The Saint Sees It Through (2 page)

And now so many of those things were only memories, and the Saint
had new enemies and other battles to think of, and he
sat in Cookie’s Cellar with as much right and reason as any law-abiding
citizen. Perhaps even with more; for he was lucky
enough never to have heard of the place before a
man named
Hamilton in Washington had mentioned it on the phone some
days before.

Which was why Simon was there now with
absolutely no in
tention of succumbing to the campaign of discouragement
which had
been waged against him by the head waiter, the
melancholy waiter,
the chef, and the chemist who measured
out eyedroppers of
cut liquor behind the scenes.

“Are you waiting for somebody,
sir?” asked the melancholy
waiter, obtruding himself again with a new variation on his
primary motif; and the Saint nodded.

“I’m
waiting for Cookie. When does she do her stuff?”

“It ain’t hardly ever the same
twice,” said the man sadly.
“Sometimes it’s earlier and sometimes
it’s later, if you know
what I mean.”

“I
catch the drift,” said the Saint kindly.

The orchestra finally blew and banged itself
to a standstill,
and its component entities mopped their brows and began to
dwindle away through a rear exit. The relief of relative quiet
was
something like the end of a barrage.

At the entrance across the room Simon could
see a party of
salesmen and their lighter moments expostulating with the
head
waiter, who was shrugging all the way down to his outspread
hands with
the unmistakable gesture of all head waiters who are
trying to explain to
an obtuse audience that when there is simply
no room for any more tables there is
simply no room for any
more tables.

The melancholy
waiter did not miss it either.

“Would
you like your check, sir?” he inquired.

He put it
down on the table to ease the decision.

Simon
shook his head blandly.

“Not,” he
said firmly, “until I’ve heard Cookie. How could
I look my friends in
the eye if I went home before that? Could I
stand up in front of the Kiwanis Club in
Terre Haute and con
fess that I’d been to New
York, and been to Cookie’s Cellar,
and
never heard her sing? Could I face——
”

“She may be late,” the waiter
interrupted bleakly. “She is,
most nights.”

“I know,” Simon acknowledged.
“You told me. Lately, she’s
been later than she was earlier. If you know
what I mean.”

“Well, she’s got that there canteen,
where she entertains the
sailors—and,” added the glum one, with a
certain additionally
defensive awe, “for free.”

“A noble deed,” said the Saint, and noticed the total on
the check in front of him with an involuntary twinge. “Remind me
to be a sailor in my next incarnation.”

“Sir?”

“I see the spotlights are coming on. Is
this going to be
Cookie?”

“Naw.
She don’t go on till last.”

“Well, then she must be on her way now.
Would you like to
move a little to the left? I can still see some of the
stage.”

The waiter dissolved disconsolately into the shadows, and
Simon settled back again with a sigh. After having
suffered so
much, a little more
would hardly make any difference.

A
curly-haired young man in a white tuxedo appeared at the
microphone and boomed through
the expectant hush: “Ladies
and
gentlemen—Cookie’s Cellar—welcomes you again—and
proudly presents—that sweet singer of sweet songs: … Miss
—Avalon—Dexter!
Let’s all give her a nice big hand.”

We all gave her a nice big hand, and Simon took another
mouthful of his diluted ice-water and braced
himself for the
worst as the
curly-haired young man sat down at the piano and
rippled through the introductory bars of the latest popular pain.
In the course of a reluctant but fairly extensive
education in the
various saloons and
bistros of the metropolis, the Saint had
learned to expect very little uplift, either vocal or visible, from
sweet singers of sweet songs. Especially when they
were merely
thrown in as a secondary
attraction to bridge a gap between
the
dance music and the star act, in pursuance of the best proven
policy of night club management, which discovered
long ago
that the one foolproof way
to flatter the intellectual level of the
average habitue is to give him neither the need nor the oppor
tunity to make any audible conversation. But the
Saint felt
fairly young, in fairly
good health, and fairly strong enough to
take anything that Cookie’s
Cellar could dish out, for one night
at
least, buttressing himself with the knowledge that he was
doing it for his Country… .

And then suddenly all that was gone, as if
the thoughts had never crossed his mind, and he was looking and listening in
complete
stillness.

And
wondering why he had never done that before.

The girl stood under the single tinted
spotlight in a simple
white dress of elaborate perfection, cut and
draped with artful
artlessness to caress every line of a figure that could
have worn
anything or nothing with equal grace.

She sang:

“For
it’s a long long time

From May
to December,

And the days grow short

When you reach November …”

She had reddish-golden-brown hair that hung long over her
shoulders and was cut straight across above large brown eyes
that had the slightly oriental and yet
not-oriental cast that stems
from
some of the peoples of eastern Europe. Her mouth was level and clean-cut, with
a rich lower lip that warmed all her
face
with a promise of inward reality that could be deeper and
more enduring than any ordinary prettiness.

