The Saint made no attempt to get closer—he knew better than to make an incautious move against a man who seemed to have the situation so comfortably lined up. Newt Haskins might look like a piece of antique furniture if he were set down in the streamlined atmosphere of New York’s Centre Street, but Simon was not deceived. Haskins wasn’t even nervous. He was utterly relaxed—a natural deadly machine buttressed with the simple knowledge that if he shot six times, six men would die.
“One of them is a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum,” said the Saint.
“An’ the other?”
Simon screwed up his eyes.
“It looks like a Webley Mark VI .455 Service revolver.”
“Service, hey?” The sheriff’s free hand caressed his neck. “What service would that mean?”
“It was the official British Army revolver in the last war,” Simon replied slowly. “I don’t know whether they’re still using it.”
Haskins peered sidelong at Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
“Do either o’ these lads look to you like they mighta been in the British Army?”
Simon shook his head.
“They look more as if they’d belong on the other side.”
“That’s how it seemed to me. But I took those irons away from Hans and Fritz less ’n fifteen minutes ago.” Another stream of tobacco juice hit the floor. “Now, why would you figure one o’ these Krauts would be totin’ a gun that looks more like it ought to belong to you?”
“I don’t suppose I can prove it,” said the Saint, “but I never owned one of those guns in my life.”
Haskins pushed back his black hat and scratched his head.
“I can’t prove you ever did, either, if it comes to that,” he said, “But it seems to me you still got plenty of explainin’ to do. There’s a whole lot o’ things goin’ on that don’t make sense, an’ you’re in the middle of all of ’em.” He motioned towards a chair with the barrel of his .45. “Now suppose you just sit down, son, an’ tell your daddy what goes on.”
The Saint sat down.
“If you don’t mind my mentioning it again,” he remarked, “you seem to bob up pretty frequently yourself.”
“I git paid for that by the county. But I shuah never worked so much overtime before until you hit the town.” The grey eyes were placid but bright as flints in their creased sockets. “I been mighty tolerant with you, son, on account of you bein’ a guest of the city, so to speak. But you don’t want to forget that we ain’t like Scotland Yard. They tell me they ask all their questions with powder puffs over there, but out here we get kinda tough an’ hasty, sometimes, when our patience is plumb wore out.”
It seemed as if there were only the two of them in the room. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, fixed in their arm-lifted pose with the petrifaction of rigor mortis, made no more difference than a pair of statues. But the most perplexing nonentity was Jesse Rogers. He had never moved or spoken, but his half-closed eyes behind the rimless glasses had not shifted once from the Saint’s face.
“You can smoke, if you like,” Haskins went on. “But be almighty shuah it’s tobacco you’re reachin’ for.” He watched the Saint kindle a cigarette and put his lighter away. “You didn’t by any chance come in heah lookin’ for a lad named Jesse Rogers, did you?”
“You knew that.”
“Shuah. You told me this afternoon. Now, I heard tell you was a smart boy, son, an’ comin’ to a feller’s dressin’-room to bump him off after the whole countryside knows you been chasin’ him all day strikes me as a right foolish way of committin’ murder. So I just can’t see that you was aimin’ to do that.”
Simon stretched out his long legs and blew smoke towards the ceiling.
“That’s very kind of you, Sheriff.”
“Way down in my heart,” Haskins declared dryly, “I’m a soft lovin’ sort of man.” His gaze brushed over the Saint’s dinner clothes. “So you hadn’t no idea of killin’ Jesse. At least, not right now. You dolled yourself all up an’ just come out here on a party, like. You wouldn’t by any chance have brought along that red-headed girl?”
“As a matter of fact,” said the Saint blandly, “I did.”
“You’ve got the ball now, son,” Haskins said. “Keep goin’.”
