Leslie Charteris - The Saint Sees it Through

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.