The Saint Sees it Through

1

He woke up in a very gradual and laborious way that was like dragging his mind out of a quagmire, so that although he knew in advance that he had been knocked out there was a lot of other history to struggle through before he got to thinking about that. He remembered everything that he had been through since the beginning of the story — Cookie's Cellar and Sutton Place South, the Algonquin and a cheap secondhand clothing store, Cookie's Canteen and a drive out to Southampton. He remembered people — Cookie, Natello, Pairfield, a melancholy waiter, even Wolcott Gibbs. And a girl called Avalon. And a hostess in Cookie's Canteen, and Patrick Hogan who had so much breezy fun and carried a gun on his hip — and who had Socked him. And Dr. Ernst Zellermann with his clean white hair and ascetic features and persuasive voice, betraying himself with his long ponderous words and the incurable cumbersome Teutonic groping for far-fetched philosophical generalisations which belonged so obviously in a germanic institute of Geopolitik. Zellermann, who was a phony refugee and a genuine master of the most painstakingly efficient technique that the same germanic thoroughness had ever evolved. Zellermann, who was the prime reason why the Saint had ever entered that circle at all...

That was how Simon had to build it back, filling in the certainties where there had been questions before, in a dull plodding climb out of the fog.

He didn't open his eyes at once because there was a sort of ache between his temples which made him screw up his brows in protest, or as a counter-irritant; and that made opening the eyes an independent operation to be plotted and toiled over. It came to him out of this that he had been knocked out before, seldom with a bare fist, but several times with divers blunt instruments; but the return to consciousness had never been so lagging and sluggish as this. He had been drugged before, and this was more like that.

After that stage, and deriving from it, there was a period of great quiet, in which he reviewed other things. He tested his sensations for the drag or the pressure of a gun anywhere on him, and remembered that he had held so strictly to his created character that he had set out unarmed. Still without moving, he let his skin give him tactile confirmation of the clothes in which he had left the Algonquin. The only doubt he had about his make-up concerned the gray of his hair and eyebrows, which was provided by talcum powder and could have been brushed out. His face coloring was a dye and not a grease paint, and his straggly moustache had been put on hair by hair with waterproof gum — both of them were secure against ordinary risks.

Then after a while he knew why he was thinking along these lines. Because somebody was washing his face. Or dabbing it with a cold wet cloth. Somebody was also shaking him by the shoulder and calling a name that he knew perfectly well.

"Tom!... Tom!"

A curiously low voice, for anyone who was trying to call him. But a voice that he knew, too. And a faint fragrance in the air that had been in his nostrils before, some other time when he had heard the voice.

He decided to try opening his eyes, and finally he made it. But there was no difference. Only blackness swimming around him. And he knew that his eyes were open.

He wondered whether he had gone blind.

His head hurt very much, and the shaking at his shoulder made him dizzy. He wished it would all go away.

"Tom! Wake up!"

A voice that filled out words like a cello; a voice and a fragrance that would be in his memory always.

"Avalon darling," he murmured sleepily, "I love you very much, but can't you do anything about your insomnia?"

Then everything was utterly still, except for the far faint lulling whisper of the sea.

It seemed like a good time to go to sleep again.

Then there was a face soft against his cheek, moving; and a dampness that was not the wet cloth, but warmer; and the fragrance sweeter and stronger in his senses; and arms and hands clinging and pressing; and the same voice talking and making sounds that merged with the slow soft roll of the sea, and breaking strangely where there were no waves breaking, and speaking and stirring, and this was something that happened a million years ago but had only been waiting a million years to happen, and he had to do something about it even if it meant smashing his way out of an iron vise that was holding him in that absurd and intolerable suspension, and there was the sweetness and the voice saying: "Simon, darling... Oh, darling, my darling... Simon, wake up, Simon!"

And the voice saying: "I didn't know — I'm such a dope, but I should have... Simon, darling, wake up!... Simon, wake up..."

And then he was awake.

A moment of clarity drifted towards him like a child's balloon, and he caught it and held on to it and everything was quite clear again while he held it.

He said very carefully: "Avalon, I left a message for you that I'd see you tomorrow. Well, this is tomorrow. Only I can't see you. That's silly, isn't it?"

