Leslie Charteris - The Saint Sees it Through

"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.