy goin' along to put a few belts away. Got any arguments?"
"Naw, but it's like — well, you know, well, hell, I mean "
"Shaddup." To Avalon, Sam said: "Uh, Miss Dexter, we asked you to come along with us, 'n it seems to me this oughta be your party. Whyn't you tell th' helmsman where to throw out the anchor?"
Avalon looked at the Saint. He looked away. She turned to Joe, who was still wandering around in wonder at the Saint's being present.
"I'll go wherever Joe wants to go."
She was rewarded by one of the most complete smiles she had ever seen.
Not that Joe reminded you of a vaudeville comic hamming romantic embarrassment; there was no calculation in his pleasure. It was just that: pure pleasure. His round face took on a glow that made it like a lamp in a mine tunnel.
The Saint took his eyes away from the back window, through which he had been scrutinising traffic in their wake, and let them rest on Joe. Where would Joe want to go? The Stork? 21? Leon and Eddie's? Or some waterfront joint — Bill's Place, or some such.
It seemed that Joe was going to require some time to decide. He was obviously accustomed to having decisions made for him: "Swab the deck," "Coil that rope," "Kick that guy in the kidneys." Here was responsibility, and he wasn't quite ready for it. If Avalon had simply told him to jump out of the cab window, there was no doubt in the world that he would have done it. He might have asked if she wanted him to do a jackknife or a belly-buster, but his final action would have been to drape himself on the asphalt. But now there was a choice concerned, he was so pleased at having his opinion asked that the fact of the choice slipped his mind.
He sat grinning for so long that Sam jabbed him with: "Well?"
Joe blinked. His grin faded slowly, like sky writing in a gentle breeze.
"Huh? Oh. Well, gosh, I don't care."
The Saint was becoming very fond of Joe. Here was a boy would give out like a defective slot machine if manipulated properly.
"She ast ya," Sam said patiently. "So you don't care. We keep flitting around behind this meter till ya make up ya mind? Name some place, any place!"
Joe blinked, and you could almost hear unused mental machinery begin to rattle and clank. The machinery ground to a stop. His face once more was like a harvest moon.
"Cookie's!" he cried, and was quiet.
The Saint suppressed a groan. He didn't like Cookie's — Canteen or Cellar. He'd never visited the Canteen, but his mind was made up.
On the other hand—
He considered the other hand. James Prather had seen him and Avalon leave with Sam and Joe. That fact would be reported, if the Saint's ideas on the situation were correct. Those receiving the report would in some way be tied up with Cookie's. Therefore, if they all turned up there in the late afternoon, before the crowd began to thicken, some overt action might be taken. Anything, he thought, to get this thing out in the open. Another point to be considered was Avalon. In the event of a fracas of any sort at Cookie's, she'd be more likely to declare her allegiance there than elsewhere.
"Splendid," the Saint said, and Avalon's half-formed answer died in her throat.
She might have been about to say all the obvious things: the place would be dull at this time of day, she didn't like it, it was a clip joint, haven of highgraders. But when the Saint spoke, she shot him a puzzled glance and was still.
Simon gave instructions to the driver, and they took off on a new tack.
"Why," Simon asked conversationally, "Cookie's?"
"All the guys," Sam Jeffries said, "keep tellin' ya if ya want a swell time, go there, if ya belong to th' Merchant Marine. Free drinks, free eats, maybe even a girl trun in. Joe here believes everything anybody tells "im."
"Sometimes," Joe said, with the air of a great philosopher, "it turns out that way."
"Yeh!" Sam snorted. "Remember in Kobe how that—"
"Aw, that," Joe broke in. "He was ribbin' us."
Simon slipped in smoothly and took the conversation over. "How is the Orient?"
"Still shot to hell," Sam said. "Gonna be a long time before all them buildings go up again."
"Did you hear about Cookie's, even there?"
"Yeah, you know, guys on other ships."
"And you've never been to Cookie's before?"
"No."
"Where did you go on this last trip?"
While Sam launched a graphic account of their travels, Simon considered the fact that neither of these boys had been to Cookie's before. This seemed hardly in keeping with the pattern which Simon had begun to put together in his mind. He felt that the link must be somewhere between ships darting about the sea and Cookie's Cellar. James Prather?
Or the late lamented Gamaliel Bradford Foley?
Foley had been tied up with Dr. Zellermann. Dr. Zellermann with Cookie's, or some member of Cookie's entourage. Therefore a link existed somewhere.
Anyway, here they were. Simon paid off the taxi, and they went inside. The place was almost deserted, but a few people were around.
Among these were James Prather, talking to Kay Natello. Prather looked up at the party's entrance, narrowed his eyes and walked toward them.