The Saint Sees It Through Read Free Page A

she
squeezed every last
innuendo out of it as well as several others which had no more basis than a well-timed leer and the personal
psychoses of the audience. There was
no doubt that she was popular: the room was obviously peppered with a
clique of regular admir ers who seemed to
know all her songs by heart, and who burst into ecstatic laughter whenever she
approached a particularly classic
line. Consequently, some of her finest gems were blan keted with informed hilarity—a fact which must
have saved many an innocent intruder much embarrassment. But she was good: she had good material, she could sell it; she
could get away with almost anything behind that big friendly bawdy
boys-in-the-lavatory-together smile, and beyond any question she had more than
enough of that special kind of showmanly bludgeoning
personality that can pound an audience into sub mission and force them
to admit that they have been wonder fully entertained
whether they enjoyed it or not.
    And the
Saint hated her.
    He hated her from a great distance; not because of that first terrible but immaterial intuition, which was
already slipping away into the
dimmer backgrounds of his mind, nor in the very least because he was a prude, which he was not.
    He hated her because dominantly, sneakingly,
overwhelming ly, phony-wittily, brazenly, expertly, loudly,
unscrupulously, popularly, callously, and evilly, with each more ribald
and risque number that she dug out of her perfertile gut, she was de stroying
and dissecting into more tattered shreds a few moments of sweetness and
sincerity that a tawny-maned nobody named Avalon Dexter had
been able to impose even on the tired and tawdry cafe
aristocracy who packed the joint… .
    “I brought you a double, sir,”
said the melancholy waiter, looming before him again in all the pride of a new
tactic. “Will that be all right?”
    “That,” said the Saint, “must
have been what I was waiting for all evening.”
    He controlled the pouring of water into the glass, and tasted the trace of liquid in the bottom. It had a
positive flavor of Scotch whisky which was nostalgically fascinating. He
con served it respectfully on his palate
while Cookie blared into an other
encore, and looked around to see whether by any chance there might be a
loose tawny mane anywhere within sight.
    And,
almost miraculously, there was.
    She must have slipped out through another
door, but the edge of the spotlight beam clipped her head for an instant
as she bent to sit down. And that was the instant when the Saint was
looking.
    The detail that registered on him most
clearly was the table where she sat. It was another ringside table
only two spaces away from him, and it happened to be one table which had never been
out of the corner of his eye since he had accepted his own place. For it
was the table of the one man whom he had really come there to see.
    It gave him a queer feeling, somehow, after
all that, to see her sitting down at the table of Dr. Ernst Zellermann.
    Not that he had anything solid at all to hold
against Dr. Zellermann—yet.
The worst he could have substantially said about
Dr. Zellermann was that he was a phony psychiatrist. And even then he would have been taking gross chances
on the adjective. Dr. Zellermann was a lawful M.D. and a self-an nounced psychiatrist, but the Saint had no real
grounds to in sult the quality of his psychiatry. If he had been
cornered on it, at that moment, he could only have said that he called Dr. Zellermann a phony merely on account of his Park
Avenue address, his publicity, and a rough idea of his list of patients, who
were almost exclusively recruited from a social stratum which is notorious for
lavishing its diamond-studded devotion on
all manner of mountebanks, yogis, charlatans, and magna- quacks.
    He could have given equally unreasonable
reasons why he thought Dr. Zellermann looked like a quack. But he would have had
to admit that there were no proven anthropological laws to prevent