and duly went to a party
1
The two young men who rang James Prather's doorbell might have been well-dressed haberdasher's assistants, shoe salesmen, or stockbrokers. They told the goggle-eyed Mr. Prather that they were attached to the Treasury Department and had credentials to prove it. One of them, a calm blond boyish young man, said his name was Harrison. He introduced the other, who was red-headed and freckled, as Smith.
Prather's pale hands fluttered in the direction of the divan.
"Sit down, will you? What's the matter? Income Tax trouble?"
Smith placed his blue felt hat on his well-pressed knee and said nothing. He seemed intensely interested in the hat. Harrison pushed his own hat back on his tow hair and seemed to develop a curiosity about the ceiling. Nobody said anything. Prather remained standing, not quite twisting his hands together; and his lobster-like eyes moved from Harrison to Smith and back.
Harrison broke the silence lazily: "You know a man named Sam Jeffries, I believe?"
Prather frowned.
"Jeffries? Jeffries? No, I think not."
"He said he was here to see you. He was quite definite about the location."
Prather frowned again.
"Oh... Yes, Yes, I think I remember who you mean. Yes. He was here, all right. What about him?"
Smith raised his freckled face.
"How's Shanghai these days?"
Prather blinked.
Harrison said: "Specifically, 903 Bubbling Well Road."
Prather blinked again. The effect was rather like raising and lowering a curtain rapidly over thickly curved lenses.
"I don't know what you're talking about, of course."
"Ah?" Smith said.
"Oh?" Harrison said.
"And I don't understand why the Treasury Department should be interested in me."
Harrison leaned back and looked at the far corner of the room. "I believe Sam Jeffries brought you a package — or packages?"
"Yes. He picked up a piece of carving for me in Shanghai — an old Chinese monk carrying a basket of fish. Very pretty."
"Where is it?" Smith asked.
"I — uh — I gave it to a — well, you know how it is — a girl."
"U'mm," Smith said.
"H'mm," Harrison said. "Where did you meet this Jeffries?"
"Oh — uh — you know — around — I don't remember."
Smith pushed a hand through his red hair and looked directly at Prather.
"According to the information that we have," he said, like a class valedictorian reciting, "you met Sam Jeffries for the first time in a place known as Cookie's Canteen on August 18, last year. At that time you entered into some kind of an agreement with him, which required a handshake to seal it, and he went on his way. On November 30, Sam Jeffries met you here in this apartment and brought with him his friend, Joe Hyman. Why? What agreement did you enter into with the two of them?"
"If you two guys would give me some idea of what you're trying to find out," Prather said, "I might be able to help you. So far you haven't made any sense at all."
Harrison moved his eyes, giving the impression of a Government Man on an important job.
"Suppose you answer a few questions for a change, Mr. Prather. We could take you downtown with us and make quite a business of this, you know."
"What goes? AH you've done so far is make innuendoes. You haven't accused me of anything specific, and — well — hell! I don't like it!"
Smith turned his freckled face directly on Prather.
"What is 903 Bubbling Well Road to you? What did you say to Sam Jeffries? Who's the guy above you? How do you think you're going to get out of all this? There, my friend, are some specific questions."
James Prather's cock-lobster eyes regarded Mr. Smith with a sort of frantic intensity.
"But — but — but—"
Harrison said: "I see. Maybe you'd better come along with us, Mr. Prather."
Prather, it was quite obvious, searched his conscience, his capabilities, and appraised his ingenuity. He looked at Harrison. He looked at Smith, and his thoughts retreated into the inside of his own mind. From somewhere he gathered a certain nervous courage, and he set his mouth in a quivering line.
"I don't know what you're after, but I do know one thing. I can stand on my constitutional rights. Unless you have any formal charges to bring against me, I don't have to say anything to you. Good day, gentlemen."
"Well," Harrison said.
"Ho-hum," Smith said.
The two young men got lazily to their feet and eyed the jittering Prather without expression for a long time. Then they went away. Prather was also on his way as soon as he could get into a jacket and grab a hat. He flagged a taxi in front of the apartment house, and directed the driver to Dr. Zellermann's Park Avenue offices.
Zellermann was not happy to see him. His long face would have made ice-cubes seem like firecrackers. He chose his words carefully, as if he were picking each one out of a hat.
"And so you led them directly to me. Mr. Prather, I consider this a very ill-advised move on your part."
"I didn't lead them to you. I wasn't followed."
"May I ask just how you know that? In your present condition you wouldn't see an elephant following you." Dr. Zellermann picked up his phone, and dialed a number. "Bring two of your boys with you immediately."
"What — what are you going to do?" Prather asked. He repeated the question three times.
Dr. Zellermann made a triangle with the thumb and forefingers of his two white hands, and rested his chin upon the apex. He looked at James Prather as if he were a subject being discussed by a class in zoology.
"One of the principal aims of this particular organization, as you know, is to take care of our own. You, inadvertently, have placed us in a position where you are in danger — physically, morally, and legally. We believe that it is to the interests of the organization to protect you. That was the purpose of my call."
"You mean then you're not—"
"Going to—"
"Well — uh—"
"Liquidate you? My dear Mr. Prather, please! As I said before our prime motivation in these present circumstances is to take care of our own. While we are waiting, I want you to tell me exactly what you told the Government men."
James Prather's mind was a roil of emotions. Uppermost, of course, was the instinct of self-preservation. He not only had no desire to die, but his every thought was directed strictly towards keeping himself alive. He cast into his mind for motives, inferences, and implications in Dr. Zellermann's attitude which might be at odds with that inherent drive which is born into every man.
"I didn't tell them anything. They seemed to know more than you could possibly expect them to. When their questions reached a certain point I did what I had to do, and that was to clam up."
"What exactly did they seem to know about?"
