He had come there to see what happened, and he had certainly seen what happened.
The young piano-player was at the mike again, beaming his very professional beam.
He was saying: "And now — ladies and gentlemen — we bring you — the lady you've all been waiting for — in person — the one and only..."
"Lookie, lookie, lookie," said the Saint to himself, very obviously, but with the very definite idea of helping himself back to reality "here comes Cookie."
2
As a raucous yowl of acclamation drowned out the climax of the announcement, Simon took another look at the table near the dais from which Cookie arose, if not exactly like Venus from the foam, at least like an inspired hippopotamus from a succulent wallow.
It was a table which he had observed during a previous casual survey of the room, without recognising Cookie herself as the third person who had joined it — a fact which the melancholy waiter, doubtless with malice aforethought, had carefully refrained from pointing out to him. But the two other people at it he had been able to place on the flimsier pages of a scrap-book memory.
The more feminine of the two, who wore the trousers, could be identified as a creature whose entrance to life had been handicapped by the name of Ferdinand Pairfield. To compensate for this, Mr. Pairfield had acquired a rather beautifully modeled face crowned with a mop of strikingly golden hair which waved with the regularity of corrugated metal, a pair of exquisitely plucked eyebrows arching over long-lashed soulful eyes, a sensuously chiseled mouth that always looked pink and shining as if it had been freshly skinned, and a variety of personal idiosyncrasies of the type which cause robustly ordinary men to wrinkle their nostrils. Simon Templar had no such common-place reactions to personal whimsy: he had enough internal equanimity to concede any human being the right to indulge in any caprice that looked like fun to him, provided the caprice was confined to the home and did not discombobulate the general populace: but he did have a rather abstract personal objection to Ferdinand Pairfield. He disliked Mr. Pairfield because Mr. Pairfield had elected to be an artist, and moreover to be a very dextrous and proficient artist whose draughtsmanship would have won the approval of Dürer or Da Vinci. There was only one thing wrong with the Art of Ferdinand Pairfield. At some point in his development he had come under the influence of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Ultimate Googooism; with the result that he had never since then been able to paint a woman except with breasts that came out like bureau drawers, apexed with nipples that took the form of rattlesnakes, put-and-take tops, bottle-openers, shoe-horns, faucets, bologna sausage, or very small Packard limousines.
The other half of the duo was a gaunt stringy-haired woman with hungry eyes and orange lipstick, whom he identified as Kay Natello, one of the more luminous of the most luminiscent modern poets. The best he could remember about her was a quote from a recent volume of hers, which might as well be reprinted here in lieu of more expensive descriptions:
FLOWERS I love the beauty of flowers, germinated in decay and excrement, with soft slimy worms crawling caressingly among the tender roots. So even I carry within me decay and excrement: and worms crawl caressingly among the tender roots of my love.