The Saint Sees It Through Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be tactful.”
    “You’d
met him before, of course.”
    “Oh, yes. He’s always hanging around the joint. Cookie introduced him the other night. He’s one of her
pets.”
    “So I gathered. Is it Love, or is he
treating her? I should think a little deep digging into her mind
would really be something.”
    “You said it, brother. I wouldn’t want
to go in there without an armored diving suit.”
    He cocked a
quiet eye at her.
    “She’s
a bitch, isn’t she?”
    “She
is.”
    “Everybody’s backslapper and good egg,
with a heart of garbage and scrap iron.”
    “That’s
about it. But people like her.”
    “They would.” He sipped his drink.
“She gave me rather a funny feeling. It sounds so melodramatic,
but she’s the first woman
I ever saw who made me feel that she was completely and frighteningly evil. It’s a sort of psychic feeling, and I got it all by myself.”
    “You’re
not kidding. She can be frightening.”
    “I can see her carrying a whip in a
white-slave trading post, or running a baby farm and strangling the
little bastards and burying them in the back yard.”
    Avalon laughed.
    “You mightn’t be so far wrong. She’s been
around town for years, but nobody seems to know much about her back ground before that. She may
have done all those things before she found
a safer way of making the same money.”
    Simon
brooded for a little while.
    “And yet,” he said, “the
waiter was telling me about all the public-spirited work she does for the
sailors.”
    “You mean Cookie’s Canteen? … Yes,
she makes great character with that.”
    “Is it one of those
Seamen’s Missions?”
    “No, it’s all her own. She hands out
coffee and coke and sandwiches, and there’s a juke box and hostesses and
enter tainment.”
    “You’ve
been there, I suppose.”
    “I’ve sung there two or three times. It’s
on Fiftieth Street near Ninth Avenue—not exactly a ritzy neighbourhood, but the boys go there.”
    He put a frown and a smile together, and said:
“You mean she doesn’t make anything out of it? Has she got a weakness for
philanthropy between poisonings, or does it pay off in publicity, or does
she just dote on those fine virile uninhibited sailor boys?”
    “It could be all of those. Or perhaps
she’s got one last leathery little piece of conscience tucked away
somewhere, and it takes care of that and makes her feel really fine. Or
am I being a wee bit romantic? I don’t know. And what’s more, I don’t have
to care any more, thank God.”
    “You’re
quite happy about it?”
    “I’m
happy anyway. I met you. Build me another drink.”
    He took their glasses over to the side table
where the supplies were,
and poured and mixed. He felt more than ever that the evening had been illumined by a lucky star. He could put casual questions and be casually flippant about
everything, but he had learned quite
a lot in a few hours. And Cookie’s Canteen loomed in his thoughts like a great big milestone. Before he was finished with it he would want more serious
answers about that irreconcilable
benevolence. He would know much more about it and it would have to make sense to him. And he had a soft and exciting
feeling that he had already taken more than the first step on the unmarked trail that he was trying to find.
    He brought the drinks back to the couch, and
sat down again, taking his time over the finding and preparation of a
cigarette.
    “I’m still wondering,” she said,
“what anyone like you would be doing in a joint like that.”
    “I have to see how the other half lives.
I’d been out with some dull people, and I’d just gotten rid of them,
and I felt like having a drink, and I happened to be passing by, so I
just stopped in.”
    None of it
was true, but it was good enough.
    “Then,”
he said, “I heard you sing.”
    “How
did you like it?”
    “Very
much.”
    “I saw you before I went on,” she
said. “I was singing for you.”
    He struck a match, and went on looking at