"They mentioned Jeffries and Hyman. They knew that they'd visited me and brought me something from Shanghai. And they asked me if I knew 903 Bubbling Well Road."
"Which of course you denied."
"Naturally. But how would they know about Jeffries and Hyman?"
Zellermann spread his hands.
"Who can tell? Seamen with money get drunk, sometimes they get into trouble. There are all kinds of situations in which they might talk. Luckily, however, they have nothing to talk about — except yourself. And you would never be indiscreet."
Prather swallowed.
"Of course not. I know I'm worried. But if you don't let me down—"
Dr. Zellermann nodded.
"I knew we could depend upon you, Mr. Prather."
And then silence fell. Dr. Zellermann seemed to have said all that he wished to say and James Prather was afraid to say anything more. They sat quietly, not meeting each other's eye. They sat like this for an undeterminable time, and their tableau was disturbed by Dr. Zellermann's blond secretary, with the sleeked-back hair, who stuck her head into the office and said:
"Mr. Carpenter to see you with two friends."
"Show them in."
The trio who entered the office were large hard-eyed men, pushing middle-age. They had one characteristic in common: they were ready to take orders and carry them out.
"Mr. Carpenter, Mr. Prather."
The two men shook hands. Prather was nervous, Carpenter matter of fact.
"Mr. Prather," Dr. Zellermann continued, "has unfortunately attracted some undesirable attention. It's up to us to see that he comes to no harm in the hands of the authorities. Mr. Carpenter, you know what to do."
Prather stood up.
"Dr. Zellermann, I can't thank you enough. I—"
Dr. Zellermann waved away his protestations of good will.
"Nonsense. One looks out for one's own."
James Prather twiddled his thumbs nervously as the long black car wound through traffic for an hour or more and left behind the city limits of New York. At long intervals farmhouses appeared on each side, and it may be presumed that birds sang in the trees nearby. Prather had no ear for our feathered friends and no eyes for rustic architecture. He sat rigidly in the back seat between the two nameless companions of Mr. Carpenter, while that gentleman drove expertly and swiftly to their unrevealed destination. The others initiated no trivial conversation, and Mr. Prather was in no mood to start any himself.
When they had travelled another hour, Carpenter swung down a narrow sideroad, whose pavement gave way presently to a sandy surface. Another turning brought them into a lane which was distinguished by car tracks and overhanging maples. After a half-mile's travel along this road, Carpenter stopped the car. He got out.
"This way," he said.
Prather, not without inner misgivings, followed the big man through a barbed-wire fence, across a pasture, and deep into a green orchard of apple trees.
"Where are you taking me?" Prather asked in a small voice.
Carpenter turned to face him.
"No place," he said. "You're here."
He took an automatic from under his left arm and pointed it at Prather's chest. The first shot would have been enough; but Carpenter, a conscientious man, gave him a second bullet to make certain.
2
The man who went down the back stairs of the Algonquin Hotel and slipped quickly and inconspicuously through the lobby from the service door could never have been mistaken for the debonair and immaculate Mr, Templar who had lately become accepted as one of the brighter landmarks of that possessive caravanserai. He wore heavy black shoes that were cracked and stained and down at heel, heavy black wool socks drooping untidily over his ankles, dark blue trousers with baggy knees and a shiny seat, a soiled white shirt with a dark tie knotted and twisted like an old rope, a dark blue reefer jacket that was wrinkled across the shoulders, patched in one elbow, and threadbare at the cuffs, and a vaguely nautical peaked cap without insignia that looked as if it was used to combining the functions of head-gear and brass polisher. His shoulders sagged and his chest slouched, so that he didn't seem very tall. His complexion was ruddy and weather-beaten. What could be seen of his hair was a drab gray that matched his bushy eyebrows and straggly moustache and the close-cropped fringe of beard around his chin.
He was out of the hotel so quickly that nobody really noticed him, but he was not bothered about being seen. If any leg men of the Ungodly were watching for him in the lobby, he was quite sure that they would patiently continue to sit and watch. The man who had become Tom Simons right down to his grimy fingernails was prepared to submit his creation to any ocular inspection — including that of the doorkeeper at Cookie's Canteen.
The doorkeeper, who was a woman with dyed red hair and a face like a dyspeptic camel, examined his identification papers and gave him a stock smile which displayed many large teeth tastefully mounted in gold.
"Glad to have you with us, Mr. Simons," she said. "Go right in and make yourself at home."
The Saint went in.
He found himself in a big barren room which had probably once been a restaurant, for one side of it was still broken up into upholstered booths. The rest of the furnishings were less ornamental, consisting of plain bare wooden tables and chairs, all of them scarred from much service. On the side opposite the booths there was a low dais with little more than enough room for the grand piano that stood on it. The walls were plastered with posters of female nubility and cartoons from Esquire. Near the entrance there was a rack of tattered popular magazines. At the back of the room there was a service bar from behind which two very wavy-haired young men in their shirtsleeves were dispensing sandwiches and bottles of non-alcoholic throat irrigation. A juke box blared inexorably through the hit parade.
The room was crowded with men of all ages, some in ordinary civilian clothes, some in costumes that tried nebulously to look like a sort of seafaring uniform. Some of the parties at the tables were engrossed in games of cards or checkers. Other men danced with the hostesses in a clear space in front of the piano, clumsily or stiffly or flashily according to type. The hostesses were mostly young and pert and passably good-looking. They wore aprons with star-dotted borders and Cookie's Canteen embroidered across them. A few other smooth-skinned young men in identical aprons moved among the tables picking up empty bottles and dirty plates.
Aside from the rather noticeably sleek fragility of the male helpers, the place was fairly typical of the numerous oases that had mushroomed across the country during the war to offer chaste and sheltered recreation to men of the services, in line with the current concept of tea and parlor games as the great spiritual need of a warrior between battles. But whereas practically all the prototypical estaminets were sponsored and protected by public organisations, Cookie's Canteen was a strictly freelance and unofficial and unendorsed post-war benevolence. And in all of that there were questions to which the Saint wanted many answers...
