Catch the Saint (20 page)

Now she was snuggling
against him, and when he glanced at
her, her eyes had
that same poignant, misty, searching look
that
had disturbed him more than once during the afternoon. It was as if the real
Carole, vulnerable and love-seeking, was for
just
a moment breaking through the razzle-dazzle of words and
laughs that normally fluttered gaily between her and the
rest of
the world.

“Couldn’t you cancel that miserable
business deal you
say
you’ve got
lined up for tonight,” she pleaded, “and we can do
something a
little more exciting than look at orphans? I feel I
owe it to you. After all, I’m the one who dragged you through Daddy’s
charities. It probably shows a lack of self-confidence.
Trying to build myself up vicariously by trotting
out the good
works of the
paterfamilias. If I thought I could really trust my
self to interest you, all on my own, I’d probably
have taken you
for a walk in the
country.”

“Are you sure you
didn’t major in psychology instead of sociology?” Simon bantered.

“A fortuneteller told
me I need to live less in my head and
more in my
heart.”

Simon looked down into his
glass noncommittally.

“I won’t try to
compete with your fortuneteller, but I can tell you one thing: You don’t need
Daddy or anybody else to make
you interesting.”

“Give me a chance to
prove it then,” she said eagerly, not
letting
go his arm.

“How?”

“Well, unless you’re
really going out with another woman to
night,
couldn’t you finish up your business early enough for
us
to get together? I could show you my prize-winning college
essays or something, just to prove I’m a great kid all on my
own.”

“You’ve already
proved it,” Simon assured her. He was think
ing
fast. Should he break with her right now, knowing he would
have to leave her behind before many days had passed anyway?
Or should he let her down gently, striking a delicate
balance between encouraging her too much and hurting her unnecessarily?
The second choice seemed best. “Wouldn’t it be better to wait
till tomorrow, though? I’m not sure what time I’ll get through
tonight.”

She moved away from him a
little, took a swallow of her
drink, and looked at him
with sly eyes over the rim of the glass.

“Are
you going out with another woman?”

“Incredible as it
may seem, I’ve managed to evade my panting
pursuers,
and the most exciting thing I can look forward to is a bottle of good wine with
dinner.”

“Then you’ll see me
after dinner? I mean, if you want to. If
you
don’t want to, don’t bother.” She suddenly broke her mock seriousness and
laughed. “I really sound like a fool, don’t I? All
these games I’m playing with you. But I’d really like it if
you
wanted to do something later this evening.”

Simon looked at his
watch.

“If I start out
soon, I just might finish before good little girls are all tucked up in
bed.”

“I’ll wait up. I can
afford to miss some sleep on the off-chance
that
I’ll get some relief from the stupefying social life I’ve been
leading.”

They left the bar, stepped
out into the perfume of exhaust
fumes and the multicoloured
city substitutes for moonlight, and
walked to where she
had parked her Lincoln convertible. Some
how,
even with the best intentions, he had managed to more or
less commit himself to Carole on that evening when he was
al
ready scheduled to risk his neck in a venture that
could take an
unpredictable number of hours.
Apparently the current of their relationship flowed both ways to a greater
extent than he wanted
to admit to himself. Or
was it a desire to unravel the girl’s feelings and set everything straight and
clear before the tides of his
life carried him away
from her again?

Whatever the reason, he
was assuming that he was going to complete his expedition to the Supremo’s
presumed operations
centre in time to see Carole again
that night. He did not have
optimistic visions of
himself knocking on a door, saying his piece
about
West Coast Kelly, and being ushered with feverish haste
into the throne room of the Supremo himself. He hoped
instead
to make contact with appropriate underlings, announce
his sup
posed identity and mission, then leave the night club and wait
for some action the next day.

He opened the car door for Carole, but made no
move to get
in beside her.

“Can’t I drop you off, wherever you’re
going?” she offered.
“Or are you
afraid I’ll attack the other woman?”

“I’m afraid of her attacking you,” he
replied, in exactly the
same mischievous
tone. “You’re not quite unknown in this town.
A cab will be more discreet.”

“I’ll see you later,
then.”

“It’s hard for me to
make a promise, but if anything holds me
up
later than ten-thirty or eleven I’ll give you a ring.”

The Pear Tree was one of
those places whose portals are vir
tually
indistinguishable from their residential neighbours except
upon close inspection. Along a quiet street of dignified
apart
ments, its unobtrusive heavy wooden door betrayed
its commer
cial genus only by a pair of long
Spanish tile panels flanking it,
whose glazed colours
illustrated the arboreal namesake of the
place.
A more inquisitive search would then have discovered
the
small brass plaque on the door itself, engraved in copybook script with the
words
The Pear Tree.

Simon opened the door and
found himself immediately confronted by a very large man in a tuxedo that
looked as if it might
have been forged from the
same material used to make old
black iron stoves. At
least it gave an impression of such stiffness
and
weightiness, and was so vast and cylindrical around the
man’s torso,
that the comparison with a huge pot-bellied stove
was irresistible. Perhaps the first thing the Saint definitely de
duced about his faceless quarry was that the
Supremo had a taste
for over-sized
myrmidons.

