The Saint Sees It Through

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 cer­tainly 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 ob­viously, 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 re­frained 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 per­sonal 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 Durer or Da Vinci. There was only one thing wrong with the Art of Ferdi­nand 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:

FLOWERS

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 des­tined to enter his life whether he wanted it or not.

He looked for Cookie again, remembering that he was not there for fun.

She was sitting at the piano now, thumping the keys almost inaudibly while she waited, for the informed applause to die away, with a broad and prodigiously hospitable smile on her large face.

She must have weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. The expansive grossness of her features was slightly minimised by a pompadoured convict coiffure which reduced the breadth of her face for as long as it lasted, but below that she was built like a corseted barrel. Her Brobdingnagian bosom bloused up from a skin of appalling sequins that shimmered down in recognisable ridges over the steatopygous scaffolding that encased her hips. As much as any other feature you noticed the hands that whacked uninhibitedly over the keyboard: large, splay-fingered, muscular, even with the incongruous vermilion lacquer on the nails they never looked like a woman's hands. They were the hands of a stevedore, a wrestler, or—for that matter—a strangler. They had a crude sexless power that nar­rowed down through the otherwise ludicrous excesses of her figure to give a sudden sharp and frightening meaning to the brash big-hearted bonhomie of her smile.

It was a strange and consciously exaggerated sensation that went through the Saint as he analysed her. He knew that some of it came from the electric contrast with the impression that Avalon Dexter had left on him. But he could make use of that unforeseen standard without letting it destroy his judgment, just as he could enlarge upon intuition only to see the details more clearly. He knew that there were not enough ingredients in the highballs he had drunk there to warp his intelligence, and he had never in his life been given to hysterical imaginings. And yet with complete dispassionate sanity, and no matter where it might go from there, he knew that for perhaps the first time in a life that had been crossed by many evil men he had seen a truly and eternally evil woman.

Just for a moment that feeling went over him like a dark wave; and then he was quite cool and detached again, watching her make a perfunctory adjustment to the microphone mounted in front of her.

'Hullo, everybody,' she said in a deep commanding voice. 'Sorry I'm late, but I've been taking care of some of our boys who don't get too much glory these days. I'm speaking of the plain ordinary heroes who man our merchant ships. They don't wear any brass buttons or gold braid, but war or no war they stay right on the job. The Merchant Navy!'

There was a clatter of approbation to show that the assembled revellers appreciated the Merchant Navy. It left no room for doubt that the hearts of Cookie's customers would always be in the right place, provided the place was far enough from the deck of an oil tanker to give them a nice perspective.

Cookie heaved herself up from the piano bench and pointed a dramatic finger across the room.

'And I want you to meet two of the finest men that ever sailed the seven seas,' she roared. 'Patrick Hogan and Axel Indermar. Take a bow, boys!'

The spotlight plastered two squirming youths at a side table, who scrambled awkwardly and unwillingly to their feet. Amid more spirited clapping, the spotlight switched back to Cookie as she sat down again and thumped out a few bars of Anchors Aweigh with a wide grin which charmingly deprecated her own share in bringing the convoy home.

'And now,' she said, with a cascade of arpeggios, 'as a tribute to our guests of honor, let's start with Testy Old William, the Nautical Man.'

Overlapping a loyal diminuendo of anticipatory sniggers and applause from the initiated, she broadened her big jolly smile and launched into her first number.