“You tell us,” said Peter. “This is making me seasick.”
Simon drew at his cigarette again.
“Maybe he knew Gilbeck wasn’t there, all the time. Maybe he just wanted to impress on that dumb Filipino that Randolph March was trying to get hold of Gilbeck and hadn’t seen him.”
“But why?” asked Patricia desperately.
“Look at it this way,” said the Saint. “Lawrence Gilbeck and Justine left unexpectedly this morning, without saying where they were going or when they’d be back. Now suppose Gilbeck was mixed up with Comrade March in some fruity skullduggery, and Comrade March found it necessary to the welfare of several million dollars to get him out of the way. Comrade March would naturally have an alibi to prove he hadn’t been anywhere near Gilbeck on the day Gilbeck disappeared, and a little artistic touch like that telephone routine wouldn’t do the alibi any harm.”
Peter searched weakly for the second bottle which he had thoughtfully provided.
“I give it up,” he said. “You ought to write mystery stories and earn an honest living.”
“And still,” said Patricia, “we’re waiting to know why all this should have anything to do with that ship being sunk.”
The Saint gazed ahead, and the clean-cut buccaneering lines of his face were carved out of the dark in a mask of bronze by the dim glow of the instrument panel. He knew as well as they did that there were many other possible explanations, that he was building a complete edifice of speculation on a mere pin-point of foundation. But much better than they ever could, he knew that that ghostly tingle in his scalp was more to be trusted than any formal logic. And there was one other thing which had come out of Peter’s report, which seemed to tie all the loose fragments of fact together like a nebulous cord.
He pointed.
“That ship,” he said, “was some sort of Foreign Investment—to somebody.”
3
Red and green dots that marked a floating village of motley craft rushed up to meet them. A trim white fifty-footer, coldly ornate with shining brass, detached itself from the welter of boats, made a tight foaming turn, and cut across their how. Simon reversed the propellers and stopped the Meteor with the smoothness of hydraulic brakes.
The fifty-footer was earmarked with the official dignity of the Law. A spotlight snapped on, washed the Meteor in its glare, and revealed a lanky man in a cardigan jacket and a black slouch hat standing in the bow.
The man put a megaphone to his lips and shouted, “You better get the hell on in—there’re too many boats out here now.”
“Why don’t you go on in yourself and make room for us?” asked the Saint pleasantly.
“On account of my name’s Sheriff Haskins,” came the answer. “Better do what I tell you, son.”
The simple statement held its own implications for Hoppy Uniatz. It conflicted with all his conditioned reflexes to be using a sacked-up cadaver for a footrest, and to have a policeman, even a policeman as incongruously uniformed as the man on the cruiser, dallying with him at such short range. The only natural method of handling such a situation presented itself to him automatically.
“Boss,” he volunteered raucously, leaning forward on to the Saint’s ear, “I brung my Betsy. I can give him de woiks, an’ we can get away easy.”
“Put it away,” snarled the Saint. He was troubled by a feeling that the spotlight on the police boat was holding them just a little too long. To face it out, he looked straight into the light and shouted amiably: “What happened?”
“A tanker blew up.”
Sheriff Haskins yelled the answer back through the megaphone, and waved his free hand. Water boiled at the cruiser’s stern, and she began to edge nearer. Thirty feet from the Meteor she reversed again. Haskins stood silent for a time, leaning across the rail and steadying himself against the police boat’s roll. Simon had a physical sensation of the sheriff’s scrutiny behind the shield of the adhesive spotlight.
He was prepared for the question when the sheriff asked, “Haven’t I seen you before?”
“You might have,” he said cheerfully. “I drove around town for a while this afternoon. We’re staying with Lawrence Gilbeck at Miami Beach, but we only got here today.”
“Okay,” said Haskins. “But don’t hang around here. There’s nothing you can do.”
The spotlight went out, a muffled bell clanged aboard the police launch, and she moved away. Simon eased in the Meteor’s clutch, let her pick up speed, and headed round in a wide circle.
