The Saint Sees It Through

The corridor outside was dim and lifeless; but as he stepped out into it the sea murmurs were left in the room behind him, and the other stirrings of sound that had crept through to him in there resolved themselves into their own individual pattern— a rumble and twitter of muffled voices and movement down­stairs. There was no movement that could be identified and no single word that could be picked out; but they had a pitch and a rhythm of deadly deliberation that spilled feathery icicles along his spine. He knew very well now why Avalon hadn't been able to sleep, and why she had come looking for Pat Hogan or Tom Simons or anyone else solid and ordinary and potentially safe and wholesome. As she had said, they weren't the sort of noises that people made if they were just trying to go on with a party. You couldn't put a finger on any one solitary thing about them; but if you had a certain kind of sensitivity, you knew . . . There was a quality of evil and terror that could set a pace and a key even in confused and distant mutterings.

It made the Saint feel strangely naked and ineffectual as he moved towards it, with the whirling but no longer dizzy hol­lowness left in his head by the drug, and the unaccustomed formality of his muscular co-ordinations, and the cold knowl­edge that he had nothing to fight with but his own uncertain strength and uprooted wits. But Patrick Hogan—or whatever his real name was—had exposed himself in just as lonely a way for the job that he had to do; and his gun couldn't have helped him much, or the sounds below would have been different. And other men on more obvious battlefronts had done what they could with what they had, because wars didn't wait.

He didn't feel particularly glorious or heroic about it: it was much more a coldly predestined task that had to be finished. It didn't seem to spread any emotion on the fact that it could easily and probably be his own finish too. It was just an automatic and irresistible mechanism of placing one foot in front of another on a necessary path from which there was no turning back, al­though the mind could sit away and watch its own housing walking voluntarily toward oblivion.

And this was it, and he was it, for one trivial tremendous moment, himself, personally—the corny outlaw who redeemed himself in the last reel.

It was quite funny, and a lot of fun, in the way he was think­ing.

He was moving like a cat, his ears travelling far ahead of his feet, and a new sound began to intrude upon them. A sound of voices. One voice detached itself from the two that were in converse, and a bell rang inside the Saint's head with brazen clangor.

It was the voice that had called Dr. Zellermann on the night the Saint had broken into the office.

And it was the voice of Ferdinand Pairfield.

Lightly and quickly, Simon pulled Avalon toward the closed door through which seeped the words of Dr. Zellermann and the fair Ferdinand.

'I won't do it,' Ferdinand said. 'That is your job, and you must complete it. You really must, Ernst.'

The Saint was shocked. This voice wasn't fluttery, seeming always ready to trail off into a graceful gesture. This voice was venomous, reminding one of a beautiful little coral snake, look­ing like a pretty bracelet, coiled to strike and inject the poison that is more deadly, drop by drop, than that of the King Cobra, Here was no witless fag with a penchant for Creme Violette; here was a creature who could command in terms of death.

The Saint's brain gave one last dizzy lurch, and then settled into a clear thin stratospheric stillness as the last disjointed fragments of the picture he had been working for fell into mesh. In some strange way that one incongruous touch had reconciled all other incongruities—the freakish fellowship of Dr. Zeller­mann with Cookie and Kay Natello, of all of them with Sam Jeffries and Joe Hyman, even the association with the lobster-eyed James Prather and the uninhibited Mrs. Gerald Meldon. His own mistake had been in accepting as merely another piece of the formula the one ingredient which was actually the cata­lyst for them all. It was a weird and yet strangely soothing sen­sation to realise at last, with the utter certainty of psychic con­firmation, that the man he had been looking for, the anchor thread of the whole fantastic web, was Mr. Ferdinand Pairfield.

3

Simon became aware of Avalon's fingers cramping on his arm, and knew that her perceptions were stumbling after his, less surely for one thing because she still lacked so much background that he had not been able to sketch for her, but following him more in mad surmise than with the integrated sureness that directed him.

