Without the slightest additional warning, and while he was still grinning and stirring the Saint's shoulder with his other hand, his right fist rammed upwards at the Saint's jaw. Simon Templar was caught where he sat, flat back and relaxed and utterly off his guard. There was an evanescent splash of multicoloured flares in the centre of his head, and then a restful blackness in which sleep seemed the most natural occupation.
5. How Ferdinand Pairfield was surprised,
and Simon Templar left him
1
He woke up in a very gradual and laborious way that was like dragging his mind out of a quagmire, so that although he knew in advance that he had been knocked out there was a lot of other history to struggle through before he got to thinking about that. He remembered everything that he had been through since the beginning of the story — Cookie's Cellar and Sutton Place South, the Algonquin and a cheap secondhand clothing store, Cookie's Canteen and a drive out to Southampton. He remembered people — Cookie, Natello, Pairfield, a melancholy waiter, even Wolcott Gibbs. And a girl called Avalon. And a hostess in Cookie's Canteen, and Patrick Hogan who had so much breezy fun and carried a gun on his hip — and who had Socked him. And Dr. Ernst Zellermann with his clean white hair and ascetic features and persuasive voice, betraying himself with his long ponderous words and the incurable cumbersome Teutonic groping for far-fetched philosophical generalisations which belonged so obviously in a germanic institute of Geopolitik. Zellermann, who was a phony refugee and a genuine master of the most painstakingly efficient technique that the same germanic thoroughness had ever evolved. Zellermann, who was the prime reason why the Saint had ever entered that circle at all...
That was how Simon had to build it back, filling in the certainties where there had been questions before, in a dull plodding climb out of the fog.
He didn't open his eyes at once because there was a sort of ache between his temples which made him screw up his brows in protest, or as a counter-irritant; and that made opening the eyes an independent operation to be plotted and toiled over. It came to him out of this that he had been knocked out before, seldom with a bare fist, but several times with divers blunt instruments; but the return to consciousness had never been so lagging and sluggish as this. He had been drugged before, and this was more like that.
After that stage, and deriving from it, there was a period of great quiet, in which he reviewed other things. He tested his sensations for the drag or the pressure of a gun anywhere on him, and remembered that he had held so strictly to his created character that he had set out unarmed. Still without moving, he let his skin give him tactile confirmation of the clothes in which he had left the Algonquin. The only doubt he had about his make-up concerned the gray of his hair and eyebrows, which was provided by talcum powder and could have been brushed out. His face coloring was a dye and not a grease paint, and his straggly moustache had been put on hair by hair with waterproof gum — both of them were secure against ordinary risks.
Then after a while he knew why he was thinking along these lines. Because somebody was washing his face. Or dabbing it with a cold wet cloth. Somebody was also shaking him by the shoulder and calling a name that he knew perfectly well.
"Tom!... Tom!"