“I wonder how long it’s going to take that lanky sheriff to figure out that you’re you,” Peter said meditatively. “Of course you couldn’t help talking back to him so that he’d pay particular attention to you.”
“I didn’t know he was the sheriff then,” said the Saint, without worry. “Anyway, there’d be something wrong with our destiny if we didn’t get in an argument with the Law. And don’t get soft-hearted and pass that bottle back to Hoppy. He’s had his share.”
He settled down more comfortably behind the wheel, and worked the Meteor’s bow to port until they were running southwards, parallel with the coast. It was the direction in which that single light had moved which he had seen immediately after the explosion, but he didn’t know why he should remember it now. On the surface, he was only heading that way because he had enjoyed the outward run, and it seemed too soon to go home.
The ocean was a vast, peaceful rolling plain in which they floated half-way to the stars. Along the shore moved a life of ease and play and exquisite frippery, marked by a million fixed and crawling and flickering lights. Among those lights, invisible at the distance, cavorted the ephemera of civilisation, a strange conglomeration of men and women arbitrarily divided into two incommiscible species. There was the class which might have sober interests and responsibilities elsewhere, but in Miami had no time for anything but diversion, and there was the class which might play elsewhere, if it had the chance, but in Miami existed only to minister to the visiting players. There went the politicians and the pimps, the show girls and society matrons, the millionaires and the tycoons and the literati, the prostitutes and the gamblers and the punks. Simon listened to the lulling drone of the Meteor and felt as if he had been suddenly taken infinitely far away from that world. It was such a tenuous thing, that culture on which such playgrounds grew like exotic flowers. It was so fragile and easily destroyed, balanced on nothing more tangible than a state of mind. In a twinkling that coastline could be darkened, smudged into an efficient modern blackout more deadly than anything in those days which had once been called the Dark Ages. The best brains in the world had worked for a century to diminish space; had worked so well that no haven was safe from the roaring wings of impersonal death…
Even a few seconds ago, the ocean on either side of them had been coloured with the flat soft hues of a deadened rainbow. It was the same caressing water of the Gulf Stream which day by day lapped the smooth tingling bodies of bathers near the shore. But out there it had been covered with sluggish oil, keeping down the blood of shattered men who would never play any more. It was so much easier to tear down than to build…
“Look, boy,” said Patricia suddenly.
The Saint stiffened and came out of his trance as she caught his arm. She was pointing to starboard, and he looked out in the direction where her finger led his eyes with an uncanny crawling sensation creeping up the joints of his spine as if it had been negotiating the rungs of the ladder.
“Chees, boss,” said Mr Uniatz, in a voice of awe, “it’s a sea-soipent!”
For once in a lifetime, Simon was inclined to agree with one of Hoppy Uniatz’s spontaneous impressions.
Just above the surface of the water, reflecting the moonglow with metallic dullness, moving sluggishly and with a deceptive air of slothfulness, drifted a weird phantasm of the sea. No living movement flexed its wave-washed surface, and yet it was indubitably in motion, splashing its way forward with logy ponderousness. A sort of truncated oval tow
er rose from its back and ploughed rigidly through its own creaming wash.
Instinctively Simon spun the Meteor’s wheel, but even before the swift craft could swing around the apparition was gone. A bow wave formed against the conning tower, climbed up it, and engulfed it in a miniature maelstrom. For a few seconds he stared in fascination at the single piece of evidence which told him he had not been dreaming: something like a short stubby pipe which went on driving through the water, trailing a thin white wake behind. While he looked, the top of the periscope moved, turned about, and fixed the Meteor with a malevolent mechanical eye. Then even that was gone, and the last trace of the submarine was erased by the smooth-flowing surface of the sea.
Peter Quentin drew a deep breath, and rubbed his eyes.
“I suppose we all saw it,” he said.
“I seen it,” declared Mr Uniatz. “I could of bopped it, too, if ya hadn’t told me to put my Betsy away.”
Simon grinned with his lips.
