Five men sat around a baize-covered table. A tired-looking man in a green eyeshade sat with his back to a window dealing stud. An even more tired-looking cigarette drooped from his lower lip. As he called the bets in a tired monotone, the cigarette wobbled up and down. The five men raised their heads from the cards as the Saint came in. One of them looked horsy; the other three were in shirtsleeves and seemed about as menacing as bookkeepers on a holiday.
The dealer flipped up five cards and said: "King bets." He lowered his eyeshade again and continued in his breath-saving tone: "Five dollar limit stud. The house kitty's fifty cents out of each pot over five dollars. It's an open game. Don't stand around watching. If you want to play, take a chair."
He shoved one out beside him with some pedal jugglery, while he dealt the second round, and Simon sat down because the chair faced the door.
The dealer pushed chips in front of him.
"The yellows are five, the blues one, the reds a half, and the whites a quarter. Fifty bucks, and you pay now."
Simon peeled money off his roll, and looked over the room while the hand was finished. There was nothing much to it. A double gasoline lantern hung over the table. The light from the window, which was on the water side of the barge and open, cut a square shaft of light through a fog of cigarette and cigar smoke. The walls had two or three Petty drawings tacked up on them.
The dealer ladled chips towards a winner, gathered up cards, and shuffled them with the speed of a boy's stick rattling along a picket fence. He dealt once around face down, and a second round face up. The Saint was high with a queen.
"Queen bets." The cigarette moved up and down.
The Saint squeezed his hole card up, peeped at it, and flattened it down. He had a pair, back to back, and he didn't like to start that well in a game.
"A buck," he said, and tossed a blue chip in.
The dealer stayed on a ten. Two of the bookkeepers dropped out, but the horsy man with a nine and the other bookkeeper with a seven spot stayed in. More cards fluttered from the dealer's agile hand, and finished up by leaving him a second ten.
"Pair of tens bets," he droned, and pushed out a yellow chip with a finger stained with nicotine to match it.
The horsy man said "Nuts!" and rid himself of his cards. The surviving bookkeeper with a seven and a jack showing spent five dollars. Simon figured him for a pair of jacks, and looked down at his own visible queen which had gotten married to a king.
"Let's make it expensive," he said, and flipped two yellows in.
The dealer stayed, but the bookkeeper folded up with a sigh. Simon got another king. The dealer gave himself an ace of spades. He removed the stub of his cigarette and said: "You bet, friend."
"The works," said Simon with an angelic smile, and used both hands to shove in his entire pile.
"Don't clown, brother." The dealer ran his thumb along the edge of the pack and snapped it with a flourish. "I told you there's a five buck limit on this game."
Simon's eyebrows rose in an arch of sanctimonious perplexity.
"What game?'
"Don't be funny," the dealer advised. "The game you're in now."
"Oh," said the Saint in a voice of silk and honey. "I wasn't betting on the game. I just want all the money back for my chips."
"See here," said the dealer dangerously, "what sort of a place do you think this is?"
The invisible coldness of angry men waiting for an explanation slid down like an avalanching glacier and crystallised the atmosphere of the room; but the Saint was utterly at ease. He leaned back in his chair and favoured the dealer with his most benevolent and carefree smile.
"I think," he said, "that it's the sort of place where ugly little runts like you give suckers a nice game with a marked deck." He sat up again; and suddenly, without warning, he snatched the pack out of the dealer's hand and smeared it in front of the other players. "Look for yourselves, boys. It's all done in the veins of the leaf in the left-hand corner. Nothing to notice if you aren't looking for it, but as plain as a billboard when you know the code. It's nice work, but it gives the house too much of an edge for my money."
The horsy man picked up some cards with a grin which held nothing but trouble.
"If you're right about this, guy, there's more coming to me than I've lost here today."
"Use your eyes," said the Saint cynically. "I don't know how many of you are in with him, but the rest of you can see it. You might like to do something about it. Personally, I'll have my dough back and talk to the manager."
"You'll do that," muttered the dealer.
There was the sound of one padding step in the alleyway outside, and a new man showed in the doorway with a sub-machine-gun covering the room.
