The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  And besides that, the Saint had something else to think about.

  It was no more than a faint flickering star far down on a dark horizon, but it was by such flickers that he had cheated death many times before, and once again that one star had not gone out.

  For once again, so ridiculously that it seemed like part of an interminable routine, and yet just as logically as it had ever happened in any case before, he still had his knife. The search that had been made would not have left any of them any hidden weapons of the expected kind, and yet once again it had failed to discover the slim sheath strapped to his left forearm. And it was still possible, in spite of the knots that had been ruthlessly tightened in the stiff new rope, that the long fingertips of his right hand might be able to reach the hilt of that keen blade. Perhaps…

  Simon held on to that attenuated hope. And at the same time yet another thing was obtruding itself on his consciousness.

  It was a peculiar acrid smell that was starting to creep into the room. It had a sharpness that was quite distinctive, that fretted his nostrils in a perplexed effort of recognition as the atmosphere grew heavier with it.

  “It isn’t quite so much fun as you thought it was going to be, is it, Randy, old boy?” he was saying. “It’s worrying about all sorts of things like that that gave Heinrich his bald dome. You’d better take some March Hair Tonic along with you if you want to save your own crop.”

  March glanced at him almost vacantly, and took another deep hot pull at his cigarette.

  And all at once Simon knew the meaning of that curious pungent odour in the air. One sentence out of Peter Quentin’s first report on Randolph March drummed through his head in a monotonous rhythm. His eyes stayed fixed on the burning cigarette with a kind of weird fascination.

  “But—that can’t be right.” March turned back to Friede, and it seemed that his voice was harsher and higher pitched. “I can’t lose everything. Everything! What am I going to live on? Where can I go?”

  “You can be sure that the Party will take care of you,” Friede said dispassionately. “I can’t tell you yet where we shall be going. I shall communicate with Berlin after the submarine is at sea. But you would be wise not to make too much of your own personal losses. Please remember that Templar’s interference has cost the Reich a much greater setback in organisation and preparation than the loss of your private fortune. In this service, as you should know, the individual is of no importance. I hope you agree with me.”

  “I hope you do, too, Randy,” said the Saint, and now his mockery had a finer edge, a crystallising direction that was founded on that acrid-smelling cigarette. “It’s a bit different, isn’t it? You had a lot of fun being a plutocrat of the Fifth Column, while you could enjoy your mansions and yachts and aeroplanes, and plan your sabotage and propaganda over nice cold bottles of champagne with a glamour girl at each elbow. Now I hope you’re going to enjoy doing a lot more hard work on beer and ersatz cheese, while a lot of big shots like Heinrich crack the whip. It will be a very refining experience for you, I think.”

  March gulped, a little dazedly, as the Saint’s insinuatingly derisive voice drove each of its points home with the leisured aim of a skilled surgeon operating a probe, and the drawn lines around his mouth whitened and twitched a little more.

  Captain Friede saw and heard the cause and effect also. His eyes had narrowed on March while Simon spoke, and it was significant that he had not tried to make the Saint stop talking. He had gone back into a reptilian stillness from which he roused again with the same reptilian speed.

  Simon saw the flare of his small nostrils that was the only warning. And then the captain had taken three quick steps across to March, snatched the cigarette from his mouth and thrown it on the floor, and stamped his heel on it.

  “Dummkopf!” he snarled. “This is no time for that!”

  But he had moved too late. March had already sucked enough marijuana into his lungs to make a man-eater out of a mouse. His eyes sparkled with a wide hollow brilliance.

  “Damn you—”

  His voice cracked, but not his muscular co-ordination. Like lightning he whirled and snatched a carbine from the slack hands of the nearest unsuspecting guard. He fanned the barrel across the captain’s chest.

