“I mean the Gilbecks. Where are they?”
“How are your ears?”
The captain did not move his head. But through the stillness everyone could hear the monotonous putter of the motor-boat engine far out in the sweltering night.
Friede’s pebbly stare pored over the Saint from under lowering lids for long crawling seconds.
Then he turned and rasped fresh orders at his men.
Carbines prodded the Saint, driving him with Karen and Hoppy towards the barred lodge room from which he had released Lawrence Gilbeck and Justine. Somebody went in ahead and turned on the light again as they were herded in. Outside, there was an exclamation and some throaty muttering as the dead body of the guard was discovered, cut short by another of the captain’s wolfish commands. The storm troopers who had followed into the prison room cleared the doorway for Friede to march through. He stood back, but the lane stayed open.
After a very brief pause of intense silence, Patricia and Peter were hustled through, to be pushed over with Simon and Karen and Hoppy into the back centre of the room.
Peter said casually, “Hullo, Chief. It’s a funny thing. I’ve never been able to make out where you collect such an ugly-looking bunch of boils to play with.”
Patricia Holm went straight to the Saint. He kissed her quickly, and his left arm still lay along her shoulders as he turned back to smile genially at Captain Friede.
“Well, Heinrich, dear carbuncle,” he murmured, “this makes a very cosy little get-together. Now what shall we do to amuse ourselves? If we only had some old treaties we could cut paper dolls. Or there’s nearly enough of us to form a glee club and sing the pig trough or Horse Vessel song.”
But one more man still had to arrive to make the get-together truly complete, and he came last through the doorway as two of the seamen moved back to close it. Randolph March’s weakly handsome face was a little drawn with strain, and his fair hair was pushed just a lock or two out of its usual clean smooth grooming. In the same way, his soft white collar was just a little crumpled at the neck. The symptoms were insignificant in themselves, and yet taken together with the equally unexaggerated wildness of his eyes they made a definite picture of a man whose nerves were falling infinitesimally short of the standard of discipline that circumstances were demanding of them.
“The Gilbecks,” he said to Friede, and his voice was roughened to just the same slight but revealing extent. “If they got away in the motor-boat—”
“I know,” said the captain.
“Why don’t you send someone after them?”
“Who?”
“Well, you’ve got plenty of men, haven’t you? There are two speedboats—”
“And no pilots. No one here could find his way very far outside of our own channel. You know what these creeks are like. We chose this place for that reason.”
“Then they’re bound to get stuck themselves, and we can catch them.”
“I’m afraid,” said the captain, “it may not be so easy. Our friend Templar and his party got here. They must have been guided. Unless Miss Leith…”
Both the men looked at Karen, and as if the full force of things that had been temporarily eclipsed by more immediate alarums rushed back on him as he studied her, Randolph March took a half-step towards her with his mouth growing tight and ugly.
“You treacherous little bitch!”
“One moment.” The captain’s intervention had no hint of chivalry—it was plainly and practically dictated by nothing but cold-rolled efficiency. Recriminations were a waste of time; therefore he had no time for them. “Let Miss Leith tell us.”
Karen gazed at him with calm contempt.
“It’s always so nice to deal with gentlemen,” she said satirically. “You wouldn’t be rude, would you? You’d just fetch some hot irons and get on with it…Well, as far as this goes I can save you the trouble. I didn’t bring them here. We met accidentally, on the way. And they had a very good guide of their own.”
“Who was it?”
“An Indian.”
Simon Templar flicked ashes peacefully on the floor.
“Let me help,” he suggested affably. “After all, there should be no more secrets between any of us. To be exact, he was a bird from the Seminole Escort Bureau, by the name of Charlie Halwuk. A great hunter, I’m told, and certainly a wonderful pathfinder. After the way he brought us here, I’d back him against any homing pigeons you can trot out. So we sent him off with the Gilbecks. He seemed quite sure he could leave anybody who chased him high and dry on a sandbank for the mosquitoes and crocodiles to finish, but of course I don’t want to stop you trying.”
Friede stared at him for a second longer, and then turned back to Karen. The mask that he had worn in the first meeting on the March Hare had been dropped like an old coat. No one could have had any doubt now as to who was in command. Randolph March, gnawing his moustache by the doorway, had become a relative nonentity pillared by his captain’s emotionless authority.
“Miss Leith, why were you trying to run away from here?”
“I got bored with the company.”
“Perhaps,” said Friede, “you were not taking yourself seriously enough in the observation you made just now.”
The girl regarded him with unwavering eyes and her red lips curled.
“I just don’t want you to think you frighten me,” she said. “As it happens, that’s another thing I’ll be glad to tell you. I was on my way out to tell the world about this submarine base of yours, and how it hooks up with Randy’s Foreign Investment Pool.”
“You are an inquisitive journalist, an ally of Templar, a blackmailing adventuress, or an agent of the Department of Justice?”
“Guess once more.”
“You are some kind of Government agent.”
“That’s right,” she said calmly. “And I mean the British Government.”
There was a great silence in the room.