Simon’s mind raced warily ahead, trying to cover all the conceivable ramifications of possibility. And yet he couldn’t find a single one which seemed to take a dangerous direction. That was the fantastic part of it. For once in his life, he could face any inquisition without a shadow on his conscience. And in that fact alone there was something more disconcerting than there would have been in any need for lies. Subterfuge and evasion were things that one expected in such adventures with the regularity of treads on a tractor. But Haskins was interested in nothing that the Saint had to conceal. The Saint’s only secrets were the lifebelt twisted on to the wrist of the drowned boy, the planting of the body on the March Hare, the interview that had followed, and a brief glimpse of a submerging submarine. And Haskins knew nothing about any of those things—even the opposition had co-operated in concealing some of them. The only things that Haskins was concerned with could be dissected under arc lights without any gear that Simon could anticipate. There was no problem of inventing a convincing lie. There was only the much more devastating problem of making the truth believable.
“I haven’t one single thing to hide,” said the Saint, and was obsessed with the hollowness of his own candour even while he said it. “You know just as much as I do—unless you know any more.”
“Don’t stop, son.”
The Saint pulled at his cigarette, marshalling the simple facts. When there was no obvious direction for a lie, what could be safer than the naked truth?
“You know why I’m in Miami. Gilbeck sent for me. I showed you his daughter’s letter. I don’t know one single thing more than what was in it, about what the trouble was. Now the Gilbecks have disappeared, and naturally I’m afraid there’s dirty work in it. Naturally, too, I want to find them. But I didn’t know where to begin.”
“You made a good start, anyhow.”
“Somebody else made the start—somebody who knew I was looking for them. Jennet shot at me. We caught him and grilled him—maybe that was overstepping the technicalities a bit, but I told you we’d done it. He told us he’d been coerced by Rogers, whom he didn’t know anything about except that he’d met him on that barge of Gallipolis’s. So I went out there and that’s where you met us again. I told you the story then. But Gallipolis had already told me that Rogers worked here, which he didn’t tell you. So I came here.”
“So you an’ Gallipolis was holdin’ out on me.” The sheriff’s voice was gentle and chiding. “Well…”
“Gallipolis is a bit prejudiced against the Law,” said the Saint, with a slight smile. “Personally, I didn’t give it a thought. I like taking care of myself. Besides, I’ve found that my motives are sometimes misunderstood when I try to interest the Law in my troubles.”
“Mebbe that’s so.”
“Look,” Simon insisted, “how hard did you try to give me the benefit of the doubt when you found that note of mine on the Mirage? Not any longer than it took you to get out to Gilbeck’s and start calling me names—”
“Just a minute, son.” Haskins elongated his neck a couple of inches. “Who told you that was where I found that note?”
The Saint sighed out a steady feather of smoke.
“Probably,” he said without batting an eyelid, “the same mysterious person who tipped you off that the Mirage was at Wildcat Key.”
It was not such a wild shot in the dark, after all. The sheriff blinked a little and then found dogged consolation in his chew.
“Son,” he remarked, “I don’t mind tellin’ you I’ve been gettin’ a mite tired of bein’ called to the phone to receive messages from a voice belongin’ to A Friend. First thing it was a drowned sailor on the March Hare. Then it was to look for the Mirage at Wildcat Key. Then it was to see what you were doi
n’ with Gallipolis on his barge, takin’ an escaped convict there. Tonight it was Jesse Rogers.”
“You mean he called you?” Simon took another puzzled glance at the recumbent figure on the divan.
“That’s right, son,” Haskins replied unexpectedly. “But A Friend called him first. A Friend told him the jig was up an’ there was a long box waitin’ for him tonight. So he called me. That warn’t much more’n an hour ago. So I come out. I tramp across country an’ let myself in the back, rememberin’ about you an’ not wantin’ to spoil anythin’. Jesse an’ me kind of got together. So when he went on, I hid me in the closet.”
The Saint’s brows were beginning to draw imperceptibly together.
“What for?”
“For Hans an’ Fritz heah.” Haskins shifted his cud from one side of his mouth to the other and gave the first side a rest. “It seems like your smartness sort of slipped a cog, son. If I hadn’t ’a done that, an’ taken those fancy shootin’ irons away from ’em when they come in—the way we figgered it, you an’ Jesse, or what was left o’ you, would be lyin’ on the floor waitin’ for the coroner.”
