The Saint Sees It Through

He nodded.

'It looks like three well-spent years.'

He felt at home there, and easily relaxed. Even the endless undertones of traffic were almost lost there, so that the city they had just left might have been a hundred miles away.

He strolled by the bookcase, scanning the titles. They were a patchwork mixture, ranging from The African Queen to The Wind in the Willows, from Robert Nathan to Emil Lud­wig, from Each to the Other to Innocent Merriment. But they made a pattern, and in a little while he found it.

He said: 'You like some nice reading.'

'I have to do something with my feeble brain every so often. I may be just another night-club singer, but I did go to Smith College and I did graduate from University of California, so I can't help it if I want to take my mind off creep joints some­times. It's really a great handicap.'

He smiled.

'I know what you mean.'

He prowled on, came to the piano, set his drink on it, and sat down. His fingers rippled over the keys, idly and aimlessly, and then crept into the refrain of September Song.

She sat on the couch, looking at him, with her own glass in her hand.

He finished abruptly, picked up his drink again, and crossed the room to sit down beside her.

'What do you know about Zellermann?' he asked.

'Nothing much. He's one of these Park Avenue medicine­men. I think he's supposed to be a refugee from Vienna—he got out just before the Nazis moved in. But he didn't lose much. As a matter of fact, he made quite a big hit around here. I haven't been to his office, but I'm told it looks like something off a Hollywood set. His appointment book looks like a page out of the Social Register, and there's a beautifully carved blonde nurse- receptionist who'd probably give most of his male patients a complex if they didn't have any to start with. He's got a private sanitarium in Connecticut, too, which is supposed to be quite a place. The inmates get rid of their inhibitions by doing exactly what they please and then paying for any special damage.'

'You mean if they have a secret craving to tear the clothes off a nurse or throw a plate of soup at a waiter, they can be accommodated—at a fancy tariff.'

'Something like that, I guess. Dr. Zellermann says that all mental troubles come from people being thwarted by some convention that doesn't agree with their particular personality. So the cure is to take the restriction away —like taking a tight shoe off a corn. He says that everyone ought to do just what their instincts and impulses tell them, and then everything would be lovely.

'I notice he wasn't repressing any of his impulses,' Simon remarked.

The girl shrugged.

'You're always meeting that sort of creep in this sort of business. I ought to have been able to handle him. But what the hell. It just wasn't my night to be tactful.'

'You'd met him before, of course.'

'Oh, yes. He's always hanging around the joint. Cookie introduced him the other night. He's one of her pets.'

'So I gathered. Is it Love, or is he treating her? I should think a little deep digging into her mind would really be something.'

'You said it, brother. I wouldn't want to go in there without an armored diving suit.'

He cocked a quiet eye at her.

'She's a bitch, isn't she?'

'She is.'

'Everybody's backslapper and good egg, with a heart of garbage and scrap iron.'

'That's about it. But people like her.'

'They would.' He sipped his drink. 'She gave me rather a funny feeling. It sounds so melodramatic, but she's the first woman I ever saw who made me feel that she was completely and frighteningly evil. It's a sort of psychic feeling, and I got it all by myself.'

'You're not kidding. She can be frightening.'

'I can see her carrying a whip in a white-slave trading post, or running a baby farm and strangling the little bastards and burying them in the back yard.'

Avalon laughed.

'You mightn't be so far wrong. She's been around town for years, but nobody seems to know much about her back­ground before that. She may have done all those things before she found a safer way of making the same money.'

Simon brooded for a little while.

'And yet,' he said, 'the waiter was telling me about all the public-spirited work she does for the sailors.'

'You mean Cookie's Canteen? . . . Yes, she makes great character with that.'

'Is it one of those Seamen's Missions?'

'No, it's all her own. She hands out coffee and coke and sandwiches, and there's a juke box and hostesses and enter­tainment.'

'You've been there, I suppose.'

'I've sung there two or three times. It's on Fiftieth Street near Ninth Avenue—not exactly a ritzy neighbourhood, but the boys go there.'

He put a frown and a smile together, and said: 'You mean she doesn't make anything out of it? Has she got a weakness for philanthropy between poisonings, or does it pay off in publicity, or does she just dote on those fine virile uninhibited sailor boys?'

'It could be all of those. Or perhaps she's got one last leathery little piece of conscience tucked away somewhere, and it takes care of that and makes her feel really fine. Or am I being a wee bit romantic? I don't know. And what's more, I don't have to care any more, thank God.'

'You're quite happy about it?'

'I'm happy anyway. I met you. Build me another drink.'

He took their glasses over to the side table where the supplies were, and poured and mixed. He felt more than ever that the evening had been illumined by a lucky star. He could put casual questions and be casually flippant about everything, but he had learned quite a lot in a few hours. And Cookie's Canteen loomed in his thoughts like a great big milestone. Before he was finished with it he would want more serious answers about that irreconcilable benevolence. He would know much more about it and it would have to make sense to him. And he had a soft and exciting feeling that he had already taken more than the first step on the unmarked trail that he was trying to find.

He brought the drinks back to the couch, and sat down again, taking his time over the finding and preparation of a cigarette.

'I'm still wondering,' she said, 'what anyone like you would be doing in a joint like that.'

'I have to see how the other half lives. I'd been out with some dull people, and I'd just gotten rid of them, and I felt like having a drink, and I happened to be passing by, so I just stopped in.'

None of it was true, but it was good enough.

'Then,' he said, 'I heard you sing.'

'How did you like it?'

'Very much.'

'I saw you before I went on,' she said. 'I was singing for you.'

He struck a match, and went on looking at her between glances at the flame and his kindling cigarette.

He said lightly: 'I never knew I was so fascinating.'

'I'm afraid you are. And I expect you've been told all about it before.'

'You wouldn't like me if you knew me.'

'Why not?'

'My glamour would dwindle. I brush my teeth just like anyone else; and sometimes I burp.'

'You haven't seen me without my make-up.'