The Saint in Miami s-22

by Leslie Charteris

  "Perhaps you'd better find out," March suggested.

  "I'll take him ashore to the house and do that while we're waiting for the police."

  Probably that was the precise mathematical point at which the Saint's last lingering fragments of doubt dissolved, creeping over his scalp with a special tingle on their way out before they melted finally into nothingness.

  The dialogue was beautifully done. It was exquisitely and economically smooth. There wasn't a ragged tone in it anywhere that should have betrayed anything to any listener who wasn't meant to understand too much-and Simon wondered whether the girl Karen was in that category. But in those few innocuous-sounding words a vital problem had been considered, a plan of solution suggested and discussed, a decision made and agreed on. And Simon knew quite clearly that the scheme which had been approved was not one which promised great benefits to his health. What would happen if they got him safely away into a secluded room in the house, and what that huskily soft-spoken captain's notions might be on the subject of likely methods of finding out things from a reluctant informant, were not the most pleasant prospects in the world to brood about. But he had staged the scene for his own benefit, and now he had to get himself out of it.

  Simon knew that not only the fate of that adventure but the fate of all other possible adventures after it hung by a thread; but his eyes were as cool and untroubled as if he had had a platoon of infantry behind him.

  "You don't have to worry about me," he said. "But Gilbeck left a letter which might be much more of a nuisance to you."

  "Gilbeck?" March repeated. "What are you talking about?"

  'I'm talking about a letter which he thoughtfully left in his house before you kidnapped him."

  "How do you know?'

  "Because I happen to be living in his house at the moment."

  The furrow returned between March's brows.

  "Are you a friend of Gilbeck's?"

  "Bosom to bosom." Simon refilled his champagne glass. "I thought he'd have mentioned me."

  March's mouth opened a little, and then an expression of hesitant relief came over his face.

  "Good Lord!" he exclaimed. He laughed, with what was obviously meant to be a disarming heartiness. "Why ever didn't you say so before? Then what is all this business-a joke?"

  "That depends on your point of view," said the Saint. "I don't suppose Lawrence Gilbeck and Justine found it particularly funny."

  March plucked at his upper lip.

  "If you really are a friend of theirs," he said, "you must have got hold of the wrong end of something. Nothing's happened to them. I talked to the house today."

  "Twice," said the Saint. "I took one of the calls."

  "Mr Templar," said the captain carefully, "you haven't behaved tonight like one of Mr Gilbeck's friends would behave. May we ask what you're doing in his house while he is away?"

  "A fair question, comrade." Simon raised his glass and barely wetted his lips with the wine. "Justine asked me to come and be a sort of general nursemaid to the family. I answer the phone and read everybody's personal papers. A great writer of notes and jottings, was Brother Gilbeck." He turned back to March. "I haven't ferreted the whole business out yet, Randy, but it certainly does look as if he didn't really trust you."

  "For what reason?" March inquired coldly.

  "Well," said the Saint, "he left this letter I was telling you about. In a sealed envelope. And there was a note with it which gave instructions that if anything happened to him it was to be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

  March sat quite still.

  The girl lighted a cigarette for herself, watching the Saint with intent and luminous eyes.

  March said, in an uneven voice: "Better put your gun away, Captain. It's nice of Mr Templar to come and tell us this. We ought to know more about it. Perhaps we can clear up some misunderstandings."

  "Pardon me, sir." The captain was perfectly deferrential, but he kept his gun exactly where it was. "We should be more certain of Mr Templar first." He turned his dry stony eyes on the Saint. "Mr Templar, since you seem to be so sure that something has happened to Mr Gilbeck, did you carry out his instructions and mail that letter?"

  Simon allowed his glance to shift with a subtle hint of nervousness.

  "Not yet. But-"

  "Ah, then where is the letter?"

  "I've still got it"

  "Where?"

  "At the house."

  "It would be so much better if you could produce it to Mr March and prove that you're telling the truth." The captain's eyes were as hard and flickerless as agates. "Perhaps you didn't really leave it at home. Perhaps you still have it with you."

