"Glad to have you with us, Mr. Simons," she said. "Go right in and make yourself at home."
The Saint went in.
He found himself in a big barren room which had probably once been a restaurant, for one side of it was still broken up into upholstered booths. The rest of the furnishings were less ornamental, consisting of plain bare wooden tables and chairs, all of them scarred from much service. On the side opposite the booths there was a low dais with little more than enough room for the grand piano that stood on it. The walls were plastered with posters of female nubility and cartoons from Esquire. Near the entrance there was a rack of tattered popular magazines. At the back of the room there was a service bar from behind which two very wavy-haired young men in their shirtsleeves were dispensing sandwiches and bottles of non-alcoholic throat irrigation. A juke box blared inexorably through the hit parade.
The room was crowded with men of all ages, some in ordinary civilian clothes, some in costumes that tried nebulously to look like a sort of seafaring uniform. Some of the parties at the tables were engrossed in games of cards or checkers. Other men danced with the hostesses in a clear space in front of the piano, clumsily or stiffly or flashily according to type. The hostesses were mostly young and pert and passably good-looking. They wore aprons with star-dotted borders and Cookie's Canteen embroidered across them. A few other smooth-skinned young men in identical aprons moved among the tables picking up empty bottles and dirty plates.
Aside from the rather noticeably sleek fragility of the male helpers, the place was fairly typical of the numerous oases that had mushroomed across the country during the war to offer chaste and sheltered recreation to men of the services, in line with the current concept of tea and parlor games as the great spiritual need of a warrior between battles. But whereas practically all the prototypical estaminets were sponsored and protected by public organisations, Cookie's Canteen was a strictly freelance and unofficial and unendorsed post-war benevolence. And in all of that there were questions to which the Saint wanted many answers...
He edged his way through the tables to the service bar and asked for a coke. With the bottle in his hand, he turned back towards the room, scanning the crowd through the thick fog of smoke that hung under the low ceiling and wondering what his move should be.
A girl in an apron stopped in front of him.
"Hello," she said. "You got everything you want?" '
"Yus, thank yer, miss."
"Gee, you must be English."