The Saint Sees It Through

'So do I. I dreamed about you, too.'

'No,' he said. 'We were both dreaming.'

'I'd still like to go back to sleep. But creeps keep calling me up.'

'Like Zellermann, for instance?'

'Yes. Did he call you?'

'Sure. Very apologetic. He wants me to have lunch with him.'

'He wants us to have lunch with him.'

'On those terms, I'll play.'

'So will I. But then, why do we have to have him along?'

'Because he might pick up the check.'

'You're ridiculous,' she said.

He heard her yawn. She sounded very snug. He could almost see her long hair spread out on the pillow.

'I'll buy you a cocktail in a few hours,' he said, 'and prove it.'

'I love you,' she said.

'But I wasn't fooling about anything else I said last night. Don't accept any other invitations. Don't go to any strange places. Don't believe anything you're told. After you got your­self thought about with me last night, anything could happen. So please be careful.'

'I will.'

'I'll call you back.'

'If you don't,' she said, 'I'll haunt you.'

He hung up.

But it had happened. And the dream was real, and it~was all true, and it was good that way. He worked with his cigarette for a while.

Then he took the telephone again, and called room service. He ordered corned beef hash and eggs, toast and marmalade and coffee. He felt good. Then he revived the operator and said: 'After that you can get me a call to Washington. Impera­tive five, five hundred. Extension five. Take your time.'

He was towelling himself after a swift stinging shower when the bell rang.

'Hamilton,' said the receiver dryly. 'I hope you aren't getting me up.'

'This was your idea,' said the Saint. 'I have cased the joint, as we used to say in the soap operas. I have inspected your creeps. I'm busy.'

'What else?'

'I met the most wonderful girl in the world.'

'You do that every week.'

'This is a different week.'

'This is a priority, line. You can tell me about your love life in a letter.'

'Her name is Avalon Dexter, and she's in the directory. She's a singer, and until the small hours of this morning she was working for Cookie.'

'Which side is she on?'

'I only just met her,' said the Saint, with unreal imper­sonality. 'But they saw her with me. Will you remember that, if anything funny happens to me—or to her ? . . . I met Zeller­mann, too. Rather violently, I'm afraid. But he's a sweet and forgiving soul. He wants to buy me a lunch.'

'What did you buy last night?' Hamilton asked suspiciously.

'You'll see it on my expense account—I don't think it'll mean raising the income tax rate more than five per cent,' said the Saint, and hung up.

He ate his brunch at leisure, and saved his coffee to go with a definitive cigarette.

He had a lot of things to think about, and he only began trying to co-ordinate them when the coffee was clean and nutty on his palate, and the smoke was crisp on his tongue and drift­ing in aromatic clouds before his face.

Now there was Cookie's Canteen to think about. And that might be something else again.

Now the dreaming was over, and this was another day.

He went to the closet, hauled out a suitcase, and threw it on the bed. Out of the suitcase he took a bulging briefcase. The briefcase was a particularly distinguished piece of luggage, for into its contents had gone an amount of ingenuity, cor­ruption, deception, seduction, and simple larceny which in itself could have supplied the backgrounds for a couple of dozen stories.

Within its hand-sewn compartments was a collection of docu­ments in blank which represented the cream of many years of research. On its selection of letterheads could be written letters purporting to emanate from almost any institution be­tween the Dozey Dairy Company of Kansas City and the Dominican Embassy in Ankara. An assortment of visiting cards in two or three crowded pockets was prepared to identify anybody from the Mayor of Jericho to Sam Schiletti, outside plumbing contractor, of Exterior Falls, Oregon. There were passports with the watermarks of a dozen governments—driv­ing licenses, pilot's licences, ration books, credit cards, birth certificates, warrants, identification cards, passes, permits, memberships, and authorisations enough to establish anyone in any role from a Bulgarian tight-rope walker to a wholesale fish merchant from Grimsby. And along with them there was a unique symposium of portraits of the Saint, flattering and unflattering, striking and nondescript, natural and disguised— together with a miscellany of stamps, seals, dies, and stickers which any properly conditioned bureaucrat would have drooled with ecstasy to behold. It was an outfit that would have been worth a fortune to any modern brigand, and it had been worth exactly that much to the Saint before.

He sat down at the desk and worked for an unhurried hour, at the end of which time he had all the necessary documents to authenticate an entirely imaginary seaman by the name of Tom Simons, of the British Merchant Marine. He folded and refolded them several times, rubbed the edges with a nail file, smeared them with cigarette ash, sprinkled them with water and a couple of drops of coffee, and walked over them several times until they were convincingly soiled and worn.

Then he finished dressing and went out. He took a Fifth Avenue bus to Washington Square, and walked from there down through the gray shabby streets of the lower east side until he found the kind of store he was looking for.

He couldn't help the natural elegance of his normal appear­ance, but the proprietor eyed him curiously when he announced himself as a buyer and not a seller.

'I've got a character part in a play,' he explained, 'and this was the only way I could think of to get the right kind of clothes.'

That story increased his expenses by at least a hundred per cent; but he came out at the end of an hour with an untidy parcel containing a complete outfit of well-worn apparel that would establish the character of Tom Simons against any kind of scrutiny.

He took a taxi back to the Algonquin.

There were two telephone messages.

Miss Dexter phoned, and would call again about seven o'clock.

Miss Natello phoned.

Simon arched his brows over the second message, and smiled a little thinly before he tore it up. The ungodly were certainly working. Fundamentally he didn't mind that, but the per­sistence of the coverage took up the slack in his nerves. And it wasn't because he was thinking about himself.

He called Avalon's number, but there was no answer.

There are meaningless gulfs of time in real life which never occur in well-constructed stories—hours in which nothing is happening, nothing is about to happen, nothing is likely to happen, and nothing does happen. The difference is that in a story they can be so brightly and lightly skimmed over, simply by starting a fresh paragraph with some such inspired sentence as 'Simon Templar went downstairs again for a drink, and Wolcott Gibbs waved to him across the lobby, and they spent a couple of congenial hours lamenting the sad standards of the current season on Broadway.'

Simon Templar went downstairs again for a drink, and Wolcott Gibbs waved to him across the lobby, and they spent a couple of congenial hours lamenting the sad standards of the current season on Broadway; and all the time Simon was watch­ing the clock and wondering what held back the hands. •

It was fifteen hours, or minutes, after seven when the call came.