Leslie Charteris - The Saint Sees it Through

The other half of the duo was a gaunt stringy-haired woman with hungry eyes and orange lipstick, whom he identified as Kay Natello, one of the more luminous of the most luminiscent modern poets. The best he could remember about her was a quote from a recent volume of hers, which might as well be reprinted here in lieu of more expensive descriptions:

FLOWERS

I love the beauty of flowers,

germinated in decay and excrement,

with soft slimy worms

crawling

caressingly

among the tender

roots.

So even I carry within me

decay and excrement:

and worms

crawl

caressingly

among the tender roots of my

love.

Between them they made a rather fine couple; and Simon realised how Cookie could have been the idol of both of them, if there were any foundation to the casual whispers he had been able to hear about her since he discovered that she was destined to enter his life whether he wanted it or not.

He looked for Cookie again, remembering that he was not there for fun.

She was sitting at the piano now, thumping the keys almost inaudibly while she waited, for the informed applause to die away, with a broad and prodigiously hospitable smile on her large face.

She must have weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. The expansive grossness of her features was slightly minimised by a pompadoured convict coiffure which reduced the breadth of her face for as long as it lasted, but below that she was built like a corseted barrel. Her Brobdingnagian bosom bloused up from a skin of appalling sequins that shimmered down in recognisable ridges over the steatopygous scaffolding that encased her hips. As much as any other feature you noticed the hands that whacked uninhibitedly over the keyboard: large, splay-fingered, muscular, even with the incongruous vermilion lacquer on the nails they never looked like a woman's hands. They were the hands of a stevedore, a wrestler, or — for that matter — a strangler. They had a crude sexless power that narrowed down through the otherwise ludicrous excesses of her figure to give a sudden sharp and frightening meaning to the brash big-hearted bonhomie of her smile.

It was a strange and consciously exaggerated sensation that went through the Saint as he analysed her. He knew that some of it came from the electric contrast with the impression that Avalon Dexter had left on him. But he could make use of that unforeseen standard without letting it destroy his judgment, just as he could enlarge upon intuition only to see the details more clearly. He knew that there were not enough ingredients in the highballs he had drunk there to warp his intelligence, and he had never in his life been given to hysterical imaginings. And yet with complete dispassionate sanity, and no matter where it might go from there, he knew that for perhaps the first time in a life that had been crossed by many evil men he had seen a truly and eternally evil woman.

Just for a moment that feeling went over him like a dark wave; and then he was quite cool and detached again, watching her make a perfunctory adjustment to the microphone mounted in front of her.

"Hullo, everybody," she said in a deep commanding voice. "Sorry I'm late, but I've been taking care of some of our boys who don't get too much glory these days. I'm speaking of the plain ordinary heroes who man our merchant ships. They don't wear any brass buttons or gold braid, but war or no war they stay right on the job. The Merchant Navy!"

There was a clatter of approbation to show that the assembled revellers appreciated the Merchant Navy. It left no room for doubt that the hearts of Cookie's customers would always be in the right place, provided the place was far enough from the deck of an oil tanker to give them a nice perspective.

Cookie heaved herself up from the piano bench and pointed a dramatic finger across the room.

"And I want you to meet two of the finest men that ever sailed the seven seas," she roared. "Patrick Hogan and Axel Indermar. Take a bow, boys!"

The spotlight plastered two squirming youths at a side table, who scrambled awkwardly and unwillingly to their feet. Amid more spirited clapping, the spotlight switched back to Cookie as she sat down again and thumped out a few bars of Anchors Aweigh with a wide grin which charmingly deprecated her own share in bringing the convoy home.

"And now," she said, with a cascade of arpeggios, "as a tribute to our guests of honor, let's start with Testy Old William, the Nautical Man."

Overlapping a loyal diminuendo of anticipatory sniggers and applause from the initiated, she broadened her big jolly smile and launched into her first number.

Simon Templar only had to hear the first three lines to know that her act was exactly what he would have expected — a repertoire of the type of ballad which is known as "sophisticated" to people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated. Certainly it dealt with sundry variations on the facts of life which would have puzzled a clear-thinking farm hand.

It was first-class material of its kind, clever and penetrating to the thinnest edge of utter vulgarity; and she squeezed every last innuendo out of it as well as several others which had no more basis than a well-timed leer and the personal psychoses of the audience. There was no doubt that she was popular: the room was obviously peppered with a clique of regular admirers who seemed to know all her songs by heart, and who burst into ecstatic laughter whenever she approached a particularly classic line. Consequently, some of her finest gems were blanketed with informed hilarity — a fact which must have saved many an innocent intruder much embarrassment. But she was good: she had good material, she could sell it; she could get away with almost anything behind that big friendly bawdy boys-in-the-lavatory-together smile, and beyond any question she had more than enough of that special kind of showmanly bludgeoning personality that can pound an audience into submission and force them to admit that they have been wonderfully entertained whether they enjoyed it or not.

And the Saint hated her.

He hated her from a great distance; not because of that first terrible but immaterial intuition, which was already slipping away into the dimmer backgrounds of his mind, nor in the very least because he was a prude, which he was not.

He hated her because dominantly, sneakingly, overwhelmingly, phony-wittily, brazenly, expertly, loudly, unscrupulously, popularly, callously, and evilly, with each more ribald and risque number that she dug out of her perfertile gut, she was destroying and dissecting into more tattered shreds a few moments of sweetness and sincerity that a tawny-maned nobody named Avalon Dexter had been able to impose even on the tired and tawdry cafe aristocracy who packed the joint...

"I brought you a double, sir," said the melancholy waiter, looming before him again in all the pride of a new tactic. "Will that be all right?"

"That," said the Saint, "must have been what I was waiting for all evening."

He controlled the pouring of water into the glass, and tasted the trace of liquid in the bottom. It had a positive flavor of Scotch whisky which was nostalgically fascinating. He conserved it respectfully on his palate while Cookie blared into another encore, and looked around to see whether by any chance there might be a loose tawny mane anywhere within sight.

And, almost miraculously, there was.

She must have slipped out through another door, but the edge of the spotlight beam clipped her head for an instant as she bent to sit down. And that was the instant when the Saint was looking.

The detail that registered on him most clearly was the table where she sat. It was another ringside table only two spaces away from him, and it happened to be one table which had never been out of the corner of his eye since he had accepted his own place. For it was the table of the one man whom he had really come there to see.