“The only thing that’s any good for bopping those sea-serpents is a depth charge,” he said. “And I’m afraid that’s one thing we forgot to bring with us…But did anyone see any markings on it?” None of them answered. The speedboat lifted her bow under his touch on the throttle and ate up the miles towards the shore. Simon said, “Neither did I.”
He sat quietly, almost lazily, at the wheel, but there was a tension in him that they could feel under his repose. It reached out invisible filaments to grip Peter and Patricia with the Saint’s own stillness of half-formed clairvoyance, while their minds struggled to get conscious hold of the chimeras that swam smokily out of the night’s memories. The only mind which was quite untroubled by any of these things belonged to Hoppy Uniatz, but it is not yet known whether anything more psychic than a sledge-hammer would have been capable of penetrating the protective shield of armour plate surrounding that embryonic organ.
Peter reopened his reserve bottle.
“We got rid of the name on the lifebelt,” he said hesitantly. “If we all swore the submarine had swastikas on it, we might gum things up a bit.”
“I had thought of that,” said the Saint. “But I’m afraid you might gum them the wrong way. Your passport would be against you. There may have been some other lifebelt or another stray clue that we didn’t pick up. Then we should just make matters worse. They could say we were just part of a clumsy plot to try and hang it on Hitler. It’s too much risk to take…Besides which, it wouldn’t help us at all with this Gilbeck-March palaver.”
“You’re still very sure that they’re connected,” said Patricia.
Simon swung the wheel again, and a quartering comber sped them through the inlet into the comparative quiet of Biscayne Bay.
“I’m not quite sure,” he said. “But I’m going to try and make sure tonight.”
The plan had begun to shape itself almost subconsciously while they raced over the sea. The outlines of it were still loose and undefined, but the nucleus was more than enough. He knew now what he was going to do with the body of the youth that lay under Hoppy’s elephantine brogues, and his forthright mind saw nothing ghoulish in the idea. The owner of the body could have no practical interest any longer in what happened to it: it was an article as impersonal as a leg of mutton, a piece of merchandise to be used in the most profitable way Simon could see. He knew that the idea that had come to him was crazy, but his best ideas had always been that way. There were immovable boundaries to the world of speculation and theory: beyond those frontiers there was no way to travel except by direct action. And the more straightforward and direct it was, the better he liked it. He had never found any better place to meet trouble than half-way.
Close by the rocks of the County Causeway, bordering the ship channel, he slowed the Meteor and began to edge her in to the treacherous bank.
“Pat, old darling,” he said, “you and Peter are going ashore. Hoppy and I are going to pay a call on Comrade March.”
She looked at him with troubled blue eyes.
“Why can’t we all go?”
“Because we’re too big a party for an exhibition like this. And because somebody ought to be back at Gilbeck’s to hold the fort in case anything turns up there. And lastly because if anything goes wrong, Hoppy and I might need an alibi. Get going, kids.”
The Meteor delicately nosed the bank. Peter Quentin jumped out on to the rocks and helped Patricia to follow him. He looked back unwillingly.
“March’s place is called Landmark Island,” he said. “It’s right next to where his yacht’s anchored. The yacht is a big grey thing with one funnel, and it’s called the March Hare. If you’re not home in two hours we’ll come looking for you.”
Simon waved his hand as the Meteor drifted away in the current. Scarcely waiting till they were clear, he stole a notch or two out of the throttle and turned the sleek speedster away in a wide arc. A big passenger ship was crawling up the channel behind him, looming doubly large beside the speeding cars on the Causeway. Its whistle howled piercingly as they crossed under its bow, and the Saint smiled.
“Bellow your head off, brother,” he said softly. “Maybe you’re lucky you didn’t sail two hours ago.”
They headed down the bay at a moderate and inconspicuous pace that hardly raised the voice of the engine above a mutter, and Mr Uniatz sat up on the narrow strip of deck behind the Saint and tried to bring the conversation back to fundamentals.
“Boss,” he said, “do we bump dis guy March?”
