“What is it?” she said.
“A small tidal wave from the explosion. Hold everything,” he said, and then it hit.
The piled-up crest of white hissed deliriously as it drove up the beach. It smashed against the sloping sand, gained height as it ploughed on, and broke in one giant comber against the wall. Simon held her as the water fell on them like an avalanche. There was a moment of cold, crushing confusion, and then the flood was flattened out and harmless, receding down the beach, leaving no mark except a line of rubble on the lawn.
“And there goes that thousand-dollar Schiaparelli model,” said the Saint, surveying the sodden wreckage of her dress as they stood up. “Just another casualty to this blitzkrieg business…”
His eyes ambled grimly over the scene, watching a gabbling rush of figures towards the shore. The nearer sounds of moving traffic had churned into a pulsing immobility, and a long distance away some female screamed stupidly…And then he looked down directly at his feet, and stood frozen in half incredulous rigidity.
Not more than a yard from him, a round-faced youth stared up at him unseeingly from the ground. Clad in a blue seaman’s uniform, he lay on his back in the sprawled limpness of death. The wave that had hurled him in had left a small pile of seaweed against one twisted arm. The wrist of that arm was tangled in the looped cords of an ordinary lifebelt. Simon leaned down and looked closer. The moonlight was strong enough for him to read the ship’s name that was painted on the belt, and as he read it his blood turned cold…
It seemed to him that he stared at it for a space of crawling minutes, while the letters charred themselves blackly into his brain. And yet with another unshaken sense he knew that it was actually no more than a few seconds by the clock before he was able to spur himself out of the trance of eerie and unbelieving dread that spelled from that simple name.
When he spoke, his voice was almost abnormally quiet and even. There was nothing but the steely fierceness of his grip on Patricia’s arm to hint at the chaos of fantastic doubts and questions that were screaming through his brain.
“Give me a hand, darling,” he said. “I want to get him into the house before anyone else sees him.”
There was something in his voice that she knew him too well to question. Obediently but uncomprehending, she bent over and tugged at the sailor’s feet while Simon put hands under his shoulders. The man was heavy with waterlogged flaccidness.
They were half-way across the lawn with their burden when a shadow moved on the porch of the guest house. Simon let go his end of the load abruptly, and Patricia hurriedly followed his example. The shadow detached itself from the house and stealthily drew nearer.
The moonlight shed itself with pardonable coyness over a pair of white flannels with inch wide stripes surmounted by a five-coloured blazer which might have been tailored for Man Mountain Dean. Above the blazer, and peering at the Saint, was the kind of face which unscientific mothers used to describe when trying to frighten their recalcitrant young.
“Is dat you, boss?” asked the face.
It had a voice that was slightly reminiscent of a klaxon with laryngitis, but at that moment Simon found it almost melodious. The face from which it issued, instead of giving him heart failure, seemed like a thing of beauty. From long familiarity with its abstruse code of expressions, he perceived that the deep furrows in the place where Nature had neglected to put a brow, far from foreboding a homicidal attack, were indicative of anxiety.
“Yes, Hoppy,” he said in quick relief. “This is us. Don’t stand there gawping. Come and help.”
Hoppy Uniatz lumbered forward with the gait of a happy bear. It was not his role to criticise or argue. His was the part of blind and joyful obedience. To him, the Saint was a man who worked strange wonders, who plotted gigantic schemes which slid into beautiful fruition with supernatural simplicity, who moved with a god-like nonchalance in those labyrinths of thought and cerebration which to Mr Uniatz were indistinguishable from the paths of purgatory. Thought, to Hoppy Uniatz, was a process involving acute agony in the upper part of the head, and life had really only become worth living to him on that blissful day when he had discovered that the Saint was quite capable of doing all the thinking for both of them. From that moment he had become an uninvited but irremovable attachment, hitching his wagon complacently to that lucky star.
He looked down admiringly at the body on the ground.
“Chees, boss,” he got out after a time. “I hear de bang when you boin him, but I can’t figger out what it is. De nerz almost knocks me off de porch. What new kinda cannon is dat?”
“There are times, Hoppy,” said the Saint, “when I feel that you and I should get married. As it happens, it was quite a big kind of cannon; only it wasn’t mine. Now help me get this stiff inside. Take him into my room and strip the uniform off him, and make sure that none of the servants see you.”
These were orders of a type that Hoppy could understand. They dealt with simple concrete things in a manner to which he was by no means unaccustomed. Without further conversation, he picked the youth up in his arms and returned rapidly into the shadows. The lifebelt still dangled from the corpse’s wrist.
Simon turned back to Patricia. She was watching him with a quiet intentness.
“I expect we could do with a drink,” he said.
“I could.”
“You know what happened?”
“I’m getting an idea.”
The lean planes of his face were picked out vividly for a moment as he lighted a cigarette.
“That ship was torpedoed,” he said. “And you saw the lifebelt?”
“I only read part of it,” she said. “But I saw the letters H.M.S.”
“That was enough,” he said flatly. “As a matter of fact, it said H.M.S. Triton. And, as you know, that’s a British submarine.”
