The Saint Sees It Through (25 page)

They were still keeping their voices very
low, as if they were
in a room full of ears.

“This is all new to you?” Simon asked expressionlessly.

“Why do you ask that?”

“I thought I would. I’ve told you all this because it doesn’t
matter now how much anybody knows I know.”

The Saint’s fingers had almost finished with
the odd metal
shape in his pocket. And the message which had begun to
spell
itself slothfully out from it by some multi-dimensional alchemy
between
his fingertips and his remembrance began to sear his brain with a lambent
reality that cauterized the last limp tissues
of vagueness out of his awakening.

He felt his own grip biting into her flesh.

“Avalon,” he said, in a voice that
came from a long way off
in the dark “You’ve been in this up to
the neck from the begin
ning. You might even have started a lot of
it—for all of us—by that parting crack of yours about the Saint after I socked
Zellermann. But the play-acting is over, and I must know something now.”

“What, darling?” she asked; and her voice was so easy in
contrast to his own that he knew where he
had to keep his own
sanities
together.

“I must know which side you’re on,
Avalon. Even if you
haven’t had any sense—even if it’s all words of one
syllable now.
Are you going all the way with me, or is this just an
excursion?”

It seemed as if she stiffened beside him for
an instant, and
then
softened so that she was closer and more real than ever
before.

Her voice came from a great distance also in
the darkness between them.

“You damn fool,” she said. “I worship the ground
you walk
on. I want you more than I ever
wanted anyone in my whole
life, or
ever will.”

They were both very quiet then, as if
something had been said which should never have been put into words.

And there were other sounds far away, faint
frettings against the monotonous rolling of the sea.

The Saint’s fingers touched the hard sharp metal in his trouser
pocket for one last assurance, and brought it
out. He said
very matter-of-factly: “Can you find a
match,
Avalon?”

She was in movement all around him, and he kept still; and
then there was a sudden hurtful flare of light
that flickered
agonisingly over the
scrap of embossed metal that he had taken
out of pocket and held towards her in the palm of his hand.

“No,” he said, without any
inflection. “Not mine. Pat Hogan
must have stuck his badge into my pocket as a last
desperate
resort—as a clue or a signal of
some kind. He never knew me
from Adam.
But he was an undercover man in this racket for
the Treasury Department.”

2

The match flickered once more and went out,
leaving him with
the moulding of her face stamped on his memory. And he
knew that that was not only printed by one match, but by more lights
than he
had seen in many years.

“How long have you known that?” she
asked.

“Only since I found the badge and
figured it out,” he said.
“But that’s long enough … Until then,
I’m afraid I was off
with some very wrong ideas. When I picked him
up at the Can
teen this evening I happened to see that he was going
heeled—
he had a gun in his hip pocket—and I began wondering. I’ve
been
listening to his rather shaky brogue all night, and watch
ing him
sell the blarney to Kay Natello, who never could be a
sailor’s swateheart
no matter what else; and I knew before we
left town that there
was something screwy in the setup …
But I had everything
else wrong. I had Hogan figured as one of
the Ungodly, and I
thought he was playing his game against
me.”

“If he wasn’t,” she said, “why
did he pick on you and knock
you out?”

“To get me out of the way. He didn’t know
who I was. I
was playing the part of a blabber-mouthed drunken sailor,
and just doing it too damn well. I was doing everything I could to
make
myself interesting to Cookie and Zellermann anyhow. I
was banging around in
the dark, and I happened to hit a nail
on the head by
mentioning Shanghai. So I was something to
work on. And I was
being worked on, the last thing I remember.
But Hogan didn’t want
me being propositioned. His job was
to get the goods on this gang, so he
wanted to be propositioned
himself. I might have been too drunk to
remember; or I might
have refused to testify. So he had to create
a good interruption
and break it up. And he did a lovely job, considering the
spot he
was in.”

“I’m getting some of my faith
back,” she said. “If a govern
ment man knocks you
cold, that’s legitimate; but you can’t let
anybody else do it.
Not if I’m going to love you.”

He smiled very fractionally in the gloom, and
his hand lay on
her wrist in a touch that was not quite a caress, but
something
to which nothing had to be added and from which nothing
could be
taken away.

“And now,” he said, “I suppose
you’re wondering where I
belong in this, and why Hogan doesn’t know
me.”

“I didn’t ask you.”

“I might as well tell you. Hogan is doing
his best, and so is the Department over him; but this thing goes too far over
the
world, into too many countries and too many jurisdictions.
Only an
organisation that’s just as international can cope with
it. There
is such a thing, and I’m part of it. That’s all I’m
allowed to say.”

“And meanwhile,” she said, with a
coldness that was not
really her, “why isn’t Pat in bed? And
why did he leave you
his badge?”

“Either because he’s still trying to
wring the
 
last drop out of
his act,
or because he’s trying to do some more dangerous snoop
ing. Either because he
hoped he could tip me off to keep my
mouth shut and give him a chance, or
because he knew he was
facing the high jump and if he made a bad
landing he hoped
I might get some word out for him.” The Saint stood
up.
“Either way, I’m going to find out.”