  “It’s not going to happen like that, do you see?” The words ran together in shrill desperation. “I won’t let it! I’m going to fool all of you. I’m going to keep you here. I’ll turn you over to the Navy myself. When they get here I’ll say you tried to fool me, but I was too smart for you. I captured you all myself. They won’t take anything away from me. I’ll be a hero—”

  Simon’s heart sank again.

  It was like watching a slow-motion nightmare, in which horror advanced with infinite sluggishness and yet was preceded by a paralysis which prohibited doing anything about it. March was crazy, of course—his threat could only have been uttered by a man at a hot-headed height of hysteria that could eliminate cold facts by forgetting them. But that same madness, combined with the strange dislocation of the senses of time and space that was a unique property of the drug, also destroyed itself.

  March might have thought that he could cover anyone in the room in a split second, but he was wrong. Friede only nodded, slightly and unhurriedly, to another guard who was half-way behind March. A revolver shocked the room twice with its expanding thunder…

  Simon’s frosted blue eyes settled again on Captain Friede as the Nazi looked up from a body that finished jerking a mere instant after it sprawled over the floor.

  “I hate to admit it, Heinrich,” he said, “but I couldn’t have thought of a more poetic end for him myself.”

  “He was not the first fool we have had with us,” Friede said with complete coolness. “And he will not be the last. But as long as we can find pawns like him, we shall not be afraid of many puny efforts like yours.”

  “It must be wonderful to feel so certain about everything,” said the Saint, with a coldness that had no fundamental difference, even though it had far less reason.

  The captain walked calmly around the room, testing the bonds of Hoppy Uniatz, Karen Leith, Peter Quentin, Patricia Holm, and lastly—with especial care—the Saint.

  Then he hit the Saint six times across the face, with icy calculation.

  “That,” he said, “is for some of your humorous remarks. I only wish it was practical for us to take you to Germany, where the discipline of a concentration camp would do much more for your education. But as it is, you will be removed from the need for discipline…I hope Gilbeck did not omit to tell you that there are a hundred pounds of high explosives under the flooring of this room, with a detonating device which I can fire by radio from the submarine. As soon as we are sufficiently far away, I shall permit myself the luxury of pressing the button…I leave you and your friends to look forward to that moment.”

  4

  It was dark in the room before their eyes could adapt themselves to see by the drift of moonlight that filtered through the small window. Friede had switched off the light when he went out, with a deliberation which told as plainly as words that he did it for a last finishing touch of sadism, to eke the ultimate ounce of mental torment out of their wait for death by stealing the small comfort of companionship that light might have given them. March’s body had been left ignored where it had fallen. The storm troopers had been withdrawn, all of them to help hasten the readying of the submarine, except one man who had been posted outside the door. They could hear him pacing up and down like a sentry.

  They had not been gagged, and Simon did not believe that that was any oversight. It belonged with the same psychology as the putting out of the light. Light could have aided courage; voices alone, speaking in darkness, might be more likely to give way, and in so doing snowball the self-made agony of nerves wrung out under intolerable strain.

  That was how Friede would have seen it.

  But Patricia Holm broke the silence first, in a voice that held only practical anxie
ty.

  “Simon, boy, are you all right?”

  “As fit as a flea, darling,” he said. “I don’t think Heinrich tried to do too much serious damage, because if he’d really knocked me out I might have missed a lot of these two hours of interesting thinking that he was so pleased about giving us.”

  And even while he spoke he was working, the muscles of his arms and shoulders cording in the titanic effort to stretch a few millimetres of slack out of the ropes on his wrists, so that his fingertips might grip the hilt of his knife and ease it out of its sheath…

  In the darkness there were sounds of other efforts, and the quick subdued catching and releasing of laboured breath.

  “I just wish,” Peter Quentin said strainingly, “you’d had the sense to mind your own fool business and let us mind ours. If we want to come to a place like this to get away from you, isn’t that enough to tell you we don’t want you? Anyone might think you were a detective snooping for evidence for a divorce.”

