The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

“According to the sheriff,” he replied unyieldingly, “it was a mysterious kibitzer called A Friend. If that was you, say so.”

  “It was.”

  “Then why didn’t you say anything to me?”

  “I told you before dinner, last night—you had to go through it all, in case you got anything else out of it. And then, if I’d told you at the Palmleaf Fan, you know you’d have still gone in to Rogers anyhow, and the plot would have worked. But I knew he belonged to the FBI, and I knew he’d be more cautious. I hoped that if I told him it might save you from being killed.”

  “That was nice of you,” said the Saint politely. “So after you’d done that, you went back to March and Friede and helped them to kidnap my friends.”

  “I didn’t. I wanted to cover myself. I went over and said that I didn’t know what went on, but you’d said something just as you left that sounded as if you already knew what the trap was and you’d organised things to take care of it. A couple of minutes later the waiter came and whispered to Friede, and he said I was right. He was raging. He gave a lot of orders in German that I couldn’t catch, and we all left. While they were getting the March Hare ready to sail, some men brought your friends on board.”

  “I saw you enjoying the joke with Randy as you went past the Causeway.”

  “I had to stay with them then. The one thing that mattered was to find out where they were going.”

  Without shifting his eyes, the Saint blew smoke at the mosquitoes that were starting to rise in thickening clouds into the twilight.

  “You still have a last chance to come clean,” he said ruthlessly. “Who are you working for?”

  She seemed to make up her mind after a hopeless struggle.

  “The British Secret Service,” she said.

  Simon looked at her for a moment longer.

  Then he put his face in his hands.

  It was a few seconds before he raised it again. And then the expression in his face and eyes had changed as if he had taken off an ugly mask.

  It was all clear now—all of it. And he felt as if he had taken the last step out of suffocating darkness into fresh air and the light of day. He didn’t even have to ask himself whether she was telling the truth. If the unshadowed straightness of her wonderful eyes had not been enough, the circumstantial evidence would have been. No lie could have fitted every niche and filigree of the pattern so completely. He could only be astounded that that was the one answer he had never guessed.

  Impulsively he reached out for her hand.

  “Karen,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me?”

  “How could I?” But her face and voice were without rancour. “I wouldn’t have been any more use if I’d been suspected. I’d put too much into getting where I was. Even for you, I couldn’t endanger any of it. I knew you were supposed to be a sort of romantic Robin Hood, but how could I know how much of that was to be trusted? I couldn’t take a chance. Until now—I’ve got to.”

  “Finish it now,” he said quietly.

  She put her cigarette back to her lips and drew at it more evenly than she had done since he lighted it. It was as though a die had been cast and a decision made, and now for the first time she could rest a little while and let herself go with the tide.

  “It started as a very ordinary assignment,” she said. “The Foreign Office knew about Randolph March, as they know about most people who might give them trouble one day. They knew he’d spent a lot of time in Germany since 1933, and had a lot of powerful Nazi friends, and a lot of leanings towards their point of view. But he isn’t the first rich man who’s thought the Nazi system might be a good thing. You know the technique—you scare a rich man into the Fascist camp with the bogy of Communism, because he’s worried about his possessions, and you scare the poor man into the Communist camp with the bogy of capitalism, and then the Communists and the Fascists make an alliance and clean up…Well, after Czechoslovakia, they found out that March was doing some heavy speculation in Nazi bonds.”

  “Through the Foreign Investment Pool?”

  She nodded.

  “So when the real war started, he was somebody to be watched. It was more or less routine at first—until I found out about Friede. Of course, I had to pretend that I had Nazi sympathies myself, but it was a long time before they’d open up at all. Even then, they never let me get near anything important—most of what I did find out was from listening at keyholes. Until last night…But before that, I’d heard the word ‘submarine’ once. I suppose I’d worked out the tanker business more or less the way you did. But if that was the scheme I had to find the submarine base. That’s why I went with them last night, because it seemed almost certain that they’d be going there. I was right. So as soon as I knew all I had to know, I slipped away. That was this morning…I saw from the map that the road couldn’t be very far away, and I’d have made it by now if those wild pigs hadn’t attacked me.”