The Saint knew an instant of frozen expectancy when all the other close calls he had ever had passed in review before the immutable knowledge that some day somewhere there must be a call too close to dodge, and he thought: "This is it." For a flash the whole set-up seemed entirely rational and obvious. A gambling barge, a quarrel over a card game, a few shots, and the whole thing might be settled in a way in which Randolph March couldn't possibly be implicated. Only a supreme combination of intuition and will-power kept his right hand from starting a hopeless dive for the butt of the Luger under his arm. It was a more than human feat to sit there without movement and expect the tearing shock of lead; but he thought: "That's what they're waiting for. They want to be able to say I fired first. I won't give them that break, anyway." But there were goose-pimples all over his body. The horsy man forced a laugh that clicked his teeth together, and stammered: "G-good God, Gallipolis, what's the ripper for?"
There was still no shooting, and it seemed to Simon that he had stopped breathing for a long time. In a detached but still partly incredulous way he began to take in the details of the prospective gunner.
Any cooperative reader who has been herded along the paths of romance and adventure by well-trained authors before, knows that a Greek must be fat, swarthy, and apparently freshly rubbed down with oil. It is this chronicler's discouraging task to try to convince such an audience that Mr Gallipolis most inconsiderately declined to conform to these simple requirements. His figure was svelte, almost feminine. Limpid eyes showed tar-black in a sunburnt face crowned with crisp black curls. He wore a pink polo shirt open at the neck, khaki pants, and very clean white tennis shoes. He leaned against the door jamb and exhibited flawless white teeth in a grin. His hands on the double grips of the Thompson gun were as slender as a girl's.
He didn't even seem to pay any special attention to the Saint. His eyes enfolded the dealer in a melting embrace.
"Why did you push the buzzer, Frank?" he inquired liquidly. "There's no stick-up here."
"That's what you think," said Frank. "This cheapskate you let in here was trying to pull a fast one and welsh on us."
The Greek said: "So?" and his eyes wrapped themselves around Simon. "Who the hell are you and how did you get on board? I never saw you before."
"I came in the back door," said the Saint. "I sat in the game and accused your dealer of cheating, that's all"
Gallipolis's face grew long with melancholy.
"Were you cheating, Frank?"
"Hell, no! He was getting in too deep, so he tried to start something."
"That's a lot of malarky!" said one of the bookkeepers boldly. "He didn't start anything. He said these cards were crooked, and they are. We've seen 'em."
Gallipolis looked amused.
"I have a hell of a time with dealers," he told the Saint "How much you got coming?"
"Fifty dollars."
"Give him his money," repeated Gallipolis, with a broadening smile.
The dealer produced a ten and two twenties and slapped them on the table. Gallipolis stepped aside and spoke to the Saint again.
''Come on, mister. You must have something on your mind or you wouldn't have come in the back door. We can talk it over in the bar."
Simon took
his money and stood up, admiring the way Gallipolis handled his gun. As Simon walked around the table, the Greek edged along the wall to keep the other players out of the line of fire. He was behind Simon when the Saint reached the door.
"Take it easy," he recommended, as the Saint stepped outside. "If you start running I can drop you before you make the end of the hall." He turned back to the other players. "See what you can get out of Frank, boys. If you're still short anything, see me before you go."
As Gallipolis left the room, the horsy man said: "Did you ever eat a pack of cards, Quickfingers?" and left the table to close the door.
The bar furniture comprised a simple pinewood counter and three kitchen tables flanked with chairs. The Saint, walking with a circumspect negation of haste, reached it alive, which he had at no time taken for granted. He discovered that the landward windows were shuttered to conceal an inside coating of thin steel. A square hole provided an outlook from the window at one end of the bar, and would also, Simon decided, have served very well for a gun port.
Gallipolis rested the machine gun on the counter and nodded Simon to a chair. He studied the Saint with his ever-present grin.
"Well, you're on board. So what? You don't look like a heist man. What are you, a Sam?" He answered his own question with a shake of his curly head. "No, you don't look like the law. Give, friend, give. Who are you, and what do you want?"