He edged his way through the tables to the service bar and asked for a coke. With the bottle in his hand, he turned back towards the room, scanning the crowd through the thick fog of smoke that hung under the low ceiling and wondering what his move should be.
A girl in an apron stopped in front of him.
"Hello," she said. "You got everything you want?" '
"Yus, thank yer, miss."
"Gee, you must be English."
"That's right, miss." The Saint's voice was hoarse and innocent. "Strite from Aldgate. 'Ow did yer guess?"
"Oh, I'm getting so I can spot all the accents."
"Well now!" said the Saint admiringly.
"This your first time here?"
"Yus, miss."
"When did you get to New York?"
"Just got in larst night."
"Well, you didn't take long to find us. Do you have any friends here?"
"No, miss..."
The Saint was just saying it when a face caught his eye through the blue haze. The man was alone now in a booth which a couple of other seamen had just left, and as he shifted his seat and looked vacantly around the room the Saint saw him clearly and recognised him.
He said suddenly: "Gorblimy, yes I do! I know that chap dahn there. Excuse me, miss—"
He jostled away through the mob and squeezed unceremoniously into the booth, plonking his bottle down on the stained tabletop in front of him.
"Ullo, mite," he said cheerfully. "I know I've seen you before. Your nime's Patrick 'Ogan, ain't it?"
"Shure, Hogan's the name," said the other genially, giving him a square view of the unmistakable pug-nosed physiognomy which Simon had last seen impaled on the spotlight of Cookie's Cellar. "An' what's yours?"
"Tom Simons."
"I don't remember, but think of nothing of it. Where was it we met?"
"Murmansk, I think — durin' the war?"
"It's just as likely. Two weeks I've spent there on two trips, an' divil a night sober."
It appeared that Hogan found this a happy and satisfactory condition, for he had obviously taken some steps already towards inoculating himself against the evils of sobriety. His voice was a little slurred, and his breath was warmed with spicier fluids than passed over the counter of Cookie's Canteen.
"This 'ere's a bit of orl right, ain't it?" Simon said, indicating the general surroundings with a wave of his bottle.
"There's nothing better in New York, Tom. An' that Cookie — she's a queen, for all she sings songs that'd make your own father blush."
"She is, is she?"
"Shure she is, an' I'll fight any man that says she isn't. Haven't ye heard her before?"
"Naow. Will she be 'ere ternight?"
"Indeed she will. Any minute now. That's what I come in for. If it wasn't for her, I'd rather have a drink that'll stay with me 'an a girl I can have to meself to roll in the hay. But Cookie can take care of that too, if she's a friend of yours."
He winked broadly, a happy pagan with a girl and a hangover in every port.
"Coo," said the Saint, properly impressed. "And are yer a friend of 'ers?"
"You bet I am. Why, last Saturday she takes me an' a friend o' mine out to that fine club she has, an' gives us all the drinks we can hold; an' there we are livin' like lords until daybreak, an' she says any time we want to go back we can do the same. An' if you're a friend o' mine, Tom, why, she'll do the same for you."
"Lumme," said the Saint hungrily. "Jer fink she would?"
"Indeed she will. Though I'm surprised at an old man like you havin' these ideas."
"I ain't so old," said the Saint aggrievedly. "And if it comes ter 'aving fun wif a jine—"
A figure loomed over the table and mopped officiously over it with a checkered rag. The hand on the rag was pale and long-fingered, and Simon noticed that the fingernails were painted with a violet-tinted lacquer.
Hardly daring to believe that anything so good could be true, the Saint let his eyes travel up to the classical features and pleated golden hair of the owner of that exotic manicure.
It was true. It was Ferdinand Pairfield.
Mr. Pairfield looked at the Saint, speculatively, but without a trace of recognition; discarded him, and smirked at the more youthful and rugged-looking Hogan.
"Any complaints, boys?" he asked whimsically.
"Yes," Hogan said flatly. "I don't like the help around here."
Mr. Pairfield pouted.
"Well, you don't have to be rude" he said huffily, and went away.
"The only thing wrong with this place," Hogan observed sourly, "is all those pretty boys. I dunno why they'd be lettin' them in, but they're always here."
Then the truculent expression vanished from his face as suddenly as it had come there, and he let out a shrill joyful war-cry.
"Here she is, Tom," he whooped. "Here's Cookie!"
The lights dimmed as he was speaking, giving focus to the single spotlight that picked up the bulbous figure of Cookie as she advanced to the front of the dais.
Her face was wide open in the big hearty jolly beam that she wore to work. Throwing inaudible answers back to the barrage of cheers and whistling that greeted her, she maneuvered her hips around the piano and settled them on the piano stool. Her plowman's hands pounded over the keyboard; and the Saint leaned back and prepared himself for another parade of her merchandise.
"Good evening, everybody," she blared when she could be heard: "Here we are again, with a load of those songs your mothers never taught you. Tonight we'll try and top them all — as usual. Hold on to your pants, boys, and let's go!"
She went.
It was a performance much like the one that Simon had heard the night before; only much more so. She took sex into the sewer and brought it out again, dripping. She introduced verses and adlibs of the kind that are normally featured only at stag smokers of the rowdiest kind. But through it all she glowed with that great gargoyle joviality that made her everybody's broadminded big sister; and to the audience she had, much as the USO would have disapproved and the YMCA would have turned pale with horror, it was colossal. They hooted and roared and clapped and beat upon the tables, demanding more and more until her coarse homely face was glistening with the energy she was pouring out. And in key with his adopted character, and to make sure of retaining the esteem of Patrick Hogan, the Saint's enthusiasm was as vociferous as any.