“That remains to be seen,” Simon told him. “Meanwhile you can take the sack off that sailor.”
Mr Uniatz clung with the pride of parenthood to his original idea.
“He’s better in de sack, boss, when we t’row him in. I got it weighted down wit’ some old iron I find in de garage.”
“Take him out of the sack,” Simon ordered. “You can throw the sack and the old iron in, but make sure he doesn’t go with them.”
He switched off the engine as Hoppy began moodily to obey. Ahead of them loomed the grey hull of the March Hare. Besides the riding lights, other subdued lights burned on her, illuminating her deck and superstructure with a friendly glow, and at the same time vouching for the fact that there were still people on board who might not be quite so friendly. But to Simon Templar that was merely an interesting detail.
The delight of his own audacity crept warmingly through his veins as the speedboat drifted silently towards the anchored yacht. The Meteor heeled slightly as Hoppy lowered the weighted sack into the bay.
“Now whadda we do?” asked Mr Uniatz hoarsely. “He ain’t got nut’n on but his unnerwear.”
Simon caught the anchor chain and made fast to it, steadying the Meteor with deft but heroic strength to ease her against the hull without a sound that might have attracted the attention of the crew. The moon was over the March Hare’s stern, and it was dark at the bow. His job began to look almost easy.
“I’m going on board,” he said. “You wait here. When I let down a rope to you, pass up the body.”
4
He stretched his muscles experimentally, and felt under the cuff of his left sleeve to make sure that the ivory-hilted throwing-knife which had pulled him out of so many tight corners nested there snugly in the sheath strapped to his forearm. Over his head, the anchor chain slanted steeply up to the March Hare’s flaring prow. He gripped the Meteor’s foredeck with soft-shod feet and jumped for the chain, and hung there above the rippling tide as the speedboat floated under him to the length of the painter. Then he went swarming up the chain with the soundless agility of a monkey.
He reached the hawse-hole, and swung both legs up to it. Manoeuvring himself gingerly, he was able to get the fingers of one hand over the edge of the deck-planking near the bow. With a quick muscular twist he sent the other hand up to join it, and chinned himself cautiously.
With his eyes on a level with his hands, he discerned a deck hand in white ducks leaning over the rail on the opposite side of the bow. Simon low
ered himself again, and began to work his way aft with infinite patience, suspended from the edge of the deck by nothing but the grasp of his bent fingers.
When he was almost amidships he chinned himself again. This time the forward end of the deckhouse secured him from the danger of being caught at a disadvantage if the man in white had happened to turn round, and there was no one else to be seen from that angle. He freed one hand and reached up for the lowest bar of the rail. In a few seconds more he was standing on the deck and melting into the nearest pool of shadow.
From the stern of the yacht, soft voices and the tinkle of ice in glasses mingled with the faint music of a low-tuned radio. Motionless against the side of the deckhouse, Simon listened for an envious moment, and discovered that his throat was parched from the salt air and the neat whisky he had swallowed. The melodious sounds of tiny icebergs in cold fluid were almost more than his resolution could resist, but he knew that those amenities had to wait. He started back towards the bow with the flowing stealth of a cat.
The seaman at the rail had not moved, and did not move as Simon crept up to him on noiseless rubber soles. The Saint studied his position scientifically, and rapped him on the shoulder.
The man spun round with a hiccup of startlement. With his mouth hanging open, he had time to glimpse the sheen of a shaded deck light on crisp black hair, the chiselled leanness of devil-may-care lines of cheekbone and jaw, a pair of mocking blue eyes, and a reckless mouth that completed the picture of a younger and streamlined reincarnation of the privateers who once knew those coasts as the Spanish Main. It was a face which by no stretch of imagination could have belonged to any ally of his, and the seaman knew it intuitively, but his reactions were much too slow. As he reached defensively for a belaying pin socketed in the rail nearby, a fist that seemed to be travelling with the weight and velocity of a power-diving aeroplane struck him accurately on the point of the chin, which he had carefully placed in the exact position where Simon had planned for him to put it.
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 3