The Saint Sees It Through

He finished, and then made a quick search of the room and the person of his test specimen, looking for one thing only; but it seemed that Mr. Pairfield's wanderings into wickedness hadn't taken the course of acquiring any of the useful armaments of evil. No doubt he was glad to delegate all such crudities to underlings. The Saint ended his brief quest still weaponless; yet he gave it up with a glance at Avalon that had all the carefree lights of supreme laughter in its blue brilliance.

'Knock 'em off one by one,' he remarked—'as the bishop said as he surveyed the new line-up of thespian talent at the Follies. That's our motto. Shall we move on to the next experi­ment?'

Their hands touched momentarily; and then he was out of the room and on his way down the stairs.

On his way, with the new chill ugly knowledge that the palpitating fright of Ferdinand Pairfield could only have been germinated by something that had been there in that house before any board creaked and Pairfield had thrown his door open and seen the Saint. And that that something, whatever form it took, could only be deadly for the federal man who had called himself Patrick Hogan—if it hadn't been conclusively deadly already.

Or if simple death might not be much better than what could be going on.

Simon was at the foot of the stairs, in the hall, with the front door only a few steps away; and Avalon was still close beside him. Escape would have been easy for them. But he knew with­out even wordless asking that neither of them had thought of that. Her eyes were steady and quiet and only inquiring as they met his again. The sounds that came through the solid closed door of the living-room were strangely distorted and dreadful in their muffled distortion.

The Saint saw her throat move as she listened and looked at him; but her gaze was only waiting, always.

Their hands met and held that time, for an instant; and some­thing quirked over his lips that could have been a smile, but wasn't. Then he left her.

He didn't go to the living-room door, but vanished the other way, towards the kitchen.

In a few seconds more he was back, and he brought with him a stag-handled carving knife. The blade was strong and gleaming, and he tested it with his thumb before he slid it up his left sleeve and held it there with the pressure of a bent elbow against the flat of the blade.

His lips almost touched her ear, and he spoke in a voice that was only the echo of a whisper.

'Get on your horse, darling,' he said. 'Sneak out of here and grab one of the cars outside while I keep 'em busy. Drive into town and recruit some large healthy cops. Bring 'em back just as fast as you can. And have breakfast with me.'

She only shook her head. Her long hair brushed his mouth.

He couldn't argue with her there.

He left her and hoped that she would go, and knew that she wouldn't. He was glad and yet bitter about that; but it was a confusion of things that he could only take as they broke over him and save to be struggled with some other time.

He had to end this other thing first, no matter how.

He went to the door that the sounds came through, and stopped to put an eye to the keyhole for a second's preview of what he had to walk into. And it was curious that while his face turned to stone his only detached mental reaction was that it was merely exactly what he had imagined in a distant nightmare of unbearable understanding. He had that unreal sensation of being a long way off from all of it, away somewhere, even while the nerve endings curdled under his skin and he began to move under an impetus that was altogether instinctive and altogether quixotic and absurd.

Even while he heard the air-conditioned voice of Dr. Ernst Zellermann, cool and persuasive like the voice of a society psychoanalyst in a darkened consulting-room, the only distinct articulate sound that Re caught and held afterwards, saying: 'Why not be reasonable, Patrick, and get it into your head that I must go on until you tell me exactly how much you've been able to accomplish with your masquerade?'

The keyhole glimpse wiped out into a full picture as Simon opened the door.

It was something that would haunt him all his life, something that belonged in a Grand Guignol school of outlandish horror, that was so much worse because the mind had heard all about it long ago and long ago dismissed it as a ghoulish fantasy. Now it was real after all, and the reality had a chill intellectual impact that was capable of leaving scars on the memory of even such a man as the Saint, who thought he had already seen most variations of what there was to be seen in the pathology of macabre dreadfulness.

The figure of Dr. Zellermann, standing poised and cool with his smooth silver locks and fine ascetic profile and a long cigarette clipped in his sensitive fingers and treasuring half an inch of unshaken ash, was a stock item in its way. So was the figure of Patrick Hogan, bound hand and foot in a chair, with the sweat of agony running down into his eyes and the lower half of his face covered with the gag through which some of those horrible formless strangled sounds had come. It was the two women squatting beside him, Cookie with her crude bloated face no longer wearing its artificial smile, and Natello with the sallow skin stretched tight over the bones of her skull and her haggard eyes smouldering with a light of weird absorption. The women, and what they were doing. . . .

And this was the reality of half-remembered legend-histories of Messalina, of tales of the Touareg women commissioned to the ritual torture of their captives, of witches out of a dim uni­versal folklore bent to the consummation of some black sacra­ment of pain. This was what gave a sudden dimension and articulation to his ambiguous impressions of Cookie and Natello, just as in their separate ways the performance seemed to breathe blood and life into them, hardening and enrooting the slobbish grossness of Cookie and illuminating Natello's starved ethereal gawkiness—even throwing a pale reflection of its hot heathen glow on Zellermann's satanically connoisseurish frigidity. This, that somehow crystallised and focused all the twisted negations and perversions that were inherent in the philosophy they served. This new scientific and persuasive barbarism, aptly and symbolically framed in the gleaming chrome-plated jungle of a Pairfield-decorated parlour. . . .

But for Simon Templar it was a symbol too; and more than that it was a trial and evidence and verdict, and a sentence that only waited for an execution that would be a pride and a clean pleasure to remember with the ugliness that began it.

He walked into the room empty-handed, with the carving knife in his sleeve held by the pressure of his bent left arm.

Zellermann held his cigarette with the ash unbroken in his left hand, and his right hand dropped into the side pocket of his beautifully tailored coat. Aside from the lightning switch of his bleached gray eyes, that was his only movement. But it was quite adequate for what it meant.

The Saint didn't even seem to. notice it.

He was Tom Simons again, perfectly and entirely, for the few steps that he had to take. They seemed to stretch out for an infinity of distance and an eternity of time; but no one who watched him could have seen how every cell and fibre of him was wrung out in the achievement of that convincing uncon­sciousness of their importance. He lurched quite clumsily in his walk, and his stare trying to hold Zellermann was blank and glazed— and those were the easiest tricks in his act.

' 'Ullo, Doc,' he mouthed. 'Wot abaht one fer the road?'

He was in a dream where every second seemed to take a week to crawl by, and you could stop overnight to analyse every inching flicker of event.

He saw Zellermann relax fractionally, even embark on the mental prologue to an elaborate clinical evaluation of drug reactions. He saw Cookie and Kay Natello rising and turning towards him with a mixture of uncertainty and fear and hope. He saw everything, without looking directly at any of it.

'You must be made out of iron, Tom,' Zellermann said admiringly, and as if he had learned the formula from a book. 'You just about put us all under the table. We were going to bed.'

The Saint staggered closer to him.

'I bin to bed once,' he said. 'But I'm thirsty. Honester­gawd. Coudden I 'ave just one more drop before closing time?'

Then his wandering gaze seemed to catch sight of Hogan for the first time.

'Swelp me,' he said, 'that's 'im! The bugger 'oo 'it me! All tied up shipshake so 'e 'as ter be'yve. Just lemme 'ave one crack at' im—'

'Patrick just had too much to drink,' Zellermann said. 'We're trying to get him to bed . . .'

He actually moved closer, suavely and with almost contemptu­ous skill, interposing himself between Simon and the uglier details of his specialized treatment for intoxication.