Eliminating all doubt, the nose suddenly belched orange and purple fire, with a crashing roar that drowned all the impact of a heavy slug. But all at once Gallipolis had no face any more. It had dissolved into a formless smear as the flattened bullet spread through it from behind in an enlarging splash of brains and splintered bones. The Greek lurched as if he had been hit by a truck, and then dropped forward on to his face and hid the horror in the dock planking.
The horrific but at least integral face of Mr Uniatz rose dripping over the side of the pier into full view.
“Dat son of a bitch,” said Mr Uniatz, in a voice hoarse with righteous fury. “He’s takin’ us for a ride all de time. I got such a toist, boss, I can’t wait no longer. So I drink a pint of dat slop before I find out it ain’t what he has in de bottles. Dis ain’t de Pool we are lookin’ for at all!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR FOUGHT THE LAST ROUND AND HEINRICH FRIEDE WENT ON HIS WAY
1
“If we get out of here,” said the Saint, “I’ll give you a lake of it. If we get out.”
But he spoke so quickly that the line didn’t waste an instant. He knew quite simply what that single shot meant, on their side and the other. But there was no use arguing about it. It had saved everything and blown everything to hell, with one catastrophic explosion. And that was that.
“Get back behind those storehouses—everybody,” he snapped. “Charlie, get moving.”
He stooped, and in one flowing movement shoved the motor-boat away, snatched up the sub-machine-gun that had tumbled out of the Greek’s lifeless hands, and raced after Karen and Hoppy towards the clump of small buildings at the end of the pier. He crouched there with them in partial shelter, and jerked his automatic out of its holster to give it to Karen Leith.
“You said you could use it,” he reminded her. “Now show me. The fat’s in the fire, but I think we can create a diversion while the boat gets clear.”
From out in the anchorage came sounds of disorganised movement and some confused shouting. To the right of them, a door of the lodge was flung open, flinging a long strip of pallid illumination across the open shore, and Simon remembered the second lighted window which he had not waited to investigate after he had located Gilbeck and Justine. But only one man came plunging out, and then stopped uncertainly while he tried to orient himself to the disturbance.
He stayed in the beam of light from the doorway just one instant too long. Hoppy’s Betsy snorted in its ear-splitting bass, and the man’s arms and legs seemed to whirl wide of his body like the limbs of a spun marionette before he fell to the ground. He kicked twice after he was down, and then he was quite still.
Mr Uniatz lowered the gun which he had been holding poised for a finishing shot.
“Chees, boss,” he said disgustedly. “I ain’t been gettin’ enough practice. I t’ought I was gonna hafta waste anudder sinker on him.”
Simon thought he saw a dim alteration in the silhouette of the submarine’s conning tower, as if something might be emerging from it. In any case, an extra shot would not be wasted if it kept the general attention centred in their direction and away from the water. He plugged a bullet somewhere in the right direction, and heard it ricochet whining into the night.
Nobody else had come out of the lodge and it seemed a fair chance that there had been no one else in it.
“Spread out that way,” he directed Hoppy. “They don’t know what sort of a raid they’re up against yet, and we may as well give them something to think about.”
Mr Uniatz still lingered for a moment, nursing his cosmic grievance.
“I don’t get it, boss,” he complained. “If dis ain’t de Pool, what de hell are dey beefin’ about?”
“Maybe they were fond of Gallipolis,” Simon told him. “You never can tell. We’ll talk about it some other time. Slide!”
“Okay.”
Mr Uniatz edged away. His idea of stealth was rather like that of a prowling bison, but it was adequate for the circumstances. And at least it needed no more detailed instructions. The Hoppy Uniatz who struggled in leviathan agony with the coils and contortions of the Intellect, and the Hoppy Uniatz of the life of direct action and efficient homicide were two men so different that it was hard to associate their responses with the same individual. But it was in such situations as this that Mr Uniatz came into his precarious kingdom.