It went on for a full threequarters of an hour before Cookie gave up, and then Simon suspected that her principal reason was plain exhaustion. He realised that she was a leech for applause: she soaked it up like a sponge, it fed and warmed her, and she gave it back like a kind of transformed incandescence. But even her extravagant stamina had its limit.
"That's all for now," she gasped. "You've worn me down to a shadow." There was a howl of laughter. "Come back tomorrow night, and I'll try to do better."
She stepped down off the platform, to be hand-shaken and slapped on the back by a surge of admirers as the lights went up again.
Patrick Hogan climbed to his feet, pushing the table out and almost upsetting it in his eagerness. He cupped his hands to his mouth and split the general hubbub with a stentorian shout.
"Hey, Cookie."
His coat was rucked up to his hips from the way he had been sitting, and as he lurched there his right hip pocket was only a few inches from Simon's face. Quite calmly and almost mechanically the Saint's eyes traced the outlines of the object that bulged in the pocket under the rough cloth — even before he moved to catch a blue-black gleam of metal down in the slight gape of the opening.
Then he lighted a cigarette with extreme thoughtfulness, digesting the new and uncontrovertible fact that Patrick Hogan, that simple spontaneous child of nature, was painting the town with a roscoe in his pants.
3
Cookie sat down with them, and Hogan said: "This is me friend Tom Simons, a foine sailor an' an old goat with the gals. We were drunk together in Murmansk-or I was drunk anyway."
"How do you do, Tom," Cookie said.
"Mustn't grumble," said the Saint. " 'Ow's yerself?"
"Tired. And I've still got two shows to do at my own place."
"I certainly did enjoy 'earing yer sing, ma'm."
"This your first visit?"
"Yus, ma'm."
"Call me Cookie. Everyone does."
"Yus, ma'm."
"I bet it wont' be his last," Hogan said. "Eh, Tom?"
"Not arf it won't," said the Saint. "If you'll 'ave me. But I dunno as I'll 'ave a lot more charnces on this trip."
Cookie took out a pack of cigarettes, offered them, and lit one for herself. She looked at the Saint again.
"Aren't you staying long?" she asked conversationally.
"Naow. Back on board by supper-time on Tuesday, them's the orders — an' we only drops the 'ook yesterdye. Be a s'ilor an' see the world — I don't think."
"That's too bad."
"Aow, it's orl in the dye's work, ma'm. But I ses ter meself, I'm goin' ter see New York while I got the charnce, by crikey."
"Where are you heading for next?"
"Through the canal an' strite to Shanghai. Then back from there to Frisco. Then—"
"Say, Cookie," interrupted Hogan brazenly, "how's about a drop of real liquor for a couple o' good friends who've dried their throats to a cinder with cheerin' for ye?"
She took a deep man-sized drag at her cigarette, flicked ash from it on to the table, and glanced at the Saint again with expressionless and impersonal calculation.
"I might find you a drop," she said.
She stood up and started away; and Patrick Hogan nudged the Saint with one of his broad disarming winks as they followed her.
"What did I tell ye, Tom?"
"Cor," said the Saint appreciatively, "you ain't arf a one." They went through a door at the side of the service bar, which took them into a kitchen that might once have been bustling and redolent with the concoction of rare dishes for the delectation of gourmets. Now it looked bare and drab and forlorn. There was no one there. A centre table was piled with loaves of bread and stacks of sliced ham and cheese, and littered with crumbs and scraps. Cases of coke and pop were pyramided in one corner. The only thing on the stove was an enormous steaming coffee pot; and a mass of dirty cups and plates raised sections of their anatomy, like vestiges of a sunken armada, out of the lake of greasy water in the sink.
Cookie led the way into another room that opened off the kitchen. It was so tiny that it must once have seen duty as a store room. Now it barely had space for a couple of plain chairs, a wastebasket, a battered filing cabinet, and a scarred desk scattered with bills and papers. Kay Natello sat at the desk, in front of an antique typewriter, pecking out an address on an envelope with two clawlike fingers.
"Hullo, Kay," Hogan said familiarly. "An' how's me swateheart tonight?"
"We're just going to have a quick one," Cookie said. "Be a darling and find us some glasses, Kay, will you?"
Kay Natello got up and went out into the kitchen, and Cookie opened a drawer of the desk and pulled out a half-empty bottle of Scotch. Natello came back with four wet glasses and put them on the desk.
"This is Tom Simons — Kay Natello," Cookie said, "Tom's only just got in, and he's sailing again on Tuesday."
"Too bad," said Natello.
"We all 'ave ter work, Miss," Simon said modestly. "At least we got plenty o' grub an' a nice clean bed ter sleep in, as long as it don't sink under us."
Cookie finished pouring four powerful slugs, and picked up one of them.
"Well, boys," she said. "Down the hatch."
The drinks duly went down the hatch.
"You were sailing soon, too, weren't you, Pat?" asked Natello.
"Next week. Off to South Africa, India, Singapore, and back the same way."
"We'll miss you," said Cookie. "What about you, Tom — are you going to England?"
"Shanghai," said the Saint, wiping his droopy moustache. "Through the canal. An' back to Frisco."
Cookie poured herself another drink, and downed it at one gulp like a dose of medicine. Perhaps that was what it was for her.
"I've got to leave you," she announced. "Got my next show to do."
She helped herself to another small jolt, as an afterthought, just in case she had made a mistake and cheated herself on the last one. The effect on her was not even noticeable. Her small piggy eyes summarised the Saint with the quick covert shrewdness of an adept Fiftysecond-Street head waiter taking the measure of a new customer. She said with perfectly timed spontaneity: "Look, why don't you boys come over to the Cellar when you get through here? On the house."
Hogan thumped her heartily on the back without even jarring her.
"Darlin', what did ye think we were waitin' for? Sure, we'll be there shoutin' for ye. Won't we, Tom?"
