The Saint Sees It Through Read Free

large face.
    She must have weighed more than two hundred
and fifty pounds. The expansive grossness of her features was
slightly minimised by a pompadoured convict coiffure which reduced the breadth of her face for as long as it lasted, but below that she was built like a corseted
barrel. Her Brobdingnagian bosom bloused up
from a skin of appalling sequins that shimmered down in recognisable ridges over the steatopygous scaffolding that encased her hips. As much as any other
feature you noticed the hands that
whacked uninhibitedly over the keyboard: large, splay-fingered, muscular, even with the incongruous vermilion lacquer
on the nails they never looked like a woman’s hands. They were the hands of a stevedore, a wrestler, or—for that matter—a strangler. They had a crude sexless
power that nar rowed down through the otherwise ludicrous excesses of
her figure to give a sudden sharp and
frightening meaning to the brash big-hearted bonhomie of her smile.
    It was a strange and consciously exaggerated
sensation that went through the Saint as he analysed her. He knew that
some of it came from the electric contrast with the impression that Avalon
Dexter had left on him. But he could make use of that unforeseen standard
without letting it destroy his judgment, just as he could
enlarge upon intuition only to see the details more clearly. He knew that there
were not enough ingredients in the highballs he had drunk there to warp
his intelligence, and he had never in his life been given to hysterical
imaginings. And yet with complete dispassionate sanity, and no matter where it might go from there, he knew that for perhaps the first time in a
life that had been crossed by many evil men he had seen a truly and
eternally evil woman.
    Just for a moment that feeling went over him
like a dark wave; and then he was quite cool and detached again, watching her make a perfunctory adjustment to the microphone mounted in front
of her.
    “Hullo, everybody,” she said in a
deep commanding voice. “Sorry I’m late, but I’ve been taking care of some of our
boys who don’t get too much glory these days. I’m speaking of the plain ordinary heroes who man our merchant ships.
They don’t wear any brass buttons or
gold braid, but war or no war they stay
right on the job. The Merchant Navy!”
    There was a clatter of approbation to show
that the assembled revellers appreciated the Merchant Navy. It left no room
for doubt that the hearts of Cookie’s customers would always be in the right
place, provided the place was far enough from the deck of an oil tanker to give them a nice
perspective.
    Cookie heaved herself up from the piano
bench and pointed a dramatic finger across the room.
    “And I want you to meet two of the finest men that ever sailed the
seven seas,” she roared. “Patrick Hogan and Axel Indermar.
Take a bow, boys!”
    The spotlight plastered two squirming youths
at a side table, who scrambled awkwardly and unwillingly to their feet.
Amid more spirited clapping, the spotlight switched back to Cookie as she sat
down again and thumped out a few bars of Anchors Aweigh with a
wide grin which charmingly deprecated her own share in bringing the
convoy home.
    “And now,” she said, with a cascade of arpeggios, “as a
tribute to our guests of honor, let’s start with Testy Old William, the Nautical
Man.”
    Overlapping a loyal diminuendo of
anticipatory sniggers and applause from the initiated, she broadened her big jolly smile and launched into her first number.
    Simon Templar only had to hear the first
three lines to know that her act was exactly what he would have expected—a
reper toire of the type of ballad which is known as “sophisticated”
to people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated. Certain ly it
dealt with sundry variations on the facts of life which would have
puzzled a clear-thinking farm hand.
    It was first-class material of its kind,
clever and penetrating to the thinnest edge of utter vulgarity; and