The Saint in Miami
( Saint - 22 )
Leslie Charteris
A mysterious summons and a hidden Nazi submarine scatter death from Miami's luxurious beach villas to the treacherous Everglades.
THE SAINT IN MIAMI
by Leslie Charteris.
How Simon Templar Dealt with Phantoms, and Hoppy Uniatz Clung Strictly to Facts
Simon Templar lay stretched out on the sands in front of Lawrence Gilbeck's modest twentyfive-room bungalow, and allowed the cottony breakers pushing their way in from the Atlantic to lull him with the gentle roar of their disintegration on the slope at his feet.
Although it was an hour after a late dinner, the sand was still warm from the day's sun. Overhead, the celebrated Miami moon, by kind permission of the Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Public Relations, floated among the stars like a piece of luminous cheese, looking more like the product of one of Earl Carroll's electricians than a manifestation of nature. The moon dripped down a silvery opalescence which left black shadows in the areas it missed. The shadows deepened the tiny indentations beside Simon's nose, and for a moment gave an entirely false suggestion of care and worry to his face he looked at Patricia Holm.
That the appearance of care was false, Patricia knew. Commonplace care was a disease of modern existence which was incapable of infecting the exuberant life of that amazing modern buccaneer who was better known to most of the world by his queer nickname of "The Saint" than by the names which were recorded on his birth certificate. Worry he might cause to the plodding members of many police forces throughout the world; worry he certainly had caused, in lavish and sometimes even fatal doses, to very many members of that loosely knit fraternity which is popularly referred to as the Underworld, even when it lives in much greater luxury than most respectable people; but the worry stopped there. It was something quite external to the Saint. If it ever touched him at all, it was in the form of a perverse and irresponsible worry-a small irking worry that life might one day become dull, that the gods of gay and perilous adventure who had blessed him so extravagantly through all his life so far might one day desert him, leaving nothing but the humdrum uneventfulness which ordinary mortals accept as a substitute for living . . .
He reached out a brown hand and trickled sand through his fingers on to the arm which Patricia was using as a pillow for her spun-gold hair.
"You know such fascinating people, darling," he said. "These Gilbecks must be specially good samples. I suppose it's that open-handed New World hospitality I've read about. Turn your house over to a gang of strangers, and just leave them to it. I expect it has a lot of good points, too. Your guests don't have a chance to get on your nerves. Probably they'll send us a wire in a month or two from Honolulu or somewhere. 'So nice to have had you with us. Do come again.' "
Patricia moved her rounded arm to ward off the trickle of sand which threatened her hair.
"Something must have happened," she said seriously. "Justine wouldn't write me that she was in trouble and then go away."
"But she did," Simon insisted. " 'Come,' she writes you. 'All is not well. My father is moping about the house, bowed down with some mysterious grief and woe. Something Sinister is Going On.' So what do we do?"
"I remember," said Patricia. "But keep on talking if it amuses you."
"On the contrary," said the Saint, "it hurts me. It scarifies my sensitive soul . . . We gird up our loins and fly out here to the rescue of the beauteous Justine and her distraught papa. And are they here?"
He formed a human question mark by pulling up his knees and looking at them.
Patricia supplied the answer: "No, they aren't here."
"Exactly," Simon agreed. "They aren't here. Instead of finding them on the doorstep, waiting to welcome us with stuffed tarpon, potted coconuts, and poi, we are met by nothing more convivial than a Filipino houseboy with a cold. He informs us in a hoarse gust of germs that Comrade Gilbeck and this voluptuous daughter you've described so lushly have hoisted the anchor on their yacht, which I think is most appropriately named the Mirage, and departed for ports unknown."
"You make a good story of it."
"I have to. Otherwise I'd be weeping over it. The whole mushy business depresses me. I'm afraid our hosts have taken a powder, as Hoppy would say."
"Well," protested Patricia, "you can't blame me for it."
