The Saint Sees It Through

THE DOCTOR WAS A PHONY,

AND COOKIE WAS A CROOK—

but what about the girl with the

bell-like voice? The Saint had to know!

A new opium ring was flooding the country with all the misery, vice, and murder that go with the illicit traffic in drugs. How could Dr. Zellermann, the Park Avenue psychiatrist, be linked with the distribution of the dope? What did New York's bawdiest rendezvous for sea­men, Cookie's Canteen, have to do with it?

And where did 903 Bubbling Well Road, Shanghai enter the picture? It was the business of Simon Templar (The Saint) to find the an­swers to these questions. It was his job to track down and bring to justice the 'top brass' of the criminal organization that made these con­nections profitable.

But, the Saint was sick—love-sick. He had been so ever since he first laid eyes on lovely Avalon Dexter. She was utterly desirable; her laughter was like 'bells at twilight'; and honesty seemed to look out of her eyes! The Saint 'had it bad.'

Most important, Avalon was in a position to help him immeasurably with his mission. However, she might be one of the international gang he had vowed to smash! Templar had to be sure. His life was at stake!

THE   SAINT

SEES   IT   THROUGH

BY

Leslie Charteris

Author of The Saint in New York, etc.

THE SAINT SEES IT THROUGH

Copyright, 1946, by Leslie Charteris

CAST OF CHARACTERS

SIMON TEMPLAR ('THE SAINT')

Deadly foe of the 'Ungodly.' His code is harsh but just and applies to all criminals—whether they be men or women!

AVALON DEXTER

Has so perfect a figure that she can wear anything— or nothing—with equal grace. Is she for the Saint? Or is she allied with a vicious, world-wide gang of criminals? The Saint is not sure.

DR. ERNST ZELLERMANN

Tall, silky-haired, Park Avenue psychiatrist. Has '. . . one of those fat smiles that somehow remind the Saint of fresh shrimps.' An habitue of Cookie's Cellar.

COOKIE

A mammoth woman. Proprietress of 'Cookie's Cel­lar' and 'Cookie's Canteen.' 'Everybody's back-slapper and good egg, with a heart of garbage and scrap iron!'

FERDINAND PAIRFIELD

Golden-haired   surrealistic  artist  who  works  for Cookie. 'He' paints his fingernails with a violet tinted lacquer.

KAY NATELLO

Slatternly writer of lewd lyrics that Cookie sings. Has a 'voice like a nutmeg grater on tin cans ...'

PATRICK HOGAN

A simple seaman who is '... painting the town with a roscoe in his pants.' Knocks the Saint cold with a single smashing blow to the jaw!

1.

How Simon Templar spent a Night Out,

and Avalon Dexter took him Home.

Simon Templar lighted another cigarette, took a sip of his latest and most anemic-looking highball, and reflected with consider­able gloom that if the vanquishing of villains required any man like himself to endure certain unpleasantnesses and discomforts there must be a lot of more attractive and entertaining places to endure them in than a joint with a name like Cookie's Cellar, situated in a rejuvenated basement in the East Fifties of New York City, USA.

Such, for instance, as any reasonably busy boiler factory in any moderately insalubrious zone of reconversion.

For instance, in the boiler factory he would not have been offered Little Neck clams to whet his appetite. But then, after succumbing to the temptation, he would not have been faced with a soup plate full of water enlivened with a few fragments of weary ice among which floated, half submerged, four im­mature bivalves which had long ago decided that the struggle for existence was not worth it. In the boiler factory, he would not have been able to order a rare filet mignon; but then, he would probably have had a real appreciation of the lunch in his plastic pail.

In the boiler factory there might have been a continual cacoph­ony of loud and nerve-racking noises; but it was very doubtful whether they could have achieved such pinnacles of excruciating ingenuity as were being scaled by the five frenetic sons of rhythm who were blowing and thumping their boogie-woogie beat on the orchestra dais. There might have been smoke and stench in the air; but they would have been relatively crisp and fresh compared with the peculiarly flat sickly staleness of the vapor­ized distillate of cigars, perfume, and sweat that flowed through the happy lungs of Cookie's clientele.

There might have been plenty of undecorative and even vicious men to look at; but they would not have been undeco­rative and vicious in the sleek snide soft way of the chair-polishing champions who had discovered that only suckers work. There might have been a notable dearth of beautiful women who wore too little, drank too much, and chattered too shrilly; and it would have been a damn good thing.

But Simon Templar, who was known as the Saint in sundry interesting records, sat there with the patience of a much more conventional sanctity, seeming completely untouched by the idea that a no-girl no-champagne customer taking up a strategic table all by himself in that jampacked bedlam might not be the management's conception of a heaven-sent ghost. . . .

'Will there be anything else, sir?' asked a melancholy waiter suggestively; and the Saint stretched his long elegantly tailored legs as best he could in the few square inches allotted to him.

'No,' he said. 'But leave me your address, and if there is I'll write you a postcard.'

The melancholy one flashed him a dark glance which sug­gested that his probable Sicilian ancestry was tempted to answer for him. But the same glance took in the supple width of the Saint's shoulders, and the rakish