Her voice had the harmonic richness of a
cello, sustained
with perfect mastery, sculptured with flawless diction,
clear and
pure as
a bell.

She sang:

“And these few precious
days

I’d spend with you;

These golden days

I’d spend with you.”

The song died into silence; and there was a
perceptible space of breath before the silence boiled into a crash of applause
that the accompanist, this time, did not have to lead. And then the
tawny hair
was waving as the girl bowed and tossed her head
and laughed; and then
the piano was strumming again; and
then the girl was singing again, something light and
rhythmic,
but still with that shining
accuracy that made each note like a
bubble
of crystal; and then more applause, and the Saint was
applauding with it, and then she was singing
something else
that was slow and
indigo and could never have been important
until she put heart and
understanding into it and blended them
with
consummate artistry; and then again; and then once more,
with the rattle and thunder of demand like waves
breaking
between the bars of melody,
and the tawny mane tossing and
her
generous lips smiling; and then suddenly no more, and she
was gone, and the spell was broken, and the noise
was empty
and so gave up; and the
Saint took a long swallow of scarcely
flavored
ice-water and wondered what had happened to him.

And that was nothing to do with why he was
sitting in a high-class clip joint like Cookie’s Cellar, drinking solutions of
Peter
Dawson that had been emasculated to the point where
they should have been
marketed under the new brand name of Phyllis Dawson.

He looked at the dead charred end of a
cigarette that he had
forgotten a long time ago, and put it down and lighted another.

He had come there to see what happened, and
he had cer
tainly seen what happened.

The young piano-player was at the mike
again, beaming his
very professional beam.

He was saying: “And now—ladies and
gentlemen—we bring you—the lady you’ve all been waiting for—in person—the one
and only…”

“Lookie, lookie, lookie,” said the
Saint to himself, very ob
viously, but with the very definite idea of
helping himself back
to reality “here comes Cookie.”
   

2

As a raucous yowl of acclamation drowned out the climax of
the
announcement, Simon took another look at the table near the dais from which
Cookie arose, if not exactly like Venus
from the foam, at
least like an inspired hippopotamus from a succulent wallow.

It was a table which he had observed during
a previous casual
survey of the room, without recognising Cookie herself
as the third person who had joined it—a fact which the melancholy waiter,
doubtless with malice aforethought, had carefully re
frained from pointing
out to him. But the two other people at
it he had been able
to place on the flimsier pages of a scrap-book
memory.

The more feminine of the two, who wore the trousers, could
be identified as a creature whose entrance to
life had been
handicapped by the name of Ferdinand Pairfield. To compensate
for this, Mr. Pairfield had acquired a rather beautifully
modeled face crowned with a mop of strikingly
golden hair which waved with the regularity of corrugated metal, a pair of
exquisitely plucked eyebrows arching over
long-lashed soulful
eyes, a
sensuously chiseled mouth that always looked pink and
shining as if it
had been freshly skinned, and a variety of per
sonal idiosyncrasies of the type which cause robustly ordinary men to
wrinkle their nostrils. Simon Templar had no such
common-place reactions to personal whimsy: he had
enough
internal equanimity to
concede any human being the right to
indulge
in any caprice that looked like fun to him, provided
the caprice was confined to the home and did not
discombobulate
the general populace:
but he did have a rather abstract
personal
objection to Ferdinand Pairfield. He disliked Mr.
Pairfield because Mr. Pairfield had elected to be
an artist, and moreover to be a very dextrous and proficient artist whose
draughtsmanship would have won the approval of D
ü
rer
or Da
Vinci. There was only one thing wrong with the Art of Ferdi
nand Pairfield. At some point in his development
he had come
under the influence of
Dadaism, Surrealism, and Ultimate Googooism
; with the result that he had never since then been able to
paint a woman except with breasts that came out
like bureau drawers, apexed with nipples that took the form of rattlesnakes,
put-and-take tops, bottle-openers, shoe-horns,
faucets, bologna
sausage, or very
small Packard limousines.

The other half of the duo was a gaunt
stringy-haired woman
with hungry eyes and orange lipstick, whom he
identified as
Kay Natello, one of the more luminous of the most
luminiscent
modern poets. The best he could remember about her was a
quote
from a recent volume of hers, which might as well be
reprinted here in
lieu of more expensive descriptions:

F
LOWERS

I love
the beauty of flowers,

germinated in decay and excrement,

with soft slimy worms

crawling

caressingly

among
the tender

roots.

So even I carry
within me

decay and excrement:

and worms

crawl

caressingly

among
the tender roots of my

love.

Between them they made a rather fine couple; and Simon
realised how Cookie could have been the idol of
both of them,
if there were any
foundation to the casual whispers he had been
able to hear about her since he discovered that she was des
tined to enter his life whether he wanted it or
not.