The Saint in Miami (10 page)

Her face showed a mixture of reactions too complex to analyse. Red lips and deep violet eyes were both as elusive as the reflections in rippling water; but he felt the involuntary stirring of firm muscles in her rounded arm.

“Now, Ginger,” he said, “where did that note come from?”

“From the MIRAGE.” Her voice at least was completely matter-of-fact. “It was found this morning, abandoned at Wildcat Key. There was no trace of the Gilbecks or their crew.”

He walked a few steps in silence, trying to find a niche for this new knowledge.

“Where is this Wildcat Key?” he asked evenly.

“It’s just outside of Card Sound, south of Old Rhodes Key.” They had reached the cream-coloured Packard. “We could run down there on a fishing trip tomorrow-if your blonde girl friend wouldn’t object.”

He opened the car door.

“Let’s have dinner tonight and talk it over-if you can get away from Randy again.”

She settled herself on the maroon leather upholstery. The starter whirred, twisting the motor into a throaty purr.

“What else is there to talk over?”

“I still haven’t asked you the most important question.”

“What’s that?”

“What is your place in this picnic?”

His hand was still on the car door, and for a moment her fingers rested lightly on his.

“Ask me tonight,” she said. And then she was gone, and he was crinkling his eyes into the dust of her departure.

3

Simon Templar poured gin and French vermouth into a tall crystal mixer, added a shot of Angostura, and swizzled the mixture with a long spoon. Then he poured some of it over the olives in three cocktail glasses and passed them around.

“In spite of your lack of sex appeal,” Peter Quentin said frowningly, “Patricia and I have been getting attached to you. We’re going to miss you when you’re gone.”

“Gone where?” Simon inquired.

Peter flourished a hand which seemed to push back the walls of the house and patio and encompass the world outside.

“Out to the Great Beyond,” he said sombrely. “When you start for that barge this afternoon, you might wear a target over your heart. It’ll give March’s snipers something to aim at, and save a lot of messy bracketing.”

Simon regarded him compassionately, and tested his concoction.

“You’re worrying about nothing. You heard Lafe Jennet boast about how he could shoot, and I believe him. That bloodshot eye was hatched out behind a rifle sight He could knock an ant out of a palm top, shooting against the sun.”

“Then what was he trying to do-knock down the wall?”

“The trouble with your peanut brain,” said the Saint disparagingly, “is that you’re putting the March Combine in the same class as Hoppy-bop ‘em quick, and the hell with where they fall. You’ve forgotten our mythical protective letter, and other such complications. If Jennet could have popped me if he’d wanted to, which I believe, then his orders only were to scare me. And the organiser of the scheme expected that we’d catch him. And the organiser also expected Jennet to squeal when things started to look too tough. And Jennet did. He squealed all he knew, which was exactly what he was meant to squeal, and did it much better that way than if they’d tried to coach him in a part. The idea being to make me think I’ve been pretty clever, and send me rushing out to this barge like a snorting warhorse.”

“And that’s just what you mean to do, so everybody ought to be happy.” Peter finished his Martini and ate the olive. “Whatever they’ve arranged for you there goes through according to schedule, and you end up at the bottom of the Tamiami Canal, weighted down with a couple of tons of coal.”

He went back to the portable bar for a refill.

“His red-headed heart-throb won’t look so luscious in black,” said Patricia troubledly.

“Believe it or not,” said the Saint, “she came here to tell me something.”

“I notice you’re doing your listening with your mouth these days,” Peter remarked. “You shouldn’t have washed off her lipstick-it suited you.”

Simon sprawled himself out in a chair and gazed at them both affectionately.

“Do you two comedians want to listen?” he inquired. “Or would you rather go on rehearsing your new vaudeville act?”

He told them everything that had happened from the arrival of Haskins to the capture of Lafe Jennet. They didn’t find the affair of the note so wildly hilarious as he had done, being more practically concerned with the miraculous good fortune that had deflated it; but when he came to his parting conversation with Karen Leith, they sat up, and then pondered it silently for several seconds.

“Wouldn’t it be more likely,” Peter said at last, “that Karen’s visit was timed to find out whether the note business had worked?”

“But she covered me up for Haskins.”

“She covered up your visit to March,” Patricia corrected. “March wouldn’t want that brought in, anyway.”

