triumph.”
“And, of course, there is no bribe left to offer him. He has had the satisfaction of making you suffer the last possible indignity. Now he can only look forward to the sadistic climax of proving that all your sacrifice was in vain.”
“C’est ca. One believes, now, that the Saint understands everything.”
“That’s one thing I’ll never do,” said the Saint. “But I’ll keep trying.”
He lighted a cigarette and stared out of the elaborately lace-curtained windows through which he could see practically nothing, listening to the vague rumbles and beeps and blended voices and sporadic clatters of the city without hearing them, and wondered if some miracle would ever earn him a reprieve from the reputation to which he had dedicated himself.
He could no longer have been flippant about soap operas, but he was beginning to think that a magnificent soap opera could have been built around him, except that hardly anyone would have believed the plot material except himself.
“Tell me some more about this charmer, Pierrot-le-Fut,” he said.
The details he was mainly interested in were the haunts and habits of the specimen. He wrote down certain addresses that Yvonne Norval gave him, and when he had finished asking questions she stood up with quiet dignity.
“I apologize for taking so much of your time, Monsieur,” she said. “But since you have heard it all, may I dare to hope a little?”
“I will try to think of something,” he said. “But whatever happens, when you leave this room, you must forget that you ever spoke to me, or told me anything. This may be our last meeting; but in any case, we never met.”
“C’est entendu, Monsieur le Saint.”
It was the most natural thing for him to offer his hand as he opened the door for her, but he was somewhat stunned and embarrassed when she bent over it and touched it to her lips. Then, before he could protest, she was gone.
It was quite a while since the Saint had tackled such a relatively basic and elementary problem as this. Regardless of the visions of starry-eyed spiritual or psychological idealists, he had never believed in the redemption or rehabilitation of such creatures as Pierrot-le-Fut: he believed in one fast, thrifty, and final cure for what ailed them, a treatment which eliminated all risk of a relapse. The fact that he had not administered this remedy so often of late was not due to any loss of faith in the efficacy of death as a disinfectant, but to the distracting pressure of too many more intriguing and more profitable claims on his attention. He realized now how much he had missed some of the old simple pleasures. But it had taken a pustule of such almost incredible stature as Pierrot-le-Fut to remind him of them.
The next evening he headed for the area near Mont-martre which was frequented by the self-baptized Pierre Norval and his ilk, not to sample any of the garish boites clustered around the Place Pigalle where pilgrims from all over the world pay their traditional respects to the symbols of mammalian reproduction, but to sift through some of the unglamorous outlying cafes where the parasites on the by-products of this activity met to scheme, drink, boast, connive, gamble, and trade every kind of illicit merchandise—vegetable, mineral, and human. And without any elaborate disguise, using only a few of those subtle shifts of dress and demeanor which were his own inimitable masterpieces of camouflage, he was able to do it without ever incurring the kind of attention that would have greeted an ordinary tourist who had strayed so far from the time-honored tourist trap-line.
He found Pierrot-le-Fut quite quickly, at the third of the addresses he had jotted down, an unattractive bistro off the Boulevard Clichy, and without evident nausea he sipped some extraordinarily foul and bitter coffee while he browsed slowly and exhaustively through the same edition of Match that he had mauled through each of the other stops he had
“And, of course, there is no bribe left to offer him. He has had the satisfaction of making you suffer the last possible indignity. Now he can only look forward to the sadistic climax of proving that all your sacrifice was in vain.”
“C’est ca. One believes, now, that the Saint understands everything.”
“That’s one thing I’ll never do,” said the Saint. “But I’ll keep trying.”
He lighted a cigarette and stared out of the elaborately lace-curtained windows through which he could see practically nothing, listening to the vague rumbles and beeps and blended voices and sporadic clatters of the city without hearing them, and wondered if some miracle would ever earn him a reprieve from the reputation to which he had dedicated himself.
He could no longer have been flippant about soap operas, but he was beginning to think that a magnificent soap opera could have been built around him, except that hardly anyone would have believed the plot material except himself.
“Tell me some more about this charmer, Pierrot-le-Fut,” he said.
The details he was mainly interested in were the haunts and habits of the specimen. He wrote down certain addresses that Yvonne Norval gave him, and when he had finished asking questions she stood up with quiet dignity.
“I apologize for taking so much of your time, Monsieur,” she said. “But since you have heard it all, may I dare to hope a little?”
“I will try to think of something,” he said. “But whatever happens, when you leave this room, you must forget that you ever spoke to me, or told me anything. This may be our last meeting; but in any case, we never met.”
“C’est entendu, Monsieur le Saint.”
It was the most natural thing for him to offer his hand as he opened the door for her, but he was somewhat stunned and embarrassed when she bent over it and touched it to her lips. Then, before he could protest, she was gone.
It was quite a while since the Saint had tackled such a relatively basic and elementary problem as this. Regardless of the visions of starry-eyed spiritual or psychological idealists, he had never believed in the redemption or rehabilitation of such creatures as Pierrot-le-Fut: he believed in one fast, thrifty, and final cure for what ailed them, a treatment which eliminated all risk of a relapse. The fact that he had not administered this remedy so often of late was not due to any loss of faith in the efficacy of death as a disinfectant, but to the distracting pressure of too many more intriguing and more profitable claims on his attention. He realized now how much he had missed some of the old simple pleasures. But it had taken a pustule of such almost incredible stature as Pierrot-le-Fut to remind him of them.
The next evening he headed for the area near Mont-martre which was frequented by the self-baptized Pierre Norval and his ilk, not to sample any of the garish boites clustered around the Place Pigalle where pilgrims from all over the world pay their traditional respects to the symbols of mammalian reproduction, but to sift through some of the unglamorous outlying cafes where the parasites on the by-products of this activity met to scheme, drink, boast, connive, gamble, and trade every kind of illicit merchandise—vegetable, mineral, and human. And without any elaborate disguise, using only a few of those subtle shifts of dress and demeanor which were his own inimitable masterpieces of camouflage, he was able to do it without ever incurring the kind of attention that would have greeted an ordinary tourist who had strayed so far from the time-honored tourist trap-line.
He found Pierrot-le-Fut quite quickly, at the third of the addresses he had jotted down, an unattractive bistro off the Boulevard Clichy, and without evident nausea he sipped some extraordinarily foul and bitter coffee while he browsed slowly and exhaustively through the same edition of Match that he had mauled through each of the other stops he had
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