The Saint Sees it Through

by Charteris Leslie

The figure of Dr. Zellermann, standing poised and cool with his smooth silver locks and fine ascetic profile and a long cigarette clipped in his sensitive fingers and treasuring half an inch of unshaken ash, was a stock item in its way. So was the figure of Patrick Hogan, bound hand and foot in a chair, with the sweat of agony running down into his eyes and the lower half of his face covered with the gag through which some of those horrible formless strangled sounds had come. It was the two women squatting beside him, Cookie with her crude bloated face no longer wearing its artificial smile, and Natello with the sallow skin stretched tight over the bones of her skull and her haggard eyes smouldering with a light of weird absorption. The women, and what they were doing...

And this was the reality of half-remembered legend-histories of Messalina, of tales of the Touareg women commissioned to the ritual torture of their captives, of witches out of a dim universal folklore bent to the consummation of some black sacrament of pain. This was what gave a sudden dimension and articulation to his ambiguous impressions of Cookie and Natello, just as in their separate ways the performance seemed to breathe blood and life into them, hardening and enrooting the slobbish grossness of Cookie and illuminating Natello's starved ethereal gawkiness — even throwing a pale reflection of its hot heathen glow on Zellermann's satanically connoisseurish frigidity. This, that somehow crystallised and focused all the twisted negations and perversions that were inherent in the philosophy they served. This new scientific and persuasive barbarism, aptly and symbolically framed in the gleaming chrome-plated jungle of a Pairfield-decorated parlour...

But for Simon Templar it was a symbol too; and more than that it was a trial and evidence and verdict, and a sentence that only waited for an execution that would be a pride and a clean pleasure to remember with the ugliness that began it.

He walked into the room empty-handed, with the carving knife in his sleeve held by the pressure of his bent left arm.

Zellermann held his cigarette with the ash unbroken in his left hand, and his right hand dropped into the side pocket of his beautifully tailored coat. Aside from the lightning switch of his bleached gray eyes, that was his only movement. But it was quite adequate for what it meant.

The Saint didn't even seem to. notice it.

He was Tom Simons again, perfectly and entirely, for the few steps that he had to take. They seemed to stretch out for an infinity of distance and an eternity of time; but no one who watched him could have seen how every cell and fibre of him was wrung out in the achievement of that convincing unconsciousness of their importance. He lurched quite clumsily in his walk, and his stare trying to hold Zellermann was blank and glazed — and those were the easiest tricks in his act.

" 'Ullo, Doc," he mouthed. "Wot abaht one fer the road?"

He was in a dream where every second seemed to take a week to crawl by, and you could stop overnight to analyse every inching flicker of event.

He saw Zellermann relax fractionally, even embark on the mental prologue to an elaborate clinical evaluation of drug reactions. He saw Cookie and Kay Natello rising and turning towards him with a mixture of uncertainty and fear and hope. He saw everything, without looking directly at any of it.