She said: "I had to put the light out again because I didn't want it to show under the door... Simon, dear, wake up! Don't go to sleep again!"

He said: "Why did you come here anyway?"

"Because that creep I was with knew Cookie, and she'd apologised, and she was being as nice as she can be, and I have to work and Hollywood came into the picture, and it seemed like the only graceful thing to do, and I can't fight the whole night club racket, and... Simon, you must stay awake!"

"I am awake," he said. "Tell me what happened."

"After Pat hit you, Cookie said that it wasn't your fault that Ferdy went after him — he went by himself, or she sent him, or something. And he was broken-hearted. So we all put you to bed, and everything broke up. Zellermann said that you'd sleep it off—"

"I bet he did. But I never had to sleep off a crack on the jaw before."

"Pat's a strong guy. He carried you upstairs all by himself."

"I've been slugged by strong guys before. Believe it or not. But it never felt like this afterwards. I feel as if I'd been drugged."

"You could have been. You were drinking."

"I was cheat-drinking. I poured the last one myself. But Zellermann could have slipped something into my glass."

"I suppose he could have, in the commotion... Stay awake, Simon. You must!"

"I'm still awake. That's how I know. If I'd had it all, you wouldn't have been able to rouse me now. Hogan stopped that by slugging me. But Zellermann still thought I'd sleep it off. I would have, too, if you hadn't worked on me."

"Simon, are you making sense now?"

"I'm- doing everything in the wide world I can." It was still an unforgettable effort to speak concisely and intelligibly. "Give me a chance, baby. I'm working at it. I never was drunk tonight. I sound like it now, but I wasn't."

She was close to him and holding him, her face against his, as if she was trying to transmit her life and wakefulness to him from every inch of her body.

It seemed like a long time; and through all of it he was working through fluctuating waves of awareness to cling on to the wandering balloon that was his only actual link to this other world that he had to keep touch with against all the cruel violation of a dream and the fumes of a drug that kept creeping back to try and steal away his will.

She said after a few seconds or a thousand years: "Darling, you shouldn't have dressed up with that moustache." He knew that he had to shut out the note in her voice that hung between a sob and a hysterical giggle. "It tickles," she said.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Remind me to get rid of it. Any time when I know what I'm doing."

She roused up beside him.

"Darling, you won't go off again now, will you?"

"No." He rolled over and rolled up. The movement sent his head whirling away from his body on a weird trajectory that revolted his stomach. He caught it somehow as it came back, and held it firmly in his hands. He said meticulously: "Look. You were dabbing my face with a wet cloth when I came to. You got the wet cloth from somewhere. Where?"

"There's a bathroom. Here."

Her fingers slid into his hand. He went stumbling through the dark where she led him, as if his limbs didn't belong to him any more.

Then he was alone for a while.

A while during which he used every trick and help that his experience could lend to him. Plus an overdose of aspirin from a bottle which he found in a cabinet over the washbowl.

Plus an effort of will that tore every nerve in his body to shreds and put it painstakingly together again. He never quite knew how he accomplished that. Part of it came from the native resilience of a perfect physique in pluperfect condition, the inestimable reserves of a phenomenal athlete who hadn't been out of training for sixteen years. Part of it came from an unconquerable power of mind that would have torn every cell of its habitation apart and remodelled it to achieve the resuscitation that had to be achieved. The Saint didn't know, and had no sort of inward power to waste on analysing it. He only knew that it took every atom of inward power that he could gouge out of himself, and left him feeling as if he had been drawn through a steam wringer at the end. But he had done what he had set himself to do; and he knew that also.

He didn't even know how long it took; but he knew he had done it when he was finished.

He knew it when he turned out the light in the bathroom and ventured back into the dark to find Avalon, feeling strangely light and vacuous in his bones, but with his mind queerly cool and alive, as if the discipline had purged and polished it to stratospheric limpidity and translucence.

He knew it when she was still waiting for him, and their hands met in the blackness that was not blind any more, and they sat side by side on the edge of a bed, and he could touch the warmth of her hair and say: "It's okay now, Avalon. Honestly. Everything's under control. Now tell me—"

"How did you do it?" she asked, huskily, and close to him, but not leaning on him. "Why were you putting on the act, and what are you doing here?"

"I bought myself a costume and some war-paint," he said lightly, "and here I am, because I was invited. The important thing is — what were you doing, trying to wake me up in the middle of the night?"