  The Saint thought back over the country they had traversed, and smiled rather grimly.

  “I don’t suppose they’ve even bothered to try and catch you,” he said. “Because they know better. We’ve been pushing this wall-eyed wheelbarrow through the swamp for about fourteen hours with an Indian guide who has X-ray eyes, and we haven’t arrived yet.”

  “But I’ve got to get out!” she said desperately. “You can take me. I can identify myself to the British Ambassador in Washington. I’ve only got to get to a telephone. He’ll drop a word to the State Department, and in half an hour the Navy and the Coastguard will be here.”

  “Looking for a most illegal German submarine base,” said the Saint. “But not particularly interested in a couple of friends of mine.”

  She stared at him almost incredulously.

  “Are you still thinking of them?”

  “It’s a weakness of mine,” he said.

  She sat still.

  Then she let the stub of her cigarette fall carefully into the stream. She reached out and took his own cigarette-case out of his pocket, and helped herself to another. She waited until he gave her a match.

  She said, “For three months I’ve let myself be pawed by Randolph March and leered at by Heinrich Friede. I’ve pretended to sympathise with a philosophy that stinks to high heaven. I’ve let myself gloat over the invasion of peaceful countries and the bombing of helpless women and children and the enslaving of one nation after another. I’ve made myself laugh at the slaughter of my own people and the plundering of Jews and the torture of concentration camps. I’ve even let you walk blindly into what might have been your death, while all my heart loved you, because I’m not big enough to decide who is to live and who is to die while the civilisation that made us is trying to save all the lights in the world from going out. And all you can think of is your friends!”

  Simon Templar gazed at her with clear eyes of bitter blue.

  For a long time. While the intensely even tones of her voice seemed to hang in the sultry air and beat back savagely into his brain.

  Like an automaton, he lighted a fresh cigarette he had taken, and put his cigarette-case away. In the infinite silence, every scintilla of feeling seemed to empty out of his face, leaving nothing but a fine-drawn shell that was as readable as graven stone.

  The mask turned towards Hoppy Uniatz.

  “Do you think you could drive this thing?”

  “Sure, boss,” said Mr Uniatz expansively. “I loin it on de farm at de reform school.”

  The Saint’s eyebrows barely moved.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t have thought of volunteering before.” His accent was amazingly limpid and precise. “Will you take it back the way Charlie Halwuk tells you?” He turned to the motionless Indian. “Which way is where we were going, Charlie?”

  The Seminole raised a mahogany arm.

  “Plenty straight into sun. No can miss now.”

  Simon stood up, and caught a bough over his head, and swung himself swiftly on to the quivering shore.

  “Thanks—Karen,” he sai
d.

  Her lips were white.

  “What are you doing?” she asked shakily.

  His smile was suddenly gay and careless again.

  “You’ve got enough men to look after you, darling. I’m going to see if I can find Patricia and Peter before the Navy gets there. Give my love to the Ambassador.” He waved his hand. “On your way, Hoppy—and take care of them.”

  “Okay, boss,” said Mr Uniatz valiantly.

  He hauled back on the clutch levers. The giant wheels made a quarter turn, and stalled. Hoppy started the engine again and raced it up. Too late, the Saint saw what had happened. A log that had drifted down while they were talking had nosed in between the back wheels and embedded itself in the soft bank of the stream. But by the time he saw it, he could do nothing. Never a man to waste time on niggling finesse, Mr Uniatz had slammed the clutches home while the engine roared at full throttle. There was a deafening screech of rending metal, and every moving part came to a shuddering standstill with an unmistakably irrevocable kind of finality.

  Mr Uniatz pumped homicidally at the starter and succeeded in producing a slow spark and a soft puff of expiring smoke.

  “Let it rest,” said the Saint wearily, and glanced at Karen again. “I did my best, darling, but I think Fate had other ideas.”