She said shakily, “It can’t be true—”
“We’ve got to find out.” His face was lighted again in the ripening glow of his cigarette. “I’m going to borrow Gilbeck’s speedboat and take a trip out to sea and find out if there’s anything else to pick up where the wreck happened. D’you want to see if you can locate Peter while I get it warmed up? He should have got back by now.”
There was no need for her to answer. He watched her go, and turned in the direction of the private dock. As he walked, he looked out over the ocean again. Close down to the horizon he saw a single light, that moved slowly southwards and then vanished.
2
Lawrence Gilbeck’s twin-screw speedboat shuddered protestingly as the Saint drove her wide open to the top of an inbound comber. For a moment she hung on the crest with both whirling propellers free; then they clutched the water again, and she dived into the trough like a toboggan racing down a bank of smooth ice. Curtains of spray leapt six feet into the air on each side of her as she settled down to a steady forty knots. The name painted on her counter said Meteor, and Simon had to admit that she could live up to it.
From his place on the other side of the boat, crouching behind the slope of the forward windshield, Peter Quentin spoke across Patricia.
“It’ll be a great comfort to all the invalids who’ve come south for the winter,” he said, “to know that you’re here.”
He spoke in a tone of detached resignation, like a martyr who has made up his mind to die bravely so long ago that the tedious details of his execution have become merely an inevitable anticlimax. He hunched his prize-fighter’s shoulders up around his ears and crinkled his pleasantly pugnacious features in an attempt to penetrate the darkness ahead.
Simon flicked his cigarette-end to leeward, and watched its red spark snap back far beyond the stern in the passing rush of wind.
“After all,” he said, “the Gilbecks did leave word for us to make ourselves at home. Surely they couldn’t object to our taking this old tub out for a spin. She was sitting in the boathouse just rusting away.”
“Their Scotch wasn’t rusting away,” Peter remarked,
operating skilfully on the bottle clamped between his feet. “I always understood that it improved with age.”
“Only up to a point,” said the Saint gravely. “After that it’s inclined to become anaemic and waste away. A tragedy which it is the duty of any right-minded citizen to forestall. Hand it over. Pat and I are chilly after our shower-bath.”
He examined the label and sipped an approving sample before he handed the bottle to Patricia.
“Mr Peter Dawson’s best,” he told her, raising his voice against the roar of the engine as he opened the throttle wider. “Pass it back to me before Hoppy gets it and we have to consign a dead one to the sea.”
Somewhere within the small globule of protopathic tissue surrounded by Mr Uniatz’s skull a glimmer of remote comprehension came to life as the Saint’s words drifted back to him. He leaned over from his seat behind.
“Any time you say to t’row him out, boss,” he stated reassuringly, “I got him ready.”
Through years of association with the Palaeolithic machinery which Mr Uniatz’s parents had bequeathed to him as a substitute for the racial ability of homo sapiens to think and reason, Simon Templar had acquired an impregnable patience with those strange divagations of continuity with which Hoppy was wont to enliven an ordinary conversation. He took a firmer grip on the wheel and said, “Who have you got ready?”
“De dead one,” said Hoppy, exercising a no less noble degree of patience and restraint in elucidating such a simple and straightforward announcement as he had made. “De stiff. Any time ya ready, I can’t row him in.”
Simon painfully worked out the association of ideas as the Meteor ate up the silver-speckled water.
“I was referring,” he explained kindly, “to our bottle of Peter Dawson, which will certainly be a dead one two minutes after you get your hands on it.”
“Oh,” said Mr Uniatz, settling back again. “I t’ought ya was talkin’ about de stiff here. I got me feet on him, but he don’t bodder me none. Any time ya ready.”
Patricia gave Simon back the bottle.
“I noticed that Hoppy brought a sack down to the boat,” she said, with the slightest of tremors in her voice. “I wondered if that was what was in it…But has it occurred to you that every Coastguard boat for a hundred miles will be headed here? We might have a lot of explaining to do if they got curious about Hoppy’s footrest.”
Simon didn’t argue. Part of what she said was already obvious. Not so far ahead of them, many new lights were rising and falling in the swell, and searchlights were smearing long skinny fingers over the ocean. The Saint had no definite plan yet, but he had seldom used a plan in any adventure. Instinct, impulse, a fluid openness of approach that kept his whole campaign plastic and effortlessly adaptable to almost any unexpected development—those were the only consistent principles in anything he did.
“I brought him along because we couldn’t leave him in the house,” he said at length. “The servants might have found him. We may drop him overboard out here or not—I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“What about the lifebelt?” said Patricia.
“I peeled the name off and burnt it. There’s nothing else to identify it. There wasn’t any identification in his clothes.”
“What I want to know,” said Peter, “is how would a single sailor get lost overboard from a submarine at a time like that.”
“How do you know he was the only one?” said Patricia.
Simon put a fresh cigarette between his lips and lighted it, cupping his hands adroitly around the match.
“You’re both on the wrong tack,” he said. “What makes you think he came off a submarine?”
“Well.”