"Crikey," said the Saint, with a wistful break in his voice. "You ain't arf giving us a time, ma'm. I mean, Cookie."
"That's fine," Cookie said. "Then I'll be expecting you. Kay, you take care of them and bring them along. See you all later."
She gathered her foundation around her, gave a last hesitant glance at the Scotch bottle, and made a resolute exit like a hippopotamus taking off to answer the call of Spring.
Kay Natello took care of them.
Simon didn't keep very close track of the caretaking, but the general trend of it was quite simple. After the Scotch was finished and they left the canteen, it involved stopping at a great many bars on the way and having a drink or two in each of them. Hogan acquired more blarney and boisterousness as it went on: he said that Kay was his girl, and an Irishman's girl was his castle, or something that sounded like that. He beamingly offered to pulverize various persons whom he suspected of dissenting from his opinions about Oliver Cromwell, Michael Collins, De Valera, and Kay Natello. Simon Templar did his best to keep in time with the mood, and surreptitiously dribbled as many drinks as he could into the nearest cuspidor. Through it all, Kay Natello only became more stringy and more removed. She responded to Pat Hogan's elephantine flirtations when she remembered to; in between, she was more like a YWCA chaperone trying to keep up with the girls. Simon was quite relieved that she didn't at any point offer to break into significant vers libres... But it still seemed to take a long time to reach Cookie's Cellar.
Once they were there, however, it was a repetition of the night before from another viewpoint. This time, the Saint was one of the reluctant heroes under the spotlight. Cookie sang the same kind of songs, giving and receiving the same enthusiasm.
After one of the more turbid numbers, Kay Natello nudged the Saint and said proudly: "I wrote that for her."
"Cor!" said the Saint respectfully.
That was only a mild expression of what he thought. The idea of a poetess of Kay Natello's school composing those kinds of lyrics in her lighter moments had an austere magnificence which he hoped to dwell on some quiet evening when he had nothing else at all to do.
It was like the night before again, with a difference, because Avalon Dexter was there.
She wasn't there to work. She was just another customer, wearing a simple afternoon dress, sitting at a table at the back of the room; but he saw her long tawny hair dance as she talked and looked around. It gave him a queer sensation to watch her like that and have her glance pass over him in complete unawareness. It was like being invisible.
And it also gave him a sort of guilty feeling, as though he was hiding and spying on her. Which at that moment he was. The man with her was slightly rotund and slightly bald. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and he had a round and pleasant pink face that looked very clean and freshly barbered. He was not, you could tell very quickly, another Dr. Zellermann in his manual recreations. He behaved like a nice wholesome middle-aged man who was enjoying the company he was in. Any impartial observer would have conceded that he was entitled to that, and quite undeserving the unreasonable malignance with which Simon regarded him. Simon knew it was unreasonable, but that didn't blunt the stab of resentment that went through him when he saw her chattering so gaily with this complacent jerk. He was surprised at his own symptoms, and not too pleased about them either.
Cookie finished at last, with Hogan and the Saint competing in the uproariousness of their appreciation. The melancholy waiter brought some more drinks, bowed down into profounder misery by the knowledge that this was one table which he dared not discourage, and that at the same time it was one table where the tip would certainly be no compensation. Cookie ploughed through the room, stopping to give jovial greeting to various tables, and surged on to the bar, where there were other members of her following to be saluted and the bartender had been trained to have three ounces of Scotch waiting for her with a cube of ice in it.
It was twenty minutes before she breasted back to her own table, and then she had Dr. Ernst Zellermann in tow.
Cookie introduced him, and mopped her face and reached for the first drink that arrived. "Tom's sailing on Tuesday," she said. "Shanghai." The Saint had already begun to let it look as if his liquor consumption was catching up with him. He lurched in his chair, spilt some of his drink, and gave a wink that was getting heavy and bleary.
"Gonna find aht if it's true abaht China," he said.
"I may be able to tell you a few places to go," Zellermann said smoothly. "I spent quite a time there once — In the good days before the war."
He looked very noble and full of unfathomable memories; and Simon Templar, dimly returning his gaze, felt coldly and accurately like a specimen on a dissecting table.
Zellermann picked up his glass and turned to Cookie with the utmost charm.
"You know," he said, "I don't know why you don't invite more people like Mr. Hogan and Mr. Simons out to Long Island. After all, they deserve to be entertained much more than I do."
"That's an idea," Cookie said. "How about it, boys? I've got a little shack on the beach at Southampton. We close this joint on Sundays anyhow. Why don't you come along? I'll see that you're back in town on Monday. You can swim in the ocean and get some sun on the beach, and we'll make a party of it and it won't cost you a cent. Dr. Zellermann and I will drive you out as soon as we've closed this place. We'll have a grand weekend. I'll have company for you, too. The most attractive girl you've ever seen." Simon was much too drunk to catch the glance that flashed between them — or at least he had been able to convince everyone of that. "Dexter is coming along," Cookie said.
4
The Saint mumbled something about seeing a man about a dog, and was able to get out alone. There was a telephone booth near the entrance. He called the Algonquin and asked for Avalon.
Miss Dexter was not there at the moment, as he knew; but could they take a message?
"When is she likely to get it?" he asked.
"I couldn't say, sir, but she's been calling in about every half hour. She seems to be expecting a message. Is this Mr. Templar?"
The Saint held his breath for a moment, and took a lightning decision.
"Yes."
"I know she's asked whether you called. Can she call you back?"
The Saint said: "I'm afraid she can't reach me, but tell her I'll see her tomorrow."
Nothing could have been more true than that, even if she didn't understand it; and somehow it made him feel better with himself. It meant something to know that she had hoped he would find a way to get in touch with her — no matter why. She would not know that he had been back to the Algonquin since his "arrest," for that had been taken care of; and she must continue to believe that he was locked up somewhere downtown. But she had asked...