Captain Friede’s face did not change. It was like a mould of hard-baked clay, without feeling or flexibility, behind which cogs and connections turned with the insentient functionality of an adding machine. Only in the drooping of the heavy lids over his obsidian eyes was there a sign of the reflex of personal viciousness.
Then he swung back to March.
“Go back to the yacht and get on the radio telephone to Miami,” he ordered, and his tone had lost the last pretence of deference. “Call Nachlohr and tell him to get the emergency squad together. The motor-boat will take at least three hours to get to Everglades—there is no other place they could head for. The emergency squad can drive across in about two hours, once they are collected. Tell Nachlohr to take all necessary measures. Gilbeck must not reach a telephone, at any cost.”
The Saint stopped breathing.
It was the weak point in everything he had built on, the vital flaw in the one hope for which he had sacrificed all of them there.
Perhaps his brain had never worked so fast. The pressure of it made his head reel, and yet somehow he knew, almost without being able to believe it, that he held the faintest betrayal of dismay out of his face. In fact, he even forced another shade of carefree impudence into his taunting smile.
“It’s a lovely idea, Randy,” he said encouragingly, “and it’ll certainly make everything much more exciting. Jesse Rogers and I were just talking along those lines in the Palmleaf Fan last night—you remember that conference you arranged for us. On account of your suspicions about him were perfectly right; only they should have gone further. He really is an agent of the FBI, and it seems he’d found out even more about your local Bund than you suspected. In fact, he had a complete membership list, and the boys who weren’t pinched last night are just being closely watched to see who else will get in touch with them. The guy listening on the wire will get a big kick out of it when you talk to Nachlohr—that is, if Comrade Nachlohr is still in a place where he can receive telephone calls.”
The Saint took another pull at his cigarette
, and his smile became even more demoralising as he drew reckless strength from the reactions that their faces were less quick to conceal than his.
“And there’s one other thing you may have forgotten,” he went on in the same blithe and bantering voice. “You remember the letter I told you about that Gilbeck had written? Well, when I finally found out where this base was, I brought it up to date with some postscripts of my own before we started off on this trip, and mailed it off to Washington in case of accidents. I’ll admit I hoped to be able to rescue all the hostages before the big guns went off. But in a few hours they’ll be going off, just the same…So what with one thing and another, Heinrich, old Drekvurst, it looks as if you’re going to have to make a lot of good excuses to your Führer.”
3
It worked.
It had to. The bluff was flawlessly played, as few living men but Simon Templar could have played it, but that only gave it a little extra certainty. The barest essential minimum of confidence would have served almost as well. For its real magnificence was in the basic conception.
It was unanswerable. Friede and March might suspect that an indefinite amount of it was bluff—although Simon had said it in a way that would have left only the most optimistic opposition any grounds for pinning much faith to that idea. They might have some evanescent motes of doubt. But doubt was the only thing that fundamentally had to be achieved. Doubt would work just as effectively both ways. For the stakes were too high to let Friede and March take the gamble. They couldn’t even dare to waste precious time on an inspirational chance which if it failed would leave them worse off than before.
Simon read all these things in their faces, and knew the lift of a forlorn triumph which made every sacrifice worth while.
Friede stared at him with those vengefully hooded eyes.
“You sent that information to Washington?”
“By air mail,” Simon confirmed, and only wished he had had enough foresight to make it true. “They’ve probably got it by now, and I expect the Navy and the Coastguard and the Marines will be on their way before morning.”
Randolph March loosened his collar.
“They don’t have to find anything,” he said. “We can—can kill all these people and sink them in the swamp. Nobody could find them. Then we all say that Gilbeck must have gone off his head, and everybody knows the Saint’s reputation—if we send the submarine out to sea—”
“You sickly fool!” Friede turned on him with impersonal savagery. “What about the Indian? And how do you think you can discredit Gilbeck as easily as that? What about the stores and other things here that a naval expert would recognise?”
“We could sink them in the river—”
“Without leaving any traces—in the time we’ve got? And wouldn’t the investigators think of that? It would only take one diver to find them.”
“Then what can we do?”
Friede stood with the immobility of a carving in Saxon stone, yet in his stillness he epitomised all the qualities that had been developed and glorified in the system which he represented—the crude driving force and brutality of the Vandals who had left their tribal name to posterity as a synonym for the destroying barbarian, fatefully combined with an infinitude of patient and painstaking and pitiless cunning that the Mongol invaders had left Eastern Europe for a legacy that was to filter westwards and lend its aid to the creation of a greater shambles than Genghis Khan ever aspired to. There was no mistaking the power and competence of the man: the only mystery was the strange contagious warp which had taken those abilities and bent them irrevocably to the service of death and desolation.
“We have to leave here,” he said at last, and his voice was bluntly commonplace and precise, considering nothing but the immediate tactical problem. “Another base can be found for the submarine, probably, but in any case it must not be captured at all costs…I’m afraid you will have to lose the March Hare.”
“Must I?” March sounded like a pouting child.
