The Saint and the People Importers Read Free

backwater bottleneck behind the theatre and restaurant district, the traffic jam seemed to be nearing the oft-predicted urban millennium when the only solution will be to cover the whole mess with concrete and start all over again on top of it.
    “I’ll walk from here,” Simon said through the opening in The glass partition.
    He got out and paid the driver.
    “There’s plenty of curry restaurants around here,” the cabman said. “Must be at least one in every block.”
    “I think I’ll go to the Golden Crescent anyway,” Simon told him. “They may all use the same brand of chutney, but where I’m going there’s something special about the atmosphere.”
    2
    To the uninitiated foreigner, London is Big Ben, double-decker buses, dazzling uniforms, and Buckingham Palace. The contrivers of English tourist brochures tend to give the central section of the city called Soho the same treatment that a respectable family gives to a fallen female relative: they get a kick out of knowing about her but they don’t go out of their way to advertise her existence very exuberantly to outsiders. Appropriately heralded by the statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly Circus on its southwest corner, Soho is a roughly rectangular area of about ninety acres bounded on the north by Oxford Street and on the east by Charing Cross Road; but its distinction is much more a matter of atmosphere than of physical boundaries.
    Soho is, in the most far-reaching sense of the word, an entertainment district. It contains Carnaby Street, the birthplace of a contemporary form of sartorial extravagance, which for some tastes would be entertainment enough; but that is only one facet of its resources. Along its many-angled, space-starved streets and alleys the stalwart sensation-seeker can visit a pub, a penny arcade, a bookmaker’s shop, or a strip-tease show. He can buy a red hot magazine or a blue hot reel of movie film. He can eat at an Indian, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Balkan, American, Jewish, or even an English restaurant. He can get himself an expensive companion in an expensive bar, or a cheap dancing partner, or a souvenir lump on the back of his skull if he should be foolhardy enough to follow the wrong helpful little chap into the wrong obscure doorway.
    Soho, regarded (for literary effect) as a painted woman, is considerably cleaner, better dressed, and brighter than what might loosely be called her counterparts in other great cities. When the Saint got out of his taxi he was standing in front of a pub as staid and wholesome as any in Oxford or Windsor. Many of the passers by would have looked at home on the most pristine boulevard in Belgravia.
    But Soho, being the sort of place it is, attracts in large numbers that curious variety of human being who combines an enterprising spirit with inordinate laziness and a total lack of moral-principle. If prevented by circumstances from becoming a politician or a fiction-writer, such an individual will tend to gravitate to the kind of subsurface sources of income with which Soho abounds. The Saint saw a female of the species almost as soon as he left the kerb and set off down a short, constricted side street. She was fat and young and had curly black hair, and she was sitting in a ground floor window of a building across the road. When she saw Simon her expression of disconsolate boredom did not change, but remarkably like a clockwork toy she raised one plumpish hand and mechanically beckoned to him three times with a pudgy forefinger.
    The Saint cheerfully tipped an imaginary hat and strode on. Turning into the next, more populous street, he ran a gauntlet of second rate strip-show establishments whose wares were vividly publicised by a fusillade of glossy photographs on either side of their doors-photographs whose charming bare subjects had no connection whatever with the dancing girls presumably on non-stop view inside. He edged around a ragged stoop-shouldered vendor of hot chestnuts,