IV How Mr Gallipolis Became Hospitable, and Karen Leith Kept Her Date
"I'm Simon Templar." The Saint locked hands around his knee.
Curtains veiled the Greek's swimming eyes.
"So? The Saint? I heard you were in the southlands."
"Who told you?"
Gallipolis shrugged.
"News leaks out fast to a boat like this. I thought you were big time-the biggest of the lot. What the hell's the idea of picking on me?"
Muffled noises came from the poker room, followed by curses and a groan. The Saint said: "I'm afraid your customers really are feeding that pack of cards to Frank. I wonder if he's got a good digestion."
"He had it coming," said Gallipolis, still grinning. "But you didn't come out here just for that. What else have I got that you want?"
The Saint found a smoke, thumbed his lighter, and inhaled pensively.
"I'm looking for a guy named Jesse Rogers."
The Greek's face remained pleasantly receptive, with just a faint upward movement of his strongly marked black brows. Simon could picture his expression staying exactly the same right up until his forefinger squeezed a trigger.
"So?"
"Do you know him?"
"Sure."
It was a spine-tickling sensation, having to take all the initiative while growing more firmly convinced that Gallipolis would give no illuminating facial reaction until something fatal was said, and then fatal would be the only word for it "Do you want to tell me anything about him?"
"Why not?" The Greek's candour seemed engagingly unfeigned. "He's an entertainer-sings smutty songs at the piano. He plays here sometimes."
"When?"
"Oh, not professionally. I mean he gambles. He works every night at a dive uptown called the Palmleaf Fan. You could have found him there. Why did you have to come and make trouble here?"
Simon decided that he couldn't be any worse off if he played a line of equally calculated frankness.
I never heard of him until this morning, or you either," he said. "Not until a friend of yours who calls himself Lafe Jennet took a shot at me and missed me by about three inches."
"You're wrong both ways, Mr Saint." Gallipolis was still grinning, but mechanically. "Jennet isn't a friend of mine; and he didn't take a shot at you, or he'd have hit you. He could put a bullet up the rear end of a southbound flea."
"I wouldn't be any less excited," said the Saint, "if he could pop a bedbug in the starboard eye. The point is that I hate being shot at, even in fun. So I told Lafe that I'd have to send him back to the chain-gang where he belongs, after playing a few other games with him, unless he told me where he got his humorous idea. He told me that someone he met out on this barge blackmailed him into it"
Gallipolis considered his machine-gun and said: "Meaning me?"
"No-this fellow Rogers. He said he didn't know anything about him except that he often hung out around here. So I thought I'd drop out and see."
"You could have come to the door and asked."
"How did I know you weren't in on it?"
The houseboat was silent except for the sounds of breaking furniture and a body bumping up and down on the floor.
"The bear came over the mountain," said Gallipolis eventually, "to see what he could see. It's a good story, anyhow. Where's Jennet now?"
"He's waiting in the woods with a friend of mine."
"That's a good story, too."
"How do you think I found this boat if Jennet didn't show me?" Simon asked patiently.
"You want to fetch him in?"
The question was almost casual; but Simon knew that it was a challenge, and might become more than that Gallipolis still had him guessing.
But he had to balance the situation entirely by his own system of accountancy. It had seemed like a good idea at first to leave Jennet behind, not knowing what might be waiting on the barge. But he had found out more about that since-at least, enough for the present. He was a prisoner under the nozzle of a sub-machine-gun, which was an irrevocable temporary fact, regardless of what anyone was thinking or whatever other scheming might be going on. He had no further use for Mr. Jennet. And he had told Hoppy to come after him if he hadn't returned by nightfall; but Jennet would be a handicap to that, and in any event Hoppy could have been knocked off with ease, being no Indian fighter, before he had moved his own length into the open ... It didn't seem as if ceding the point could make anything much worse, and it might even make some things clearer.
"If you want him badly enough," said the Saint; and he had covered all those points in such a lightning survey that his hesitation could barely have been timed with a stopwatch.