“The submarine wasn’t sunk, was it?” said the Saint. “It did the sinking. So why should it have lost any of its crew? Furthermore, he wasn’t wearing a British naval uniform—just ordinary sort of seaman’s clothes. He might have come off the ship that was sunk. Or off anything. The only incriminating thing was the lifebelt. A submarine might have lost that. But his wrist was tangled up in the cords in quite a peculiar way. It wasn’t at all easy to get it off—and it must have been nearly as difficult to get it on. If he’d just caught hold of it when he was drowning, he wouldn’t have tied himself up to it like that. And incidentally, how did he manage to drown so quickly? I could have held my breath from the time the torpedo blew off until I saw him lying at my feet, and not even feel uncomfortable.”
Peter took the bottle out of Patricia’s hands and drew a gulp from it.
“Just because Justine Gilbeck wrote a mysterious letter to Pat,” he said, without too much conviction, “you’re determined to find a mystery somewhere.”
“I didn’t say that this had anything to do with that. I did say it was a bit queer for us all to come to Miami on a frantic invitation, and then find that the girl who sent the invitation isn’t here.”
“Probably somebody told her about your reputation,” Peter said. “There are a few old-fashioned girls left, although you never seem to meet them.”
“I’ll just ask you one other question,” said the Saint. “Since when has the British Navy adopted the jolly Nazi sport of sinking neutral ships without warning?…Now give me another turn with that medicine.”
He took the bottle and tilted it up, feeling the drink forge his blood into a glow. Then, without looking round, he extended his arm backwards and felt the bottle engulfed by Mr Uniatz’s ready paw. But the glow remained. Perhaps it had its roots in something even more ethereal than the whisky, but something nevertheless more permanent. He couldn’t have told anyone why he felt so sure, and yet he knew that he couldn’t possibly be so wrong. The far fantastic bugles of adventure were ringing in his ears, and he knew that they never lied, even though the sounds they made might be confused and incomprehensible for a while. He had lived through all this before…
Patricia said, “You’re taking it for granted that there’s some connection between these two things.”
“I’m only taking the laws of probability and gravitation for granted,” he said. “We come here and find one screwy situation. Within twelve hours and practically spitting distance, we run into another screwy situation. It’s just a good natural bet that they could raise their hats to each other.”
“You mean that that kid who was washed ashore with the lifebelt was part of some deep dark plot that Gilbeck is mixed up in somehow,” said Peter Quentin.
“That’s what I was thinking,” said the Saint.
Patricia Holm stared out at the roving lights that wavered over their bow. She had had even more years than Peter Quentin in which to learn that those wild surmises of the Saint’s were usually as direct and accurate as if some sixth sense perceived them, as simple and positive as optical vision was to ordinary human beings.
She said, “Why did you want Peter to check up on this fellow March? What has he got to do with anything?”
“What did Peter find out?” countered the Saint.
“Not much,” Peter said moodily. “And I know a lot of more amusing ways of wasting an afternoon and evening in this town…I found out that he owns one of the islands in Biscayne Bay with one of these cute little shacks like Gilbeck’s on it, about the size of the Roney Plaza, with three swimming pools and a private landing field. He also has a yacht in the Bay—a little runabout of two or three hundred tons with twin Diesels and everything else you can think of except torpedo tubes…As you suspected, he’s the celebrated Randolph March who inherited all those patent-medicine millions when he was twenty-one. Half a dozen show girls have retired in luxury on the proceeds of divorcing him, but he didn’t even notice it. The ones he doesn’t bother to marry do just about as well. It’s rumoured that he likes a sprinkle of marijuana in his cigarettes, and the night club owners hang out flags when he’s here.”
“Is that all?”
“Well,” Peter admitted reluctantly, “I did hear something else. Some broker chappie—I ran him down and scraped an acquaintance wi
th him in a bar—said that March had a big load of money in something called the Foreign Investment Pool.”
The Saint smiled.
“In which Lawrence Gilbeck also has plenty of shekels,” he said, “as I found out by looking through some of the papers in his desk.”
“But that’s nothing,” Peter protested. “It’s just an ordinary investment. If they both had their money in General Motors—”
“They didn’t,” said the Saint. “They had it in a Foreign Investment Pool.”
The Meteor canted up the side of a long roller, and above the sound of the engine a deep glug floated forward as Mr Uniatz throatily inhaled the last swallow from his bottle. It was followed by a splash as he regretfully tossed the empty bottle far out over the side.
“You still haven’t told us why you were interested in March,” said Patricia.
“Because he phoned Gilbeck twice today,” said the Saint simply.
Peter clutched his brow.
“Naturally,” he said, “that hangs him. Anyone who phones anybody else is always mixed up in some dirty business.”
“Twice,” said the Saint calmly. “The houseboy took the first call, and told March that Gilbeck was away. March left word to have Gilbeck call him when he got back. Two hours later he phoned again. I took the call. He was very careful to make sure I got his name.”
“A sinister symptom,” Peter agreed, wagging his head gravely. “Only the most double-dyed villains worry about having their names spelt right.”
“You ass,” said the Saint dispassionately, “he’d already left his name once. He’d already been told that Gilbeck was away. So why should he go through the routine again?”
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 2