"I was afraid," she said, very quietly now.

He could feel the tenseness of her like a strung wire beside him; but he said nothing, keeping her hand steadily in his hand and his shoulder lightly against hers, until she went on.

"I told you why I came here."

"I remember."

"I had a scare when I saw Zellermann. Nobody had said anything about him, which they could hardly have helped doing unless they were holding out on purpose. But I didn't want to be silly, so I just tried to pass it off. You heard me. And I thought, Ferdy didn't count at all, and you and Pat were two outside guys who couldn't have been mixed up in anything, and nothing much could happen while you were around. But I was scared, in a silly way, inside. And then, when Pat picked on you for no reason at all, it all came up again."

"I know," said the Saint. "And then?"

"Then I just tried to talk myself out of it, but I didn't get very far with that. But us Dexters never know when to say Uncle... So then I went to bed when everybody else did, when Pat had broken everything up anyway. I thought I could go to sleep and forget it; but I couldn't... I just lay awake and listened... And nobody else seemed to go to bed. Nobody tried to open my door, which I'd locked, being a bright girl; but every time I was nearly asleep I could hear people creeping about and muttering. And it never sounded like the sort of noises they'd make if they were just trying to go on with a party. And I went on being afraid all the time. I'm a very imaginative character, don't you think?"

"No," he said. "Not any more than you should be."

"So finally I thought I just had to talk to somebody safe and ordinary again, and I thought you and Pat were the best bet there was. I didn't know what on earth I'd have said to you when I got here, but I'd have thought of something. I always can, being an old hardened expert... But when I crept in here, and had the light on for a moment, and Pat hadn't been to bed at all, and you seemed to be out for keeps as Zellermann said you would be — I suppose I had a moment of panic. So... Simon, will you forget me being so stupid? I'm not usually like this. But it's sort of ridiculous, after everything that's gone on, for this to be you."

The Saint seemed to have arms vaguely attached to his body, one of them pressing her against him and the other lying across his lap and becoming conscious of something sharp-edged and metallic in his pocket — something that was definably not small change creased into a fold of his trousers. Something that bothered his forearm and his thigh together, so that he put his hand into his pocket to fumble and identify it, while he was talking... He still had to cling on to every item of his hard-won clarity, inch upon inch.

He said: "Avalon, I've got to tell you two or three things as sharply as I can make it. I'll fill in the details later, when we have time. If we have time. But probably you can do that for yourself anyway."

She said: "Yes, darling."

"If you can't, you'll have to take my word for it. We're right in the middle of a situation where human life is cheaper than the air. I'm going to try to make sense, and I want you to listen closely. I'm sure I can't do it twice."

"I won't interrupt," she said.

The Saint fastened his mind on what he wanted to say. He forced himself with tremendous effort to expand the phrase "Benny sent me" into a broad picture.

"The relationship between 903 Bubbling Well Road in Shanghai and Dean's Dock and Warehouse Company in Brooklyn is not apparent on any map. But it's there. I know it. I came along on this clambake to snap the cord that ties those two locations together. This joint is where one end of it is anchored. You've got to see the theory before you can understand the problem."

He rested for a moment. It was still harder than he would have believed to marshal his thoughts.

"Once there was a man who got an idea. For the sake of convenience let's call him Dr. Ernst Zellermann, though it may be somebody else. His idea was utterly simple: If you can supply a man with narcotics you can make him into a tool. The war shot the dope-smuggling racket into its proper hell, but revival on a large scale was forecast when Hiroshima became a subject for history books. And that's where 903 Bubbling Well Road entered the picture."

He paused again.

"Let's assume that some person or persons glaumed on to the bulk of available opium in the Orient. Collaborationists, almost certainly. They established a headquarters, stored their supplies, and awaited the inevitable ending of hostilities. They knew that merchant ships would soon be coming, and that many of these ships would have touched at New York. So Dr. Z collects a pal or two and sets up a place here. For the sake of clarity let's call it Cookie's Canteen. Merchant seamen are invited, everything free, even a roll of hay with whatever hostess a boy can promote. Our likely character is wined and dined at Cookie's Cellar, everything still on the house. If he exhibits certain desirable larcenous tendencies — which would be revealed under questioning by a clever psychiatrist — the pitch is made. And the Mad Hatter said plaintively: 'It was the best butter—"

Avalon said: "Huh?"