“And then, if the note had misfired somehow, she was there to put the finger on him for Jennet.” Peter was developing his theory with growing conviction. “And when Jennet missed, she could report back that you were on your way out to this gambling barge-“

“And if you get out of that alive,” said Patricia, “she’ll have another chance on your date tonight-“

“And if he still accidentally happens to be alive in the morning,” Peter concluded, “there’s a fishing trip down to Wildcat Key on which anything can happen … It all hangs together, Chief. They’ve got about half a dozen covering bets, and your luck can’t hold for ever. They haven’t missed a loophole.”

The Saint nodded.

“You may be absolutely right,” he said soberly. “But there’s still no way out of it for me. If we want to get anywhere, we can’t barricade ourselves in the house and refuse to budge. I’ve got to follow the only trail there is. Because any place where there’s a trap there may be a clue. You know that from boxing. You can’t lead without opening up. I’m going with my eyes open-but I’m going.”

They argued with him through lunch, but it would have been more useful to argue with the moon. The Saint knew that he was right, in his own way; and that was the only way he had ever been able to handle an adventure. He had no use for conniving and tortuous stratagems: they were for the ungodly. For him, there was nothing like the direct approach- with the eyes open. So long as he was prepared for pitfalls, they merely formed the rungs of a ladder, leading through step after step of additional discovery to the main objective. They might be treacherous, but there could be no adventure without risk.

When it was ultimately plain that his determination was immovable, Peter demanded the right to take the risk with him. But the Saint shook his head just as firmly.

“Somebody has to stay here with Pat,” he pointed out. “Certainly she can’t come. And I’d rather leave you, because you’re brighter than Hoppy. If there’s so much cunning at work, the whole scheme might be to get me out of the way for a raid on this place.”

It was impossible to argue with that, either.

And yet, as the Saint sped by the waters of Indian Creek and crossed it at 41st Street, he had few doubts that for the present he himself was the main centre of attraction to the ungodly. Later it might be otherwise; but for the present he was satisfied that the ungodly would regard his entourage as small fry to be mopped up at leisure after he had been disposed of.

The open 16-cyIinder Cadillac which he had chosen from the selection in the well-stocked garage purred past the golf course and held a steady fifty to the Venetian Causeway. The islands of Rivo Alto, Di Lido, and San Marino, splashed with multihued homes of luxury, slid past them like a moving diorama. The Saint stole a glance at Lafe Jennet, who was packed like a blue sardine between himself and Hoppy on the front seat.

“When we hit Biscayne Boulevard, Sunshine,” he said, “which way do we turn?”

“For all of me,” Jennet said viciously, “you can run yourself into the bay-“

The last word expired in a painful involuntary exhalation caused by the pulverising entrance of Mr Uniatz’s elbow into the speaker’s ribs.

“De boss astcha a question,” said Mr Uniatz magisterially. “Or woujja like a crack on de nose?”

“Turn left, an’ go west on Flagler,” said Jennet, and shut his mouth more tightly than before.

A phalanx of skyscrapers swept by, towering reminders of the perverted Florida boom. A magic city with no more than four or five million acres to spread out in had had to drive its fingers of commerce into the sky.

At Flagler Street they had to slow down. A traffic policeman, picturesque in pith helmet, white belt, and skyblue uniform, gazed at them without special interest while he held them up. But Hoppy Uniatz put one hand in his coat pocket and crowded the pocket inconspicuously into Jennet’s waist, and Jennet crouched down and made no movement. The policeman released their line, and they drove on.

They had to crawl for some blocks-first through the better shops, whose windows reproachfully displayed their most stylish variety of clothing to a throng of sidewalk strollers whose ambition appeared to be to wear as few clothes as the law would let them; then further westward past barkers, photo shops, fortune tellers, and curio vendors with despondent-looking families of tame Seminole Indians squatting in their doors. A newsboy with his papers and racing forms hopped on the running-board, and Simon noticed a card of cheap sun-glasses pinned to his shirt. He bought a pair, and stuck them on Jennet’s nose.

“We don’t want some bright cop to recognise that sour puss of yours while you’re with us,” he said.

Eventually the traffic thinned out, and Simon opened the big car up again. They whispered past the Kennel Club and golf course, and Jennet spoke again as they came in sight of the Tamiami Canal.