Simon tried to follow him with his eyes and ears, lost him for a while, and then felt a weird tingle as something like a deliriously gaudy snake reached into the wedge of light from the lodge doorway and drew back quickly with the gun that the dead man lying there had dropped clutched in his maw. It was a half-instant before he realised that the jazzy colouration was due to the sleeve of the Seminole chief’s shirt which Hoppy still proudly wore. Thus having augmented his armament, Mr Uniatz let off another shot which drew an answering shriek from somewhere out in the bay.
The babble of incoherent voices that came over the water was dying away as a new, crisper and harsher voice began to dominate them with a rattle of commands.
“Friede,” said the Saint inclemently, and felt the girl’s left hand in the crook of his elbow.
“I only wish we could spot him,” she said.
Somehow there was nothing that jarred him in the cold-blooded way she said it.
Abruptly, a searchlight on the upper deck of the March Hare sizzled into life, thrusting a white spear over the treetops below the lodge. It swung high and wild for a moment, and then dipped towards the waterfront and began to sweep towards them, cutting a blinding arc out of the bay.
Simon raised the machine-gun, settling his fingers on the grips, but before he had chosen his aim the gun that he had given Karen spat twice, shatteringly, across his right eardrum. At the second shot, the white blade of light shrunk suddenly back into a small red eye that faded and went out. A faint tinkle stole over the pool, belatedly, to confirm the visual evidence.
“At this range, darling,” said the Saint respectfully, “I’ll admit you’ve shown me.”
“I used to be pretty good,” she said.
Friede’s voice began barking fresh orders, but it was too far for the guttural German to be distinguishable. However, dim figures could be seen moving on the March Hare’s lighted decks, and Simon lifted the Tommy gun again.
“It won’t do any harm to keep them busy,” he remarked, and hosed a short burst along the length of the yacht.
As the clatter of the Tommy gun died away, and its echoes went dwindling across the startled Everglades, one or two hoarse yells floated back to suggest that the expenditure of precious ammunition might have shown another small profit. There were also four or five answering shots, aimed at the fiery flickering of the machine-gun’s muzzle. They were born out of tiny sparks that blossomed on the yacht’s deck, and spanged to extinction among the corrugated-iron shelters to left and right. The darkness gave them a curious impersonality, making them seem as unfrightening as the first heavy drops of a thunder shower or a June bug banging against a lighted window.
Then all the lights on the March Hare went out as somebody pulled a master switch.
“I was afraid they’d think of that,” Simon said conversationally.
He strained his eyes to penetrate the obscurity of the bay. The moon had risen higher, thinning the darkness of the sky; there was enough light for him to see the pale beauty of Karen Leith’s face beside him, watching with the same intentness as his own. But over the water, against the sombre unevenness of the opposite river bank, the illumination was deceptive and full of shadows that seemed to take form from imagination and then disappear. Yet he could see nothing that looked like the motor-boat in which he had sent off Charlie Halwuk and Justine and Lawrence Gilbeck. He had not kept track of the time, but it seemed as if they should have had almost enough leeway, with the current helping them, to steal far enough down river to be safe. Certainly he had heard none of the outcry or shooting that should have ann
ounced their discovery.
Karen was thinking the same thoughts.
She said, “Do you really think they can make it?”
“Once they get clear,” said the Saint, “it’s in the bag. I’ve done some travelling with that dried-up Seminole, and I can’t think of any place I wouldn’t back him to make in this country.”
It seemed quite natural that there was nothing to say about themselves. They were there. Without a guide, the jungle at their backs held them as securely as a prison wall.
“I wish you could have done something about your friends,” she said.
“They may get a chance to do something about themselves in the excitement,” he said, and they both knew that they were just talking. “They’re wonderful people for getting themselves out of trouble.”