  “It was the deputy sheriffs that worried me,” said the Saint. “If I’d known that you and Pat were just looking for some jungle love I’d have gone back to the Palmleaf Fan. I was just afraid they might have picked you up because they’d found out she was under sixteen.”

  “Make it under nine,” said Patricia. “You should have left us here just for being taken in by an old chestnut like that.”

  “It was just as good a chestnut as it always has been,” said the Saint. “In fact, it was better than usual in this case. The sheriff had already paid us a call earlier in the day, and you had every reason to believe that I might have raised some more hell at the Palmleaf Fan. Which as a matter of fact was what did happen, to some extent.”

  “Tell us,” said Patricia.

  The Saint told them, while he writhed and fought and rested and fought again. It was worth telling, to pass the time, and it kept all their minds away from other things. But in spite of what he was doing, his voice never lost its concise and self-contained inflection. He might have been telling a story that there was all the time in the world to discuss.

  By the time he had finished they knew everything that he knew himself. The picture was complete. And there was silence again…

  “A sweet set-up,” Peter commented at length. “I just wish I could have had your pal Heinrich to myself for a few minutes.”

  It seemed like the only thing to say. But Hoppy Uniatz had other ideas.

  “Boss,” he said heavily, “I still don’t get it.”

  “Get what?” Simon asked, very kindly.

  “About de Pool.”

  “Hoppy, I tried to tell you—”

  “I know, boss. Dis here ain’t de Pool, at all. But you hear what March says before dey give him de woiks? He says after we come here de Pool is all blown up. We ain’t never blown up nut’n. So dey must be some udder hijackers tryin’ to muscle in on dis shine. I don’t get it,” said Mr Uniatz, reiterating his major premise.

  “It’s just a general craze for blowing things up,” Simon explained. “It’ll die out after a while, like miniature golf and the Handies.”

  There was another lull. There should have been so much to say at a time like that, and yet at that time there seemed to be so little that was worth saying.

  Outside, above the slow pacing of the sentry, the heavier tramping back and forth of laden men went on, with the sounds of creaking tackle and clunking wood, of muttering voices and the intermittent sharp spur of commands.

  Karen Leith said reflectively, “I don’t know how the rest of you are getting on, but I’m supposed to have been trained in all the tricks of getting out of ropes, and I’m afraid these knots are too good for me.”

  “For me too,” said Peter.

  Even the Saint seemed to have stopped struggling.

  Patricia said in a sudden eerie whisper, “What’s moving around in here?”

  “Shut up,” said the Saint’s low voice. “Just keep on talking as you have been.”

  And the sound came from a different part of the room from where he had last spoken. In the dim moonlight their straining eyes watched a shadow move—a shadow that crept here and there on the floor. But it was not Randolph March come to life again, as the first ghostly brush of horror in their flesh had suggested, for his shape could still be seen lying where it had fallen.

  They were tongue-tied for a while, trying to frame sentences that would sound natural.

  At last Peter said, with purpose, “If only Hoppy and I were loose, we could jump the guy at the door and get his gun and kill some more of the swine before they got us.”

  “But they would get you, Peter.” Again the Saint’s voice came from another place. “There are plenty of them, and one gun-load wouldn’t go very far.”

  “If we were loose,” said Patricia, taking her tone from Peter, “we could sneak off and hide in the jungle. They couldn’t afford to spend much time hunting for us.”

  “But they’d still get away,” said the Saint.

  “Maybe dey wouldn’t have room for all de liquor,” said Mr Uniatz, developing his own fairytale. “Maybe dey gotta leave a whole case, so we can find it.”

  “If I could get out,” Karen said, “I’d do anything to try and stop the submarine.”

  “With what?” Peter demanded.

  “I wish I knew.”

  There was a tiny snapping sound, a very thin long-drawn squeak, then a slurred rustle.

  Peter made a restive movement.

  “I know it’s all quite stupid,” he remarked, “but I wish you’d give us some of your ideas, skipper. Just to pass the time. What would you do if you could do anything?”