“You turn left here. Go right on Eighth Street. Then you turn off again just before you hit the Tamiami Trail. You’ll have to leave the car there, whether you like it or not. There ain’t no way but walkin’ to reach that barge.”

The relics of abandoned subdivisions grew less frequent. Flatwoods crept close to the highway. Thrust back by the hand of man, curbed but impossible to tame, the wilderness of Florida inched inexorably back and waited with primeval patience to reclaim its own.

Jennet said: “You’d better slow down. Tain’t far, now.”

They had gone several blocks without passing another car when he indicated a dim trail leading to the right Simon pulled the wheel over and nursed the big car skilfully over the rutted track carpeted with brownish pine needles. When the track petered out he eased the Cadillac into a thicket of pines which formed a natural screen against the outside world, and stopped the engine. He climbed out, and Hoppy Uniatz yanked Jennet out on the other side.

“I never said Rogers would be here now,” Jennet growled sulkily. “What happens after this ain’t nuth’n to do with me.”

“I’ll take a chance on it,” said the Saint. “All you have to do is to lead me on.”

He was ready for the chance by then, ready with every trained and seasoned sense of muscle and nerve and eye. This was the first point at which ambushes might begin, and even though all his movements seemed easy and careless he was overlooking no possibilities. Under lazily drooping lids, his hawk-sharp blue eyes never for an instant ceased their restless scanning of the terrain. This was the kind of hunting at which he was most adept, in which he had mastered all the tricks of both woodsman and wild animal before he learned simple algebraic equations. And something that lay dormant in his blood through all city excitements awoke here to unfathomable exhilaration …

The flatwoods ended suddenly, cut off in a sharp edge by encroaching grass and palmettos. Still in the shelter of the trees, he redoubled his caution and halted Hoppy and Jennet with a word.

He stared out over a far-flung panorama of flatness baked to a crusty brown by years of relentless sun. A covey of quail zoomed up out of the bushes ahead with a loud whirr of wings, and were specks along the edge of the trees before the startled Hoppy could reach for his gun.

A narrow footpath wound away through the palmettos. The Saint’s eyes traced its crooked course to where the unpainted square bulk of a two-storied houseboat broke the emptiness of the barren plain. Boards covered the windows on the side towards him, but a flash of reflected light from the upper deck showed that at least one window remained unboarded at the stern. The palmettos hid any sign of water, giving an illusion that the houseboat rested on land.

Lafe Jennet said: “Come on.”

The Saint’s arm barred his way.

“Will Gallipolis be there now?”

“He’s always there. Most time durin’ the afternoon he runs a game.”

Simon tramped out his cigarette, conscious of the revealing smoke.

“Keep him here,” he instructed Hoppy. “Don’t come any closer unless I call for you, or you hear too many guns going off. Keep well hidden. And if I don’t get back by dark, give him the works, will you?”

He moved off like a shadow through the trees to a point where the flatwoods bellied out closest to the barge. The rest of it was not going to be so easy, for even that shortened stretch was at least a quarter of a mile without any obvious cover. Evidently Mr Gallipolis had chosen his location with a prevision of unannounced attack that would have done credit to a potential general. A single marksman could have picked off a dozen men between the trees and the boat, even though the invading forces took it at a run; while suitable preparations for any less vigorous visitor could be made on board long before he came within hailing distance.

Simon stopped again at the point of the wood, and slapped a mosquito on his neck. A squirrel chattered rowdily in a nearby tree, protesting against the Saint’s intrusion. The sudden noise made the patterned landscape of glaring light and eccentric shadow seem unconscionably still.

He leaned against a tree and let a rapid newsreel of the events of the day run through his mind, trying to pick out of it some guiding inkling of March’s campaign; but it was not a profitable delay. He could always appreciate the finer points of an adversary’s inventiveness, but the introduction of Lafe Jennet and Gallipolis and the thus far legendary Jesse Rogers formed a kaleidoscope that was hard to fit in to any preconceived pattern. The only apparently comprehensive theory was the one which Peter Quentin had propounded, and yet even that still had one vital flaw It did not take into account the protective letter with which March must credit him with having covered his exposed flank. He couldn’t believe that the ungodly would have him killed without first having dealt with that contingency. And yet there was very little sense left in any supposition which could make his projected call on Mr Gallipolis seem foolproof.