The Saint took another grip on himself, brought his conscious mind up from whirling in dark chasms, lifted it with every ounce of will power he could command.

"Sorry, I wandered... The pitch was made. 'How would you like to make some extra money, chum, and here's a hundred on account. Just go to 903 Bubbling Well Road and say Benny sent you. Bring back the packages you'll be given, bring them here, and collect some more money.'... So our lad does it. Now the sale and distribution of the dope won't bring in enough to pay the overhead of a really big-scale setup like this, so Operation B goes into effect. A doctor can supply patients with narcotics, can turn them into hopheads more safely than anybody else. Then, by shutting off the supply, he can get almost anything in return for more dope to ease the craving. Blackmail — or services. That's where Dean's Warehouse and Docking Company is tied up with Operation A, or Shanghai. The hop-heads knock it over, bring in the sheaves — of furs, jewels, whiskey, whatnot. Or a bank is held up, instead. Or anything. A whole empire of crime begins to spread out from one central system."

The Saint sighed. He was weary. Avalon took his hand in hers.

"So that's it," she said. "That explains a lot of things I didn't understand before. Why they'd go overboard for some creep who knew the difference between port and starboard and nothing else."

They were still keeping their voices very low, as if they were in a room full of ears.

"This is all new to you?" Simon asked expressionlessly.

"Why do you ask that?"

"I thought I would. I've told you all this because it doesn't matter now how much anybody knows I know."

The Saint's fingers had almost finished with the odd metal shape in his pocket. And the message which had begun to spell itself slothfully out from it by some multi-dimensional alchemy between his fingertips and his remembrance began to sear his brain with a lambent reality that cauterized the last limp tissues of vagueness out of his awakening.

He felt his own grip biting into her flesh.

"Avalon," he said, in a voice that came from a long way off in the dark "You've been in this up to the neck from the beginning. You might even have started a lot of it — for all of us — by that parting crack of yours about the Saint after I socked Zellermann. But the play-acting is over, and I must know something now."

"What, darling?" she asked; and her voice was so easy in contrast to his own that he knew where he had to keep his own sanities together.

"I must know which side you're on, Avalon. Even if you haven't had any sense — even if it's all words of one syllable now. Are you going all the way with me, or is this just an excursion?"

It seemed as if she stiffened beside him for an instant, and then softened so that she was closer and more real than ever before.

Her voice came from a great distance also in the darkness between them.

"You damn fool," she said. "I worship the ground you walk on. I want you more than I ever wanted anyone in my whole life, or ever will."

They were both very quiet then, as if something had been said which should never have been put into words.

And there were other sounds far away, faint frettings against the monotonous rolling of the sea.

The Saint's fingers touched the hard sharp metal in his trouser pocket for one last assurance, and brought it out. He said very matter-of-factly: "Can you find a match, Avalon?"

She was in movement all around him, and he kept still; and then there was a sudden hurtful flare of light that flickered agonisingly over the scrap of embossed metal that he had taken out of pocket and held towards her in the palm of his hand.

"No," he said, without any inflection. "Not mine. Pat Hogan must have stuck his badge into my pocket as a last desperate resort — as a clue or a signal of some kind. He never knew me from Adam. But he was an undercover man in this racket for the Treasury Department."

2

The match flickered once more and went out, leaving him with the moulding of her face stamped on his memory. And he knew that that was not only printed by one match, but by more lights than he had seen in many years.

"How long have you known that?" she asked.

"Only since I found the badge and figured it out," he said. "But that's long enough... Until then, I'm afraid I was off with some very wrong ideas. When I picked him up at the Canteen this evening I happened to see that he was going heeled — he had a gun in his hip pocket — and I began wondering. I've been listening to his rather shaky brogue all night, and watching him sell the blarney to Kay Natello, who never could be a sailor's swateheart no matter what else; and I knew before we left town that there was something screwy in the setup... But I had everything else wrong. I had Hogan figured as one of the Ungodly, and I thought he was playing his game against me."

"If he wasn't," she said, "why did he pick on you and knock you out?"