"Furthermore," Simon continued, "I don't believe there ever was any reason for Justine to send for you. Probably Papa had just taken a flier in Consolidated Toothpicks, and then some dentist proclaimed that toothpicks destroy the teeth, and the bottom fell out of the market. After she wrote that letter another dentist came back and said that toothpicks not only prevent decay but also cure cancer, nervous B.O., and athlete's foot The market boomed again, Pappy rejoiced, and they climbed into their canoe and paddled happily away to celebrate, forgetting all about us."
"Maybe that's what happened."
Simon sat up, with a shrug of his wide shoulders, and brushed the sand impatiently from his long legs.
He looked at her, and almost forgot everything else. A trick of that musical-comedy moon made her seem scarcely real. She was part of his life, the most enduring keystone of his happiness, unchanging as the stars; yet at that moment she seemed to have blended into the warm magic of the Florida night, become remote and doubly beautiful, like some cast-up fantasy of moonbeams and mother of pearl. The banter began to die out of his blue eyes. He touched her, and so felt the detachment of her mind which had helped the illusion.
"You really think something has happened, don't you?" he said soberly.
"I'm sure of it."
A breeze sprang up from the ocean and danced inland, stirring the palm fronds behind them. It seemed to touch the Saint with a chill; and yet he knew there was no chill in the wind. He had felt this other kind of chill so many times before, like the points of a million spectral needles, frozen and feathery-thin, probing every pore with a touch as light as a cobweb. In the past it had led him into the shadow of death more often than he could remember; and yet even more often than that its same impartial touch had warned him of danger in time to escape the falling shadow. It was the chill of adventure-the stirring of a ghostly prescience that was for ever rooted in his uncanny attunement to the whispering wavelengths of battle and sudden death. And he felt it then, as he gazed out at the shimmering vagueness of the sea.
"Look." He slid an arm behind Patricia's shoulders and helped her to sit up. "There's quite a big ship out there. I've been watching it. And it seems to be heading in. I could see the port light a few minutes ago, and now the starboard light's visible too. We must be looking directly at her bow."
"Perhaps the Gilbecks are coming back, after all," she said.
"It's much too big for them," he said quietly. "But why would a ship that size be heading straight for the shore-as close as that?"
Patricia stared at it.
Out on the ocean, a beam of silver light streamed out suddenly from a searchlight on the vessel's forepeak. It held steady for a second, then turned erratically as if it were hunting for something. The ray swung downwards, struck the water close to the cobbled pathway of moonlight, and swept quickly over the sea, lancing the surface like a scalpel of pure luminance. Leaking rays caught the figures of men behind it and silhouetted them against the whiteness of the superstructure.
Not until then did Simon realise that the ship was even closer to the shore than he had thought. He stood up and raised Patricia to her feet "You've felt that there was something wrong all evening," he said, "and I guess your hunch was right There's something wrong out there."
"It looks as if someone had fallen overboard," she said,"and th
ey're trying to pick them up."
"I wonder," said the Saint He didn't know; but his answer came instantly. Even as he spoke, things happened as if his words had cued them. The searchlight went out, and with it the porthole and deck lights. Black as a collier, the vessel slid into the dappled lane of reflected moonlight A finger of intense radiance appeared suddenly on one of her sides, unfolded upwards with a swift blossoming, and pointed into the sky with a burst of glare that momentarily erased the brilliance of the boon. Answering that splash of fire, the entire ship heaved as though a cyclopean hand had struck it from below. For an instant the blaze wrapped it from stem to stern; and then it seemed to vomit all its insides towards the sky in one black and scarlet shower.
The dap of thunder that started from that cataclysmic disruption rolled against Simon's eardrums a split second later.
He caught Patricia's hand and dragged her hastily up the sloping beach to where a fringe of palms and a wall of pinkish stone bordered the lawn. She felt herself lifted effortlessly through the air for an instant, and then he was crouching beside her under the shelter of the wall. For a fleeting indefinable lull, the world seemed to stand still. On nearby Collins Avenue, automobiles had stopped while their drivers stared curiously out to sea. The breeze had gone rustling away across the flats of Florida, but the air was filled with a new and more frightening roar.
