The Saint Sees It Through (13 page)

He sat grinning for so long that Sam jabbed
him with:
“Well?”

Joe blinked. His grin faded slowly, like sky
writing in a gentle breeze.

“Huh? Oh. Well, gosh, I don’t care.”

The
Saint was becoming very fond of Joe. Here was a boy
would give out like a defective slot machine if
manipulated
properly.

“She ast ya,” Sam said patiently.
“So you don’t care. We keep
flitting around behind this meter till ya
make up ya mind?
Name some place, any place!”

Joe blinked, and you could almost hear unused
mental ma
chinery begin to rattle and clank. The machinery ground
to a
stop. His face once more was like a harvest moon.

“Cookie’s!” he cried, and was
quiet.

The Saint suppressed a groan. He didn’t like
Cookie’s—
Canteen or Cellar. He’d never visited the Canteen, but
his mind
was made up.

On the other hand——

He considered the other hand. James Prather
had seen him and Avalon leave with Sam and Joe. That fact would be re
ported, if
the Saint’s ideas on the situation were correct. Those
receiving the report
would in some way be tied up with
Cookie’s. Therefore, if they all
turned up there in the late after
noon, before the crowd began to
thicken, some overt action
might be taken. Anything, he thought, to get
this thing out in
the open. Another point to be considered was Avalon. In
the
event of a fracas of any sort at Cookie’s, she’d be more likely
to declare
her allegiance there than elsewhere.

“Splendid,” the Saint said, and
Avalon’s half-formed answer
died in her throat.

She might have been about to say all the
obvious things: the
place would be dull at this time of day, she didn’t like
it, it was
a clip joint, haven of highgraders. But when the Saint
spoke, she shot him a puzzled glance and was still.

Simon gave instructions to the driver, and
they took off on
a new tack.

“Why,” Simon asked
conversationally, “Cookie’s?”

“All the guys,” Sam Jeffries said,
“keep tellin’ ya if ya want
a swell time, go there, if ya belong to th’
Merchant Marine.
Free drinks, free eats, maybe even a girl trun in. Joe
here be
lieves everything anybody tells “im.”

“Sometimes,” Joe said, with the air
of a great philosopher, “it
turns out that way.”

“Yeh!” Sam snorted. “Remember
in Kobe how that——
”

“Aw, that,” Joe broke in. “He
was ribbin’ us.”

Simon slipped in smoothly and took the
conversation over.
“How is the Orient?”

“Still shot to hell,” Sam said.
“Gonna be a long time before all them buildings go up again.”

“Did you hear about Cookie’s, even
there?”

“Yeah, you know, guys on other
ships.”

“And you’ve never been to Cookie’s
before?”

“No.”

“Where did you go on this last
trip?”

While Sam launched a graphic account of their
travels, Simon
considered the fact that neither of these boys had been
to
Cookie’s before. This seemed hardly in keeping with the pattern
which
Simon had begun to put together in his mind. He felt
that the link must be
somewhere between ships darting about
the sea and Cookie’s Cellar. James
Prather?

Or the late lamented Gamaliel Bradford Foley?

Foley had been tied up with Dr. Zellermann.
Dr. Zellermann
with Cookie’s, or some member of Cookie’s entourage.
There
fore a link existed somewhere.

Anyway, here they were. Simon paid off the
taxi, and they
went inside. The place was almost deserted, but a few
people
were
around.

Among these were James Prather, talking to Kay Natello.
Prather looked up at the party’s entrance,
narrowed his eyes
and walked toward
them.

3.

How Mr. Prather said little, and

Dr. Zellermann said even less

The Saint
had never considered himself to be psychic. He had
learned that by adding the factors of a
situation he could fore
cast the probable
moment when Death would leer at him over
a gunsight, or ride the business end of a club, or sing through
the air on the point of a knife. He had learned
that, when he sub
consciously placed
such factors in their proper alignment and
came up with a subconscious answer, his adrenal glands went
quickly into action with a suddenness that brought
a tingling
to the back of his neck
and the tips of his fingers.

He did not regard this sensation as the
result of a psychic
gander into the immediate future, nor as the brushing of
the
back of his neck by an ectoplasmic hand once belonging to the
goose-over-a-grave
school of premonitory shuddering. The tin
gle he felt when
James Prather followed his bulging eyes across
the deserted floor of
Cookie’s Cellar was, he knew, the result
of his adrenals
sitting up and taking notice.

For Simon had added the factors, and their
sum total was danger. Not that he expected explosive action at the moment. He
could have written the dialogue to come almost word for
word.
These characters weren’t certain where and how the Saint
fitted into the picture. Their
motivation at the moment was the
desire for
such knowledge, and they would go about satisfying
that desire in a fashion designed to be subtle and
offhand.

Nobody
would say, yet: “Just what the hell are you doing
here?”

The Saint said under his breath to Avalon:
“Get a table. Yonder bucko would have words with me. I’ll join you.”

She sandwiched herself between Sam and Joe and
piloted
them to the far wall, which had been pleasantly blank before
Ferdinand
Pairfield had agonized upon it in pastel, and the
Saint waited for
Prather.

“Just
what the hell are you doing here?” Prather demanded.

