“They have gambling rooms with anything you want. If you’ve got a few thousand dollars you’re tired of keeping, they’ll be delighted to help you out.”
“I tried that once today,” said the Saint reminiscently.
They went through into a large, dimly-lighted dining-room. The tables were grouped around three sides of a central dance floor, and on the fourth side, facing them, an orchestra played on a dais. Back against one side wall was a long bar. Grotesquely carved coconut masks with lights behind them glowered sullenly from the walls. At either end of the bar a stuffed alligator mounted on its hind legs proffered a tray of matches. Electric bulbs scattered over the raftered ceiling struggled to throw light downwards through close rows of pendent palmetto fans, and only succeeded in enhancing the atmospheric gloom. The collective decorative scheme was a bizarre monstrosity faithfully carried out with justifiable contempt for the healthy taste of probable patrons, but with highly functional regard for the twin problems of reducing the visible need for superfluous cleaning and concealing the presence of cockroaches in the chop-suey, and Simon recognised that it was entirely in tune with the demand that it had been designed for.
A silky head waiter, proportionately less blue-jowled as his position demanded, ushered them towards a table on the floor, but the Saint stopped him.
“If nobody minds,” he said, “I’d rather have a booth at the back.”
The majordomo changed his course with an air of shrivelling reproach. He might have been more argumentative, but it seemed as if Karen’s presence restrained him. As they sat down he said, “Will Mr March be joining you?”—and he said it as if to imply that Mr March would have had other ideas about good seating.
Karen dazzled him with her smile and said, “I don’t think so.”
She ordered Benedictine, and the Saint asked for a bottle of Peter Dawson, more with an eye to Mr Uniatz’s inexhaustible capacity than his own more modest requirements.
The orchestra struck up another number, and multi-coloured spotlights turned on at each corner of the room threw moving rainbows on the floor. Karen glanced at him almost with invitation.
“All right,” he said resignedly.
They danced. He hadn’t wanted to, and he had to keep his mind away from what they were doing. She had a lightness and grace and rhythm that would have made it seem easy to float away into unending voids of rapturous isolation; her yielding slenderness was too close to him for what he had to remember. He tried to forget her, and concentrate on a study of the human contents of the room.
And he realised that there were some things about the clientele of the Palmleaf Fan which were more than somewhat queer.
He wasn’t thinking of the more obvious queernesses, either; although it dawned on him in passing that some of the groups of highly made-up girls who sat at inferior tables with an air of hoping to be invited to better ones were a trifle sinewy in the arms and neck, while on the other hand some of the delicate-featured young men who sat apart from them were too well-developed in the chest for the breadth of their shoulders. Those eccentricities were standard of the honky-tonks of Miami. The more unusual queerness was in some of the cash customers. There was, of course, a good proportion of unmistakable sightseers, not-so-tired business men, visiting firemen, shallow-brained socialites, flashy mobsters, and self-consciously hilarious collegians—the ordinary cross-section of any Miami night spot. But among them was a more than ordinary leavening of personalities who unobtrusively failed to fit in—who danced without abandon, and drank with more intensity of purpose than enthusiasm, and talked earnestly when they talked at all, and viewed the scene when they were not talking with a detachment that was neither bored nor disapproving nor cynical nor envious but something quite inscrutably different. Many of them were young, but without youthfulness—the men hard and clean-cut but dull-looking, a few girls who were blonde but dowdy and sometimes bovine. The older men tended to be stout and stolid, with none of the élan of truant executives. There was one phrase that summed up the common characteristic of this unorthodox element, he knew, but it dodged annoyingly through the back of his mind, and he was still trying to corner it when the music stopped.
They went back to the table, and he sat down in the secure position he had chosen with his back to the wall. Their order had been delivered, and Hoppy Uniatz was plaintively contemplating eight ounces of Scotch whisky which he had unprecedently poured into a glass. “Boss,” complained Mr Uniatz, “dis is a clip jernt.”
“Very likely,” Simon assented. “What have they done to you?”
Hoppy flourished his glass. “De liquor,” he said. “It’s no good.”
Simon poured some into his own glass, sniffed it, and sipped. Then he filled it up with water and ice and tried again. “It seems all right to me,” he said.
“Aw, sure, it’s de McCoy. Only I just don’t like it no more.”
The Saint inspected him with a certain anxiety.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you feeling well?”
“Hell, no boss. I feel fine. Only I don’t like it no more. It ain’t got no kick after dat Florida pool water. I ast de waiter if he’s got any, an’ he gives me dat stuff.” Hoppy pointed disgustedly at the carafe. “It just tastes like what ya wash in. I told him we ain’t gonna pay for no fish-bath, an’ he says he won’t charge for it. I scared de pants off him. But dey try it on, just de same. Dat’s what I mean, boss, it’s a clip jernt,” said Mr Uniatz, proving his contention.
The Saint sighed.
“What you’ll have to do,” he said consolingly, “is go back to Comrade Gallipolis and ask him for some more.”
He lighted a cigarette and returned to his faintly puzzled analysis of the room.
