Saint Goes West (11 page)

He had a little difficulty in getting service, because the lone bartender, who looked like a retired stunt man and was acнtually exactly that, was having a little dialogue trouble with the only other customer at that intermediate hour, who had obviously been a customer with more enthusiasm than disнcretion.

“He can’t do that to me,” declared the customer, propping his head in his hands and staring glassy-eyed between his fingers.

“Of course not,” said the bartender. “Take it easy.”

“You know what he said to me, Charlie?”

“No. What did he say to you?”

“He said ‘You stink!’ “

“He did?”

“Yeah.”

‘Take it easy.”

“You know what I’m gonna do, Charlie?”

“What you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna tell that son of a bitch where he gets off.”

“Take it easy, now.”’

“He can’t do that to me.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m gonna tell him right now.”

“Now take it easy. It’s not that bad.”

“I’ll kill the son of a bitch before he can get away with that.”

“Why don’t you go out and get something to eat first? You’ll feel better.”

“I’ll show him where he gets off.”

“Take it easy.”

“I’m gonna show him right now.” The customer lurched up, staggered, found his balance, and said: “Goo’bye.”

“Goodbye,” said the bartender. “Take it easy.”

The customer navigated with careful determination to the door, and vanished-an almost ridiculously good-looking young man, with features so superficially perfect that he could easily have stepped straight out of a collar advertisement if he had been a little less dishevelled.

“Yes, sir?” said the bartender, facing the Saint with the combination of complete aplomb, extravagant apology, comнradely amusement, genial discretion, and sophisticated depнrecation which is the heritage of all good bartenders.

“A double Peter Dawson and plain water,” said the Saint. “Is there something about the air around here which drives people to drink?”

“It’s too bad about him,” said the bartender tolerantly, pouring meanwhile. “When he’s sober, he’s as nice a fellow as you could meet. Just like you’d think he would be from his pictures.”

A vague identification in the Saint’s mind suddenly came into surprising focus.

“I get it,” he said. “Of course. Orlando Flane-the heartнthrob of the Hemisphere.”

“Yeah. He really is a nice guy. Only when he’s had a few drinks you gotta humor him.”

“Next time,” said the Saint, “you should ask him about the Chinese laundryman.”

It took no little ingenuity to frustrate the bartender’s proнfessional curiosity about that unguarded remark, but it was as entertaining a way of passing the time as any other, and the Saint felt almost human again when he turned back to the white walls of Liberty Studios.

He had no lasting interest in Orlando Flane as a person at all, and might have forgotten him again altogether if they had not been literally thrown together so very shortly afterнwards.

That is, to be excruciatingly specific, Orlando Flane was thrown. Or appeared to be. At any rate, he seemed to be nearing the end of a definite trajectory when Simon opened the outer door of Mr. Ufferlitz’s office and almost tripped over him. Only because he was prepared by a lifetime of lightning reactions, Simon adapted himself resiliently to the shock and scooped the actor up with one sinewy arm.

“Is there a lot of fun like this around here?” he inquired pleasantly, looking at Peggy Warden, who was getting up rather suddenly from her typewriter.

Then he saw that Mr. Ufferlitz himself was standing in the communicating doorway to his private office, and realised exactly what certain remarks of the cynical Lazaroff were intended to convey, and why out of his own experienced judgeнment he had sensed long ago that Mr. Ufferlitz was not merely a farcical stock character.

“Get out of here,” Byron Ufferlitz was saying coldly. “And stay out, you drunken bum.”

Orlando Flane might have gone back to the floor a second time, if the Saint had not been interestedly holding him up. He reeled inside the supporting semicircle of the Saint’s arm, and wiped the back of his head across his bruised lips. But he had sobered surprisingly, and there was no more alcoholic slur in his syllables than there was in the savage set of his dark long-lashed eyes as he looked back across the room.

“All right, you bastard,” he said distinctly. “You can throw me out now because I’m drunk. But I can remember just as far back as you can. I’ve got plenty of things to settle with you, and when I fix you up you’re going to stay fixed!”

