The Saint Sees It Through Read Online Free PDF

enjoyment of
smack ing Dr. Ernst Zellermann in the smooch.
    He lighted another cigarette with no less care than he had devoted to the other operation, and said nothing
more until the taxi drew up outside a black and white painted brick building on the river side of Sutton Place South.
He got out and helped her out, and she said: “Come in for a minute and let me fix you a real drink.”
    “That’s
just what I needed,” he said, and paid off the taxi, and
strolled up beside her as casually as if they had known, each other
for a hundred years, and it was just like that, and that was how it
was.  
     
    4
     
    The living-room was at the back. It was big and quiet and comfortable.
There was a phonoradio and a record cabinet, and a big bookcase,
and another tier of shelves stacked with sheet music, and a
baby piano. The far end of it was solid with tall windows.
    “There’s a sort of garden outside,”
she said. “And the other end of it falls straight down on to East River
Drive, and there’s nothing beyond that but the river, so it’s almost
rustic. It only took me about three years to find it.”
    He nodded.
    “It
looks like three well-spent years.”
    He felt at home there, and easily relaxed.
Even the endless undertones of traffic were almost lost there, so that the
city they had just left might have been a hundred miles away.
    He strolled by the bookcase, scanning the
titles. They were a patchwork mixture, ranging from The African Queen to The Wind in the Willows, from Robert Nathan to Emil Ludwig , from Each
to the Other to Innocent Merriment. But they made a
pattern, and in a little while he found it.
    He said:
“You like some nice reading.”
    “I have to do something with my feeble brain every so often.
I may be just another night-club singer, but I did go to Smith College and I did graduate from University of
California, so I can’t help it if I
want to take my mind off creep joints some times. It’s really a great handicap.”
    He smiled.
    “I
know what you mean.”
    He prowled on, came to the piano, set his
drink on it, and sat down. His fingers rippled over the keys, idly and
aimlessly, and then crept into the refrain of September Song.
    She sat on the couch, looking at him, with
her own glass in her hand.
    He finished abruptly, picked up his drink
again, and crossed the room to sit down beside her.
    “What
do you know about Zellermann?” he asked.
    “Nothing much. He’s one of these Park
Avenue medicine men. I think he’s supposed to be a refugee from Vienna—he got out
just before the Nazis moved in. But he didn’t lose much. As a matter of
fact, he made quite a big hit around here. I haven’t been to
his office, but I’m told it looks like something off a Hollywood set.
His appointment book looks like a page out of the Social
Register, and there’s a beautifully carved blonde
nurse-receptionist who’d probably give most of his male patients a
complex if they didn’t have any to start with. He’s got a private
sanitarium in Connecticut, too, which is supposed to be quite a place.
The inmates get rid of their inhibitions by doing exactly what they please and then
paying for any special damage.”
    “You mean if they have a secret craving
to tear the clothes off a nurse or throw a plate of soup at a waiter, they
can be accommodated—at a fancy tariff.”
    “Something like that, I guess. Dr. Zellermann says that all mental troubles come from people being thwarted
by some convention that doesn’t agree with their particular personality.
So the cure is to take the restriction away—like taking a tight shoe off a corn. He says that everyone ought to do
just what their instincts and
impulses tell them, and then everything would be lovely.
    “I notice he wasn’t repressing any of
his impulses,” Simon remarked.
    The girl
shrugged.
    “You’re always meeting that sort of creep
in this sort of business. I ought to have been able to handle him. But
what the hell. It just wasn’t my night