Leslie Charteris - The Saint Sees it Through

"Mr. Templar," Avalon said. "Miss Natello. Simon — Kay."

"How do you do," said the Saint, for want of a better phrase.

"Come in, Kay," Avalon said. "Sit down and make yourself miserable. Have a drink? You know what this night life is like. The evening's only just started. What goes on in the big city?"

Her gay babble was just a little bit forced, and perhaps only the Saint's ears would have heard it.

Kay Natello stayed in the entrance, plucking her orange-painted mouth with the forefinger and thumb of one hand. Under her thick sprawling eyebrows, her haunted eyes stared at the Saint with thoughtful intensity.

"Mr. Templar," she said. "Yes, you were at Cookie's."

"I was there," said the Saint vaguely, "for a while."

"I saw you."

"Quite a big night, wasn't it?" Avalon said. She sank back on to the settee. "Come on in and have a drink and tell us your troubles. Simon, fix something for her."

"I won't stay," Kay Natello said. "I didn't know you had company."

She hauled her angular bony frame out of its lean-to position against the entrance arch as gauchely as she put her spoken sentences together.

"Don't be so ridiculous," Avalon said. She was impatiently hospitable — or hospitably impatient. "We were just talking. What did you come in for, if you didn't want to stay for a few minutes?"

"I had a message for you," Kay Natello said. "If Mr. Templar would excuse us...?"

"If it's from Cookie, Mr. Templar was part of the ruckus, so it won't hurt him to hear it."

The other woman went on pinching her lower lip with skeletal fingers. Her shadowed eyes went back to the Saint with completely measurable blankness, and back to Avalon again.

"All right," she said. "I didn't mean to crash in here at all, really, but Cookie made such a fuss about it. You know how she is. She was a bit tight, and she lost her temper. Now she's getting tighter because she shouldn't have. She'd like to forget the whole thing. If you could... sort of... make it up with her..."

"If she feels like that," Avalon said, with that paralysing smiling directness which was all her own, "why didn't she come here herself?"

"She's too tight now. You know how she gets. But I know she's sorry."

"Well, when she sobers up, she can call me. She knows where I live."

"I know how you feel, darling. I only stopped in because she begged me to... I'll run along now."

Avalon stood up again.

"Okay," she said, with friendly exhaustion. "I've taken a lot from Cookie before, but tonight was just too much — that's all. Why don't you beat some sense into her one of these times when she's receptive?"

"You know how she is," Kay Natello said, in that metallic monotone. "I'm sorry."

She hitched her wrap up once again around her scrawny shoulders, and her hollow eyes took a last deliberate drag at the Saint.

"Goodnight, Mr. Templar," she said. "It was nice meeting you."

"It was nice meeting you," Simon replied, with the utmost politeness.

He crossed to the side table again and half refilled his glass while he was left alone, and turned back to meet Avalon Dexter as the outer door closed and her skirts swished through the entrance of the room again.

"Well?" She was smiling at him, as he was convinced now that nobody else could smile. "How do you like that?"

"I don't," he said soberly.

"Oh, she's as whacky as the rest of Cookie's clique," she said carelessly. "Don't pay any attention to her. It's just like Cookie to try and send an ambassador to do her apologising for her. It'd hurt too much if she ever had to do it herself. But just this once I'm not going to—"

"I'm afraid you've missed something," Simon said, still soberly, and perhaps more deliberately. "Natello didn't come here to deliver Cookie's apologies. I've got to tell you that."

Avalon Dexter carried her glass over to the side table.

"Well, what did she come for?"

"You went out with a beautiful exit line. Only it was just too good. That's why Cookie is so unhappy now. And that's why she had Natello drop in. To find out what kind of a hook-up there might be between us. It happens that there wasn't any." The Saint put his glass transiently to his mouth. "But that isn't what Natello found out."

The break in her movements might have been no more than an absent-minded search for the right bottle.

"So what?" she asked.

"So I honestly didn't mean to involve you with anything," he said.

She completed the reconstruction of a highball without any other hesitation; but when she turned to him again with the drink in her hand, the warm brown eyes with the flecks of laughter in them were as straight as he had always seen them.

"Then," she said, "you didn't just happen to be at Cookie's tonight by accident."

"Maybe not," he said.

"For Heaven's sake, sit down," she said. "What is this — a jitterbug contest? You and Kay ought to get married. You could have so much fun."

He smiled at her again, and left one final swallow in his glass.

"I've got to be running along. But I'm not fooling. I really wish to hell that nobody who had any connection with Cookie had seen me here. And now, to use your own words, you're stuck with it."

She looked at him with all the superficial vivacity thrown off, seriously, from steady footholds of maturity. And like everything else she did that was unexpected, after she had done it it was impossible to have expected anything else.

"You mean it might be — unhealthy?"

"I don't want to sound scary, but... yes."

"I'm not scared. But don't you think you might tell me why?"

He shook his head.

"I can't, right now. I've told you more than I should have already, as a matter of fact. But I had to warn you. Beyond that, the less you know, the safer you'll be. And I may. be exaggerating. You can probably brush it off. You recognised me from a picture you saw once, and you were good and mad, so you threw out that parting crack just to make trouble. Then I picked you up outside, and you thought I'd been nice, so you just bought me a drink. That's the only connection we have."

"Well, so it is. But if this is something exciting, like the things I fell in love with you for, why can't I be in on it?"

"Because you sing much too nicely, and the ungodly are awful unmusical."

"Oh, fish," she said.

He grinned, and finished his drink, and put down the glass.

"Throw me out, Avalon," he said. "In another minute dawn is going to be breaking, and I'm going to shudder when I hear the crash."

And this was it, this was the impossible and inevitable, and he knew all at once now that it could never have been any other way.

She said: "Don't go."

Simon woke up with the squeal of the telephone bell splitting his eardrums. He reached out a blind hand for it and said: "Hullo."

"Hullo," it said. "Mr. Templar?"

The voice was quite familiar, although its inflection was totally different from the way he had heard it last. It was still excessively precise and perfectionist; but whereas before it had had the precision of a spray of machine-gun slugs, now it had the mellifluous authority of a mechanical unit in a production tine.

"Speaking," said the Saint.

"I hope I didn't wake you up."

"Oh, no."

Simon glanced at his wrist watch. It was just after twelve.

"This is Dr. Ernst Zellermann," said the telephone.

"So I gathered," said the Saint. "How are you?"

"Mr. Templar, I owe you an apology. I had too much to drink last night. I'm usually a good drinker, and I have no idea why it should have affected me that way. But my behavior was inexcusable. My language — I would prefer to forget. I deserved just what happened to me. In your place, I would have done exactly what you did."