"To get me out of the way. He didn't know who I was. I was playing the part of a blabber-mouthed drunken sailor, and just doing it too damn well. I was doing everything I could to make myself interesting to Cookie and Zellermann anyhow. I was banging around in the dark, and I happened to hit a nail on the head by mentioning Shanghai. So I was something to work on. And I was being worked on, the last thing I remember. But Hogan didn't want me being propositioned. His job was to get the goods on this gang, so he wanted to be propositioned himself. I might have been too drunk to remember; or I might have refused to testify. So he had to create a good interruption and break it up. And he did a lovely job, considering the spot he was in."

"I'm getting some of my faith back," she said. "If a government man knocks you cold, that's legitimate; but you can't let anybody else do it. Not if I'm going to love you."

He smiled very fractionally in the gloom, and his hand lay on her wrist in a touch that was not quite a caress, but something to which nothing had to be added and from which nothing could be taken away.

"And now," he said, "I suppose you're wondering where I belong in this, and why Hogan doesn't know me."

"I didn't ask you."

"I might as well tell you. Hogan is doing his best, and so is the Department over him; but this thing goes too far over the world, into too many countries and too many jurisdictions. Only an organisation that's just as international can cope with it. There is such a thing, and I'm part of it. That's all I'm allowed to say."

"And meanwhile," she said, with a coldness that was not really her, "why isn't Pat in bed? And why did he leave you his badge?"

"Either because he's still trying to wring the last drop out of his act, or because he's trying to do some more dangerous snooping. Either because he hoped he could tip me off to keep my mouth shut and give him a chance, or because he knew he was facing the high jump and if he made a bad landing he hoped I might get some word out for him." The Saint stood up. "Either way, I'm going to find out."

He heard and felt the rustle of her quick movement out of his sight; and then she was in front of him, face to face, and her arms around him and his hands under the soft eaves of her hair.

"Simon — are you all right now?"

"I'm as much use as I'll ever be tonight." His smile was still invisible through the darkness, and in some ways he was glad of it. His touch was strong and tender together. He said: "And Pat did his best, and I'm sure nothing is going to wait for him."

He kissed her again and held her against him; and he remembered a great many things, perhaps too many, and perhaps too many of them were not with her. But none of that mattered any more.

He let her go presently, and in time it had only been a moment.

"I suppose," he said, "you wouldn't happen to have any artillery in your weekend kit? A machine-gun might be useful; but if you're travelling light a small stiletto would help."

"I haven't anything better than a pair of nail scissors."

"I'm afraid," Simon said sadly, "it might be hard to persuade Zellermann to sit still for that."

Light slashed through the room like a stealthy blade as he found the door handle and opened it.

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 Crème 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..

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.

The Saint blinked at him blearily, swaying another step and two steps nearer.

It looked fine and perfect until the doctor's glance suddenly switched and hardened on a point beyond the Saint's shoulder, and the whole calm patronising balance of his body hardened with it as if it had been nipped in an interstellar frost.

And even then, only one precise unit of him moved — the hand that still rested in his coat pocket. But that movement was still as adequate and eloquent as it had been the first time.

Simon didn't need any manuals or blueprints to work it out. He knew, with that endless impersonality of comprehension, that Avalon Dexter had started to follow him into the room, and that Zellermann had seen her, and that the shining wheels that ran in Zellermann's brain had spun an instantaneous web together, and that rightly or wrongly the web had enough tensile strength in Zellermann's mind for Zellermann to walk on it.

The Saint's own movement actually followed and resulted from Zellermann's; and yet it was like the clicking of a switch and the awakening of a light, so that it was almost simultaneous.

He heard the splitting blast of Zellermann's gun in the same quantum as he was aware of stumbling sideways and straightening his left arm so that the bone handle of the carving knife dropped into the curved fingers of his waiting left hand, and then he was aware of a searing pang in his left arm and a shocking blow that spun him half around, but he had his balance again in the same transposition, and his right hand took the haft of the knife as it dropped and drew it clear of the sleeve and turned it and drove it straight with the same continued gesture into Zellermann's chest, just a little to one side of the breastbone and a hand's breadth below the carnation in his buttonhole.