Both of them had become hooked to an unwinding chain that was going somewhere on its own. Only it happened to be the same chain for both of them. It seemed as if the hand of destiny was in that — Simon didn't want to think any more, just then, about what that destiny might be.
When he got back to the table, everything had been settled. Patrick Hogan proclaimed that when his great-grandfather sailed for America, all the luggage he had was in his coat pockets, and he could do anything that his great-grandfather could do. He was certain that, next to his great-grandfather and himself, his pal Tom Simons was just as expert at light travelling.
"I can take you in my car," Zellermann said convivially. "There's plenty of room."
Simon didn't doubt it was a car you could play badminton in.
"I'll have to stay till the bitter end," said Cookie, "and Dexter will probably want to pick up some things. I'll bring her."
It was worked out just as easily and rapidly as that. But Simon knew that aside from the hospitable cooperation, Avalon Dexter was not intended to know that Dr. Zellermann would be a member of the house party. Or he hoped he knew it.
He had some confirmation of that when they were leaving.
Avalon seemed to be on her way back from the powder room when they started out. There was a rather lost and apart expression on her face that no one else might have seen. Zellermann half stopped her.
"Good evening, Avalon," he said, half formally and half engagingly.
"How are you?" Avalon said, very brightly and very cheerfully and without a pause, so that before he could have said anything else she was neatly past him and gone.
Zellermann stood looking after her without a ripple of reaction, his face as smooth as a head of marble.
Simon recalled that he had also hit Dr. Zellermann in the eye, and realised that some momentary inaccuracy had made him fail to leave any souvenir contusion on the eyelid. All he could detect, in the brighter light of the foyer, was a small area of matt surface just above the cheekbone. Dr. Zellermann's peripalpebral ecchymosis, clearly, had received the most skilled medical and cosmetic treatment.
The encounter had made Hogan and the Saint drift further on towards the door, and Kay Natello had excused herself on a farewell visit to the powder room. It was a chance that might not recur very quickly.
Simon said: "Pat, 'oo is this Dexter jine?"
"She used to work here, Tom me boy, an' a swate singer she was too. That was her just went by. But you'll meet her when we get to Southampton. An' if Cookie says she's for you, ye're in luck."
"She's a corker, orl right," said the Saint. "If that's 'oo yer mean. Although she wouldn't 'ave much time fer an ole goat like me. Clarss, that's wot she is..." He staggered just a little, and put his arm around Hogan's broad shoulders, and decided to take a chance on Hogan's unpredictable pugnacity. "But if it comes ter that, mite, wot djer see in an ole sack o' bones like that there Natello?"
Hogan laughed loudly and clung to him for mutual support.
"She's okay, Tom," he said generously. "An' she's a friend of Cookie's, an' she's me swateheart. Is it her fault if she's an old sack o' bones? She reminds me of me old Aunt Eileen, an' she's been kindness itself to me iver since we met, so I'll fight any man that says she's not the toast o' the town."
That was how they piled into Dr. Zellermann's car, which was not only big enough to play badminton in but could probably have accommodated a social set of tennis as well.
Hogan and Natello sat in the back, and after a few lines of noisy repartee seemed to get close together and go to sleep. Dr. Zellermann steered them out over the Triborough Bridge with surgical care and precision, while he chatted urbanely about the sea and world commerce and logistics and the noble part that was being played by such unsung paladins of reconversion as Tom Simons. The Saint sat beside him, making the right answers as best he could improvise them, and remembering Avalon Dexter and many various things.
Apparently, as he had worked it out, Avalon's arrival at Southampton to find Zellermann there already was meant to be a surprise for her. Apparently, then, there was an idea extant that she wouldn't have accepted the invitation if she had known Zellermann would be there. Certainly she had brushed him off coolly enough that night, with merely conventional politeness. That was what any ordinary person would think.
But Simon Templar was still alive for no more fundamental reason than that he had never thought what any ordinary person would think — or was intended to think. So that he could stand far back and see that if he were the Ungodly and he wanted to hook Simon Templar, he might easily play the cards something like that.
And why had Avalon accepted the invitation anyhow?
The Saint's lips hardened over the reminder that he always had to think like that. He had had to do it for so long that it was a habit now. And now, for the first time in an infinitude of years, he was conscious of it again.
And it wasn't any fun at all, and there was no pleasure at all in the knowledge of his own wisdom and vigilance; because this was Avalon, and this wasn't the way he wanted to think about Avalon.
Avalon with her russet locks tossing like the woods of New England in the fall, and her brown eyes that laughed so readily and looked so straight.
But Patrick Hogan with his ingenuous joviality and the gun on his hip. Patrick Hogan with his uninhibited young sailor's zest for a spree, and his cheerful acceptance of Kay Natello. Patrick Hogan, whom the Saint had hooked so deftly as a sponsor — who had been so very willing to be hooked.
And the Parkway stretching ahead, and the soothing murmurs of movement.
And Avalon with the friendliness and the passion meeting at her mouth, and the music always in her voice.
And the great hospitality of Cookie and Zellermann, and the glances that went between them.
And the headlights reaching out to suck in the road.
And Avalon...
The Saint slept.
He woke up presently out of a light dream mist in which sane thought and diaphanous fantasy had blended so softly and lightly that it seemed like a puzzle in clairvoyance to separate them.
Then, as you sat still and probed for them, they slipped away elusively and faded at the last fingertip of apprehension, so that it was like searching for shadows with a lantern; and in the end there was nothing at all except time gone by and the headlights still drinking up the road — a road over which pools of thin white fog loomed intermittently and leapt and swallowed them and were gone like the dream.
The Saint lighted a cigarette and glanced at the pale precise sharply graven profile of Dr. Zellermann on his left.
"We're nearly there," Zellermann said, as if there had been no hiatus at all.
