The Saint Sees It Through (4 page)

And he still asked nothing more of the night
than a passable
excuse to demonstrate his distaste for Dr. Ernst
Zellermann
and all his works.

And this just happened to be the
heaven-saved night which
would provide it.

As Cookie reached the climax of her last and
most lurid
ditty, and with a sense of supremely fine predestination,
the
Saint saw
Avalon Dexter’s hand swing hard and flatly at the
learned doctor’s smoothly shaven cheek. The actual sound of
the slap was drowned in the ecstatic shrieks of
the cognoscenti
who were anticipating
the tag couplet which their indetermi
nate
ancestors had howled over in the First World War; but
to Simon Templar, with his eyes on nothing else,
the move
ment alone would have been
enough. Even if he had not seen the girl start to rise, and the great
psychologist reach out and grab her wrist.

He saw Zellermann yank her back on to her
chair with a vicious wrench, and carefully put out his cigarette.

“Nunc dimittis,”
said the
Saint, with a feeling of ineffable
beatitude creeping through his arteries
like balm; “O Lord,
now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.
…”

He stood up quietly, and threaded his way
through the
intervening tables with the grace of a stalking panther,
up to
the side of Dr. Ernst Zellermann. It made no difference to him that
while he was on his way Cookie had finished her
last number, and all
the lights had gone on again while she
was taking her final
bows. He had no particular views at all
about an audience or
a lack of it. There was no room in his soul
for anything but the
transcendent bliss of what he was going
to do.

Almost dreamily, he gathered the lapels of
the doctor’s din
ner jacket in his left hand and raised the startled man
to his
feet.

“You really shouldn’t do things like that,”
he said in a tone
of
kindly remonstrance.

Dr. Zellermann stared into sapphire blue eyes
that seemed
to be laughing in a rather strange way, and some
premonitive
terror
may have inspired the wild swing that he tried to launch in reply.

This, however, is mere abstract speculation. The recordable
fact is that Simon’s forearm deflected its fury
quite effortlessly
into empty air.
But with due gratitude for the encouragement,
the Saint proceeded to hit Dr. Zellermann rather carefully in the eye.
Then, after steadying the healer of complexes once
more by his coat lapels, he let them go in order to
smash an
equally careful left midway
between Dr. Zellermann’s nose
and
chin.

The
psychiatrist went backwards and sat down suddenly in
the middle of a grand
clatter of glass and china; and Simon
Templar gazed at him with deep
scientific concern.
 
“Well, well,
well,” he murmured. “What perfectly awful
reflexes!”

3

For one fabulous moment there was a stillness and silence
such as
Cookie’s Cellar could seldom have experienced during
business hours; and
then the background noises broke out
again in a new key and tempo, orchestrated with a
multiplying
rattle of chairs as the patrons
in the farther recesses stood up
for a
better view, and threaded with an ominous bass theme
of the larger waiters converging purposefully upon
the centre
of excitement.

The Saint seemed so unconcerned that he
might almost have
been unaware of having caused any disturbance at all.

He said to Avalon Dexter: “I’m terribly sorry—I hope you
didn’t get anything spilt on you.”

There was an unexpected inconsistency of
expression in the way she looked at him. There were the remains of pardonable
astonishment
in it, and a definite shadowing of fear; but
beyond that there
was an infinitesimal curve in the parted lips
which held an
incongruous hint of delight.

She said in a rather
foolish and meaningless way: “Thank
you——
”

Then the vanguard of the sedative squad was
at the Saint’s
side, in the person of a captain whose face looked as if
it
had known rougher employment than smirking welcomes and
farewells to transient suckers.

He was a
fairly weighty man, and his
tuxedo was tight
across his shoulders. He grasped the Saint’s arm and
said with
out any professional servility: “What’s this all
about?”

“Just a little apache dance
routine,” Simon said pleasantly.
“Unscheduled addition to the floor
show. I’ve been practising
it quite a while. Would you like me to show
you, or would
you rather let go my arm?”

The bouncer captain, with the Saint’s biceps
palpably under his fingers and the Saint’s very cool blue eyes on him, seemed
to experience a shred of
indecision.

Avalon
Dexter’s clear voice said: “Take it easy, Joe.”

Simon gently eased his arm away in the act of
searching for
a cigarette, and gazed interestedly at Dr. Zellermann,
who
was trying to
unwrap himself from a tablecloth with which he
had become entangled in the course of his descent.

“Unfortunately,” he explained,
“my partner hasn’t practised
so much, and his timing is all off.
It’s too bad he had to fall
down and hurt his face, but accidents will
happen.”

Dr. Zellermann got to his feet, assisted by
one of the larger
waiters, who thoughtfully kept hold of him under the
guise
of continuing his support.