He was still listening. In a few more seconds, if nothing had gone wrong, it would be time to hear the motor-boat engine starting its racket somewhere in the distance to the south-west. But it had not come yet. The jungle seemed to have fallen unearthly still, for the owl had departed to more peaceful glades, and not more than half the shocked insects had tentatively begun to resume their choir practice since the last burst of firing had stunned them to an abnormal silence.
Then there was a muffled grating of wood, and a splash far fainter than a leaping fish would have made, and Simon suddenly was aware that a vague shape that had been drifting shorewards on the murkily moonlit water was neither the product of an overstrained retina nor the floating stump of a tree. At the same instant Hoppy fired twice, and the crack of Karen’s gun jumped in on the heels of those explosions. Simon took a fraction longer to bring up the Tommy gun, but the thundering stammer of death that poured from it made up in quantity for its tardiness. The response came in shouts and screams, and a single thin piercing wail that seemed as if it would never stop before it was smothered in a choking gurgle. The boat ceased to drift cross-stream and swung lazily round with the current, and something human plunged away from it with a loud splash and floundered wildly back towards the submarine. Karen’s gun spoke once more, and the splashing stopped as if it had been cut off with a knife.
The Saint’s teeth showed in the dark mask of his face.
“I wonder how the bastards like our blitzkrieg,” he drawled.
“I like it, anyway,” she said, and the cool tension of excitement was in her voice, with no kind of fear. “Now I know what it must feel like to fight Hitler’s invaders. You’re only scared until the first shot is fired. And then you hate their guts so much that it doesn’t matter what they can do, if you can only get some of them before they get you.”
“ ‘They shall not pass,’ ” he said crookedly. “I only wish we could make it stick. But there’ll be more landing parties, and we haven’t many more shots between us.”
“I’m only glad,” she said, “that we could be together like this—just once.”
Their hands held in an understanding that more words could only have made trivial.
Hoppy Uniatz fired three times more at spaced intervals but without any audible repercussion.
Then a new sound penetrated the Saint’s ears—a faint pervasive hum that almost blended with the continuous buzzing of mosquitoes. He had barely time to recognise it as the carrier hum of a loudspeaker before Heinrich Friede’s magnified voice blared clearly across from the yacht.
“If Mr Templar is there, will he please fire one shot?”
Simon hesitated a moment. Then—
“What the hell?” he said grimly to Karen. “They must know it’s my outfit. The police or the Coastguard wouldn’t have opened fire without some sort of parley…But stand by to duck.”
He fired one shot, trying to aim it at the voice, and then flung the girl aside and dropped flat beside her behind the flimsy cover of the nearest storehouse. But the hail of machine-gun fire which he had half-expected to cut loose in reply did not come.
“Thank you,” said the voice. “Now I think you have done enough damage. Another party has already landed higher up the river, and you will certainly be captured in a short time, but I should prefer not to lose any more men. Therefore unless you surrender at once, we shall start working on Miss Holm and Mr Quentin, quite slowly and scientifically, so that their cries can be broadcast to you. If you wish to avoid this, you can signify your surrender by firing two shots close together.”
Then Patricia Holm’s voice came clearly through, without a faltering syllable, so that he could almost see the brave set of her chin and the undaunted steadiness of her eyes.
“Hullo, Simon, boy…Don’t listen to the big ape. He’s only saying that because he knows he can’t catch you.”
“Tell him to go to hell,” Peter put in.
But a single sharp cry overtook the last word, and was instantly stifled.
“I shall give you ten seconds to decide, Mr Templar,” said Captain Friede.
Simon bowed his head over the sub-machine-gun, and his hands were clenched on the grips as if he could have torn the weapon apart like a stick of putty.
Karen Leith gazed at his face of frozen granite.
Then she pointed her gun to the stars and pulled the trigger twice, quickly.
As if in answer, far to the west, a motor-boat engine awoke to spluttering life.
2
The square bulk of Mr Uniatz lumbered uncertainly out of murk.
