Leslie Charteris - Catch the Saint

Simon looked at his watch.

“If I start out soon, I just might finish before good little girls are all tucked up in bed.”

“I’ll wait up. I can afford to miss some sleep on the off-chance that I’ll get some relief from the stupefying social life I’ve been leading.”

They left the bar, stepped out into the perfume of exhaust fumes and the multicoloured city substitutes for moonlight, and walked to where she had parked her Lincoln convertible. Somehow, even with the best intentions, he had managed to more or less commit himself to Carole on that evening when he was already scheduled to risk his neck in a venture that could take an unpredictable number of hours. Apparently the current of their relationship flowed both ways to a greater extent than he wanted to admit to himself. Or was it a desire to unravel the girl’s feelings and set everything straight and clear before the tides of his life carried him away from her again?

Whatever the reason, he was assuming that he was going to complete his expedition to the Supremo’s presumed operations centre in time to see Carole again that night. He did not have optimistic visions of himself knocking on a door, saying his piece about West Coast Kelly, and being ushered with feverish haste into the throne room of the Supremo himself. He hoped instead to make contact with appropriate underlings, announce his supposed identity and mission, then leave the night club and wait for some action the next day.

He opened the car door for Carole, but made no move to get in beside her.

“Can’t I drop you off, wherever you’re going?” she offered. “Or are you afraid I’ll attack the other woman?”

“I’m afraid of her attacking you,” he replied, in exactly the same mischievous tone. “You’re not quite unknown in this town. A cab will be more discreet.”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“It’s hard for me to make a promise, but if anything holds me up later than ten-thirty or eleven I’ll give you a ring.”

The Pear Tree was one of those places whose portals are virtually indistinguishable from their residential neighbours except upon close inspection. Along a quiet street of dignified apartments, its unobtrusive heavy wooden door betrayed its commercial genus only by a pair of long Spanish tile panels flanking it, whose glazed colours illustrated the arboreal namesake of the place. A more inquisitive search would then have discovered the small brass plaque on the door itself, engraved in copybook script with the words The Pear Tree.

Simon opened the door and found himself immediately confronted by a very large man in a tuxedo that looked as if it might have been forged from the same material used to make old black iron stoves. At least it gave an impression of such stiffness and weightiness, and was so vast and cylindrical around the man’s torso, that the comparison with a huge pot-bellied stove was irresistible. Perhaps the first thing the Saint definitely deduced about his faceless quarry was that the Supremo had a taste for over-sized myrmidons.

“Good evening, sir,” the iron cask rumbled. “How many, please?”

“Just one.”

“For dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Very good.”

Simon was passed on to a beautifully dressed platinum blonde who in various ways might have symbolised a pear-bearing tree whose fruits were just passing the maximum of ripeness. There would be nothing too brash, too hurried here. From the dim red recesses of the bar where she guided him came a delicate ripple of piano music. A starched and freshly shaved headwaiter took his order while he savoured a dry martini on the rocks.

The dining room had the same restrained, polished plushness of the rest of the establishment. It was not easy to imagine that this compartment of elegance in the midst of middle-aged Main-Lineage could be the epicentre of a criminal empire, but the Saint had long since stopped feeling surprise at the discrepancies between appearance and reality, between façade and inner fact.

As he ate his lobster thermidor, he watched for any sign that this particular room, with its damask-covered tables and silver ice buckets, its fresh flowers and candles in tinted crystal, might be hosting something more sinister than well-heeled and well-served dinner guests. True, a few of the male diners possessed shoulders and features that looked more as if they had been formed in the saloons and gyms of New York’s Lower East Side than on the playing fields of Princeton, but that in itself proved nothing except the levelling potential of worldly success.

Only one feature of the room engaged the Saint’s attention more than any other, and that was a door at the rear marked private. Such a door was not particularly unusual. In fact the world was full of doors marked private that concealed nothing more mysterious than adding machines, toilets, or supplies of clean towels. But this door, which never opened while the Saint was eating his meal, was at least a promising starting point for exploration.

Now a man less blessed with courage and a flair for dramatic direct action than Simon Templar was might have made discreet enquiries about the nature of the room labelled private, might have requested an audience with the manager, or might have done any number of things less effective than what he did.

He finished his lobster, swallowed the last of his Bollinger, got up from his table, and walked over to the door marked private.

He had scarcely applied his knuckles to the varnished wood when his waiter, a nervous little man whose head-hair was entirely concentrated in a miniature black mop under his nose, raced up to him and tapped him on the arm.

“Don’t put your hands on me, Bug-face,” the Saint ordered him coarsely, “or I’ll play Turkey in the Straw’ with my heels all up and down your backbone.”

Suddenly a red-hot skillet could not have seemed less attractive to the waiter’s touch than the Saint’s forearm. Simon’s natural inflections had been flattened out for the occasion into a raspy Western accent, and his face had a cruel toughness that would have made a chunk of flint seem mushy by comparison.

“Was something wrong with your dinner, sir?” the waiter asked with quavering unctuousness.

“Where’s the manager?” Simon barked back.

The waiter was making frantic gestures in the air with one hand while trying to keep the Saint appeased with a servile smile.

“If you’ll tell me what was wrong...”

Simon bent over him menacingly.

“Look, you pinheaded spaghetti-wrangler, I won’t talk to anybody but the manager.”

The suave headwaiter arrived on the scene, more self-possessed than his. colleague.

“What seems to be the trouble, sir?” he enquired smoothly.

“What the hell use are you?” Simon growled. “Are you going to knock this door down for me? What do I have to do to see the manager here — dynamite the joint?”

He reckoned that the more noise he made, the sooner he would be admitted to the inner sanctum. With one possible danger: a bouncer (Simon had already spotted the black barrel shape of the front-door greeter taking an interest from the dining-room entrance) might simply try to throw him out. The Saint was confident that he could throw the bouncer out instead, but he preferred a less devious way of getting the attention of the higher ups. He banged harder on the private door.

The headwaiter, who was no more a roughhouse type than his subordinate, glanced around to locate the tuxedoed gorilla, who moved unobtrusively down one side of the dining room towards them.

“If you would please tell me what your complaint is,” the headwaiter said placatingly, “I’ll be glad to—”

“I don’t have no complaint,” Simon said. “I’m here on business, and I wanna see the manager.”