Leslie Charteris - The Saint Sees it Through

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.