He was a fairly weighty man, and his tuxedo was tight across his shoulders. He grasped the Saint's arm and said without any professional servility: "What's this all about?"
"Just a little apache dance routine," Simon said pleasantly."Unscheduled addition to the floor show. I've been practising it quite a while. Would you like me to show you, or would you rather let go my arm?"
The bouncer captain, with the Saint's biceps palpably under his fingers and the Saint's very cool blue eyes on him, seemed to experience a shred of indecision.
Avalon Dexter's clear voice said: "Take it easy, Joe."
Simon gently eased his arm away in the act of searching for a cigarette, and gazed interestedly at Dr. Zellermann, who was trying to unwrap himself from a tablecloth with which he had become entangled in the course of his descent.
"Unfortunately," he explained, "my partner hasn't practised so much, and his timing is all off. It's too bad he had to fall down and hurt his face, but accidents will happen."
Dr. Zellermann got to his feet, assisted by one of the larger waiters, who thoughtfully kept hold of him under the guise of continuing his support.
With his patriarchal locks dishevelled, one eye closed, and a smear of blood smudged down from one corner of his mouth, Dr. Zellermann was not in the least beautiful or benign. In fact, for a man who claimed to adjust the mental disorders of others, he showed a lamentable lack of psychic balance. He spoke to and about the Saint, in very precise English mingled with a few recherché foreign epithets and expletives; and Simon was saddened to learn from the discourse that the doctor was clearly the victim of several psychoses, inclined towards paranoia, subject to perverse delusions, and afflicted with obsessive coprophilia. Simon realised that the symptoms might have been aggravated by some recent shock, and he was considering the case with clinical impartiality when Cookie herself surged through the ring of bystanders.
Simon had never thought she was beautiful, but now he saw for himself how ugly she could look. The big practised smile was gone, and her mouth was as hard and functional as a trap. Her eyes were bright, watchfully venomous, and coldly capable. For that moment, in spite of the complete oppositeness of all the associations, Simon felt that she had the identical bearing of a hard-boiled matron preparing to quell trouble in a tough reform school.
"What's this all about?" she demanded, using what began to sound like the house formula.