3

THE COLORED BUTLER showed Simon into April Quest’s living-room, and brought him a Martini. It was a comfortable room, modern in style, but it had the untouched impersonal feeling of an interior decorator’s exhibit. Everything in it looked very new and overwhelmingly harmonious. But the chairs were large and relaxing, the sort of chairs that a man likes, and at least there were no sham-period gewgaws or laboriously exotic touches.

Simon lighted a cigarette and amused himself with some magazines which he found on a shelf under the table by the couch. Some of them were fan magazines, and one of them had her picture on the cover. He remembered now that it had caught his eye on a newsstand not long ago. Naturally it was a beautiful face, since that was part of her profession, framed in softly waved auburn hair, with a small nose and high cheekbones and large expressive eyes. But he had noticed her mouth, which was generous and yet sultry, laughing and yet wilful, as if she could be passionate in her selfishness but never cold or unkind … Then he looked up, and she was standing in front of him.

It was a slight shock, as if the picture had suddenly come to life. She was so exactly like it. The only thing different was her dress, and this was something formal and white and very simple. But the neck was cut down to her waist, and the material was so sheer that you would have known exactly what she wore underneath it if she had worn anything. She looked like a wayward Madonna decked out in a suitable disguise to find out what really went on in night clubs.

She said: “Sorry I wasn’t ready, but I had the goddamnedнest time getting dressed. Every lousy rag I put on looked like hell.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad you were able to save something out of the junk pile.”

“Pretty frightening, isn’t it?” she said, looking down at herself. “Brings out all the floozie in me. And everything else. Well, nobody can ever say I didn’t give my All.”

She had a glass in her hand, practically empty. She emptied it, and sat down beside him and tinkled a small hand-bell.

“Shall we have some more serum before we go to the rat race?”

He drained his own glass and nodded, but the acceptance was hardly necessary. The butler appeared like a watchful genie with a shaker in his hand, and proceeded to pour withнout any instructions.

Simon gazed at her speculatively over his cigarette.

“It’s a hell of a way to get acquainted, isn’t it?” he reнmarked. “But it’s nice of you to cooperate, as Byron calls it.”

“If a girl never had to cooperate any worse than this,” she said, “this goddamn racket would be a breeze.”

“Just how much cooperation is supposed to be ordered here?” Simon asked. “Byron left it a little vague.”

She looked at him.

“It doesn’t sound like Byron to leave anything to your imagination.”

“Maybe my imagination is a little slow.”

“Are you kidding me, or where have you been all your life?”

“I haven’t been getting an Ufferlitz-Hollywood build-up all my life.”

Her eyes were curious.

“We’re going to Ciro’s together. In this town, that autoнmatically means a budding romance. If we leer at each other and hold hands a bit, they’ll just about have us in bed together. We don’t actually have to go to bed before witнnesses, because you can’t print that anyway. Disappointed?”

“Not a bit,” said the Saint … “It’s much more fun withнout witnesses.”

“For Christ’s sake,” she said pleasantly. “You didn’t have to be here long to learn the routines, though.”

His clear blue eyes rested on her again, and this time their lazy mockery had a different twinkle. A slow grin etched itself around his mouth.

“Thank God,” he drawled, and held out his hand. She couldn’t help shaking it, and smiling back at him; and suddenly they were laughing together. “Now we can have fun,” he said.

So they were friends.

Simon Templar had to admit that inefficiency at least was not one of Mr. Ufferlitz’s failings, or at any rate of his assistнants. The head waiter at Ciro’s, whom Simon had never seen before in his life, said “Good evening, Miss Quest,” and then: “Good evening, Mr. Templar!”-with an air of glad surprise, as though he were greeting an old and valued cusнtomer who had been away for a long time, and ushered them to a ringside table from which he removed the RESERVED card with a flourish. He said enticingly: “A cocktail to start with?”

“Dry Martinis,” said the Saint; and he bowed and beamed himself away.

“The works,” said April Quest.

“So I see,” murmured the Saint. “Let’s pretend we’re used to it.”

“You’re going to be an experience,” she said. “Did you ever do any acting?”

“Not for the camera.”

“Were you on the stage?”

He shook his head.

