The Saint Sees It Through (21 page)

Hogan thumped her heartily on the back without
even jarring her.

“Darlin’, what did ye think we were
waitin’ for? Sure, we’ll be there shoutin’ for ye. Won’t we, Tom?”

“Crikey,” said the Saint, with a
wistful break in his voice.
“You ain’t arf giving us a time, ma’m. I
mean, Cookie.”

“That’s fine,” Cookie said.
“Then I’ll be expecting you. Kay,
you take care of them and bring them
along. See you all later.”

She gathered her foundation around her, gave
a last hesitant
glance at the Scotch bottle, and made a resolute exit
like a hip
popotamus
taking off to answer the call of Spring.

Kay Natello took care of them.

Simon didn’t keep very close track of the
caretaking, but the
general trend of it was quite simple. After the Scotch
was finished and they left the canteen, it involved stopping at a great
many bars
on the way and having a drink or two in each of
them. Hogan acquired
more blarney and boisterousness as it went on: he said that Kay was his girl,
and an Irishman’s girl
was his castle, or something that sounded like that. He beam
ingly offered to pulverize various persons whom he
suspected
of dissenting from his
opinions about Oliver Cromwell, Michael
Collins, De Valera, and Kay Natello. Simon Templar did his
best to keep in time with the mood, and
surreptitiously dribbled as many drinks as he could into the nearest cuspidor.
Through it all, Kay Natello only
became more stringy and
more removed.
She responded to Pat Hogan’s elephantine flirta
tions when she remembered to; in between, she was more like
a YWCA chaperone trying to keep up with the girls.
Simon
was quite relieved that she
didn’t at any point offer to break into
significant
vers libres… .
But it still seemed to take a long
time
to reach Cookie’s Cellar.

Once they were there, however, it was a
repetition of the
night
before from another viewpoint. This time, the Saint was
one of the reluctant heroes under the spotlight. Cookie sang
the same kind of songs, giving and receiving the
same enthusi
asm.

After one of the more turbid numbers, Kay
Natello nudged
the Saint and said proudly: “I wrote that for
her.”

“Cor!” said the Saint
respectfully.

That was only a mild expression of what he
thought. The
idea of a poetess of Kay Natello’s school composing those
kinds
of lyrics in
her lighter moments had an austere magnificence
which he hoped to dwell on some quiet evening when he had
nothing else at all to do.

It was like the night before again, with a
difference, because
Avalon Dexter was there.

She wasn’t there to work. She was just another customer,
wearing a simple afternoon dress, sitting at a
table at the back
of the room; but he
saw her long tawny hair dance as she talked
and looked around. It gave him a queer sensation to watch her
like that and have her glance pass over him in
complete unawareness
. It was like being invisible.

And it also gave him a sort of guilty feeling,
as though he
was hiding and spying on her. Which at that moment he
was. The man with her was slightly rotund and slightly bald. He
wore horn-rimmed
glasses and he had a round and pleasant
pink face that looked
very clean and freshly barbered. He was not, you could tell very quickly,
another Dr. Zellermann in his
manual recreations. He behaved like a nice
wholesome middle-
aged man who was enjoying the company he was in. Any impartial
observer
would have conceded that he was entitled to
that, and quite
undeserving the unreasonable malignance with
which Simon regarded
him. Simon knew it was unreasonable,
but that didn’t blunt the stab of
resentment that went through
him when he saw her chattering so gaily with
this complacent
jerk. He was
 
surprised at his own symptoms, and
 
not too
pleased about them either.

Cookie
finished at last, with Hogan and
the Saint competing
in the uproariousness of their appreciation. The
melancholy
waiter brought some more drinks, bowed down into
profounder
misery by the knowledge that this was one table which he
dared not
discourage, and that at the same time it was one table
where the tip would
certainly be no compensation. Cookie
ploughed through the room, stopping to
give jovial greeting to various tables, and surged on to the bar, where there
were other
members of her following to be saluted and the bartender
had
been trained to have three ounces of Scotch waiting for her
with a cube
of ice in it.

It was twenty minutes before she breasted
back to her own table, and then she had Dr. Ernst Zellermann in tow.

Cookie introduced him, and mopped her face and
reached
for the first drink that arrived.
“Tom’s sailing
on Tuesday,” she said. “Shanghai.”
The Saint had already
begun to let it look as if his liquor
consumption was catching up with him.
He lurched in his
chair, spilt some of his drink, and gave a wink that was
getting
heavy and bleary.

“Gonna find aht if it’s true abaht
China,” he said.

“I may be able to tell you a few places
to go,” Zellermann
said smoothly. “I spent quite a time
there once—In the good days before the war.”

He looked very noble and full of unfathomable
memories;
and Simon Templar, dimly returning his gaze, felt coldly
and
accurately like a specimen on a dissecting table.

Zellermann picked up his glass and turned to
Cookie with
the utmost charm.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t
know why you don’t invite
more people like Mr. Hogan and Mr. Simons out
to Long Island. After all, they deserve to be entertained much more than
I do.”

