“Who is it?” he asked, from habit, but his circulation changed tempo like a schoolboy’s.
“Same one who was here dis mawnin’.”
He heard the negress flat-footing disdainfully away as he slipped into a fresh white mess jacket.
Karen Leith was in the patio, and her loveliness almost stopped him. She was wearing some unelaborately costly trifle of white, gathered close about breast and waist and billowing into extravagant fullness below. The tinted patio lights touched the folds with some of the sunset colours of her hair. Otherwise it was all white, except for a thin green chiffon handkerchief tucked into a narrow gold belt at her waist.
“So you made it,” said the Saint.
“You asked me.”
Her lips were so fresh and cool, smiling at him, that it was an effort not to repeat his performance of the morning, even though there could be no excuse for it now.
“I couldn’t believe I was so irresistible,” he said.
“I thought it over all day and decided to come…Besides, it made Randy so mad.”
“Doesn’t that matter?”
“He hasn’t bought me—yet.”
“But you told him.”
“Why not? I’m free, white, and—twenty-five. I had to tell him, anyway. I asked Haskins not to tell, but I realised I couldn’t trust him. Suppose he’d gone ambling off in his quiet crafty way and told Randy, just to see what he could stir up. It’d’ve looked quite bad if I hadn’t said it first.”
They were still holding hands and Simon became conscious of it rather foolishly. Even though she hadn’t tried to draw away. There was either too little reason for it, or too much. He released her fingers and went to the portable bar which he had thoughtfully ordered out before he went to dress.
“Are you sure that was all?” he asked as he brewed cocktails with a practised hand.
“Of course, I did wonder how you made out on your trip this afternoon.”
“As you see, I came back alive.”
“Did you find the barge and the mysterious Mr Rogers?”
“The barge, but not Mr Rogers. He wasn’t there. I’m going to meet him tonight.” Simon handed her a glass. “But it’s nice of you to be interested. It’s a pity, though, because I shall have to take you home early.”
“What for?” she objected. “I’m a long time out of the vicarage. I could even enjoy going to a place like the Palmleaf Fan.”
The Saint was a man whose nerves of steel and impregnable imperturbability are by this time as familiar as the contour of their own bottoms to all patrons of circulating libraries and movie theatres, not to mention the purchasers of popular magazines and newspapers. It cannot therefore be plausibly stated that he staggered on his feet. But it must also be revealed that he came as close to it as he was ever likely to come. So it can only be recorded that he picked up his own drink and subsided circumspectly into the nearest chair.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “I forced a fugitive from a chain gang, under threats of hideous torture, to guide me to a gambling barge that looked like a prop from a Grand Guignol show. I crawled for miles on my stomach like a serpent, ruining an excellent pair of pants and getting myself stuck in all kinds of intimate places with an assortment of needle points which no good housewife would leave on a potted palm. I had a contest in hypnotism with a singularly evil-looking cottonmouth moccasin on the bank of a very stagnant canal. I exposed a crooked stud-dealer, and was offered his job by a curly-haired Greek with a machine-gun. Some thoughtful soul even took the trouble to send the sheriff after me again, and I had to distract his attention by giving him our friend Jennet as a scapegoat. And do you know where that got me?”
“I think so.” She could even look demure. “You found out that Rogers worked at the Palmleaf Fan.”
Simon swallowed a mouthful of blended alcohols with a voracity that would have done credit to Mr Uniatz.
“When did you find it out?”
“Oh, several days ago.”
“Of course, you couldn’t have told me right away, instead of letting me wriggle all over Florida like a boy scout trying for an eagle badge. I mean, we could have spent the afternoon playing backgammon or visiting an alligator farm, or something else harmless and diverting.”
She was sitting on the arm of his chair now, and her slim fingers rested on his shoulder.
“My dear,” she said, “I hated to let you do it. But I wasn’t sure what else there was. And would you have missed it?”
“You were just doing it for my own good?”
“I didn’t know there was nothing else in it than tracking Rogers down. You had to find out. If you were going to follow a trail, you had to follow it exactly as it was laid out. I might have switched you into a short cut that led nowhere.”
The Saint sat up.
“Karen,” he said quietly, “how much more do you know?”
She sipped her drink.
“This is nice,” she said. “What is it?”
“Something I made up. I call it a Wedding Night.”
“That sounds more like a perfume.”
He took hold of her wrist with a grip that was more crushing than he realised.
“Why not answer the question?”
She lifted her glass again and then looked at him levelly. “Haven’t I got just as much right to ask you the same question?”
“That’s fair enough. I’ll answer it. You know just about everything I know. You heard it on the March Hare last night. I shot the works—and half of them were guessworks. You also know what I found out today. I haven’t kept anything back. But I’m just as much in the dark as I ever was—with the only difference that I’m not wondering any more whether I’m just dreaming that there’s dirty work going on, like an old maid looking under the bed for lecherous burglars. The fact that Jennet took a shot at me this morning proves that someone is interested in my nuisance value, whether the shot was only meant for a warning or not. And since your boyfriend Randy and his captain are the only people I’d flaunted my nuisance value at so far, they must be in it up to the neck. A baby could put all that together. But that’s all.”