The Saint did not allow so much as the quiver
of an eyelash
to acknowledge his downfall as a prophet. His lazy smile
and mocking blue eyes only indicated amusement at the gauche approach. Prather
flushed under the steady gaze, and his lobster-like eyes shifted away and back.
In their shifting away, they
touched on Joe Hyman and Sam Jeffries but
showed no trace
of recognition.
 

“Comrade,” the Saint said, “far
back in the history of this
country certain gentlemen flung powder and
shot about in the
cause of freedom. Such points as they won have been
tradition
ally passed down through the years, and one of those
points is
the untrammelled right to visit such places as this, with
its steel-
trap economy, its bad air and worse drinks. Just why
anyone
in his right mind should like to exercise his right to such dubious
pleasure is beyond me, but there it is.”

“There’s something fishy about
this,” Prather said in a sort of
bewildered whine. “First, you
come to my place with a song and
dance about research. Then you follow me
here. Why? I know
who you are. You’re the Saint. But I can’t see why you
followed
me.”

“Follow you? Dear boy, I wouldn’t follow
you into the
flossiest bagnio this side of Paradise. But now that you
seem to
have made such a lightning trip here, I’m happy to see you.
Won’t you
join my party? I’m still gathering material.”

Prather regarded the table where Avalon
parried verbs with
Sam Jeffries with the concentration of a man sucking a
piece of
popcorn out of a cavity.

“Thank you,” he said
with a grimness that was rather sur
prising.
“I’ll be glad to.”

Sam was on his life story, apparently having begun at the
present, and was working backward.

“… and there was this guy we had to
see in Shanghai. Joe
wanted to get drunk right off, but I says no
we gotta see this guy
before
…”

He broke off, looked up. No flicker of
recognition moved his
brown face as he glanced incuriously at Prather. To the Saint,
Sam said: “I was just tellin’ Miss Dexter
about our last trip.”

Something happened, but the Saint didn’t
catch it. It could
have been a glance, a shake of the head, a kick in the
ankle,
from James Prather. For Sam suddenly froze. He didn’t look at
Prather, he
didn’t look at anybody, but you could see his
thoughts and amiable
chatter roll themselves up like armadillos and become impregnable and lifeless.
All the warm lights went
out of his eyes, and his smile became a
fixed liability.

His social immobility somehow conveyed
itself to Joe, who
underwent little change to achieve Sam’s frozen state.
Both
young men rose to shake hands as the Saint performed intro
ductions,
but, like Mudville on the night of Casey’s disaster, there was no joy in them.
Sam remained standing, long, lean,
and brown.

“Guess
we better shove off, huh, Joe?”

“Yeah,” Joe said,
meeting nobody’s eye. “Guess so.”

“Don’t run away, boys,” Avalon
said. But she said it per
functorily. She knew they were going. Her tone was a polite
ness, not an urging.

“When the party’s just starting?”
said the Saint, He, too,
knew they were going. A kick, a frown, a
shake of the head.
These
had made the boys jittery.

“Well, Saint,” Sam said. “You
know how it is. Just back from a long trip. We were kinda thinkin’ of girls of
our own. Course,
I’ll have to get one for Joe, here, but still——
” He
nodded at
Avalon. “Thought we had something there—uh, Miss. But
seems she’s staked out. So we’ll blow.”

More
handshakes, and they were gone.

Kay
Natello came over to greet them, and in that voice like a
nutmeg
grater on tin cans, asked, “What’ll it be?”

She didn’t seem to be anxious to cut up old
touch
é
s with
Simon, so he played
it her way.

“Old Foresters all around.
Doubles,” he added, remembering
the strength of drinks at Cookie’s.

“Now,” the Saint said when Kay had
gone. “Tell me about
Dr. Zellermann.”

“What
is there to tell?”

Prather didn’t seem uncomfortable. There
was, in his mind,
nothing to tell. At least, he gave that impression.

“He’s a psychiatrist,” he went on.
“A good one, maybe. Any
rate, he gets good prices.”

“Well,” the Saint said. “Maybe
we’d better drop him. Let’s
just have fun, kids.”

Avalon looked several volumes of unprintable
material at
the Saint and asked: “How do you propose to do
that?”

“By displaying my erudition,
darling.” The Saint smiled
gently at her, and then bent attentive eyes
on Prather as he said:
“For instance. Do you know the word
‘cougak’?”

This brought no response. Simon sighed
inwardly. Might as
well get it out into the open, he thought. “It’s the
term applied
to
the bloom of a certain plant known as
Pavarer somniferum.
It’s cultivated chiefly in Asia. After the poppy
flowers, and the
leaves fall off, the
remaining pod develops a bloom, easily
rubbed
off with the fingers, called cougak. Then it is time to
make the
incision.”

“What
are
you talking about?” Avalon demanded.

“Mr.
Prather, I think,” said the Saint.

Prather blinked his overblue
eyes at Simon.

“I’m
sorry, but I don’t know what you mean.”

“It really doesn’t matter,” the
Saint said. “Let’s talk about
something else.”

He noted that Kay Natello, who had been
hovering in the
middle distance, took her departure at this point and
vanished
through the archway at the back. Had there been a signal?
If
so, he hadn’t caught it.