  3

  “I’ll have to go on foot,” said the girl. “The way I started. If I had a guide—”

  “What about it, Charlie?” Simon interrupted.

  The Seminole shook his head impassively.

  “Indian go. Maybe three-four days. White man no can do. White man die plenty quick.”

  Karen Leith covered her eyes, just for a moment.

  The Saint touched her shoulder.

  “We may be able to steal a boat and get you out through the islands,” he said. “But we’ve got to get to the base first. And we’ve got to step on it.”

  Without the bright beams of the marsh buggy to light the way, an attempt to get through the trackless Everglades at night was hopeless and might well be fatal. And there was not much more time. Florida twilights were short, and darkness would drop like spilled ink as soon as the sun was gone.

  Simon stood up.

  “Charlie, you lead. We’ve got to make Lostman’s River before dark. Travel fast, but be as quiet as you can.”

  The Indian nodded and got out. The ground quivered badly under Simon, but Charlie Halwuk’s moccasined feet seemed to possess some native buoyancy that prevented them from sinking.

  Karen spoke to him with tormented calm.

  “You’d better keep your eyes open, too. There may be a party out looking for me, in spite of what he said.”

  “If man come, I hear,” stated Charlie Halwuk.

  He parted branches and moved on. The procession formed behind him.

  The Indian’s course was deceptively casual to watch, but it was like trying to follow the course of a dodging jackrabbit. He ducked under vines, found passage through tight-packed foliage, and used roots and tufts of grass as stepping-stones with the sure-footedness of a mountain goat. Behind Simon and the girl, Gallipolis began a whispering flow of his inexhaustible Greek profanities. Bringing up the rear, Hoppy Uniatz, who in spite of his nickname had never had any practice in the art of agile skipping about on treacherous knolls, uttered occasional louder epithets as he floundered along.

  Presently they came to another narrow stream.

  “Cross here,” said Charlie Halwuk, and forded out into the knee-deep water.

  The others waded after him. They were nearly across to the opposite bank when Simon noticed that the densest of hammocks screened the shore to bar their way. The Indian slipped sideways along it, working upstream. Then he held up his hand, stopped for a moment, and returned to Simon.

  “Go down other way,” he said imperturbably. “Crocodile up there. Make bad to get out.”

  “Crocodiles!” The girl’s fingers tightened on Simon’s arm, and he knew she was thinking of her own crossing of that same brackish water some time before. “I didn’t know there were any in Florida.”

  “Plenty here,” said Charlie.

  He moved on noiselessly through the water, found a clump of bushes which looked no different to Simon than the rest, and pushed them aside like a gateway on to the shore. The Saint climbed after him into a cavernous cathedral dank with dripping Spanish moss and roofed with a lacework of twisted branches, so dark that it gave the illusion that night had already fallen. They went on.

  The journey became a nightmare race against fleeting time, with every obstacle that the most prolific combination of soil and moisture could erect to impede them. Gallipolis kept up his blasphemous monotone, but Mr Uniatz, whose chassis had been designed for weight-lifting rather than cross-country running, was reduced to an asthmatic grunting. And always the Indian ahead was a tireless space-eating will-o’-the-wisp that kept just a few yards in the lead but could never be overtaken, even though the ground grew firmer at last and the thorny scrub began to thin out. Karen stumbled against the Saint, and for a while his arm held her up, but presently she pulled herself free and fought on indomitably at his side again.

  And then, at last, Charlie Halwuk stopped and looked back. Simon caught up with him, and found himself gazing through a last thin screen of vines into the pinkish afterglow of the vanished sun. A breeze stirred, wrinkling water that lay in a wide roseate pool. The Indian pointed.

  “Lostman’s River,” he said.

  Simon stared at it while the shadows deepened perceptibly. Karen Leith came up beside him and clung to his arm, but he scarcely noticed her. He was feeling an absurd weakness that foreran a new flood of strength as he let himself bathe in the mad magnificent knowledge that they had made it, in spite of everything. They were there.