  He took one step closer.

  The Saint's left hand stirred involuntarily towards his breast pocket. At least, the movement looked involuntary-a defensive gesture that was checked almost as soon as it began. But the captain saw it, and interpreted it as he was meant to interpret it. He took two more steps, and reached towards the pocket. Which was exactly what Simon had been arranging for him to do.

  A lot of things happened all at once, with the speed and efficiency of a highly specialised juggling routine. They can only be catalogued laboriously here, but their actual sequence was so swift that it defeated the eye.

  The Saint made a half turn and a neat flick of his right wrist which jarred the bubbling contents of his champagne glass squarely into the captain's eyes. Simultaneously the fingers of the Saint's left hand closed like spring-steel clamps on the wrist behind the captain's Luger. Meanwhile, all the unexpected physical agility which justified Hoppy Uniatz's professional name, and compensated with such liberality for the primeval sluggishness of his intellect, surged into volcanic activity. One of his massive feet swung up from the rear in a dropkick arc which terminated explosively on the base of the captain's spine; and almost immediately, as if the kick had only been timed to elevate the captain to meet it, the top of the captain's skull served as a landing field for the whisky bottle for which by this time Mr Uniatz had no further practical use. The captain lay down on the deck in a disinterested manner, and Simon Templar turned his Luger in the direction of Randolph March's slackly drooping jaw.

  "I'm sorry we can't stay now," he murmured. "But I'm afraid your skipper had some unsociable ideas. Also it's getting to be time for Hoppy's beauty sleep. But we'll be seeing you again-especially if Lawrence Gilbeck and Justine don't show up very soon. Try not to forget that, Randy . . ."

  His voice was very gentle, but his eyes were no softer than frozen sapphires. And then, as quickly and elusively as it had come, the chill fell away from him as he turned to smile at the girl, who had not moved at all in those last hectic seconds.

  "You'll remember, won't you?" he said. "Any time you feel like some more fun, you know where to find me."

  She didn't answer, any more than March, but the recollec­tion of her raptly contemplative gaze stayed in his mind all the way home and until he fell asleep.

  He was breakfasting heartily on fried chicken and waffles served under the shade of a gaudily striped umbrella when Peter Quentin and Patricia joined him on the patio.

  "You must have been tired." Patricia slipped her bath robe back from her brown shoulders, and draped slender tanned legs and sandalled feet along the length of a cane chair. "Peter and I have been swimming for two hours. We thought you were going to sleep all day.

  "If we hadn't heard you snoring," said Peter, "we could have hoped you were dead."

  The Saint's white teeth denuded a chicken bone.

  "Early rising is the burden of the proletariat and the affectation of millionaires," he said. "Being neither, I try to achieve a very happy mean." Holding the bone in one hand, he used it as a pointer to indicate the retreating form of a billowy Negress who was waddling away into the background with a tray. "Where did the Black Narcissus come from? She wasn't here yesterday. She says her name's Desdemona, and I find it hard to believe."

  "Don't talk with your mouth full
," Patricia told him. "She showed up this morning with a coloured chauffeur named Even. It was their day off yesterday."

  "That's interesting." Simon stirred his coffee. "And the Fillipino houseboy was downtown on some errand. So nobody actually saw how Gilbeck and Justine left."

  "They phoned," she said; and he nodded.

  "I've helped people to make phone calls myself, in my day."

  Peter Quentin hoisted his powerful trunk-clad form on to a sunwarmed coping, and swung his sandy feet.

  "If the Gilbecks don't show up today, skipper, so we just stick around?"

  Simon leaned back and glanced around contentedly at the semi-tropical scene. The house sprawled out around him, cool and spacious under the roof of Cuban tile. A riot of poinsettias, hibiscus, and azaleas bordered the inner wall of the estate and overflowed into the patio. On the other side of the house, a palm-lined driveway swept in a horseshoe towards Collins Avenue. The heightened colours drawn in flashing sunwashed lines made a picture-book setting for the ocean's incredible blue.

