The Saint Sees It Through (26 page)

3

Simon became aware of Avalon’s fingers
cramping on his arm,
and knew that her perceptions were stumbling
after his, less
surely for one thing because she still lacked so much
background
that he
had not been able to sketch for her, but following him
more in mad surmise than with the integrated sureness that
directed him.

He pressed his hand over hers and went on
listening, as Pairfield said: “It’d be dreadful to lose you, but of course
you know
how much the FBI would like to know the truth about why
you became
a refugee from Vienna. I’ve taken care of you all
this time, but I
can’t go on doing it forever. If you let me down and anything happens—”

“I don’t want to let you down, Ferdinand,” Zellermann
said; and through all the measured confidence of his accents Simon
had a vision of the smooth brow shining like damp
ivory. “But
our methods are
getting nowhere. I think he’ll die before he
tells us what he knows.”

“He’d better not,” Ferdinand said
in the same deadly bell-
like voice. “I want all the information he has. And I shall
not
assist you. You know the sight of
torture and pain sickens me.
I should
simply die.”

“You didn’t seem particularly affected in
the case of Foley.”

“Oh, but I was! When I stuck that knife
in him, I almost
fainted. It was thrilling! But that’s another case in
point. It
should have been unnecessary for me to do it. You knew
that
he was toying
with the idea of selling us out, and blackmailing
us to boot. You should have handled it.”

The Saint could almost see Zellermann shrug.

“You won’t come and help us?”

“I simply couldn’t. Get down there again. I want that information
immediately.”

Simon pulled Avalon away from the door, and
they fled on
cat feet down the corridor and stood very still pressed
against
the wall. Dr. Zellermann came out of Ferdinand’s room and went downstairs
without a glance in their direction.

Now the Saint had purpose. Each task in its
turn, and the
silencing of the golden boy was first. He strode to the
door and
flung it open. Ferdinand, clad in a pale cerise dressing
gown,
turned and saw the Saint.

He looked up casually and a little irritably,
as if he only ex
pected to see Zellermann coming back with an
afterthought
excuse. When he saw the Saint, his expression remained out
wardly
unchanged. His reaction came from deep under his skin,
instead of being the
muscular contortion of a moment’s shock.
It came out as a dew
of sweat on his face that swelled into an
established wetness;
and only after that was established his
pretty face went
pinched and pallid with terror. He didn’t have
to say anything to
make a complete confession that he was
answering his own
questions as fast as they could spiral through
his reeling mind, and
that he knew that the answers were all
his own and there was
nothing he could say to anyone else, any
where. He wasn’t the
first dilettante in history who had been
caught up with by the
raw facts of life in the midst of all the
daffodils and dancing;
and he would not be the last.

The Saint felt almost sorry for him; but all
the pity in the
world didn’t alter the absolute knowledge that Mr.
Pairfield
constituted a very real menace to the peace and quiet
which
Simon wanted for a few seconds more. Mr. Pairfield’s eyes in
flated
themselves like a pair of small blowfish at what they
divined; his mouth
dropped open, and his throat tightened in
the preliminary
formation of a scream. These were only the immediate reflex responses
blossoming out of the trough of ter
ror that was already there, but they
were no less urgent and
dangerous for that. Something had to be done
about them, and
there was really only one thing to do.

Simon put out his left hand and grasped the
lapels of Mr.
Pairfield’s dainty silk dressing-gown together, and drew
him
closer with a sympathetic smile.

“Ferdy,” he said, “don’t you
know that it’s time for all good
little girls to be asleep?”

And with that his right fist rocketed up to
impinge on Mr.
Pairfield’s aesthetic chin, and sleep duly followed… .

Simon slid an arm under him as he crumpled,
and carried
him back into the room and dumped him on the bed. It was
a nice encouraging thing to discover and prove that he still had
that much
strength and vitality in him, even though he knew
very well that the
power and agility that were required to anesthetise
Ferdinand Pairfield
would not necessarily be enough to
cope with anyone who was at least
averagely tough of mind and
body. It made him feel a new sureness of
himself and a new hope
that slipped looseningly and warmingly into
his limbs as he
tore one of Cookie’s fine percale sheets into wide
ribbons to tie
Ferdinand’s wrists and ankles to the bed and then to
stuff into
his slackly open mouth and gag him.

He found himself working with the swift
efficiency of second
nature; and that was a good feeling too, to
be aware of the old deftness and certainty flowing into his own movements with
increasing
ease all the time, and the gossamer bubble of his
wakefulness holding
and not breaking but growing more clear
and durable with each
passing minute..

He finished, and then made a quick search of
the room and
the
person of his test specimen, looking for one thing only; but
it seemed that Mr. Pairfield’s wanderings into
wickedness hadn’t
taken the course of
acquiring any of the useful armaments of
evil. No doubt he was glad to delegate all such crudities to
underlings. The Saint ended his brief quest still
weaponless; yet
he gave it up with a
glance at Avalon that had all the carefree
lights of supreme laughter in
its blue brilliance.