"What is it?" she said.
"A small tidal wave from the explosion. Hold everything," he said, and then it hit.
The piled-up crest of white hissed deliriously as it drove up the beach. It smashed against the sloping sand, gained height as it ploughed on, and broke in one giant comber against the wall. Simon held her as the water fell on them like an avalanche. There was a moment of cold crushing confusion; and then the flood was flattened out and harmless, receding down the beach, leaving no mark except a line of rubble on the lawn.
"And there goes that thousand-dollar Schiaparelli model," said the Saint, surveying the sodden wreckage of her dress as they stood up. "Just another casualty to this blitzkrieg business . . "
His eyes ambled grimly over the scene, watching a gamboling rush of figures towards the shore. The nearer sounds of moving traffic churned into a pulsing immobility, and a long distance away some female screamed stupidly . . . And then he looked down directly at his feet, and stood frozen in half incredulous rigidity.
Not more than a yard from him, a round-faced youth stared up at him unseeingly from the ground. Clad in a blue seaman's uniform, he lay on his back in the sprawled limpness of death. The wave that had hurled him in had left a small pile of seaweed against one twisted arm. The wrist of that arm was tangled in the looped cords of an ordinary lifebelt. Simon leaned down and looked closer. The moonlight was strong enough for him to read the ship's name that was painted on the belt, and as he read it his blood turned cold . . .
It seemed to him that he stared at it for a space of crawling minutes, while the letters charred themselves blackly into his brain. And yet with another unshaken sense he knew that it was actually no more than a few seconds by the clock before he was able to spur himself out of the trance of eerie and unbelieving dread that spelled from that simple name.
When he spoke, his voice was almost abnormally quiet and even. There was nothing but the steely fierceness of his grip on Patricia's arm to hint at the chaos of fantastic doubts and questions that were screaming through his brain.
"Give me a hand, darling, he said. "I want to get him into the house before anyone else sees him.''
There was something in his voice that she knew him too well to question. Obediently but uncomprehending, she bent over and tugged at the sailor's feet while Simon put hands under his shoulders. The man was heavy with water-logged flaccidness.
They were halfway across the lawn with their burden when a shadow moved on the porch of the guest house. Simon let go his end of the load abruptly, and Patricia hurriedly followed his example. The shadow detached itself from the house and stealthily drew nearer.
The moonlight shed itself with pardonable coyness over a pair of white flannels with inch wide stripes surmounted by a five-coloured blazer which might have been tailored for Man Mountain Dean. Above the blazer, and peering at the Saint, was the kind of face which unscientific mothers used to describe when trying to frighten their recalcitrant young.
"Is dat you, boss?" asked the face.
It had a voice that was slightly reminiscent of a klaxon with laryngitis, but at that moment Simon found it almost melodious. The face from which it issued, instead of giving him heart failure, seemed like a thing of beauty. From long familiarity with its abstruse code of expressions, he perceived that the deep furrows in the place where Nature had neglected to put a brow, far from foreboding a homicidal attack, were indicative of anxiety.
"Yes, Hoppy," he said in quick relief. "This is us. Don't stand there gawping. Come and help."
Hoppy Uniatz lumbered forward with the gait of a happy bear. It was not his role to criticise or argue. His was the part of blind and joyful obedience. To him, the Saint was a man who worked strange wonders, who plotted gigantic schemes which did into beautiful fruition with supernatural simplicity, who moved with a godlike nonchalance in those labyrinths of thought and cerebration which to Mr. Uniatz were indistinguishable from the paths of purgatory. Thought, to Hoppy Uniatz was a process involving acute agony in the upper part of the head; and life had really only become worth living to him on that blissful day when he had discovered that the Saint was quite capable of doing all the thinking for both of them. From that moment he had become an uninvited but irremovable attachment, hitching his wagon complacently to that lucky star.