“And one other thing,” she said. “You have a reputation.”
“That’s true.” He admitted it without vanity or self-satisfaction as a cold fact. “Moreover, I’m still doing my best to live up to it…Now it’s your turn. You told me this morning I could ask you this tonight, and I’m asking.”
“Your glass is empty,” she said.
His grip had relaxed while he talked, and he let her release herself without tightening it again. She made no attempt to massage her wrist, although the red print of his fingers on her satin skin made him realise how he had forgotten his strength. She had a strength of her own which he sensed as a core of steel no less finely tempered than his, underneath the outward beauty of satin and softness and gossamer, and he wondered why it should be so blandly assumed that women with Tanagra bodies and magazine-cover faces could only be either vapid or vicious inside.
He went back to the portable bar and stirred the shaker and refilled his glass, and said, “If you want to welsh on that, perhaps you’ve got a reason.”
“You’re asking me what I know,” she replied. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you I don’t know much more than you’ve said already.”
“What you actually said I could ask is what your place is in this party.”
She let him light her a cigarette, and her amazing eyes were like amethysts under his ruthless scrutiny.
“I run around with Randolph March,” she said.
“For what you hope to get out of it?”
“For what I hope to get out of it,” she said, without wincing.
“Then why are you going out with me?”
“Because I want to.”
“Do you expect to get anything valuable out of me?”
“Probably nothing but a few more kicks in the teeth.”
He felt cheap, but he had t
o harden his heart, even though he was hurting himself as much as he could hope to hurt her.
“Does it make any difference to you if March is mixed up in some dirty work?” he inquired relentlessly.
“A lot of difference.”
“If you could get the goods on him, you could make something out of it.”
“That’s right. I could.”
“Meanwhile, you’ll string along with him. And I’m sure he expects you to bring back all the information you can squeeze out of me. Your job is to keep him in touch with what I think and find out and what I’m going to do.”
“Exactly that.”
“What would you say if I told you I’d figured all that out long ago, and decided I didn’t care? That I knew you’d been put to watch me, but I didn’t think you could do me any harm, and so I didn’t give a damn? That I knew you might be dangerous, but I didn’t mind, because I liked danger and it was fun to be with you. Suppose I told you I was taking a chance with my eyes open, and I didn’t give a hoot in hell for any harm you could do. Because I believed you’d break down before you saw me put on the spot. And the hell with it, anyway. Then what?”
“God damn you,” she said in a low voice. “I’d love you.”
He was shaken. He hadn’t meant to goad her so far, or have so much said.
He wanted to take a step towards her, but he knew he must not. And she said, “But I’d call you a fool. And I’d love you for that, too. But it couldn’t make any difference.”
He glanced at his cigarette, and flipped dead ashes on to the terrace. He finished his drink, with leisured appreciation. And he knew that those things made no difference either. In a ridiculous, reckless way he was happy, happier than he had been since the beginning of the adventure. With no good reason, and at the same time with all the reasons in the world.
When he was sure enough of himself he put out his hand.
“Then let’s have another cocktail at the Roney Plaza,” he said, “and decide where we’ll go to dinner. And see how it turns out.” She stood up.
Her quiet acceptance seemed even grateful, but there was far more behind it than he could put together at once. It was so hard to penetrate that dazzling and intoxicating outer perfection. She was all white mist and moonbeams, cold flame of hair and cool redness of soft lips, and swords behind them.
But she took his hand.
“Let’s have tonight,” she said.
She could have said it in twenty ways. And perhaps she said it in all of them at once, or none. But the only certain thing was that for one brief moment, for the second time that day, her mouth had been yielding against his. And this time he had not moved at all.
4
At eleven-thirty she was still with him. When he had looked at his watch and suggested that it was time they left the restaurant, she had said, “I can’t stop you taking me home, but you can’t stop me calling a taxi and going straight to the Palmleaf Fan.”
So they were driving northwards, and on their right the sea lapped a pebbly strip of beach only about eight feet below them. The houses had thinned out and become scarce, and on the left a tangled barrier of shrubbery grew high out of grassy dunes. Only an occasional car dimmed its lights in meeting and flashed by. The road narrowed, and held down their speed with short scenic-railway undulations.
Simon drove with a cigarette clipped lightly between two fingers, and a deep lazy devilment altered the alignment of one eyebrow to an extent that only a micrometer could have measured. But there was a siren song in the wind that his blood answered, and when he put the cigarette to his lips his blue eyes danced with lights that were not all reflected from the glowing end.
He was insane, but he always had been. There could be nothing much screwier than going out to what looked more and more like an elaborately organised rendezvous with destiny in the company of a girl who had freely declared herself a wanderer from the enemy camp. And yet he didn’t care. He had told her the literal truth, within its limits exactly as he believed she had told him. The evening had been worth it, and they had bargained for that. They had had four hours for which he would have fought an army. Adventures could be good or bad, trivial or ponderous, but there had been four hours that would live longer than memory. Even though nothing more of the least importance had been said. They had known each other, and behind the streens of sophisticated patter and unforgettable cross-purposes their own selves had walked together, clear-eyed, like children in a walled garden.