With his patriarchal locks dishevelled, one
eye closed, and
a smear of blood smudged down from one corner of his
mouth,
Dr. Zellermann was not in the least beautiful or benign. In
fact, for
a man who claimed to adjust the mental disorders of
others, he showed a
lamentable lack of psychic balance. He
spoke to and about the Saint, in very
precise English mingled
with a few
recherche foreign epithets and expletives; and Simon
was saddened to
learn from the discourse that the doctor was
clearly
the victim of several psychoses, inclined towards para
noia, subject to perverse delusions, and afflicted
with obsessive
coprophilia. Simon
realised that the symptoms might have
been
aggravated by some recent shock, and he was considering the case with clinical
impartiality when Cookie herself surged
through the ring of bystanders.

Simon had never thought she was beautiful, but
now he
saw for himself how ugly she could look. The big practised
smile was
gone, and her mouth was as hard and functional
as a trap. Her eyes
were bright, watchfully venomous, and
coldly capable. For that moment, in spite of the complete
oppositeness of all the associations, Simon felt that she had the
identical bearing of a hard-boiled matron
preparing to quell
trouble in a tough
reform school.

“What’s this all about?” she
demanded, using what began
to sound like the house formula.

“This insolent
swine,” Zellermann said, gathering his words
with a vicious
precision that made them come out as if he
were spitting
bullets, “attacked me for no reason at all——
”

“Or only one little reason,” said
the Saint easily. “Because I saw you grab Miss Dexter’s arm, and I thought
you were
getting much too rough.”

“Because
she slapped me!”

“For
a very good reason, chum. I saw it.”

Cookie’s wet marble eyes flicked from face
to face with the
alertness of a crouched cat surrounded by sparrows. Now
she
turned on the girl.

“I
see,” she rasped. “What have you been drinking, Avalon?”

Simon admired the blushless pot-and-kettle majesty of that,
for at close quarters Cookie was enveloped in a
rich aroma
of whisky which probably
contributed some of the beady glaze
to
her malevolent stare.

“Really, Cookie,” he said earnestly,
“anyone who wanted
to get tight on the drinks you serve here
would have to have
been working on it since breakfast.”

“Nobody asked you
to come here,” Cookie threw at him,
and went on to Avalon: “I’d like to
know what the hell makes
you think you’ve
got a right to insult my customers ——
”

It was not a pretty scene, even though the
Saint’s aversion
to
that kind of limelight was greatly tempered by the happy
memory of his knuckles crushing Dr. Zellermann’s
lips against
his teeth. But he felt
much more embarrassed for Avalon. The
puzzling
hint of a smile had left her lips altogether, and
something else was coming into her eyes that
Cookie should
have been smart enough
to recognise even if she was too
alcoholic
for ordinary discretion.

He said quietly: “The customer insulted her,
Cookie——
”

“You dirty
liar!” shouted Zellermann.

“—and he had it coming to him,” Simon went on in the
same tone.
“I saw it all happen. Why not just throw him out
and let’s go on with
the fun?”

“You mind your
own goddam business!” Cookie blazed at
him purply. Again she
turned to the girl. “You drunken slut—
I’ve had just about
enough of your airs and graces and bull——
”

That was it. Avalon’s lips came together for
an instant, and the suppressed blaze flashed like dynamite in her eyes.

“That’s fine,” she said.
“Because I’ve had just about enough
of you and your creep
joint. And as far as I’m concerned you
can take your joint
and your job and stuff them both.”

She whirled away; and then after only one
step she turned
back, just as abruptly, her skirts and her hair swooping
around
her. And as she turned she was really smiling.

“That is,” she added sweetly,
“if the Saint doesn’t do it
for you.”

Then she was gone, sidling quickly between
the tables; and
there was a new stillness in the immediate vicinity.

In the local silence, the Saint put a match
to his neglected
cigarette.

Now he understood the paradoxical ingredient
in Avalon’s
expression when she first saw him. And her revelation
flared
him into an equally paradoxical mixture of wariness and high
amusement.
But the barest lift of one eyebrow was the only
response that could be
seen in his face.

Cookie’s stare had come back to him, and
stayed there.
When she spoke to him again her voice had no more geniality
than before, and yet there was still a different note in it.

“What’s
your name?”

“Simon Templar,” he said, with no
more pointedness than
if he had said “John Smith.”

The
effect, however, was a little different.

The muscular captain took a step back from
him, and said with unconscious solemnity: “Jesus!”

Dr. Ernst Zellermann stopped mopping his mouth
with a
reddening handkerchief, and kept still like a pointer.

Cookie kept still too, with her gross face
frozen in the last
expression it had worn, and her eyes so anchored that they
looked almost rigid.

The Saint said peaceably: “It’s nice to
have met you all, but
if somebody would give me my check I’d like to
get some
fresh air.”

The melancholy waiter was at his side like a lugubrious
genie, holding up
the check by the time he had finished his
sentence.

“Now, just a minute, Mr. Templar.” Cookie’s voice came
through again with the sticky transparency of honey
poured
over a file. “These
little things do happen in night clubs, and we
all understand them. I didn’t mean to be rude to you—I was
just upset. Won’t you sit down and have a drink
with me?”