And Avalon...
The Saint slept.
He woke up presently out of a light dream mist in which sane thought and diaphanous fantasy had blended so softly and lightly that it seemed like a puzzle in clairvoyance to separate them.
Then, as you sat still and probed for them, they slipped away elusively and faded at the last fingertip of apprehension, so that it was like searching for shadows with a lantern; and in the end there was nothing at all except time gone by and the headlights still drinking up the road — a road over which pools of thin white fog loomed intermittently and leapt and swallowed them and were gone like the dream.
The Saint lighted a cigarette and glanced at the pale precise sharply graven profile of Dr. Zellermann on his left.
"We're nearly there," Zellermann said, as if there had been no hiatus at all.
Houses and hedges rose at the headlights, dodged adroitly, and were left behind. Southampton, Long Island, slept in peace, exposing nothing in common with its parent town of Southampton, England — not bombed, not scarred by war, and not knowing the other battle that swept through it in the sleek car that Dr. Zellermann drove.
They touched the end of Main Street, turned right and then left again presently, and then after a little while they swung into a driveway and stopped. Simon knew where they were — somewhere in the long line of ambitious beach-fronted houses which had expanded along that coast.
Cookie's summer hideaway may have been only a shanty in new shanty town, but her description of it as "a little shack" was rather modest. Dr. Zellermann let them in with a key, and found light switches with familiar assurance. They went through a panelled hall with quite a broad oak staircase, and into a living-room" that was almost as big as Cookie's Cellar — which didn't make a barn of it either. But it was still a large room, with tall french windows on the ocean side and glass tables and big square-cut modern couches, all of it reflecting the kind of fast-moneyed life which Simon could easily associate with the profits of a joint like Cookie's. And probably also reflecting, he thought in a flash of intuition, the interior decorating ideas of Ferdinand Pairfield — after the apotheosis of Kay Natello he doubted whether any of the members of Cookie's clique would be allowed to withhold their talents from practical application.
Zellermann slid aside a pair of pale green mirrors with geometrical designs frosted on them, disclosing a bar alcove with three chrome-legged stools in front and a professional array of bottles forming a relief mural behind. He stepped through the flap in the counter and said: "How about a drink?"