Simon looked at the two guns on the dressing-table again, and at Tweedledum and Tweedledee again, and at Jesse Rogers again, and felt as if he was balanced on a pinnacle of crumbling ice above an interplanetary maelstrom of emptiness.
“You’ve taken the ball again,” he said. “It’s all yours. Now you keep going.”
“It was a mighty clever idea, accordin’ to Jesse’s tip from A Friend an’ the way we worked it out,” Haskins proceeded luxuriously. “After Jesse had done his act, he got a message that you wanted to see him—”
“Wait,” Simon interrupted. “I hadn’t got as far as that. He beat me to it. I got a message that he wanted to see me.”
Haskins barely twitched one shaggy eyebrow.
“That’s what the waiter told him, anyhow. I don’t misbelieve you, son. Mebbe the waiter was just doin’ his part. It don’t make no difference. One way or another, you get here. An’ when you walk in the door, like you did just now, Hans an’ Fritz are already holdin’ Rogers up. Hans will shoot you with the Magnum, while Fritz shoots Jesse with that British gun. Then they leave the right guns beside each o’ you, an’ duck out the window. When everybody comes rushin’ in, it looks just like you’d killed each other in a gun fight—particularly since about four people know that you’ve been trailin’ Jesse all day with a grudge agin him on account of he hired Lafe Jennet to take a shot at you. Havin’ come in on some of that myself this afternoon, I’d ’a been most liable to figger that was the way of it myself.” The sheriff scratched one leg with the toe of the opposite boot. “Thinkin’ it all over, son, it shuah seems to me that somebody was takin’ an awful lot of trouble to see that you an’ Jesse was both got rid of together with no questions asked.”
Simon Templar put his cigarette to his lips and filled his lungs with warm soothing vapour and forgot to let it out again. His whole being seemed to stand still in the same cumulative and timeless stasis that affected the expansion of his ribs.
But through those fleeting seconds, his brain absorbed fact and association and deduction as completely and meticulously as his lung tissues ingested the smoke. Every molecule of factual knowledge was seeping into its predestined pore. The pattern was all falling into place. Every piece had its revealed significance, even to the most trivial fragments. He didn’t know whether to feel stupid or triumphant. Certainly he had expended an astronomical amount of time and energy and cerebration on the trail of a wild goose, but had it been really wasted? The wild goose—to cross metaphors with a lavishness that only a pedant could criticise in the circumstances—had come home to roost. There were only a few vacant spaces left…
“It makes sense, Sheriff.” Even the naturalness of his own voice surprised him. “I’ve spent about twelve hours letting myself be nursed into the most beautifully elaborate set-up I ever heard of. But how about Jesse? Did he really tell Jennet to shoot at me?”
Rogers spoke for the first time without any expression.
“I did. I didn’t have to tell him to hit you, so I thought I’d pass on the order and see what happened.”
“You see, son,” Haskins explained, “you got yourself mixed up in some powerful big organisin’. I found out tonight that Jesse was workin’ heah as what you’d call an undercover man for the Department of Justice. It didn’t surprise me so much, neither. I’ve knowed for a long time that this place was the local headquarters of Mr Hitler’s Nazi-American Bund.”
4
“Of course,” said the Saint with an ecstatic lilt in his voice that was too zephyrous for anyone else there to hear. “Of course…”
And he felt as if a fresh wind from out of doors had blown through his head, leaving it clean and light, with all the dark tangles swept away. Everything else was set in its niche now, to be seen clearly from every angle. The only thing that amazed him was that he had failed to find the connecting link long ago. Those last words of Haskins’s had supplied it.