Houses and hedges rose at the headlights, dodged adroitly, and were left behind. Southampton, Long Island, slept in peace, exposing nothing in common with its parent town of Southampton, England — not bombed, not scarred by war, and not knowing the other battle that swept through it in the sleek car that Dr. Zellermann drove.
They touched the end of Main Street, turned right and then left again presently, and then after a little while they swung into a driveway and stopped. Simon knew where they were — somewhere in the long line of ambitious beach-fronted houses which had expanded along that coast.
Cookie's summer hideaway may have been only a shanty in new shanty town, but her description of it as "a little shack" was rather modest. Dr. Zellermann let them in with a key, and found light switches with familiar assurance. They went through a panelled hall with quite a broad oak staircase, and into a living-room" that was almost as big as Cookie's Cellar — which didn't make a barn of it either. But it was still a large room, with tall french windows on the ocean side and glass tables and big square-cut modern couches, all of it reflecting the kind of fast-moneyed life which Simon could easily associate with the profits of a joint like Cookie's. And probably also reflecting, he thought in a flash of intuition, the interior decorating ideas of Ferdinand Pairfield — after the apotheosis of Kay Natello he doubted whether any of the members of Cookie's clique would be allowed to withhold their talents from practical application.
Zellermann slid aside a pair of pale green mirrors with geometrical designs frosted on them, disclosing a bar alcove with three chrome-legged stools in front and a professional array of bottles forming a relief mural behind. He stepped through the flap in the counter and said: "How about a drink?"
"Sure, an' that must have been what me throat was tryin' to tell me," said Hogan with a prodigious yawn, "when I was dreamin' about the Suez Canal on the way."
"I'll get some ice," said Natello, in the same lifeless twang, as if she was used to being useful and didn't think about it any more.
"And I'll help ye, if ye'll lead the way."
They went out. Simon sat on one of the stools, put one elbow on the bar, and pushed back his disreputable cap. Zellermann set out a row of glasses, disregarded the finely representative stock behind him, and brought up a bottle of Old MacSporran Genuine Jersey City Scotch Whiskey from under the bar and began to measure out doses.
"Are you and Patrick on the same ship?" he asked pleasantly.
"Naow," said the Saint. "We met in Murmansk."
"Of course. I should have remembered. He's going to Singapore and you're headed for Shanghai."
"That's right, guv'nor."
"Have you known Patrick long?"
"On'y since the larst bar we was in. In Murmansk, that was."
"Until you met at the Canteen tonight."
"That's right. An' I ses to 'im, Gorblimy, I ses, I've seen you before; an' 'e ses to me, Gorblimy, 'e ses—"
Simon went on with this.
Dr. Zellermann finished his general pouring, turned for a liqueur glass, and unobtrusively selected himself a bottle of Benedictine from the display shelves.
"A very fine instinctive type," he said suavely. "Quite unrepressed, given to violent mental and physical expression, but essentially sequacious under the right guidance."
The Saint rubbed his eyes.
"Blimey, guv'nor," he said, "yer carn't arf tork, can yer? Strike me pink!"
He subsided into abashment when this miracle failed to occur, " and devoted himself to the exotic nuances of Old MacSporran as soon as Hogan and Natello returned with sufficient ice to numb his palate into bypassing its more caustic overtones. He had a gift of being able to let time slide over him while he pretended to be linked with it, so that nobody noticed that his presence was somewhere else while he sat where he was. He was able to pass that knack on to Tom Simons, without making any change in the character he had created. But he had no important recollections of the next hour and more. He knew that Dr. Zellermann was a flawless temporary host, dispensing adequate drams of MacSporran while he sipped Benedictine; that Patrick Hogan sang Danny Boy and Did Your Mother Come from Ireland? in a very uncertain tenor; and that Kay Natello made her original drink last all the time, with her head obligingly tilted on to Hogan's shoulder and a rapt expression on her sallow face as if she had been mentally composing an elegy on the death of a gonococcus.
And then there was a rush of machinery on the drive, and an involuntary lull, and the thud of the front door, and footsteps, and the barge-like entrance of Cookie. Followed by Avalon Dexter.
Followed, after another moment, by Ferdinand Pairfield, who had apparently been swept up enroute. But Simon paid scarcely any attention to him.
His eyes were on Avalon.
Her glance skimmed the room, and she saw Zellermann. She checked for the barest instant — it was so slight that it could have made no impression on anyone else. But the Saint was watching, and he saw it. And then she was still smiling, but her vivacity was skilled and watchful. Or so it seemed to him.
"Oh, company," she said, and flopped down on the sofa where Hogan and Natello were ensconced, and began chattering brightly and trivially to Hogan about night clubs and songs and bands.
Zellermann poured two drinks behind the bar, choosing the best bottles, and brought them out. He handed one to Cookie on his way, and carried the other over to Avalon.
"Since we have to be guests together," he said ingratiatingly, "couldn't we stop feuding and forgive each other?"
Avalon had to look up at him because he was on the arm of the sofa next to her.
"I'm being framed," she announced, very brightly. She dropped her voice after the general statement, but the Saint was still listening. She said: "I'll stop feuding and forgive you if you'll just get off my arm."
She went on bibbering to Hogan about musical trivia.
Simon Templar seized the opportunity to slip behind the bar, single out a bottle of Peter Dawson, and pour himself a nightcap that would last.
When he looked for Zellermann again, the doctor was standing beside Cookie with his attentive and invariable smile.
Patrick Hogan was trying to show Avalon how to sing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.
Zellermann was saying: "... tomorrow will be soon enough."
"There's plenty of time," Cookie said.
They started towards the bar.
Mr. Pairfield had already drifted over there in a rather forlorn way — perhaps because nobody was offering him any immediate appreciation, and perhaps because of an understandable reluctance to invite any more of Hogan's uninhibited hostility. He had made another distasteful survey of the Saint's well-aged uncouthness, and averted his pure pretty face to review the color scheme of fluids and labels on the background shelves.