He pressed his hand over hers and went on listening, as Pairfield said: 'It'd be dreadful to lose you, but of course you know how much the FBI would like to know the truth about why you became a refugee from Vienna. I've taken care of you all this time, but I can't go on doing it forever. If you let me down and anything happens—'

'I don't want to let you down, Ferdinand,' Zellermann said; and through all the measured confidence of his accents Simon had a vision of the smooth brow shining like damp ivory. 'But our methods are getting nowhere. I think he'll die before he tells us what he knows.'

'He'd better not,' Ferdinand said in the same deadly bell-like voice. 'I want all the information he has. And I shall not assist you. You know the sight of torture and pain sickens me. I should simply die.'

'You didn't seem particularly affected in the case of Foley.'

'Oh, but I was! When I stuck that knife in him, I almost fainted. It was thrilling! But that's another case in point. It should have been unnecessary for me to do it. You knew that he was toying with the idea of selling us out, and blackmailing us to boot. You should have handled it.'

The Saint could almost see Zellermann shrug.

'You won't come and help us?'

'I simply couldn't. Get down there again. I want that infor­mation immediately.'

Simon pulled Avalon away from the door, and they fled on cat feet down the corridor and stood very still pressed against the wall. Dr. Zellermann came out of Ferdinand's room and went downstairs without a glance in their direction.

Now the Saint had purpose. Each task in its turn, and the silencing of the golden boy was first. He strode to the door and flung it open. Ferdinand, clad in a pale cerise dressing gown, turned and saw the Saint.

He looked up casually and a little irritably, as if he only ex­pected to see Zellermann coming back with an afterthought excuse. When he saw the Saint, his expression remained out­wardly unchanged. His reaction came from deep under his skin, instead of being the muscular contortion of a moment's shock. It came out as a dew of sweat on his face that swelled into an established wetness; and only after that was established his pretty face went pinched and pallid with terror. He didn't have to say anything to make a complete confession that he was answering his own questions as fast as they could spiral through his reeling mind, and that he knew that the answers were all his own and there was nothing he could say to anyone else, anywhere. He wasn't the first dilettante in history who had been caught up with by the raw facts of life in the midst of all the daffodils and dancing; and he would not be the last.

The Saint felt almost sorry for him; but all the pity in the world didn't alter the absolute knowledge that Mr. Pairfield constituted a very real menace to the peace and quiet which Simon wanted for a few seconds more. Mr. Pairfield's eyes in­flated themselves like a pair of small blowfish at what they divined; his mouth dropped open, and his throat tightened in the preliminary formation of a scream. These were only the immediate reflex responses blossoming out of the trough of ter­ror that was already there, but they were no less urgent and dangerous for that. Something had to be done about them, and there was really only one thing to do.

Simon put out his left hand and grasped the lapels of Mr. Pairfield's dainty silk dressing-gown together, and drew him closer with a sympathetic smile.

'Ferdy,' he said, 'don't you know that it's time for all good little girls to be asleep?'

And with that his right fist rocketed up to impinge on Mr. Pairfield's aesthetic chin, and sleep duly followed. . . .

Simon slid an arm under him as he crumpled, and carried him back into the room and dumped him on the bed. It was a nice encouraging thing to discover and prove that he still had that much strength and vitality in him, even though he knew very well that the power and agility that were required to anes­thetise Ferdinand Pairfield would not necessarily be enough to cope with anyone who was at least averagely tough of mind and body. It made him feel a new sureness of himself and a new hope that slipped looseningly and warmingly into his limbs as he tore one of Cookie's fine percale sheets into wide ribbons to tie Ferdinand's wrists and ankles to the bed and then to stuff into his slackly open mouth and gag him.

He found himself working with the swift efficiency of second nature; and that was a good feeling too, to be aware of the old deftness and certainty flowing into his own movements with increasing ease all the time, and the gossamer bubble of his wakefulness holding and not breaking but growing more clear and durable with each passing minute..