“The choice is yours. But you cannot stay here. On the other hand, if you try to escape in the March Hare, the Coastguard seaplanes will find it without much trouble. The submarine has at least a good chance of escape. I think you would do much better to come with us. There will be other work for you, and you can be sure that the Fatherland will not forget you.”
The guard of seamen stood stiffly around the room like soldiers on parade, like robots, without initiative or feeling of their own. It gave Simon an eerie sensation to watch them. They would live or die, kill or be killed, as they were commanded, and all the time think only along one narrow track of blind mechanical obedience. They were a deadlier army than Karel Capek ever dreamed of in his fantasy of the revolt of the robots. And the Saint had a frightening prescience of the holocaust that must lay waste the earth before free and sentient men could triumph over those swarming legions from whom everything human had been stolen but their bodies and their ability to carry out commands. They were the new zombies, the living dead who existed only to interpret the ambitions of a neurotic autocrat more sinister than Nero…
Friede snapped an order at one of them to fetch some rope, and the man saluted and hurried to the door. Before he could get out he had to halt, salute again, and make way for a young man who arrived at the entrance at the same moment.
The young man wore only a white undershirt and a pair of soiled cotton trousers, but his cap was worked with an officer’s gold thread. He had very blond hair and a callous high-cheekboned face, and his blue eyes had the inner unseeing brightness of a fanatic. He held a revolver in one hand. He looked at Friede and raised his other hand and said, “Heil Hitler.”
“Heil Hitler,” responded Friede almost perfunctorily, and went on in clipped, methodical German, “Lieutenant, it has become necessary to remove the submarine immediately. You will prepare to sail at once. Take on all the fuel you can carry, also all the spare food supplies from the March Hare. You will also take as much as possible of the reserve ammunition and torpedoes from the stores on shore here. You will be ready in not more than two hours. I shall be going with you myself and I shall give you your destination later. That is all.”
“Jawohl, Herr Kapitän.”
The lieutenant raised his hand again, turned on his heel, and went out. His young hard voice began rattling its own orders outside.
A moment later the seaman returned with a full coil of rope. Friede jerked his head curtly at the five prisoners.
“Search them and tie them up. Use another rope to tie them to the beds. And be sure that both jobs are well done.”
Randolph March lighted a cigarette with hands that were not quite perfectly steady. Then he put the hands in his pockets and gazed about the room, trying not to pay too much attention to what was going on, and taking especial care not to meet directly the eyes of any of the captives. It was a different approach from that of Friede, who followed every move with implacable if unmoving vigilance. But in his own way March was trying to ape the captain’s cold-blooded self-possession, although the faint shine of moisture on his forehead and the almost imperceptible whitish lines around his mouth worked against him.
“What are you going to do with them?” he asked.
“Leave them here,” replied Friede, without taking his eyes from what the seaman was doing, and in a tone that somehow seemed to leave the trend of the sentence unfinished.
March puffed his cigarette jerkily.
“Why don’t we take the girls?”
“What for?”
“Er—hostages. We might still be followed. But even the Navy might hesitate to attack us if they knew we’d got them on board.”
“It might also help to relieve your own boredom,” said the captain cynically.
March swallowed.
Friede switched a glance to him for just long enough to sum him up like a butcher a sample of steer beef on the hoof, and said, “It might be possible if you were prepared to share your relief with the rest of the crew. But even
then it might give just as much trouble as relief. Apart from jealousies, seamen are superstitious. A wise commander humours them. This isn’t a time to risk troubles that we can eliminate.”
He might have been devoting excessively laborious precautions to planning a picnic.
March paced his corner of the room in short zigzags to which he tried to give the same air of casualness.
“The Foreign Investment Pool will be blown up,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That means—that means almost everything I had.”
“Unfortunately.”
“Then—then I’m not going to have very much left.”
“My friend,” said the captain, with terrifying simplicity, “have you stopped to consider how you would be able to reach any of your resources after Gilbeck’s confession has reinforced Templar’s report to Washington?”
Randolph March came to a halt in his pacing. It was as if the full meaning of the place where he had arrived was dawning on him at that time. His face was suddenly old and ugly, and his eyes emptied as though they were taking in a vista of the years that were left to him.
Simon saw him without pity, even with an arctic and eternal satisfaction. For what March had been and for what he had done there could be no excuse that could stand up to judgment, for what he suffered on account of it there could be no sympathy that was not maudlin, and in a world where civilisation was fighting for its very life there was no room for such inanities. It was that kind of vacuous sentimentality which had allowed the powers of the jungle to grow strong—that perverse broadmindedness which insisted on acknowledging every argument for the other side while discounting all the irrefutable evidence on its own side, which strained every nerve to make excuses for a murderer while it pigeonholed the sufferings of the victims who did not need any excuse. It was against such injustices masquerading under the name of Justice that the Saint had always waged his relentless battle, and now at this time he was glad that Randolph March had to suffer even a fraction of what had been suffered by the men and women and children who had been crushed under the juggernaut to which he had freely given his aid.
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 24