  This was the secret outpost of the conspiracy, the field headquarters of March and Friede. He took it in.

  The March Hare was there, riding at anchor in the broad pool, a slash of pastel grey across the river with porthole lights beginning to reflect themselves in the darkening water like orderly ranks of stars. Between it and the shore was moored a whale-backed shape of a deeper and more glossy grey, most of it hardly breaking the surface, but with its periscope and conning tower outlined in sharp silhouette against the sheen of the pool.

  To his right, a small dock shaped like a slender capital T pointed from the water into the shore, at a place where a group of corrugated-iron buildings, probably storehouses, clustered around a huge aluminium-painted fuel storage tank. Tied up to the dock was a small open motor-boat, rubbing gently against the piling in the river current. A little further on, another long low building broke the dusk with two yellow lighted windows, but even they were not much more than a hundred yards from where he stood.

  On his other side, Hoppy breathed heavily and drained the last drops from the bottle he had brought with him from the abandoned marsh buggy, and dumped it into the undergrowth, its extinction hardly seemed to reach his attention under the stress of the awe-inspiring realisation that was silting up in the small hollow space inside his head.

  “Boss,” Mr Uniatz said reverently, “is dis de Pool?”

  “This is it,” said the Saint.

  “Boss—” Mr Uniatz wriggled with the brontosaurian stirring of an almost unconquerable eagerness. “Can I try it?”

  “No,” Simon said ruthlessly. “You stay here with everybody else. I’m going ahead to reconnoitre. The rest of you keep quiet and don’t move until I give you a signal. Gallipolis, let’s have your flashlight. When I blink it this way, come after me.”

  He pressed Karen’s hand for a moment as he released himself from her arm. Then he was gone.

  He stayed just within the edge of the jungle, for the river bank had been cleared for some distance around the lodge. Mud sucked at his boots, and more mosquitoes found him to make a buzzing and stinging hell out of every step, but already with his natural instinct for the wilds he was learning the tricks of movement in that new kind of
country, and he felt a boyish kind of excitement at the awareness of his increasing skill.

  He waded through a narrow winding arm of the river that crossed his path, circumnavigating another evil cottonmouth that curled like an almost indiscernible sentinel in a clump of lilies, and then he was almost directly behind the lodge. The river broadened in front of the building, arching out towards the Gulf in a sheltering bay. There was more dark formidable land on the other side, its coastline dimly broken by other tortuous creeks that carried the drainage of the Everglades out to sea, and he had to admit that the submarine base had been chosen with a master tactician’s eye. Without knowing every secret marker of the channel that had been dredged to it, no one could have found it by water in anything larger than a skiff, and even then only a Seminole pilot would be likely to escape getting lost among the myriad islands and shoals that still lay between it and the sea.

  Silently as a roaming panther Simon stepped out of the sheltering jungle and crossed the clearing towards the blacker shadow under the wall of the lodge, where one of the lighted windows was like a square hole in the darkness striped with narrow black lines. As he reached it he saw that they were bars, and his pulses gained a beat in the rate of their steady rhythm. But a curtain inside made it impossible to see through.

  He shifted towards the corner which might bring him round to a door.

  An owl hooted mournfully in the thickets behind him, where the shrill chorus of innumerable insects made a background din above which one might have been tempted to believe that no slight sound could have been heard. And yet as Simon turned the corner he did hear a different sound—a sharp rustle that jerked his muscles into involuntary tension like the warning trill of a rattlesnake.

  Then he saw that it was not a snake, but a man who had stepped out of the shadow of the doorway.

  They stared at each other for an instant in the stillness of surprise.

  Out there in the open, there was just enough relief from the darkness for Simon to see him. He was a huge crop-headed bull-necked man in dirty ducks, naked to the waist, with a boiler chest matted with thick hair. A revolver hung in a holster at his hip, and one of his great hands grabbed for it while the other reached for the Saint.