“Boss,” he said blankly, “was dat you? Dijja mean we say uncle to dem Heinies?”
“No, Hoppy,” said the girl. “I did it.”
The Saint looked at her strangely.
“At least,” he said, “I shouldn’t have expected you to help me break down.”
Her hand slipped over his, and her lovely face held the ghost of a smile of great understanding.
She said, “My dear, they could have taken us. In the end. You know it as well as I do. Why should anyone suffer for nothing? Probably we shall still all be killed, but it may be quick. And we’ve done all that we hoped to do. Our messengers got away. Listen.”
He listened, steeping his spirit in the methodical chugging of the motor-boat far off in the dark, before it was drowned out by the more steady thrum of a speed tender putting out from the March Hare—knowing that she had only spoken the truth, and glad of it, but still trying to reconcile himself to the paradox of defeat in victory. And he wondered if that might only be because his own personal pride had not yet been subdued, so that his insignificant individual face must still obtrude on a cataclysmic background in which millions of individuals no less important to themselves would yet be consumed like ants in a furnace.
And through that, after seconds that might have run into centuries, he came back to a sanity as immeasurable and enduring as the stars.
Everything else went on. But there was a difference. A difference beyond which nothing could be changed. And yet the only way he could show it was in the recapture of the old careless mockery which had always gone ahead of him like a banner. Because other rebels and outlaws like him would still come after him and the great game would still go on, as long as the spark of freedom was born into the souls of men.
“Of course,” he said. “And they still haven’t killed us yet. They could have their hands full even after they’ve got us.”
The speedboat was creaming in towards the dock.
“Ya mean, boss,” said Mr Uniatz dumbly, “I can’t do no more practice on dese mugs?”
“Not just now, Hoppy. We’ve got to get Patricia and Peter back with us first. After that we may be able to do something.”
And if he thought that the chance was very slight, the doubt could never have been heard in his voice.
He threw the Tommy gun on the ground away from him, and with a similar gesture the girl tossed her automatic after it. More slowly, perplexed but still reluctantly obedient, Hoppy Uniatz followed suit. They stood in a silent group, watching the tender slacken in towards the pier landing.
Simon took out his cigarette-case and offered
it to Karen, as easily as if they had been standing in the foyer of a New York night club waiting for a table, while men leaped out of the speedboat, ran down the pier, and fanned out at the double into a wide semi-circle with the efficient precision of trained storm troops—which, he reflected ironically, was what they probably were. But without giving them a glance he struck a match and held it for Karen. Their eyes met over the flame in complete understanding.
“We did have fun, anyway,” he remarked.
“We did.” Her voice was as steady as his, and he never wanted to forget the unchanged loveliness of her proud pale face, and the cool violet of her eyes, and the tousled flame of her hair. “And thanks for everything—Saint.”
He touched the match to his own cigarette and flipped it away, but light still dwelt on them. It came from the converging beams of three flashlights in the ring that was closing in on them.
Simon looked round the circle. Some of the men were in German naval uniforms, others in ordinary seaman’s dungarees, but they all had the square dry-featured brutalised faces which Nazi ethnology had set up as the ideal of Nordic superiority. They were armed with revolvers and carbines.
Another man ran around the outside of the group, beyond range of the lights, and said, “Verzeihen Sie, Herr Kapitän. Die Gefaugene sind verschwunden.”
“Danke.”
The second voice was Friede’s. He strode through into the light. His heavy-jawed face was hard and arrogant, the flat-top mouth clamped in an implacable line that turned down slightly at the corners. His stony eyes swept quickly and unfeelingly over his three captives, ending with the Saint.
“Mr Templar, this is not all your party.”
“You may have noticed a guy on the dock with his head blown open,” said the Saint helpfully. “He was liquidated quite early in the proceedings. In fact, we did that ourselves. He didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind which side to be on, so we put him into permanent neutrality.”
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 23
