Leslie Charteris - The Saint Sees it Through

He walked into the room empty-handed, with the carving knife in his sleeve held by the pressure of his bent left arm.

Zellermann held his cigarette with the ash unbroken in his left hand, and his right hand dropped into the side pocket of his beautifully tailored coat. Aside from the lightning switch of his bleached gray eyes, that was his only movement. But it was quite adequate for what it meant.

The Saint didn't even seem to. notice it.

He was Tom Simons again, perfectly and entirely, for the few steps that he had to take. They seemed to stretch out for an infinity of distance and an eternity of time; but no one who watched him could have seen how every cell and fibre of him was wrung out in the achievement of that convincing unconsciousness of their importance. He lurched quite clumsily in his walk, and his stare trying to hold Zellermann was blank and glazed — and those were the easiest tricks in his act.

" 'Ullo, Doc," he mouthed. "Wot abaht one fer the road?"

He was in a dream where every second seemed to take a week to crawl by, and you could stop overnight to analyse every inching flicker of event.

He saw Zellermann relax fractionally, even embark on the mental prologue to an elaborate clinical evaluation of drug reactions. He saw Cookie and Kay Natello rising and turning towards him with a mixture of uncertainty and fear and hope. He saw everything, without looking directly at any of it.

"You must be made out of iron, Tom," Zellermann said admiringly, and as if he had learned the formula from a book. "You just about put us all under the table. We were going to bed."

The Saint staggered closer to him.

"I bin to bed once," he said. "But I'm thirsty. Honestergawd. Coudden I 'ave just one more drop before closing time?"

Then his wandering gaze seemed to catch sight of Hogan for the first time.

"Swelp me," he said, "that's 'im! The bugger 'oo 'it me! All tied up shipshake so 'e 'as ter be'yve. Just lemme 'ave one crack at' im—"

"Patrick just had too much to drink," Zellermann said. "We're trying to get him to bed..."

He actually moved closer, suavely and with almost contemptuous skill, interposing himself between Simon and the uglier details of his specialized treatment for intoxication.

The Saint blinked at him blearily, swaying another step and two steps nearer.

It looked fine and perfect until the doctor's glance suddenly switched and hardened on a point beyond the Saint's shoulder, and the whole calm patronising balance of his body hardened with it as if it had been nipped in an interstellar frost.

And even then, only one precise unit of him moved — the hand that still rested in his coat pocket. But that movement was still as adequate and eloquent as it had been the first time.

Simon didn't need any manuals or blueprints to work it out. He knew, with that endless impersonality of comprehension, that Avalon Dexter had started to follow him into the room, and that Zellermann had seen her, and that the shining wheels that ran in Zellermann's brain had spun an instantaneous web together, and that rightly or wrongly the web had enough tensile strength in Zellermann's mind for Zellermann to walk on it.

The Saint's own movement actually followed and resulted from Zellermann's; and yet it was like the clicking of a switch and the awakening of a light, so that it was almost simultaneous.

He heard the splitting blast of Zellermann's gun in the same quantum as he was aware of stumbling sideways and straightening his left arm so that the bone handle of the carving knife dropped into the curved fingers of his waiting left hand, and then he was aware of a searing pang in his left arm and a shocking blow that spun him half around, but he had his balance again in the same transposition, and his right hand took the haft of the knife as it dropped and drew it clear of the sleeve and turned it and drove it straight with the same continued gesture into Zellermann's chest, just a little to one side of the breastbone and a hand's breadth below the carnation in his buttonhole.

Then he left the knife there where it stuck and took Zellermann's automatic away as the doctor's fingers loosened on it, ripping it clear of the pocket at about the moment when Zellermann's shoulders rolled on the floor, and fired again and again while he was still rising and Cookie was starting towards him with her broad muscular hands reaching out and Natello was still swinging back the hot curling-iron that she had been playing with.

They were the first women that Simon Templar had ever killed, and he did it rather carefully and conscientiously, in the pellucid knowledge of what they were and what they had done, and to his own absolute judicial satisfaction, shooting Kay Natello three inches above her hollow navel and Cookie in the same umbilical bullseye, as closely as he could estimate it through her adipose camouflage.

Hamilton said almost plaintively: "Couldn't you arrange to leave more than one prisoner, just once in a while?"

"Could you arrange to have people stop attacking me?" asked the Saint. "Self-defense is so tempting. Besides, think how much I save the country on trials and attorneys. I ought to get a rebate on my income tax for it."

"I'll speak to the President about it right away."

"Anyway, I left you the kingpin — and I think he's got the kind of imagination that'll do some real suffering while he's waiting for his turn in the death house. I feel rather happy about that — which is why I left him."

"Before your tender heart gets you into any more trouble," Hamilton said, "you'd better get out of there if you can. I'll talk to you again in New York. I've got another job for you."

"You always have," said the Saint. "I'll get out. Hogan can hold the fort long enough."

He cradled the telephone and looked at the federal man again. He said: "It's all yours, Patrick. Washington wants me out of the limelight. As usual... By the way, is the name really Hogan?"

The other nodded. Simon had done all that he could for him: he would be able to hold the fort. And other forts again. His face was still pale and drawn and shiny, but there was no uncertainty in it. It was a good face, moulded on real foundations, and durable.

"Sure," he said. "Hogan's the name. But I was born in New Jersey, and I have to work like hell on the brogue." He was studying the Saint while he talked, quite frankly and openly, but with a quiet respect that was a natural part of his reversion from the character part he had been playing, sitting very laxly but squarely in an armchair with the glass of brandy that Simon had poured for him, conserving and gathering his strength. He said: "You had me fooled. Your cockney's a lot better. And that make-up — it is a make-up, isn't it?"

"I hope so," said the Saint with a smile. "I'd hate to look like this for the rest of my life."

"I didn't expect anything like this when I left my badge in your pocket. I was just clutching at a straw. I figured it was a thousand to one it wouldn't do me any good. I thought you were just another drunken sailor — in fact, I let you pick me up just for that, so I could watch what this gang would do with you."

The Saint laughed a little.

Avalon Dexter finished binding up his arm with torn strips of another of Cookie's expensive sheets. She was very cool and efficient about it. He moved his arm and tested the bandage approvingly; then he began to wriggle into his jacket again. Zellermann's one shot had missed the bone: the bullet had passed clean through, and the flesh wound would take care of itself.

He said: "Thanks, darling."

She helped him with his coat.

He said: "Go on quoting me as just another drunken sailor, Pat. You don't even have to bring me into this finale. The witnesses won't talk. So Tom Simons woke up, and was drunk and sore and scared, and scrammed the hell out. He went back to his ship, and nobody cares about him anyway. Let him go. Because I am going anyway, while you take the phone and start calling your squads to take care of the bodies."