The Saint Sees It Through

He inspected her again critically.

'I might survive it.'

'And I'm lazy and untidy and I have expensive tastes.'

'I,' he said, 'am not a respectable citizen. I shoot people and I open safes. I'm not popular. People send me bombs through the mail, and policemen are always looking for an excuse to arrest me. There isn't any peace and stability where I'm around.'

'I'm not so peaceful and stable myself,' she said seriously. 'But I saw you once, and I've never forgotten you. I've read . everything about you—as much as there is to read. I simply knew I was going to meet you one day, even if it took years and years. That's all. Well, now I've met you, and you're stuck with it.'

She could say things like that, in a way that nobody else could have said them and gotten away with it. The Saint had met most kinds of coquetry and invitation, and he had had to dodge the anthropophagous pursuit of a few hungry women; but this was none of those things. She looked him in the face when she said it, and she said it straight out as if it was the most natural thing to say because it was just the truth; but there was a little speck of laughter in each of her eyes at the same time, as if she wondered what he would think of it and didn't care very much what he thought.

He said: 'You're very frank.'

'You won't believe me,' she said, 'but I never told anyone anything like this before in my life. So if you think I'm com­pletely crazy you're probably right.'

He blew smoke slowly through his lips and gazed at her, smiling a little but not very much. It was rather nice to gaze at her like that, with the subdued lamplight on her bronze head, and feel that it was the most obvious and inescapable thing for them to be doing.

This was absurd, of course; but some absurdities were more sure than any commonplace probabilities.

He picked up his glass again. He had to say something, and he didn't know what it would be.

The door-bell beat him to it.

The shrill tinny sound ripped shockingly through his silence, but the lift of his brows was microscopic. And her answering grimace was just as slight.

'Excuse me,' she said.

She got up and went down the long hall corridor. He heard the door open, and heard a tuneless contralto voice that twanged like a flat guitar string.

'Hullo, darling!—oh, I'm so glad I didn't get you out of bed. Could I bring the body in for a second?'

There was the briefest flash of a pause, and Avalon said: 'Oh, sure.'

The door latched, and there was movement.

The raw clockspring voice said audibly: 'I'm not butting in, am I?'

Avalon said flatly: 'Of course not. Don't be silly.'

Then they were in the room.

The Saint unfolded himself off the couch.

'Mr. Templar,' Avalon said. 'Miss Natello. Simon—Kay.'

'How do you do,' said the Saint, for want of a better phrase.

'Come in, Kay,' Avalon said. 'Sit down and make yourself miserable. Have a drink? You know what this night life is like. The evening's only just started. What goes on in the big city?'

Her gay babble was just a little bit forced, and perhaps only the Saint's ears would have heard it.

Kay Natello stayed in the entrance, plucking her orange-painted mouth with the forefinger and thumb of one hand. Under her thick sprawling eyebrows, her haunted eyes stared at the Saint with thoughtful intensity.

'Mr. Templar,' she said. 'Yes, you were at Cookie's.'

'I was there,' said the Saint vaguely, 'for a while.'

'I saw you.'

'Quite a big night, wasn't it?' Avalon said. She sank back on to the settee. 'Come on in and have a drink and tell us your troubles. Simon, fix something for her.'

'I won't stay,' Kay Natello said. 'I didn't know you had company.'

She hauled her angular bony frame out of its lean-to position against the entrance arch as gauchely as she put her spoken sentences together.

'Don't be so ridiculous,' Avalon said. She was impatiently hospitable—or hospitably impatient. 'We were just talking. What did you come in for, if you didn't want to stay for a few minutes ?'

'I had a message for you,' Kay Natello said. 'If Mr. Templar would excuse us ... ?'

'If it's from Cookie, Mr. Templar was part of the ruckus, so it won't hurt him to hear it.'

The other woman went on pinching her lower lip with skeletal fingers. Her shadowed eyes went back to the Saint with completely measurable blankness, and back to Avalon again.

'All right,' she said. 'I didn't mean to crash in here at all, really, but Cookie made such a fuss about it. You know how she is. She was a bit tight, and she lost her temper. Now she's getting tighter because she shouldn't have. She'd like to forget the whole thing. If you could . . . sort of ... make it up with her . . .'

'If she feels like that,' Avalon said, with that paralysing smiling directness which was all her own, 'why didn't she come here herself?'

'She's too tight now. You know how she gets. But I know she's sorry.'

'Well, when she sobers up, she can call me. She knows where I live.'

'I know how you feel, darling. I only stopped in because she begged me to. ... I'll run along now.'

Avalon stood up again.

'Okay,' she said, with friendly exhaustion. 'I've taken a lot from Cookie before, but tonight was just too much—that's all. Why don't you beat some sense into her one of these times when she's receptive?'

'You know how she is,' Kay Natello said, in that metallic monotone. 'I'm sorry.'

She hitched her wrap up once again around her scrawny shoulders, and her hollow eyes took a last deliberate drag at the Saint.

'Goodnight, Mr. Templar,' she said. 'It was nice meeting you.'

'It was nice meeting you,' Simon replied, with the utmost politeness.

He crossed to the side table again and half refilled his glass while he was left alone, and turned back to meet Avalon Dex­ter as the outer door closed and her skirts swished through the entrance of the room again.

'Well?' She was smiling at him, as he was convinced now that nobody else could smile. 'How do you like that?'

'I don't,' he said soberly.

'Oh, she's as whacky as the rest of Cookie's clique,' she said carelessly. 'Don't pay any attention to her. It's just like Cookie to try and send an ambassador to do her apologising for her. It'd hurt too much if she ever had to do it herself. But just this once I'm not going to——'

'I'm afraid you've missed something,' Simon said, still soberly, and perhaps more deliberately. 'Natello didn't come here to deliver Cookie's apologies. I've got to tell you that.'

Avalon Dexter carried her glass over to the side table.

'Well, what did she come for?'

'You went out with a beautiful exit line. Only it was just too good. That's why Cookie is so unhappy now. And that's why she had Natello drop in. To find out what kind of a hook-up there might be between us. It happens that there wasn't any.' The Saint put his glass transiently to his mouth. 'But that isn't what Natello found out.'

The break in her movements might have been no more than an absent-minded search for the right bottle.

'So what?' she asked.

'So I honestly didn't mean to involve you with anything,' he said.

She completed the reconstruction of a highball without any other hesitation; but when she turned to him again with the drink in her hand, the warm brown eyes with the flecks of laughter in them were as straight as he had always seen them.

'Then,' she said, 'you didn't just happen to be at Cookie's tonight by accident.'

'Maybe not,' he said.

'For Heaven's sake, sit down,' she said. 'What is this—a jitterbug contest? You and Kay ought to get