Thanks To The Saint - Leslie Charteris
The Good Medicine
Simon looked towards the corner table again. The woman who sat there with the pale-blond, delicate-featured, expensively tailored and shirted and accessoried type, for which a previous generation's graphic term "lounge lizard" has never been bettered, was not constructed to the conventional specifications of a female tycoon. Even to refer to her as a "woman" seemed slightly heavy, although the much-abused word "girl" was equally inapplicable. She could easily have passed for much less than thirty and could not have ranked forty by the most vicious estimate: the Saint would have personally favored the lower estimate, being a man and vulnerable to certain figures, of which she had a honey, unless the couturiers had cooked up some new gimmicks which could falsify even such a candid decollete as she was wearing. Incontrovertibly above that she had a face of petulant but exciting beauty, capped by casque of darkly burnished copper hair. If she could have walked many blocks outside without eliciting an appreciative whistle, it would only have been in a blackout that coincided with a dense fog.
She was completely aware of the boldly appraising way that Simon had been looking at her, he knew, and he did not have any impression that it displeased her at all. He observed that she did not seem to have brought it to her escort's attention, as a woman will when she is annoyed by such a scrutiny.
...
"The Count of Cristamonte," Stern said with the obligatory gesture. "Mrs Ashville."
The momentary widening of her eyes might have been hard to measure without a micrometer, but Simon did not miss it. They were brown eyes with flecks of green, and there were hardly any telltale wrinkles around them. Even at close quarters her skin had the clear and silky texture coveted by the users of Dreemicreem. There was no doubt that simply as a female she was what almost any male would have classified to himself as a Dish.
..
She continued to look the Saint over, not a whit less candidly than he had been studying her a few minutes earlier.
"How long are you here for?"
..
With a last flashing glance at the Saint she swept on.
..
"But more women are natural actresses than end up in Hollywood. If they're born with the spark, and given the opportunity, they don't take long to learn the princess routines. Cinderella had to have a fairy godmother, but all the modern gal needs is the confidence that comes with a little success and a lot of money. And I say the performance can be just as much fun if you forget the pedigree."
..
"If she threw herself at me, I can't pretend it wouldn't be nice to have an excuse not to duck."
..
"Will you be long?"
"No longer than this taxi will take," he said.
One reason why Simon Templar's nervous system had survived his extraordinary life with so little damage by strain and fraying was that he had an amazing gift of closing his mind to unprofitable speculation. When there was obviously nothing to be gained by trying to foreguess a situation that would soon supply its own answers, he was able to simply switch off the futile circuit and wait with only philosophical anticipation for the future to unroll itself. He saved his prophetic energy for the occasions when life and death might depend on how many moves he could stay ahead of the game, but he felt reasonably sure that this was not that kind of game.
..
He was even more sure when she unlocked the inside door at which the automatic elevator stopped in obedience to the small green button and let him step out into a room that could only have been designed by an interior decorator who had studied his subject by watching old movies on television. It cried aloud for a sinuous slumber-eyed siren in a long clinging robe, possibly fondling a tame ocelot. Elise Ashville was too palpably charged with corpuscles and vitamins for that role, and she had not even conceded to the diaphanous negligee which any writer of a certain modern school would have considered a formal necessity for such an occasion; but the suggestion of untrammeled nakedness under the demurely neck-high and ankle-deep housecoat she had changed into was no less positive and even more effective. And her approach had a refreshing timesaving candor.
..
"Then you would not misunderstand my impatience to kiss the most exciting woman I have seen in America?"
It was a purely Arabian Nights kind of episode that the Saint would never have dared to relate to anyone who he did not already know to be convinced that in this amazing world anything can happen; but this subtracted nothing from his enjoyment of it, since he was not in the habit of telling that kind of story.
...
"You and me and the mosquitoes," she said, though his dramatic enthusiasm was so enchanting that her tone of voice was softened in spite of herself. "Darling. We'd be eaten alive!"
He shook his head.
"I had already thought of that too."
He reached for her hand and held it open, and took a small gold box from his pocket and tipped out a pill into her upturned palm.
...
Innumerable flying things fluttered and dived drunkenly around the lamps, and from the shadows came myriads of mosquitoes with a ceaseless hum of tiny tireless wings. She could even see them flickering speckily pas her eyes, and hear the rise and fall of individual hungry hoverings around her, while even tinier gnats whined thinly pas like diminutive rockets. But not once did the whine build into the typical infuriating crescendo of a gnat's kamikaze plunge directly into the earhole, and she could watch her bare gleaming arms without seeing them darkened by the settling of a single mote of disrespectful voracity. Her expectant shoulders and back and legs waited for the hair-touch of an almost weightless landing and the microscopic stab of the first probing sting, but time went on and they felt nothing. And she knew that to be first on the market with a pill that would accomplish such a miracle would make what by any standards could be literally called a fortune.
There was soft music coming from the portable player, and he was spooning caviar on to the first plates on the neatly laid table.
"Come, Elise, sit down and relax," he said. "You know by now that nothing is going to bite you."
"It's amazing," she said as she let him seat her. "I must know -- did those pill makers give you a good deal?"
..
When Mrs Elise Ashville let herself wake up by sybaritically easy stages the next morning, and finally focused her eyes on the bedside clock, it showed ten minutes past eleven.
She squirmed, yawned, stretched and sprawled again int he enormous bed, draining the last raptures of sleepy recollection, until she suddenly realized that some faint sounds of activity in the apartment should have aroused her somewhat before that. Either the new maid was going to prove as unreliable as her predecessors, or she was a potential jewel who crept in and moved around like a mouse.
Mrs Ashville yawned again and sat up, in an unwontedly agreeable and optimistic mood which could not have been solely due to the single pink vitamin-complex pill what Simon Templar had persuaded her to take the night before.
"Germaine," she called -- quite dulcetly, at first.
There was no response, even after louder repetitions. Germaine Ashville, having done her part by giving her sister-in-law a facial with almost pure ethylhexanediol, and pouring two full quarts of it into her bubble bath, and even spiking all her colognes and perfumes with the same popular odorless insect repellent, was already boarding a plane to Denver with her brother, and the Saint was seeing them off.
