The Saint Sees It Through by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page A

out on the pillow.
    “I’ll buy you a cocktail in a few
hours,” he said, “and prove it.”
    “I love you,” she said.
    “But I wasn’t fooling about anything
else I said last night. Don’t accept any other invitations. Don’t go
to any strange places.
Don’t believe anything you’re told. After you got your self thought about with me last night, anything could happen. So please be careful.”
    “I will.”
    “I’ll call you back.”
    “If you don’t,” she said, “I’ll
haunt you.”
    He hung up.
    But it had happened. And the dream was real,
and it~was all true, and it was good that way. He worked with his
cigarette for a while.
    Then he took the telephone again, and called
room service. He ordered corned beef hash and eggs, toast and marmalade and
coffee. He felt good. Then he revived the operator and said: “After
that you can get me a call to Washington. Impera tive five, five hundred. Extension five.
Take your time.”
    He was towelling himself after a swift
stinging shower when the bell rang.
    “Hamilton,” said the receiver
dryly. “I hope you aren’t getting me up.”
    “This was your idea,” said the
Saint. “I have cased the joint, as we used to say in the soap operas. I
have inspected your creeps.
I’m busy.”
    “What else?”
    “I met the most wonderful girl in the
world.”
    “You do that every week.”
    “This is a different week.”
    “This is a priority, line. You can tell
me about your love life in a letter.”
    “Her name is Avalon Dexter, and she’s in
the directory. She’s a singer, and until the small hours of this morning
she was working for Cookie.”
    “Which side is she on?”
    “I only just met her,” said the
Saint, with unreal imper sonality. “But they saw her with me.
Will you remember that, if anything funny happens to me—or to her ? .
. . I met Zellermann , too. Rather violently, I’m afraid. But
he’s a sweet and forgiving soul. He wants to buy me a lunch.”
    “What did you buy last night?”
Hamilton asked suspiciously.
    “You’ll see it on my expense account—I
don’t think it’ll mean raising the income tax rate more than five per
cent,” said the Saint, and hung up.
    He ate his brunch at leisure, and saved his
coffee to go with a definitive cigarette.
    He had a lot of things to think about, and he
only began trying to co-ordinate them when the coffee was clean and
nutty on his palate, and the smoke was crisp on his tongue and drift ing in
aromatic clouds before his face.
    Now there was Cookie’s Canteen to think
about. And that might be something else again.
    Now the dreaming was over, and this was
another day.
    He went to the closet, hauled out a suitcase,
and threw it on the bed. Out of the suitcase he took a bulging
briefcase. The briefcase was a particularly distinguished piece of
luggage, for into its contents had gone an amount of ingenuity, cor ruption,
deception, seduction, and simple larceny which in itself could have supplied
the backgrounds for a couple of dozen stories.
    Within its hand-sewn compartments was a
collection of docu ments in blank which represented the cream of many years of
research. On its selection of letterheads could be written letters
purporting to emanate from almost any institution be tween the Dozey Dairy
Company of Kansas City and the Dominican Embassy in Ankara. An assortment of
visiting cards in two or three crowded pockets was prepared to
identify anybody from the Mayor of Jericho to Sam Schiletti,
outside plumbing contractor, of Exterior Falls, Oregon. There were passports with
the watermarks of a dozen governments—driv ing licenses, pilot’s
licences, ration books, credit cards, birth certificates,
warrants, identification cards, passes, permits, memberships, and
authorisations enough to establish anyone in any role from a
Bulgarian tight-rope walker to a wholesale fish merchant from
Grimsby. And along with them there was a unique symposium of
portraits of the Saint, flattering and