"I wonder," he muttered, with almost pathetic audibility, "if I'm in the mood for some Crème Violette?"
Simon didn't violently detest Mr. Pairfield, and all his instincts were against wasting gratuitous abuse on such creatures; but he was irrevocably playing a part, and he was still sure that Hogan was the star to which his wagon had to stay hitched until a better form of traction came along,
"Wot?" he said sourly. "Ain't there no Cream Pansiette 'ere?"
Mr. Pairfield was emboldened by his surroundings to tilt an offended nose.
He said superciliously: "I beg your pardon?"
"You 'eard," growled the Saint trenchantly, in the time-honored formula of Cockney repartee. "You ain't got clorf ears."
That was when Cookie and Dr. Zellermann arrived.
Cookie said overwhelmingly: "Ferdy, don't be so sensitive. Tom's got a right to enjoy himself—"
Dr. Zellermann sidled behind the bar and leaned over towards the Saint and said with his monastic charm: "You know, in my studies of psychology nothing has ever fascinated me so much as the symbolism of the sailor. Of course you've heard all that stuff about the 'girl in every port' and 'what shall we do with the drunken sailor?' and so on. Really a fine synopsis of the natural impetuous life. But why?... You have a proverb which says there is no smoke without fire. Then where is the fire? The sailor — the sea. The sea, which once covered the whole earth. The sea, out of which our earliest protoplasmic ancestors first crawled to begin the primitive life which you and I are now enlarging..."
The Saint gaped at him with adoring incomprehension.
Cookie was absent-mindedly pouring herself another year or two of Old MacSporran, and saying to Mr. Pairfield: "Now for God's sake, Ferdy, have some Violette and stop fussing. And then you can be a good boy and see if the beds are all ready, there's a dear."
"Now take your own case, Tom," Zellermann was pursuing engagingly. "When you get to Shanghai, for instance—"
There was a sudden mild crash as Patrick Hogan spilled two glasses and an ashtray off the table in front of him in the act of hoisting himself to his feet.
"I'm goin' to the little sailor boy's room," he proclaimed loudly.
"Second door on your right down the hall," said Kay Natello, as if she had been reciting it all her life.
"Run along, Ferdy," Cookie was saying with a certain kindness, "and see if you can't think what we ought to do about those pictures in the dining-room."
"Iver since I was born," Hogan challenged the whole world, "a little sailor boy's room has been in the sea. An' what was good enough for Nelson is good enough for me."
He hauled the drapes away from one of the french windows and began fumbling stubbornly with the door latch.
Pairfield the Unconvincible went over to help him, drew the curtains together again, and then slipped timidly out into the garden after him.
"When you get to Shanghai," Zellermann resumed blandly, "as soon as you go ashore, the first thing you'll want is a drink, and after that a girl. During your stay there you'll probably have many drinks and many girls. But you will have no furtive feeling about these girls, as you would have at home. On the contrary, you'll boast about them. Because you are a sailor, and therefore girls are your traditional privilege. Have you been to Shanghai before?"
"Naow. This'll be the fust time." Simon leered at the doctor familiarly. "But don't fergit — yer promised ter gimme some phone numbers."
"I won't forget," Zellermann reassured him, with all the soothing earnestness that he would have tendered to a patient with an AA Dun & Bradstreet. "Although most of them have probably changed since the war. However, I will put you in touch with a friend of mine who'll take good care of you. I know you'll find him, because I heard from him just the other day."
"Knows all the numbers, does 'e?"
"All of them. A very interesting fellow. He used to send me art pieces for my collection. As a matter of fact, you might be able to bring some back for me — he wrote me that he had several things that I wanted, if he could only send them."
The Saint took another drink while he weighed what chance he should take. And he knew that he had to take it. The invitation might not come again.
"Too 'ot fer the post office, eh?" he ventured encouragingly.
"Not at all. I think you'd find them very dull. But there are still so many restrictions about importing antiques—"
"Just an honest spot o' smuggling wot?" The Saint screwed up one eye in another ponderous wink. "Well, guv'nor, Tom Simons is yer man. To 'ell wiv the customs, that's wot I always sye."
Dr. Zellermann stared at him contemplatively.
At which second the window curtains flew apart like the portals of some explosive genesis, permitting the irruptive return of Ferdinand Pairfield accompanied by a bloodcurdling wail of horrific anguish which had started in the outside distance and arrived in the room with him before anyone else had been able to identify and classify it.
Mr. Pairfield was a remarkable sight, too. He was practically naked. His coat and shirt had been split down the back, so that the two halves of them hung and flapped like limp wings around his wrists. His trousers had completely disappeared, thus revealing that he wore pale jade silk drawers with his initials embroidered on them.
He ran to Cookie like a little boy running to his mother.
"Cookie!" he bawled. "That dreadful man! He tore my clothes, and he — he threw me into — into a lot of poison ivy!"
In that immortal moment, before anyone else could say anything, Patrick Hogan strode through the window like a victorious hooligan, beaming across every inch of his irresponsible pug-nosed face.
"Shure, an' I was just waitin' for the chance," he said joyfully. He lurched over to the bar, still with the same broad grin, and put his left hand on the Saint's shoulder and turned him a little. "But as for you, Tom me boy, ye're no pal o' mine to have sent him afther me, bad cess to ye; an' if that's your idea of a joke, here's something that oughta tickle ye—"
Without the slightest additional warning, and while he was still grinning and stirring the Saint's shoulder with his other hand, his right fist rammed upwards at the Saint's jaw. Simon Templar was caught where he sat, flat back and relaxed and utterly off his guard. There was an evanescent splash of multicoloured flares in the centre of his head, and then a restful blackness in which sleep seemed the most natural occupation.