He heard and felt the rustle of her quick
movement out of his
sight; and then she was in front of him, face to face,
and her
arms around him and his hands under the soft eaves of her hair.

“Simon—are you all right now?”

“I’m as much use as I’ll ever be
tonight.” His smile was still
invisible through the darkness, and in
some ways he was glad
of it. His touch was strong and tender
together. He said: “And Pat did his best, and I’m sure nothing is going to
wait for him.”

He kissed her again and held her against him;
and he re
membered a great many things, perhaps too many, and
perhaps too many of them were not with her. But none of that mattered any more.

He let her go presently, and in time it had
only been a moment.

“I suppose,” he said, “you
wouldn’t happen to have any ar
tillery in your weekend kit? A machine-gun
might be useful;
but if you’re travelling light a small stiletto would
help.”

“I haven’t anything better than a pair
of nail scissors.”

“I’m afraid,” Simon said sadly,
“it might be hard to persuade
Zellermann to sit still for
that.”

Light slashed through the room like a
stealthy blade as he
found the door handle and opened it.

The corridor outside was dim and lifeless; but
as he stepped
out into it the sea murmurs were left in the room behind
him,
and the other stirrings of sound that had crept through to him
in there
resolved themselves into their own individual pattern—
a rumble and twitter of muffled voices and
movement down
stairs. There was no movement
that could be identified and no
single
word that could be picked out; but they had a pitch and
a rhythm of deadly deliberation that spilled
feathery icicles along
his spine. He
knew very well now why Avalon hadn’t been able to sleep, and why she had come
looking for Pat Hogan or Tom
Simons or anyone else solid and ordinary
and potentially safe
and wholesome. As she
had said, they weren’t the sort of noises
that people made if they were just trying to go on with a party. You
couldn’t put a finger on any one solitary thing about them;
but if you had a certain kind of sensitivity, you
knew …
There was a quality of
evil and terror that could set a pace and
a key even in confused and distant mutterings.

It made the Saint feel strangely naked and
ineffectual as he
moved
towards it, with the whirling but no longer dizzy hollowness left in his head
by the drug, and the unaccustomed formality of his muscular co-ordinations, and
the cold knowledge that he had nothing to fight with but his own uncertain
strength and uprooted wits. But Patrick Hogan—or
whatever
his real name was—had
exposed himself in just as lonely a way
for the job that he had to do;
and his gun couldn’t have helped
him much,
or the sounds below would have been different. And
other men on more obvious battlefronts had done
what they could with what they had, because wars didn’t wait.

He didn’t feel particularly glorious or
heroic about it: it was
much more a coldly predestined task that had
to be finished. It didn’t seem to spread any emotion on the fact that it could
easily and probably be his own finish too. It was just an automatic and
irresistible
mechanism of placing one foot in front of another
on a necessary path
from which there was no turning back, al
though the mind could
sit away and watch its own housing
walking voluntarily toward oblivion.

And this was it, and he was it, for one trivial tremendous
moment, himself, personally—the corny outlaw who
redeemed
himself in the last reel.

It was quite funny, and a lot of fun, in the
way he was think
ing.

He was moving like a cat, his ears travelling
far ahead of his
feet, and a new sound began to intrude upon them. A sound
of
voices. One voice detached itself from the two that were in
converse,
and a bell rang inside the Saint’s head with brazen
clangor.

It was the voice that had called Dr.
Zellermann on the night the Saint had broken into the office.

And it was the voice of Ferdinand Pairfield.

Lightly and quickly, Simon pulled Avalon
toward the closed
door through which seeped the words of Dr. Zellermann and
the fair
Ferdinand.

“I won’t do it,” Ferdinand said.
“That is your job, and you
must complete it. You really must,
Ernst.”

The Saint was shocked. This voice wasn’t
fluttery, seeming always ready to trail off into a graceful gesture. This voice
was venomous, reminding one of a beautiful little coral snake, look
ing like a
pretty bracelet, coiled to strike and inject the poison
that is
more deadly, drop by drop, than that of the King Cobra,
Here was
no witless fag with a penchant for Cr
è
me
Violette;
here was a creature who could command in terms of death.

The Saint’s brain gave one last dizzy lurch,
and then settled into a clear thin stratospheric stillness as the last
disjointed
fragments of the picture he had been working for fell into
mesh. In some strange way that one incongruous touch had reconciled
all other
incongruities—the freakish fellowship of Dr. Zeller
mann with Cookie and
Kay Natello, of all of them with Sam
Jeffries and Joe Hyman, even the
association with the lobster-
eyed James Prather and the uninhibited Mrs.
Gerald Meldon.
His own mistake had been in accepting as merely another
piece
of the formula the one ingredient which was actually the cata
lyst for
them all. It was a weird and yet strangely soothing sen
sation to
realise at last, with the utter certainty of psychic con
firmation,
that the man he had been looking for, the anchor
thread of the whole
fantastic web, was Mr. Ferdinand Pairfield.