  "I like the place," said the Saint "Gilbeck or no Gilbeck, I think I'll stay. Even without the succulent Justine. Desdemona cooks with the thistledown touch of a fairy queen. It's true that she sometimes looks at me with what a more sensitive man might think was black disapproval, but I feel I can win her. I'm sure that shell learn to love me before we part."

  "It'll be one of your biggest and blackest failures if she doesn't," said Patricia.

  Simon ignored her scathingly, and lighted a cigarette.

  "Here in the midst of this epicurean if somewhat decadent Paradise," he said, "we can exist in sumptuous and sybaritic splendour at Comrade Gilbeck's expense, even though we may have to deny ourselves such British luxuries as bubble-and-squeak and toad-in-the-hole. It's a beautiful place to live. Also it's full of fascinating people."

  "You haven't tried the restaurant where I had dinner last night, when I was out sleuthing for you," said Peter Quentin. "They served me a very fat pork chop fried in peanut oil, and coffee with canned milk which turned it a disappointed grey. There was also a plate of grass and other vegetable matter, garnished with a mayonnaise compounded of machine oil and soap flakes."

  "The fascinating people are the principal attraction," Patricia explained. "Particularly the one with red hair."

  The Saint half closed his eyes.

  "Darling, I'm afraid our one and only Hoppy must have been embroidering the story. I told you last night exactly what happened. The whole thing was most casual. Somehow she has fallen under the baleful spell of March's Gastric Ambrosia, but naturally my superior beauty impressed her. I judged her to be a demure little thing, unversed in the ways of the world and unskilled in duplicity."

  "And shy," said Patricia.

  "Perhaps. But certainly not lacking-at least in several major points which a crude man might find attractive in that particular type of girl."

  "I suppose that's why you offered to find some more fun for her."

  "So long as she has her fun," Peter observed, "it can't really matter if you get us all bumped off."

  Simon created a perfect smoke-ring.

  "We don't have to worry about that for the present. I think our murders will be temporarily postponed on account of the hitch which I contrived last night."

  "You mean that letter you invented?"

  Simon refrained from answering while Desdemona hove alongside to collect the dishes. When the last of them was on the tray supported by her ample arm, she asked stoically: "When is you-all goin' away?"

  The Saint flipped a half dollar in the air, caught it, and placed it on the edge of the laden tray.

  "That was one of the best breakfasts I ever ate, Desdemona," he told her. "I think we'll wait until Mr Gilbeck gets back." He added deliberately: "Are you sure they didn't give you any idea how long they'd be away?"

  " 'Deed they didn't." Desdemona's eyes grew round as they moved from Simon to the shiny coin. "Sometimes they's gone a week acruisin'. Sometimes 'tain't moh than foh a day."

  She departed stolidly on that enlightening note, and Peter grinned.

  "You'd better try some folding money next time," he suggested. "She doesn't seem to thaw for silver."

  "All artists are temperamental." Simon stretched his legs and took up from where he had been interrupted. "Yes, I was talking about that letter which I was clever enough to invent." "What makes you think they believe in it any more?" "Perhaps they don't. But on the other hand, they don't know for certain. That's the catch. And even if they've decided that I really didn't have a letter last night, the idea's been put into their head. There might be a letter. I might even write one myself, having seen how they reacted to the idea. It's a discouraging risk. So they won't bump us off until they're quite sure about it"

  "How nice," Peter said glumly. "So instead of being bumped off without any mess, we can look forward to being tortured until they find out just where they do stand."

  Patricia straightened suddenly.

  Simon looked at her, and saw that her cheeks had gone pale under the golden tan.

  "Then," she said slowly, "if Gilbeck and Justine haven't been murdered-if they've only been kidnapped-"

  "Go on," said the Saint steadily.

  She stared at him from a masklike face that mirrored un­thinkable things.

  "If you're right about all these things you've guessed-if March really is up to the neck in dirty business, and he's afraid of Gilbeck giving him away-" One distraught hand rumpled her corn-gold hair. "If Gilbeck and, Justine are prisoners somewhere, this gang will do anything to make them talk."