Karen Leith seemed to sense his vaguely irritated concentration without being surprised by it. She turned a cigarette between her own finger and thumb, and said, “What are you making of it?”
“It bothers me,” he replied, frowning. “I’ve been in other joints with some of these fancy trimmings—I mean the boys and girls. I think I know what sort of floor show they’re going to put on. But I can’t quite place some of the customers. They aren’t very spontaneous about their fun. I’ve seen exactly the same thing before, somewhere.” He was merely thinking aloud. “They look more as if they’d come out here because the doctor had told them to have a good time, by God, if it killed them. There’s a phrase on the tip of my tongue that just hits it, if I could only get it out—”
“A sort of Kraft durch Freude?” she prompted him.
He snapped his fingers.
“Damn it, of course! It’s Strength through Joy—or the other way round. Like in Berlin, with that awful Teutonic seriousness. ‘All citizens will have a good time on Thursday night. By order.’ The night life of this town must have got to a pretty grisly state…”
His voice trailed off, and his gaze settled across the room with an intentness that temporarily wiped every other thought out of his mind.
The head waiter was obsequiously ushering Randolph March and his captain to a table on the other side of the floor.
CHAPTER FIVE
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR SAW SUNDRY GIRLS AND SHERIFF HASKINS SPOKE OF DEMOCRACY
1
The orchestra uncorked a fanfare, and the room lighting seemed to become even dingier by contrast as a spotlight splashed across to illuminate a slim-waisted creature who had taken possession of the microphone on the dais. His blond hair was beautifully waved, and he had a smudge under one eye that looked like mascara.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with an ingratiating lisp, “we are now going to begin our continuous entertainment, which will go on between dances to give you a breathing spell—if you can still breathe. And to start the ball rolling, here is that beautiful baby Toots Travis.”
He stepped back, leading the applause with frightful enthusiasm, and Toots minced forward from a curtained arch on the right of the orchestra. She really was pretty, with a Dutch-doll bob
and a face to go with it and a figure with rather noticeable curves. She looked about sixteen, and might not have been much more. The orchestra blared into a popular number, and she began to saunter around the floor, waving a palm-leaf fan and singing the refrain in a voice which could have been more musical. Much more.
March semaphored boldly across the floor to Karen, and she responded more restrainedly with one hand. He gave no sign of having noticed the Saint’s existence. The captain nodded perfunctorily in their direction, and paid no further attention. Simon could hardly see any other course for him. When in a public place one encounters two persons who twenty-four hours ago were kicking one four feet into the air and beating one over the head with an empty bottle as one came down, one can hardly be expected to greet them with effusive geniality. One could, of course, call for the police and make charges, but there had been plenty of time already to do that, and the idea had obviously been discarded. Or one could come over and offer to start again where one left off, but there were social problems to conflict with that, not to mention the discouraging record of past experience.
Toots continued to stroll about after the refrain ended. It began to appear that the needlework in her dress was not of the most enduring kind. Subtly, and it seemed of their own volition, the seams were coming undone. Either because she was unaware of this, or because as a good trouper she bravely refused to interrupt the show, Toots went on circulating over the floor, revealing larger and larger expanses of white skin through the spreading gaps with every pirouette. Mr Uniatz goggled at the performance with breathless admiration.
Simon leaned a little towards Karen.
“Incidentally,” he said, without moving his lips, “what is that captain’s name?”
“Friede,” she told him.
“One of those inappropriate names, I think,” murmured the Saint.
He was recalling his first curious impressions about the captain. It had seemed on the March Hare that Friede was far more in command of the situation than March. There had been an aura of cold deadliness about him that the average observer might have overlooked, but that stood out in garish colours to anyone as familiar with dangerous men as the Saint. Throughout the episode of the previous night, Friede had never stepped out of line, had never attempted to dominate, had given March every respect and deference. And yet, when Simon looked back on it analytically, Friede had done everything that mattered. All the constructive and dangerous suggestions had come from him, although he had never obtruded himself for a moment. He had simply put words and ideas into March’s mouth, but so cleverly that March’s echo had taken the authority of an original command. It had been so brilliantly done that Simon had to think back again over the actual literal phrasing of the dialogue wondering if he was trying to put bones into a wild hallucination. Yet if that irking recollection was right, what other strange factors might there be inside that rather square-shaped cranium, which now that the captain appeared without his cap was revealed as bald as an ostrich egg?
By this time, Toots’s disintegrating seams had left nothing but four wide streamers of black lace hanging from her shoulder-straps. With a last revolution of her curvilinear body which spread them like the blades of a propeller, she reached the curtained doorway. The lights dimmed. There was a round of applause, to which Hoppy Uniatz lent his cooperation by thumping his flat hand on the table until it shuddered under the punishment.
The music and the spotlight struck up again together. Apparently intoxicated by her success, but at the same time handicapped by the shredding of her gown, Toots compromised by coming back without it. She had nothing now but the palmleaf fan, which being only about twelve inches in diameter was not nearly large enough to cover all her vital scenery. Her valiant attempts to alternate concealments and exposures held the audience properly spellbound.
