The Saint Sees It Through (23 page)

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 kind
ness, “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 re
turn of Ferdinand Pairfield accompanied by a bloodcurdling
wail of horrific anguish which had started in the
outside dis
tance 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 reveal
ing
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 any
thing, Patrick Hogan strode through the window like a vic
torious
hooligan, beaming across every inch of his irresponsible
pug-nosed
face.

“Shure, an’ I was just waitin’ for the
chance,” he said joy
fully. 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 multi
coloured flares in
the centre of his head, and then a restful
blackness in which sleep seemed the most natural occupation.

5.

How Ferdinand Pairfield was Surprised,

and Simon Templar left Him.

He woke up in a very gradual and laborious
way that was like
dragging
his mind out of a quagmire, so that although he knew
in advance that he had been knocked out there was a lot of other
history to struggle through before he got to
thinking about
that. He remembered
everything that he had been through
since the beginning of the
story—Cookie’s Cellar and Sutton Place South, the Algonquin and a cheap
secondhand clothing store, Cookie’s Canteen and a drive out to Southampton. He
remembered people—Cookie, Natello, Pairfield, a
melancholy
waiter, even Wolcott
Gibbs. And a girl called Avalon. And a
hostess
in Cookie’s Canteen, and Patrick Hogan who had so
much breezy fun and
carried a gun on his hip—and who had
Socked
him. And Dr. Ernst Zellermann with his clean white
hair and ascetic features and persuasive voice,
betraying himself
with his long
ponderous words and the incurable cumbersome
Teutonic groping for far-fetched philosophical generalisations which
belonged so obviously in a germanic institute of Geopolitik
. Zellermann, who was a phony refugee and a
genuine
master of the most
painstakingly efficient technique that the
same germanic thoroughness had ever evolved. Zellermann,
who was the prime reason why the Saint had ever
entered that
circle at all… .

That was how Simon had to build it back,
filling in the cer
tainties
where there had been questions before, in a dull plod
ding climb out of the fog.

He didn’t open his eyes at once because there
was a sort of
ache
between his temples which made him screw up his brows
in protest, or as a counter-irritant; and that made opening the
eyes an independent operation to be plotted and
toiled over. It came to him out of this that he had been knocked out before,
seldom with a bare fist, but several times with
divers blunt
instruments; but the
return to consciousness had never been
so
lagging and sluggish as this. He had been drugged before,
and this was more like that.

After that stage, and deriving from it, there was a period of
great quiet, in which he reviewed other things.
He tested his
sensations for the drag
or the pressure of a gun anywhere on
him,
and remembered that he had held so strictly to his created
character
that he had set out unarmed. Still without moving, he
let his skin give him tactile confirmation of the clothes in which
he
had left the Algonquin. The only doubt he had about his
make-up concerned the gray of his hair and eyebrows, which
was
provided by talcum powder and could have been brushed
out. His face coloring was a dye and not a grease paint, and his
straggly moustache had been put on hair by hair with
water
proof gum—both of them were secure against ordinary risks.

Then after a while he knew why he was
thinking along these
lines. Because somebody was washing his face. Or dabbing it
with a cold wet cloth. Somebody was also shaking
him by the
shoulder and calling a name
that he knew perfectly well.

“Tom! … Tom!”

A curiously low voice, for anyone who was
trying to call him.
But
a voice that he knew, too. And a faint fragrance in the air
that had been in his nostrils before, some other
time when he
had heard the voice.

He decided to try opening his eyes, and
finally he made it.
But there was no difference. Only blackness swimming
around
him. And he knew that his eyes were open.

He wondered whether he had gone blind.

His head hurt very much, and the shaking at
his shoulder made him dizzy. He wished it would all go away.

“Tom! Wake up!”

A voice that filled out words like a cello;
a voice and a frag
rance
that would be in his memory always.

“Avalon darling,” he murmured sleepily,
“I love you very much, but can’t you do anything about your
insomnia?”

Then everything was utterly still, except for
the far faint
lulling
whisper of the sea.

It seemed like a good time to go to sleep
again.

Then there was a face soft against his
cheek, moving; and a
dampness that was not the wet cloth, but
warmer; and the
fragrance sweeter and stronger in his senses; and arms
and
hands clinging
and pressing; and the same voice talking and
making
sounds that merged with the slow soft roll of the sea,
and breaking strangely where there were no waves
breaking,
and speaking and stirring,
and this was something that hap
pened
a million years ago but had only been waiting a million years to happen, and he
had to do something about it even if it
meant smashing his way out of an iron vise that was holding him in that
absurd and intolerable suspension, and there was
the sweetness and the voice saying: “Simon, darling … Oh,
darling, my darling … Simon, wake up,
Simon!”

And the voice saying: “I didn’t know—I’m
such a dope, but
I should have … Simon, darling, wake up! … Simon,
wake
up… .”

And then he was awake.

A moment of clarity drifted towards him like
a child’s bal
loon, and he caught it and held on to it and everything
was quite clear again while he held it.

He said very carefully: “Avalon, I left
a message for you
that I’d see you tomorrow. Well, this is tomorrow. Only I
can’t
see you. That’s silly, isn’t it?”

She said: “I had to put the light out
again because I didn’t
want it to show under the door… . Simon,
dear, wake up!
Don’t go to sleep again!”

He said: “Why did you come here
anyway?”

“Because that creep I was with knew
Cookie, and she’d
apologised, and she was being as nice as she can be, and
I have
to work and Hollywood came into the picture, and it seemed
like the
only graceful thing to do, and I can’t fight the whole
night club racket,
and … Simon, you must stay awake!”

“I am awake,” he said. “Tell
me what happened.”

“After Pat hit you, Cookie said that it
wasn’t your fault that
Ferdy went after him—he went by himself, or
she sent him, or
something. And he was broken-hearted. So we all put you
to
bed, and everything broke up. Zellermann said that you’d sleep
it off——
”