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 repertoire of the type of ballad which is known as "sophisticated" to people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated. Certainly 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 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 admirers 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 blanketed 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 submission and force them to admit that they have been wonderfully 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, overwhelmingly, 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 destroying 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."