“Stay where you are,” Simon ordered sternly, as Hoppy’s chair began to slide away from the table. “Haven’t you ever been out before?”
“Chees,” boss,” said Mr Uniatz bashfully. “I never see nut’n like dis. In New York dey always got sump’n on.”
Simon had to acknowledge that the comparison was justified, but he still kept Mr Uniatz in his seat. He was trying to anticipate what the arrival of March and Friede portended. By saying nothing to Haskins about the Saint’s felonious activities of the night before they had positively established themselves as asking no favours from the Law, but it was impossible to believe that they had decided to forget the whole thing. Their arrival at the Palmleaf Fan, after Simon had been led there by such a devious trail, had to be more than mere coincidence. And a kind of contented relaxation slid through the Saint’s muscles as he realised that by the same portents their personal presence guaranteed that whatever was in the wind was not going to be a waste of anybody’s time…
The peregrinations of Toots returned to the curtained doorway as the music drew to a conclusion. She stood weaving the fan with slower provocation through the last bars, scanning the audience as though making a choice. The applause grew wild. Mr Uniatz put two fingers in his mouth and emitted a whistle that pierced the room like a stiletto. The strident sound seemed to settle her selection. With a smile she tossed the fan away in his direction, blew him a kiss, stood posed for an instant in nothing whatsoever, and vanished through the curtain as the spotlight blacked out.
The nimble MC tripped back to the microphone.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, just one more sample of what we are offering you tonight. That lovely personality—Vivian Dare!”
Vivian wore a beautifully-cut dress of blue tulle, and had a considerably better soprano than Toots.
“You’re very quiet,” said Karen. “Is the show so absorbing, or are you shocked?”
Simon grinned.
“You may not believe it, but I’ve been watching Randy most of the time. He seems to like the place.”
“It’s the sort of place he does like. He could have bought it for the money he spends here.”
The Saint nodded. He had already observed the extra attentiveness of waiters around March’s table, and deduced that this was by no means a first visit. The attraction seemed to radiate to other quarters as well, for two blondes and a brunette were at that moment happily attaching themselves to the party.
“Did he bring you here much?” Simon asked.
“Often.”
“Do you think he’s trying to show you that he doesn’t need to bring a girl here?”
She laughed.
“That isn’t for my benefit. He always had girls to the table even when I was with him. It’s his kind of fun.”
She spoke without rancour, without any personal emotion that he could detect, as if she had been mentioning that March had a stamp collection. But once again Simon was brought up against the enigma of her, wondering about so many things that were unsaid.
And he was still watching March’s table for the first warning of where danger would come from. Their complete detachment was beginning to make him tense again. Neither March nor the captain had given a sign of greeting or recognition to anyone in the room except the waiters, and Karen, and the ladies of pleasure who had just joined them, and yet he knew that their arrival must have been a signal for wheels to begin turning. He wondered if that was really the only signal there would be…
Vivian had begun to carry her song among the tables, and now she was at their booth, addressing the words intimately to Mr Uniatz, who gaped up at her as if in hopes that the blue tulle would begin to come off her before she moved away.
“You are
The promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long;
You are
The breathless hush of evening—”
Hoppy’s chest expanded like a balloon, and he shifted his weight to the detriment of the chair. It had always been one of the tragedies of his life that so many women were blind to his hidden loveliness of soul.
The singer reached out and stroked his ch
eek.
“You are the angel glow
That lights the stars;
The dearest things I know
Are what you are…”
Simon choked over his drink.
“Some day
My happy arms will hold you—”
It was too much for Mr Uniatz. He tried to wrap one arm around the svelte enticing figure that was bending over him, but Vivian was ready for that. A swift kiss was planted on Hoppy’s forehead, and his clutching hand caught nothing but a mass of curly hair, which came off in the form of a wig, revealing a strictly masculine haircut underneath.
“You nasty rough beast!” squeaked Vivian, and snatched the wig back from him and fled towards the floor.
Like lightning, before Simon could move, Mr Uniatz let go with the carafe of water. It crossed the room like a damp comet, caromed off the clarinet player, boomed off a drum, and came to a cataclysmic end among the cymbals. Then Simon had Hoppy’s wrist and was holding him down with a grip of iron.
“Cut it out,” he gritted, “or I’ll break your arm.”
“We oughta take dis jernt apart, boss,” said Mr Uniatz redly.
“You damn fool!” snarled the Saint. “They were just waiting for us to start something.”
And then he realised that the room was rocking with laughter. Everyone seemed to be laughing. March’s table was in an uproar, with March himself leading it. Even Captain Friede’s tight mouth was flattened broadly across his teeth. The clarinetist was helped out by a grinning waiter, apparently being a person of no consequence. The chortling orchestra leader waved his baton, and a new dance number blared out.
Giggling couples were filtering on to the floor. The head waiter appeared at the booth and smiled, only a little more restrainedly.
“Your first time here?” he said, more as a statement than a question.
“My friend isn’t drunk,” said the Saint. “But he’s a little hasty.”
The head waiter nodded tolerantly.
“Well, there was no harm done. Shall I bring you some more water?”
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 13