“Knock ‘em off one by one,” he
remarked—“as the bishop
said as he surveyed the new line-up of thespian talent at the
Follies. That’s our motto. Shall we move on to
the next experi
ment?”

Their hands touched momentarily; and then he
was out of the room and on his way down the stairs.

On his way, with the new chill ugly knowledge
that the
palpitating fright of Ferdinand Pairfield could only have
been
germinated by something that had been there in that house
before any
board creaked and Pairfield had thrown his door
open and seen the
Saint. And that that something, whatever
form it took, could
only be deadly for the federal man who had
called himself Patrick Hogan—if it hadn’t
been conclusively
deadly already.

Or if simple death might not be much better
than what
could be going on.

Simon was at the foot of the stairs, in the
hall, with the front door only a few steps away; and Avalon was still close
beside
him. Escape would have been easy for them. But he knew with
out even wordless
asking that neither of them had thought of
that. Her eyes were
steady and quiet and only inquiring as
they met his again.
The sounds that came through the solid
closed door of the
living-room were strangely distorted and
dreadful in their muffled distortion.

The Saint saw her throat move as she listened
and looked at him; but her gaze was only waiting, always.

Their hands met and held that time, for an
instant; and some
thing
quirked over his lips that could have been a smile, but
wasn’t. Then he left her.

He didn’t go to the living-room door, but
vanished the other
way, towards the kitchen.

In a few seconds more he was back, and he
brought with
him a stag-handled carving knife. The blade was strong
and
gleaming, and he tested it with his thumb before he slid it up
his left
sleeve and held it there with the pressure of a bent
elbow against the flat of the blade.

His lips almost touched her ear, and he
spoke in a voice that was only the echo of a whisper.

“Get on your horse, darling,” he
said. “Sneak out of here
and grab one of the cars outside while I keep ‘em busy. Drive into
town and recruit some large healthy cops. Bring ‘em back
just as fast as you can. And have breakfast with
me.”

She only shook her head. Her long hair brushed
his mouth.

He couldn’t argue with her there.

He left her and hoped that she would go, and
knew that she
wouldn’t. He was glad and yet bitter about that; but it
was a confusion of things that he could only take as they broke over
him and
save to be struggled with some other time.

He had to end this other thing first, no
matter how.

He went to the door that the sounds came
through, and
stopped to put an eye to the keyhole for a second’s
preview of what he had to walk into. And it was curious that while his face
turned to
stone his only detached mental reaction was that it
was merely exactly
what he had imagined in a distant nightmare
of unbearable
understanding. He had that unreal sensation of
being a long way off
from all of it, away somewhere, even while the nerve endings curdled under his
skin and he began
to move under an impetus that was altogether instinctive
and
altogether quixotic and absurd.

Even while he heard the air-conditioned voice
of Dr. Ernst
Zellermann, cool and persuasive like the voice of a
society
psychoanalyst in a darkened consulting-room, the only distinct
articulate
sound that Re caught and held afterwards, saying: “Why not be reasonable,
Patrick, and get it into your head that I must go on until you tell me exactly
how much you’ve been able to accomplish with your masquerade?”

The keyhole glimpse wiped out into a full
picture as Simon
opened the door.

It was something that would haunt him all his
life, something
that belonged in a Grand Guignol school of outlandish
horror,
that was so much worse because the mind had heard all about
it long ago
and long ago dismissed it as a ghoulish fantasy. Now
it was real after all,
and the reality had a chill intellectual impact
that was capable of
leaving scars on the memory of even such a man as the Saint, who thought he had
already seen most variations of what there was to be seen in the pathology of
macabre
dreadfulness.

The figure of Dr. Zellermann, standing poised
and cool
with his smooth silver locks and fine ascetic profile and
a long
cigarette clipped in his sensitive fingers and treasuring half an inch
of unshaken ash, was a stock item in its way. So was the
figure of
Patrick Hogan, bound hand and foot in a chair, with
the sweat of agony
running down into his eyes and the lower
half of his face
covered with the gag through which some of
those horrible formless strangled sounds
had come. It was the
two women squatting
beside him, Cookie with her crude bloated
face no longer wearing its artificial smile, and Natello with the sallow
skin stretched tight over the bones of her skull and her
haggard eyes smouldering with a light of weird
absorption.
The women, and what they
were doing… .

And this was the reality of half-remembered legend-histories
of Messalina, of tales of the Touareg women
commissioned to
the ritual torture of
their captives, of witches out of a dim universal folklore bent to the
consummation of some black sacra
ment
of pain. This was what gave a sudden dimension and
articulation to his ambiguous impressions of
Cookie and Natello, just as in their separate ways the performance seemed to
breathe
blood and life into them,
hardening and enrooting the slobbish grossness of Cookie and illuminating
Natello’s starved ethereal
gawkiness—even
throwing a pale reflection of its hot heathen
glow on Zellermann’s satanically connoisseurish frigidity. This, that
somehow crystallised and focused all the twisted negations
and perversions that were inherent in the
philosophy they
served. This new
scientific and persuasive barbarism, aptly and
symbolically framed in the gleaming chrome-plated jungle of
a Pairfield-decorated parlour… .