And all that was over now, except for remembrance.
“We’re nearly there,” she said.
And all he had to be sure of now was that the automatic rode easily in his shoulder holster, without marring the set of a jacket which had been cut to allow for such extra impedimenta, and that his knife was loose in its sheath under his sleeve, and that the atavistic physiognomy of Hoppy Uniatz, whom he had stopped to collect on the way without any protest from her, still nodded somnolently in the back seat.
Ahead and to the left, the sand dunes flattened into a shallow gully with a wooden arch at its entrance. Over the arch a single dim bulb flickered in an erratic way that sent crazy shadows writhing across the road. As the Saint slowed down, he saw that the effect was caused by the uncannily lifelike effigy of a negro boy which reclined on top of the arch with a palmleaf fan in one dangling hand. The fan, in front of the light, moved restlessly in the breeze and created the flickering shadows.
“This is the place,” she said, “It’s about half a mile in.”
“Looks like a cheerful spot for an ambush,” he remarked, and turned the car into the shell road.
Flame fanned past his ear, and a report like the crack of doom left the drum bruised and singing. Fragments of something showered from above, and the largest of them fell solidly into his lap. He glanced at it as he instinctively trod home the accelerator, and for an instant a ghostly chill walked like a spider up his back. He had to force himself to pick up the black horror, and then suddenly he went weak with helpless laughter.
“What is it?” Karen whispered.
“It’s nothing, darling,” he said. “Nothing but the hand of a plaster negro—detached by Hoppy’s ever-ready Betsy.”
Mr Uniatz leaned over the back of the front seat and stared at the hand remorsefully as Simon tossed it out.
“Chees, boss,” he said awkwardly. “I am half asleep when I see him, an’ I t’ink he is goin’ to jump on us.” He tried to cover his mortification with a jaunty emphasis on the silver lining. “One t’ing,” he said, “if he’s plastered he won’t know who done it.”
Karen brushed off her dress.
“He’s just a big overgrown kid, isn’t he?” she said in a tactful undertone. “When are you thinking of sending him to school?”
“We tried once,” said the Saint, “but he killed his teacher in the third grade, and the teacher in the fourth grade thought he’d had enough education.”
It was fortunate that there was half a mile from the entrance arch to the premises, he reflected, so that it was unlikely that anyone at the Palmleaf Fan would have been alarmed by the shot.
The road swung right in a horseshoe. His headlights ran along a thatched wall ten feet high, broken only by a single door, and picked up the sheen of a line of parked cars. There was not a vast number of them, and he imagined that the crowd would not get thick until the other eight spots were tiredly closing and the die-hard drinkers flocked out to this hidden oasis for a last two or three or six nightcaps. Simon parked himself in the line, and as he switched off the engine he heard music filtering out from behind the impressive stockade.
“Well, keed,” he said, as Mr Uniatz gouged himself out of the back, “here we go again.”
She sat beside him for a moment without moving.
“If anything goes wrong,” she said, “I couldn’t help it. You won’t believe me, but I wanted to tell you.”
He could see the pale symmetry of her face in the dimness, the full lips slightly parted and
her eyes bright and yet stilled, and the scent of her hair was in his nostrils, but beyond those things there was nothing that he could reach, and he knew that that was not delusion. Then her fingers brushed his hand on the wheel briefly, and she opened the door.
He got out on his side, and settled his jacket with a wry and reckless grin. So what the hell?…And as they crossed to the entrance she said in a matter-of-fact way that clinched the tacit acceptance of their return to grim rules that had been half-forgotten, “It’s easier to get in here if you’re known. Let me fix it.”
“It’s a pipe, boss,” declared Mr Uniatz intrusively. “When de lookout opens de window, I reach t’ru an’ squeeze his t’roat till he opens de door.”
“Let’s give her a chance to get us in peacefully first,” Simon suggested diplomatically.
It was all strictly practical and businesslike again.
A hidden floodlight beat down on them, and a slit opened in the door—perhaps someone else had thought of Hoppy’s method of presenting his credentials, for the slit was too narrow for even a baby’s hand to pass through. But there was no need for violence. Eyes scanned them, and saw Karen, and the door opened. It reminded Simon a shade nostalgically of the glad and giddy days of the great American jest that was once known as Prohibition.
The door closed behind them as they entered, operated by a stiffly Tuxedoed cut-throat of a type Simon had seen a thousand times before.
“Good evening, Miss Leith.”
The blue-chinned watchdog approved the Saint, and veiled his startlement at Hoppy’s appearance with a mechanical smile and an equally mechanical bow.
A flagged pathway led to the entrance of the building itself, which was a rambling Spanish-type bungalow. The second door opened as they reached it, doubtless warned by a buzzer from the gate.
They went into a vestibule full of bamboo and Chinese lanterns. Another blue-chinned Tuxedo said, “A table tonight, Miss Leith? Or are you going back?”
“A table,” she said.
As they followed him, the Saint took her arm and asked, “Where is ‘back’?”
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 12