  There was no answer.

  The silence dragged through long tingling seconds.

  Patricia said softly, and not quite steadily, “Simon…”

  The Saint did not answer. Or was it an answer when two spaced finger-raps beat almost inaudibly on the floor?

  There was nothing else. They had lost track of the moving shadow, although there might have been a new angular patch of blackness in one dark corner near where the shadow had last moved. But the square of luminance from the window had spread itself on the floor in a way that built up deceptive outlines. In the straining of their eyes, all shadows seemed to run together and dissolve like ephemeral fluids. Each of them at some time tried to count other shapes that could be dimly distinguished and identified. One, two, three—and the counter…and begin again.

  But it was quiet. The ears could create sound in protest, as the eyes could create form and movement. The magnified sifflation of a breath, the screak of a cot-spring, the pulse of their own bloodstream—anything could be built into what the mind wanted to make of it. It even seemed to Karen once that something moved underneath her, like a snake slithering under the floor, so that her skin tightened with instinctive fear.

  Presently Peter spoke.

  “At a time like this,” he said loudly, “the Saint would begin to tell one of his interminable stories about a bow-legged bed-bug named Ariatophagus, who would find himself in a number of complicated and quite unprintable dilemmas. Not having Simon’s virginal mind, I can’t really deputise for him. So let’s play some other silly game. We all try to give the name of a song with our names in it. Like if your name was Mary, you’d say Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. Or Hoppy could say Hopping This Finds You As It Leaves Me, In Love.”

  There was another inevitable lull.

  “Pat Up Your Troubles in your Old Kit Bag,” said Patricia.

  “You started it, Peter,” Karen observed. “Where are you?”

  “Peter Me of Love,” said Mr Quentin engagingly.

  “Karen Me Back to Ole Virginny,” she answered.

  “This is getting worse and worse,” said Patricia. “When do we get down to Holm Sweet Holm?”

  It was something fantastic to remember, and yet coldly dreadful to go through. Somehow, with feverish desperation, they kept their voices going. They worked through every name that they all k
new, and gravitated from there into emptier and wilder devices.

  And the time crawled by.

  The square patch of moonlight moved across the floor and slid gruesomely over part of the inanimate face of Randolph March. The sentry shuffled endlessly back and forth outside. The speed tender had made three or four droning trips across the bay. The laboured tramping to and fro of the men shifting stores had dwindled; the underplay of their voices had died to rare guttural murmurs, and the barking of commands had become more infrequent. New sounds had also entered the audible background—clankings of metal distorted by the echoes of water, voices muffled by distance and mingled with vague scrapings and splashings. For a while there had been a deep humming noise that had stopped again.

  They had no way to keep track of the minutes that had passed. But each one of them knew how their little span of life had been going by. And not one of them had yet uttered any speculation about the one voice that none of them had heard for so long.

  Karen Leith said at last, almost in a sigh, “They must be nearly ready to sail by now.”

  “We did what we could,” said Patricia Holm.

  “Chees,” said Hoppy Uniatz, “dese mugs ain’t never been raised right. I see plenty a suckers take de heat, but dey always get a smoke an’ a pull from de bottle foist. I never see nobody get de woiks wit’ a toist in him like I got.”

  With all of them crowded in there, the sweltering heat had filled up the room so that it was like a physical compression, which cramped breathing and weighed into the brain with a relentless pressure that tempted thought into the hazy liberty of delirium. Another snake might have rustled under the floor beneath Peter Quentin. There might have been a repetition of the scuffling sound that he had heard before the thin creak, and the snap, and a muffled thudding that was not quite the same. The shadows that had been still might have begun moving again. He would not have been sure.

  He said, roughly, “I hate to remind you, but we weren’t talking about your grisly past. We were in the middle of a hot spelling game, and it’s up to you Hoppy. It goes ‘R-I-F-L.’ And I think we’ve got you for another life.”