  "They wouldn't need to do much," said the Saint. "Gilbeck would have to talk, to save Justine."

  "After which jolly interlude," Peter said woodenly, "he can allow himself to be slaughtered in ineffable peace, secure in the knowledge that March and Company have nothing but affection for his fatherless little girl."

  "But they'd never believe him now," Patricia said, shakily. "When he says he doesn't know anything about any such letter, they'll think that that's just what he would say. They'll torture him horribly, perhaps Justine too. They'll go on and on, trying to find out something he can't possibly tell them!" The Saint shook his head. He stood up restlessly, but his face was quite calm.

  "I think you're both wrong," he said quietly. "If Lawrence Gilbeck and Justine are still alive, I think that letter will be their insurance policy. While he believes in it March won't dare have them killed. And he won't need to torture them. Directly he asks about it ... well, Gilbeck didn't make all his money by being slow on the trigger. He'll catch on to the possibilities at once. He'll say, sure, he left a letter, and what are they going to do about it? Isn't that what you'd do? And what are they going to do about it? There's no use torturing anyone who's ready to tell you anything you want to hear. Gilbeck hasn't got any secret information that they want."

  "How do you know?" asked Peter.

  "I don't," Simon admitted. "But it isn't probable. My theory is perfectly straightforward. Gilbeck just went into March's Foreign Investment Pool. He was ready to overlook a few minor irregularities, as a lot of big business men would be. You don't make millions by splitting ethical hairs. Then Gilbeck got in deeper, and found that some of the irregularities weren't so minor. He got cold feet, and wanted to back out. But he was in too deep by that time-they couldn't let him go. Now, our strategy is that he knew there'd be trouble, so he left a protective letter. All right. So there's a letter, and I've got it."

  Patricia kept looking down, moving one hand mechanically over the contour of her knee.

  "If only you had got it," she said.

  "It might help us a lot. But as It is, the myth is a pretty useful substitute. Unwittingly, we've put Gilbeck in balk. March has got to believe in the letter. I was firing a lot of shots in the dark, but they hit things. He won't be able to figure where I got all my information, unless it was out of this imaginary letter. Which means that he's got to take care of me before he can touc
h Gilbeck. And he's got to be awfully cautious about that, unless he's quite sure what angles I'm playing."

  "I'll have to order some wool," said Peter. "It sounds like a winter of sitting around and knitting while March's outfit are sinking ships and wondering about you in their spare time."

  Simon crushed out his cigarette and took another one from the packet on the table. He sat down again and put his feet up.

  "I read the morning papers in bed," he said. "They've picked up a few bodies from that tanker, but no live ones. The way it happened, it wasn't likely that there'd be any. The cause of the explosion is still an official mystery. There was no mention of a submarine, or any other clues. So per­haps we gummed up the plot when we caught that lifebelt."

  "It's not so easy now to believe that we really saw a submarine," said Patricia. "If we told anyone else, they'd probably say we'd been drinking."

  "We had," answered the Saint imperturbably. "But I don't know that we want to tell anyone else-yet. I'd rather find the submarine first."

  Peter leaned against a pillar and massaged his toes.

  "I see," he soliloquised moodily. "Now I take up diving. I tramp all over the sea's bottom with my head in a tin goldfish bowl, looking for a stray submarine. Probably I find Gilbeck and Justine as well, tucked into the torpedo tubes."

  "There are less unlikely things," said the Saint. "The sub must have a base on shore, which has got to be well hidden. And if it's so well hidden, that's where we'd be likely to find prisoners."

  "Which makes everything childishly easy," Peter remarked. "There are approximately nine thousand, two hundred, and forty-seven unmapped islands in the Florida Keys, according to the guide-book, and they only stretch for about a hundred miles."

  "They wouldn't be any good. A good base wouldn't be too easy to hide from the air, and the regular plane service to Havana flies over the Keys several times a day."

  "Maybe it has a mother ship feeding it at sea," Patricia ventured.

  Simon nodded.

  "Maybe. We'll find out eventually."

  "Maybe you'd better call in the Navy," said Peter. "That's what they're for."