The Saint Sees it Through

by Charteris Leslie

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 conserved it respectfully on his palate while Cookie blared into another 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-announced psychiatrist, but the Saint had no real grounds to insult 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 magnaquacks.

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 a psychiatrist from being tall and spare and erect, with a full head of prematurely white and silky hair that contrasted with his smooth taut-skinned face. There was no intellectual impossibility about his wide thin-lipped mouth, his long thin aristocratic nose, or the piercing gray eyes so fascinatingly deep-set between high cheekbones and heavy black brows. It was no reflection on his professional qualifications if he happened to look exactly like any Hollywood casting director's or hypochondriac society matron's conception of a great psychiatrist. But to the Saint's unfortunate skepticism it was just too good to be true, and he had thought so ever since he had observed the doctor sitting in austere solitude like himself.

Now he had other reasons for disliking Dr. Zellermann, and they were not at all conjectural.

For it rapidly became obvious that Dr. Ernst Zellermann's personal behavior pattern was not confined to the high planes of ascetic detachment which one would have expected of such a perfectly groomed mahatma. On the contrary, he was quite brazenly a man who liked to see thigh to thigh with his companions. He was the inveterate layer of hands on knees, the persistent mauler of arms, shoulders, or any other flesh that could be conveniently touched. He liked to put heads together and mutter into ears. He leaned and clawed, in fact, in spite of his crisply patriarchal appearance, exactly like any tired businessman who hoped that his wife would believe that he really had been kept late at the office.

Simon Templar sat and watched every scintilla of the performance, completely ignoring Cookie's progressively less subtle encores, with a concentrated and increasing resentment which made him fidget in his chair.