Then he left the knife there where it stuck and took Zellermann's automatic away as the doctor's fingers loosened on it, ripping it clear of the pocket at about the moment when Zellermann's shoulders rolled on the floor, and fired again and again while he was still rising and Cookie was starting towards him with her broad muscular hands reaching out and Natello was still swinging back the hot curling-iron that she had been playing with.

They were the first women that Simon Templar had ever killed, and he did it rather carefully and conscientiously, in the pellucid knowledge of what they were and what they had done, and to his own absolute judicial satisfaction, shooting Kay Natello three inches above her hollow navel and Cookie in the same umbilical bullseye, as closely as he could estimate it through her adipose camouflage.

4

Hamilton said almost plaintively: "Couldn't you arrange to leave more than one prisoner, just once in a while?"

"Could you arrange to have people stop attacking me?" asked the Saint. "Self-defense is so tempting. Besides, think how much I save the country on trials and attorneys. I ought to get a rebate on my income tax for it."

"I'll speak to the President about it right away."

"Anyway, I left you the kingpin — and I think he's got the kind of imagination that'll do some real suffering while he's waiting for his turn in the death house. I feel rather happy about that — which is why I left him."

"Before your tender heart gets you into any more trouble," Hamilton said, "you'd better get out of there if you can. I'll talk to you again in New York. I've got another job for you."

"You always have," said the Saint. "I'll get out. Hogan can hold the fort long enough."

He cradled the telephone and looked at the federal man again. He said: "It's all yours, Patrick. Washington wants me out of the limelight. As usual... By the way, is the name really Hogan?"

The other nodded. Simon had done all that he could for him: he would be able to hold the fort. And other forts again. His face was still pale and drawn and shiny, but there was no uncertainty in it. It was a good face, moulded on real foundations, and durable.

"Sure," he said. "Hogan's the name. But I was born in New Jersey, and I have to work like hell on the brogue." He was studying the Saint while he talked, quite frankly and openly, but with a quiet respect that was a natural part of his reversion from the character part he had been playing, sitting very laxly but squarely in an armchair with the glass of brandy that Simon had poured for him, conserving and gathering his strength. He said: "You had me fooled. Your cockney's a lot better. And that make-up — it is a make-up, isn't it?"

"I hope so," said the Saint with a smile. "I'd hate to look like this for the rest of my life."

"I didn't expect anything like this when I left my badge in your pocket. I was just clutching at a straw. I figured it was a thousand to one it wouldn't do me any good. I thought you were just another drunken sailor — in fact, I let you pick me up just for that, so I could watch what this gang would do with you."

The Saint laughed a little.

Avalon Dexter finished binding up his arm with torn strips of another of Cookie's expensive sheets. She was very cool and efficient about it. He moved his arm and tested the bandage approvingly; then he began to wriggle into his jacket again. Zellermann's one shot had missed the bone: the bullet had passed clean through, and the flesh wound would take care of itself.

He said: "Thanks, darling."

She helped him with his coat.

He said: "Go on quoting me as just another drunken sailor, Pat. You don't even have to bring me into this finale. The witnesses won't talk. So Tom Simons woke up, and was drunk and sore and scared, and scrammed the hell out. He went back to his ship, and nobody cares about him anyway. Let him go. Because I am going anyway, while you take the phone and start calling your squads to take care of the bodies."

"What about Miss Dexter?" Hogan asked practically.

"She was scared too, and she scrammed independently. You know about her and how they were trying to use her. Leave her out of it if you can; but if you need her we've got her address in New York. I'll steal one of the cars and take her back with me. Hamilton will okay it. The police in New York were warned long ago, it seems — when Zellermann tried to frame me at 21, they went through a performance to make Zellermann think he'd gotten me out of the way, but they turned me loose at once."

"Okay, Saint. When you call that Imperative exchange in Washington, I say Uncle anyhow. But I can look after this. And — thank you."

They shook hands around. Hogan stayed seated in his chair. He could keep going. He was still full of questions, but he was too well trained to ask them.

"Let's get together one day," said the Saint, and meant it just like that.

He went out with Avalon.

They talked very ordinarily and quietly on the drive back, as if they had known each other for a long while, which they had, while the dawn lightened slowly around them and drew out the cool sweetness of the dew on the peaceful fields. The red-gold casque of her hair was pillowed on his shoulder as they slipped into the rousing murmur of Manhattan in the bright sunlight of another day.