“That’s an idea,” Cookie said.
“How about it, boys? I’ve got
a little shack on the beach at
Southampton. We close this joint on Sundays anyhow. Why don’t you come along?
I’ll see that
you’re back in town on Monday. You can swim in the ocean
and get
some sun on the beach, and we’ll make a party of it
and it won’t cost you
a cent. Dr. Zellermann and I will drive
you out as soon as
we’ve closed this place. We’ll have a grand
weekend. I’ll have
company for you, too. The most attractive
girl you’ve ever
seen.” Simon was much too drunk to catch
the glance that
flashed between them—or at least he had been
able to convince
everyone of that. “Dexter is coming along,”
Cookie said.

4

The Saint mumbled something about seeing a
man about a dog,
and was able to get out alone. There was a telephone
booth
near the entrance. He called the Algonquin and asked for Avalon
.

Miss Dexter was not there at the moment, as
he knew; but
could they take a message?

“When is she likely to get it?” he
asked.

“I couldn’t say, sir, but she’s been
calling in about every half
hour. She seems to be expecting a message. Is
this Mr. Temp
lar?”

The Saint held his breath for a moment, and
took a lightning
decision.

“Yes.”

“I know she’s asked whether you called.
Can she call you
back?”

The Saint said: “I’m afraid she can’t
reach me, but tell her I’ll see her tomorrow.”

Nothing could have been more true than that,
even if she
didn’t understand it; and somehow it made him feel better
with himself. It meant something to know that she had hoped
he would
find a way to get in touch with her—no matter why.
She would not know
that he had been back to the Algonquin
since his
“arrest,” for that had been taken care of; and she must
continue
to believe that he was locked up somewhere down
town. But she had
asked …

Both of them had become hooked to an unwinding
chain that
was going somewhere on its own. Only it happened to be the
same chain for both of them. It seemed as if the hand of destiny
was in
that—Simon didn’t want to think any more, just then,
about what that
destiny might be.

When he got back to the table, everything had
been settled.
Patrick Hogan proclaimed that when his great-grandfather
sailed for
America, all the luggage he had was in his coat
pockets, and he could
do anything that his great-grandfather
could do. He was
certain that, next to his great-grandfather and himself, his pal Tom Simons was
just as expert at light travel
ling.

“I can take you in my car,”
Zellermann said convivially. “There’s plenty of room.”

Simon didn’t doubt it was a car you could
play badminton in.

“I’ll have to stay till the bitter
end,” said Cookie, “and Dexter
will probably want to
pick up some things. I’ll bring her.”

It was worked out just as easily and rapidly
as that. But
Simon knew that aside from the hospitable cooperation,
Avalon
Dexter was not intended to know that Dr. Zellermann would
be a member
of the house party. Or he hoped he knew it.

He had some confirmation of that when they
were leaving.

Avalon seemed to be on her way back from the
powder room
when they started out. There was a rather lost and apart
ex
pression on her face that no one else might have seen. Zellermann
half
stopped her.

“Good evening, Avalon,” he said,
half formally and half en
gagingly.

“How are you?” Avalon said, very
brightly and very cheer
fully and without a pause, so that before he
could have said
anything else she was neatly past him and gone.

Zellermann stood looking after her without a
ripple of reac
tion, his face as smooth as a head of marble.

Simon recalled that he had also hit Dr. Zellermann
in the eye,
and realised that some momentary inaccuracy had made him
fail to
leave any souvenir contusion on the eyelid. All he could
detect, in
the brighter light of the foyer, was a small area of
matt surface just
above the cheekbone. Dr. Zellermann’s peripalpebral
ecchymosis, clearly,
had received the most skilled
medical and cosmetic treatment.

The encounter had made Hogan and the Saint
drift further
on towards the door, and Kay Natello had excused herself
on a
farewell visit to the powder room. It was a chance that might
not recur
very quickly.

Simon said: “Pat, ‘oo is this Dexter
jine?”

“She used to work here, Tom me boy, an’ a
swate singer she was too. That was her just went by. But you’ll meet her when
we get to
Southampton. An’ if Cookie says she’s for you, ye’re in luck.”

“She’s a corker, orl right,” said
the Saint. “If that’s ‘oo yer
mean. Although she wouldn’t ‘ave much
time fer an ole goat
like me. Clarss, that’s wot she is…” He staggered just a little,
and put his arm around Hogan’s broad
shoulders, and decided
to take a chance on Hogan’s unpredictable
pugnacity. “But if
it comes ter that, mite, wot djer see in an
ole sack o’ bones like
that there Natello?”

Hogan laughed loudly and clung to him for
mutual support.

“She’s okay, Tom,” he said
generously. “An’ she’s a friend of
Cookie’s, an’ she’s
me swateheart. Is it her fault if she’s an old
sack o’ bones? She
reminds me of me old Aunt Eileen, an’ she’s
been kindness itself
to me iver since we met, so I’ll fight any
man that says she’s
not the toast o’ the town.”

That was how they piled into Dr. Zellermann’s
car, which
was not only big enough to play badminton in but could
prob
ably have accommodated a social set of tennis as well.

Hogan and Natello sat in the back, and after
a few lines of
noisy repartee seemed to get close together and go to
sleep. Dr.
Zellermann steered them out over the Triborough Bridge
with
surgical care and precision, while he chatted urbanely about
the sea and
world commerce and logistics and the noble part
that was being played
by such unsung paladins of reconversion
as Tom Simons. The
Saint sat beside him, making the right
answers as best he
could improvise them, and remembering
Avalon Dexter and many various things.