“Good evening, sir,” the iron cask
rumbled. “How many,
please?”

“Just one.”

“For dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Very good.”

Simon was passed on to a
beautifully dressed platinum blonde who in various ways might have symbolised a
pear-bearing tree whose fruits were just passing the maximum of ripeness. There
would be nothing too brash, too hurried here. From
the dim red recesses of the bar where she guided him came a delicate ripple
of piano music. A starched and freshly shaved headwaiter
took
his order while he savoured a dry martini on the
rocks.

The dining room had the
same restrained, polished plushness of the rest of the establishment. It was
not easy to imagine that
this compartment of
elegance in the midst of middle-aged Main-
Lineage
could be the epicentre of a criminal empire, but the
Saint
had long since stopped feeling surprise at the discrepancies
between appearance and reality, between fa
ç
ade and inner fact.

As he ate his lobster
thermidor, he watched for any sign that this particular room, with its
damask-covered tables and silver
ice buckets, its fresh
flowers and candles in tinted crystal, might be hosting something more sinister
than well-heeled and well-
served dinner guests.
True, a few of the male diners possessed
shoulders
and features that looked more as if they had been
formed
in the saloons and gyms of New York’s Lower East Side than on the playing
fields of Princeton, but that in itself proved
nothing
except the levelling potential of worldly success.

Only one feature of the
room engaged the Saint’s attention
more than any
other, and that was a door at the rear marked
private.
Such a door was not particularly unusual. In fact the world was full of doors
marked private that concealed nothing
more mysterious
than adding machines, toilets, or supplies of
clean
towels. But this door, which never opened while the Saint was eating his meal,
was at least a promising starting point for
exploration.

Now a man less blessed
with courage and a flair for dramatic
direct action than
Simon Templar was might have made dis
creet enquiries about the nature of the
room labelled private,
might have requested
an audience with the manager, or might
have
done any number of things less effective than what he did.

He finished his lobster,
swallowed the last of his Bollinger, got
up
from his table, and walked over to the door marked private.

He had scarcely applied
his knuckles to the varnished wood when his waiter, a nervous little man whose
head-hair was en
tirely concentrated in a miniature
black mop under his nose,
raced up to him and
tapped him on the arm.

“Don’t put your hands
on me, Bug-face,” the Saint ordered him coarsely, “or I’ll play
Turkey in the Straw’ with my heels
all up and down
your backbone.”

Suddenly a red-hot skillet
could not have seemed less attrac
tive to the
waiter’s touch than the Saint’s forearm. Simon’s nat
ural
inflections had been flattened out for the occasion into a
raspy Western accent, and his face had a cruel toughness
that
would have made a chunk of flint seem mushy by
comparison.

“Was something wrong
with your dinner, sir?” the waiter
asked
with quavering unctuousness.

“Where’s the
manager?” Simon barked back.

The waiter was making
frantic gestures in the air with one
hand while trying
to keep the Saint appeased with a servile smile.

“If you’ll tell me
what was wrong
…”

Simon bent over him
menacingly.

“Look, you pinheaded
spaghetti-wrangler, I won’t talk to any
body
but the manager.”

The suave headwaiter arrived on the scene, more
self-pos
sessed than his. colleague.

“What seems to be
the trouble, sir?” he enquired smoothly.

“What the hell use
are you?” Simon growled. “Are you going to knock this door down for
me? What do I have to do to see the manager here—dynamite the joint?”

He reckoned that the more
noise he made, the sooner he would be admitted to the inner sanctum. With one
possible danger: a
bouncer (Simon had already spotted the
black barrel shape of
the front-door greeter
taking an interest from the dining-room entrance) might simply try to throw him
out. The Saint was con
fident that he could
throw the bouncer out instead, but he preferred a less devious way of getting
the attention of the higher
ups. He banged harder on
the private door.

The headwaiter, who was
no more a roughhouse type than his
subordinate,
glanced around to locate the tuxedoed gorilla, who
moved
unobtrusively down one side of the dining room towards
them.

“If you would please
tell me what your complaint is,” the headwaiter said placatingly,
“I’ll be glad to—”

“I don’t have no complaint,” Simon
said. “I’m here on busi
ness, and I
wanna see the manager.”

He continued pounding on
the door. Just before the bouncer
reached him, the barrier swung partially
open. A surly crinkly-
haired head appeared,
and a voice said, “What’s going on out
here?”

The Saint sensed the
bouncer behind him, about to grasp his arms if necessary, and he decided that
the moment for crossing this particular Rubicon had come. With a strength given
added
force by swiftness and surprise, he shoved the door
farther open,
stepped inside the private room,
slammed the door again and turned the metal knob that threw the bolt. He did it
so quickly that the three men behind him were left standing flat-footed in
the dining room, excluded entirely from even the sound of
the
ensuing proceedings.