“Not that either. Just what you might call privately. You see, when you lead a wicked life like mine, you can’t always be yourself,” he explained. “According to the job in hand, you may want to pretend to be anything, from a dyspeptic poet with Communist tendencies to a retired sea-captain with white whiskers and a perpetual thirst.”

She was studying him with candid interest now.

“Then some of that stuff about you must be on the level.”

“Some of it,” he admitted mildly.

“Most of it, I guess.” She said it herself. “I ought to have known-it isn’t the sort of thing that press-agents think up. But Jesus, you meet so many phonies in this business you get out of the habit of believing anything. I’m one myself, so I know.”

“You?”

“What do you think you know about me?”

“Let’s see. Your name’s April Quest,” he began cautiously. “Or is it?”

“That’s about as far as you’ll get, and nobody would believe that. What’s a name! Even that isn’t a hundred per cent, either. It was Quist on my birth certificate, but they thought Quest sounded better.”

“I remember reading something about you,” he recalled.“Last year, wasn’t it, when you were the new sensational discovery? You were raised in the logging country up north. Your parents died when you were a kid, but you kept the old forest going. You’d never been in a city or bought a ready-made dress or worn a pair of shoes, but tough lumberjacks worshipped the ground you walked on and worked like slaves for you. You’d never seen a lipstick or a powder puff. You were the unspoiled glamor girl of the wilderness, the untamed virgin queen of the Big Trees—”

“Nuts,” she said. “My father was a drunken longshoreman who got his skull cracked in a strikers’ riot. I was dealing them off the arm in a truck-drivers’ hash house outside Seattle when Jack Groom stopped in for a cup of coffee and offered me a trial contract at twenty-five a week. I’d just about settled on another offer to be a B-girl in San Francisco, but this looked better. And that’s more than I’d tell another soul in this village. I guess I must have a feeling about you.”

“That’s nice,” said the Saint, and meant it.

Suddenly her hand slid over his fingers, and her smile was really intoxicating.

“Darling,” she said softly.

He looked at her in a quite unreasonable stillness.

A flash bulb popped.

Simon turned in time to see the photographer backing away. April Quest giggled, and let go his hand.

“Sorry,” she said. “I only just saw the bastard coming in time.”

“Try to warn me next time, will you?” said the Saint gently. “My heart’s liable to blow a gasket when you put so much soul into your work.”

A heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and he looked up and back. April mirrored his movement at the same time. Mr. Byron Ufferlitz stood between them, looking heavily genial with a fat cigar in his mouth.

“That was nice cooperation, kiddies,” he rumbled. “I told him to get another later on, when you’re dancing. How’s everything?”

“Fine,” April said.

She smiled dazzlingly, but her voice sounded very faintly mechanical.

“How ya getting on with the Saint? He’s all right, huh? What a profile! And that figure … You two are gonna make a great team. Maybe you’ll do a lotta pictures together, like Garbo and Gilbert or Colman and Banky in the old days.”

“I can’t afford it,” said the Saint. “Earning that kind of money is too expensive these days.”

“We’ll take care of that,” said Mr. Ufferlitz jovially, if a trifle ambiguously. “Say, April, about your new hair-do, I was talkin’ to Westmore just now and …”

Simon looked around the room and caught the raised eyeнbrows of Dick Halliday, who had just come in with Mary Martin. He grinned; and then he saw Martha Scott and Carl Alsop making faces at him, and they were just the first of other faces that were breaking into expressions of recognition, and he knew that he was certainly going to have to be well paid for the explanations he would have to make to some of his friends in Hollywood for his manner of arriving back among them. Then, trying to postpone that awkward moment by finding some blank direction to turn to, he looked towards the entrance from the bar and saw Orlando Flane.

Flane was looking right at them. He had a highball glass in his hand, and his feet were braced apart as if to steady himself. In spite of that he was swaying a little. His too-handsome face was flushed, and his hair and necktie had the uncomfortably rumpled look that can never be confused with any other kind of untidiness. There was no doubt that Orlando Flane was drunk again, or still drunk. The twist of his mouth was vicious.

“Well, I mustn’t stay any longer,” Mr. Ufferlitz was saying. “Don’t want to look like I was promoting this. Have yourнselves a time, and don’t worry about the check. It’s all taken care of. ‘Bye.”