The Saint Sees It Through

'I'd like to come back,' he told Prather at the door.

Prather nodded nervously, watched the Saint and Avalon walk toward the elevator for a few feet, then almost slammed the door. Simon pushed the elevator button, and just before the door opened, planted a swift kiss on her startled but quickly responsive mouth.

'Wait for me in the lobby, darling,' he whispered, and hand­ed her inside the car.

He took up a post of observation further down the hall, so that the elevator door was halfway between him and Prather's door. He suspected he would not have long to wait before something happened. What that something might be, he was unable to predict.

He thought of the false trails he had run down before he began to sniff around Cookie's Cellar. He wondered if this would turn out to be another. Each of his previous attempts to locate the object of his search had uncovered one or more nests of illegality.

One had led him to a sort of warehouse, a huge structure where vast numbers of bottles of bona fide liquors were made less intoxicating by the simple addition of faintly colored dis­tilled water. All very healthful, no doubt, and tending to reduce the incidence of drunkenness among habitues of clip clubs like Cookie's—where, incidentally, one of the delivery trucks had led him. This wholesale watering of drinks had another human­itarian aspect: it saved work for the bartenders. Still, when he remembered the quality of Cookie's drinks, the Saint concluded that she and/or her bartenders had initiative along that same line. The Saint felt that there was room for reasonable doubt that the reduction of the alcoholic potency of the drinks stemmed from compassionate motives, cynical though that con­clusion might be.

Another trail had dragged across it a herring that had turned out to be the numbers racket. During his brief examination of exponents of mathematical larceny, he had been led again, by one of the collectors, to Cookie's.

He had run down a couple of false leads that led nowhere except to the decision that this was a Mecca for the chiseller, and that some of almost everybody's best friends are petty crooks at bottom.

The Saint was looking for bigger game. Perhaps the rising elevator would bring some.

It regurgitated two young men who were beyond doubt fresh in from the sea. They wore shore clothes, but the sea was in their tanned faces, their hard hands, and the set of their legs, braced automatically for the roll of a deck. The Saint couldn't see their eyes in the hall's gloom, but he knew they would have the characteristic look of those who gaze habitually on circular horizons.

They walked without speaking to James Prather's door, thumbed the button, were admitted. The Saint moved catlike to the door, but listening brought nothing. The door was heavy, the walls designed to give privacy to the occupant. Simon sighed, summoned the elevator, and joined Avalon, who was sitting in one of those chairs that clutter the lobbies of apartment houses and gazing at the uninspiring wallpaper with a forlorn expres­sion.

'I beg your pardon, Miss,' he said, 'but I was attracted by your beauty, and can't help asking you a question. I am a rep­resentative of Grimes Graphite, Inc—'Grimes' gets the grime,' you know—and felt certain that you must use it. Is that what makes your skin glow so?'

'My mother before me, and her mother before her, rubbed their faces each night with Grimes's graphite. But I don't use it myself. I loathe it.'

'That is hardly the point at issue, is it? We can use that line about your maternal progenitors, run a photo of yourself—do you ski?—no matter, we can fix that. And we might even be persuaded to raise the ante.'

'You twisted my bankbook,' Avalon said. 'I'm your gal.'

'Really?'

She smiled. 'Really.'

They looked at each other for a long moment, until several persons came through the front door in a group, of which the male members stared at Avalon with very obvious admiration. The Saint took her outside.

'An idea has slugged me,' he said, 'and I don't want you to be seen talking to me until we're ready. I just hope our sailor boys give me a couple of minutes to tell you.'

'What are you talking about?' she demanded as he hailed a passing taxi.

He helped her in.

'Wait,' he told the driver, and closed the glass panel separat­ing the production end of the cab from the payload.

'I have a faint hunch,' he told Avalon in a low voice. 'Two young men will presently issue from that door. Possibly you saw them come in. Tanned, one in a freshly-pressed gray suit, the other in blue? Did they notice you?'

'Looked right through me.'

'Don't be bitter, darling. They had big things on their minds. On their way down, they'll be free of care and ready to paint the town. On the way down, they'll remember you, and would be anxious to spend their newly- acquired wealth on you.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

By not so much as the twitch of a nerve end did the Saint re­veal his thoughts. He had not talked too much; he never talked too much. But if Avalon were among the Ungodly—and his every red corpuscle stood up on its hind feet and howled at the thought—she would know whether he was breathing hard on the heels of truth or not. Her knowledge would then be com­municated to the Boys Above.

He hoped, and was not prepared to admit even to himself how much he hoped, that his shadowy objectivity had no foun­dation in fact. But in his unorthodox plan of maneuvering, a failure to appraise situations and people with a fishy eye often led to the filling of mourners' benches. He'd helped to fill a few himself in his day.

And so the smile he gave Avalon was gay as confetti on New Year's Eve.

'I'm not so sure, old thing, that I myself know what I'm talking about. But if I do, those boys will come out of there with one single first desire: transportation to celebration. And I'd rather they kept greedy eyes off our cab.' He opened the glass panel. 'Pull up to the corner and wait,' he told the driver.

With one of those lightning decisions that was the despair of his enemies and the envy of his friends, Simon Templar reor­ganised his offense. He wanted to talk to those two young men who had gone a-knocking at James Prather's door, but he didn't want them to know that he wanted to talk to them.

He looked gravely at Avalon.

'Will you do something for me?'

'I'll make a cake or slice a throat,' she said softly. 'Or cross Fortysecond and Broadway against the traffic light at Saturday noon.'

'This is an even greater sacrifice,' he said mockingly. 'I want you to go back into that apartment house and do some lobbyloitering.'

Avalon didn't frown, didn't raise her eyebrows. She meditated for the space of ten seconds. Then she raised her eyes to his.

'I get the pitch, except for one thing. Who are you?'

'Your agent, of course.'

'Of course. So I manage to be seen when they come down, and will be here at the curb with them when you drive up. I'll be telling them I can't go with them, but you'll allow me to be persuaded, provided you come along. Then we all go off in your cab.' She gave him a quick kiss. 'I should fall for a ten per­center yet. Everything happens to me.'

She was out and clicking along the sidewalk on slim heels. The Saint watched her for a moment and wondered. What a partner she would make! She had divined his scheme of action, and with no prompting. She had known, without words, what his plan was. All he had had to do was sketch the bare outlines, and she had filled in the details.

'Drive around the block,' he told the driver.

It was on the third circumnavigation that the Saint saw Avalon and the two seamen at the curb in front of the apart­ment house. He amused himself with the idea that these were the only live persons he had seen on his rounds: all others had been members of the Bronx nobility walking their dogs.

'Stop there,' he commanded, and the cab driver drew up with a satisfying squeal of rubber.

'Darling,' the Saint said to Avalon, 'I was afraid you'd have gone. I'm horribly late.'

'Aren't you, just?' she said. 'I was about to take off. Well, since you're here——By the way, these are Joe Hyman and Sam Jeffries. Joe is the one with the glint.'