He looked down admiringly at the body on the ground "Chees, boss," he got out after a time. "I hear de bang when you boin him, but I can't figger out what it is. De nerz almost knocks me off de porch. What new kinda cannon is dat?
"There are times, Hoppy," said the Saint, "when I fed that you and I should get married. As it happens, it was quite a big kind of cannon; only it wasn't mine. Now help me get this stiff inside. Take him into my room and strip the uniform off him, and make sure that none of the servants see you."
These were orders of a type that Hoppy could understand. They dealt with simple, concrete things in a manner to which he was by no means unaccustomed. Without further conversation, he picked the youth up in his arms and returned rapidly into the shadows. The lifebelt still dangled from the corpse's wrist.
Simon turned back to Patricia. She was watching him with a quiet intentness.
I expect we could do with a drink," he said.
"I could.".
"You know what happened?"
"I'm getting an idea.
The lean planes of his face were picked out vividly for a moment as he lighted a cigarette.
"That ship was torpedoed," he said. "And you saw the lifebelt?"
"I only read part of it," she said. "But I saw the letters HMS."
"That was enough," he said flatly. "As a matter of fact, it was HMS Triton. And as you know, that's a British submarine."
She said shakily: "It can't be true-"
"We've got to find out." His face was lighted again in the ripening glow of his cigarette. "I'm going to borrow Gilbeck's speedboat and take a trip out to sea and find out if there's anything else to pick up where the wreck happened. D'you want to see if you can locate Peter while I get it warmed up? He should have got back by now."
There was no need for her to answer. He watched her go, and turned in the direction of the private dock. As he walked, he looked out over the ocean again. Close down to the horizon he saw a single light, that moved slowly southwards and then vanished.
Lawrence Gilbeck's twin-screw speedboat shuddered protestingly as the Saint drove her wide open to the top of an inbound comber. For a moment she hung on the crest with both whirling propellers free; then they clutched the water again, and she dived into the trough like a toboggan racing down a bank of smooth ice. C
urtains of spray leapt six feet into the air on each side of her as she settled down to a steady forty knots. The name painted on her counter said Meteor, and Simon had to admit that she could live up to it From his place on the other side of the boat, crouching behind the slope of the forward windshield, Peter Quentin spoke across Patricia.
"It'll be a great comfort to all the invalids who've come south for the winter," he said, "to know that you're here."
He spoke in a tone of detached resignation, like a martyr who has made up his mind to die bravely so long ago that the tedious details of his execution have become merely an inevitable anticlimax. He hunched his prizefighter's shoulders up around his ears and crinkled his pleasantly pugnacious features in an attempt to penetrate the darkness ahead.
Simon flicked his cigarette-end to leeward, and watched its red spark snap back far beyond the stem in the passing rush of wind.
"After all," he said, "the Gilbecks did leave word for us to make ourselves at home. Surely they couldn't object to our taking this old tub out for a spin. She was sitting in the boat-house just rusting away."
"Their Scotch wasn't rusting away," Peter remarked, operating skilfully on the bottle clamped between his feet "I always understood that it improved with age."
"Only up to a point," said the Saint gravely. "After that it's inclined to become anaemic and waste away. A tragedy which it is the duty of any right-minded citizen to forestall. Hand it over. Pat and I are chilly after our shower bath."
He examined the label and sipped an approving sample before he handed the bottle to Patricia.
"Mr Peter Dawson's best," he told her, raising his voice against the roar of the engine as he opened the throttle wider. "Pass it back to me before Hoppy gets it and we have to consign a dead one to the sea."
Somewhere within the small globule of protopathic tissue surrounded by Mr Uniatz's skull a glimmer of remote comprehension came to life as the Saint's words drifted back to him. He leaned over from his seat behind.
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