"I just want to know if all this is on the up-and-up," said Gallipolis, and he might even have been telling the truth. "You'd better take your gun out first and slide it across the floor. If you want to try shooting it out, okay, but you're making a mistake. A Tommy gun is better than an automatic, no matter how good you are."
Simon obeyed, cautiously. The gun he was giving up meant nothing to him, being the one he had taken from March's captain, and Gallipolis handled his weapon as if he had wielded it before.
The Greek leaned against the lengthwise end of the bar, and it slid creakingly sideways, disclosing a good-sized hole in the floor under it. He toed the Luger into the hole and said: "Stand up and turn around. I've been suspicious ever since my ma got raped in Athens. I want to see if you've got any more."
Simon stood still with outstretched arms while Gallipolis explored him. The Greek's touch was quick and thorough. He ended the frisking by patting Simon inside of each thigh.
"Don't get me wrong," he said, "but I've got a bullet hole in my shoulder from a fellow I thought I'd disarmed. He was wearing a crotch gun, and when I turned around he pulled it on me by zipping open his fly."
The Saint said: "Gosh, what fun!" and forebore to mention the knife strapped to his forearm.
"Come along," said Gallipolis, backing into the passage, "But don't get too close."
He stopped outside the poker room and rapped on the door. Still keeping Simon covered, he said through the panels: "You fellows stay inside until I say it's clear. We're having visitors. If you want to work on Frank some more, keep him on the table. He makes a noise when he hits the floor."
He motioned Simon in the opposite direction.
At the other end of the hallway, facing the kitchen entrance, another door gave into a sort of reception room which covered the forward end of the barge. They had to zigzag around a counter which practically bisected it and at the same time provided an effecti
ve barrier against any too rapid entry or exit. On the other side of the counter was another screen door.
"You go out and call 'em," said Gallipolis. "I can watch you from here."
Simon stepped out on to the short cramped foredeck and semaphored with his arms. After a while he saw Mr Uniatz step out of cover, herding Lafe Jennet ahead of him.
I just wouldn't shoot too quickly, comrade," Simon said, in a tone of moderate counsel. "Some other friends of mine know where I am, and if I don't get home they might pay you a call and ask questions."
"Some of your fairy tales seem to be true," Gallipolis acknowledged impersonally. "Well see what happens. I never shoot till I have to." He was watching the approaching duo at an edgewise angle through the door. "If this big baboon belongs to you, tell him to put his gun away before he comes in."
"I'll tell him," said the Saint, "but you'd better play down the ukulele. Hoppy is kind of sensitive about some things. If you wave that chopper in his face the wrong way, he might try to shoot it out regardless. You'd do much better to be sociable. Welcome him with liquor, and he'll drink out of your hand."
He spoke idly, but his nonchalance was mostly simulated. Behind it, he was trying to make sense out of an absurd idea that had been gathering strength in his subconscious.
The barge was authentic-a cheap hangout where cheap gamblers could lose their money breaking a grandmotherly law. But with that there went an enforced deduction that the Greek also might be authentic. And if Gallipolis was genuine, and Jennet was likewise, within their limitations, then there was nothing left but the absurd idea that they were only carefully placed stepping-stones to something else. And an idea like that did a superlative job of making everything meaningless and chaotic ... It made it difficult even for such an actor as the Saint to throw off all artificiality as he watched Hoppy and Lafe Jennet reach the bank of the canal.
"Hi, boss." Mr Uniatz used the back of one hand to clear trickling sweat from his eyes. Patches of damp under the arms of his blazer testified further to his discomfort "What makes out?"
"Come on in," said the Saint encouragingly. "They've got a bar."
"A bar!" Mr Uniatz's face grew slowly radiant from within, as he appeared to gradually comprehend the all-foreseeing beneficence of a Providence which had not neglected to mitigate the horrors of even such a Godforsaken spot as that with Elysian springs of distilled consolation. Gathering new strength from the thought, he speeded the hesitant Mr Jennet up the rickety gangplank with his knees. "Gwan, youse," said Mr Uniatz. "Whaddaya waitin' for?"
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