The Bund. And those fearfully earnest merrymakers outside. Karen had practically told him when she put the words “Kraft durch Freude” into his mouth—and he’d been too preoccupied to grasp it. And the whole atmosphere of the trap into which he had so nearly fallen. Its grim, far-ranging, tortuous Teutonic thoroughness. One could almost see the imprint of the fine hand of Himmler. But between the master hand of Himmler and its victims, in this as in every other corner of that incredible world-wide web of intrigue and sabotage, a more fantastic secret society than any blood-and-thunder writer of fiction would ever have dared to try and make convincing, there had to be major intermediaries, graduates summa cum laude of the Himmler school of technique. And who was the intermediary here, the local lieutenant of this greater gangsterism than the petty Caesars of civil crime had ever dreamed of? Well, not a lieutenant. A captain. Captain Friede. The man whom Simon had always sensed was the real commander even when March seemed to give the orders. It could be no one else. The finger pointed to him beyond any mortal doubt. Sometimes there could be uncertainties, but sometimes there was a clarity of vision that amounted to inspiration, that logic might justify but could not assail. It had to be Friede. And through him, the other threads linked with March, with Gilbeck, with the Foreign Investment Pool, with a torpedoed tanker, even with a drowned sailor with a lifebelt bearing the name of a British submarine tangled to his wrist. Everything, everything hooked up…There were still a few minor questions, but their solution would be direct and unequivocal. The groping was over, and all that was ahead lay straight as an arrow’s flight…
“Of course,” said the Saint, after a million years, “Jesse can’t have been quite so much under cover as he thought. Somebody had suspected him, and this was the neatest way to get rid of both of us together.”
“That’s what I think.” Rogers sat up at last, and Simon discovered that the old-young eyes behind his glasses could be unexpectedly penetrating. “I’ve been watching you all this time, and I know you’ve been telling the truth. But Haskins didn’t ask why they should want to get rid of you.”
Simon chain-lighted another cigarette. Because of various accidents, he had been able to reconstruct far more than either Rogers or Haskins. And that was where his incurable madness came back, that gay and crazy quirk of his very own that had led him into so many hairbreadth perils and so much more fun. They had provided the one vital clue, but they still couldn’t have his adventure.
“The only thing I can think of,” he said, “is that this disappearance of the Gilbecks has something to do with it. They knew my reputation, and they knew I’d be bound to take an active interest in that, and they may have thought I was too dangerous to leave at large. That is, if I was ever important at all. They may have just wanted any scapegoat at all, and heard that I was in town, and thought I’d be good enough if I could be manoeuvred into a sufficiently compromising background. But the disappearance of the Gilbecks does seem to hav
e some connection, since Haskins was first put on to me when A Friend sent him to find my note on the Mirage.”
His air of baffled candour could not have been more convincing.
“And you still haven’t any idea what connection Gilbeck could have with this?” Rogers asked, watching him.
“Not the slightest,” Simon lied tremorlessly. “If I had, I could catch up on a lot of sleep.”
Rogers sat for a moment longer, and then stood up. He went to the window and whistled softly. Two deputies loomed up in the dark outside. Rogers turned away, and Haskins said, “Boys, the two lads in the corner have gotten themselves a queer idea that Miami Beach is the Siegfried Line. I want you to take ’em into town an’ tuck ’em away so their patriotic passions can get a chance to cool.” He gathered up the two revolvers by the barrels with his left hand, and held them out. “You better take these along, too, so you can book ’em for concealed firearms.”
“You’ll hear more of this,” rasped Tweedledum, as the sheriff’s revolver waved him towards the window. “We’ve got our legal rights—”
Haskins screwed up one eye and said, “Our county Gestapo knows all about ’em, an’ I’m afraid they’ll give you more breaks than you’d get at home. In the meantime, I’m goin’ to send you some writin’ paper an’ let you write your boss an’ tell him to keep his goddam Weltanschauung at home!”
When the two men had gone out through the window, Simon said boldly, “If you knew all this before, why didn’t you do something about the place?”
“Sometimes a place like this is useful,” said Rogers. “If we know where the small fry are meeting, it gives us a chance to keep track of some of the big fish.”
“Then who is the big fish here?”
“That’s what I was sent here to find out.” Rogers shrugged. “It seems as if he spotted me before I could spot him. I hope it doesn’t make much difference. Somebody else will pick up where I left off, and in the end we’ll know him. Even if their plot had worked, it wouldn’t have really mattered.”
The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 15