The Saint in Miami (30 page)

“Jawohl, Herr Kapitan.”

The lieutenant raised his hand again, turned on his heel and went out. His young hard voice began rattling its own orders outside.

A moment later the seaman returned with a full coil of rope. Friede jerked his hand curtly at the five prisoners.

“Search them and tie them up. Use another rope to tie them to the beds. And be sure that both jobs are well done.”

Randolph March lighted a cigarette with hands that were not quite perfectly steady. Then he put the hands in his pockets and gazed about the room, trying not to pay too much attention to what was going on, and taking especial care not to directly meet the eyes of any of the captives. It was a different approach from that of Friede, who followed every move with implacable if unmoving vigilance. But in his own way March was trying to ape the captain’s cold-blooded self-possession, although the faint shine of moisture on his forehead and the almost imperceptible whitish lines around his mouth worked against him.

“What are you going to do with them?” he asked.

“Leave them here,” replied Friede, without taking his eyes from what the seaman was doing, and in a tone that somehow seemed to leave the trend of the sentence unfinished.

March puffed his cigarette jerkily.

“Why don’t we take the girls?”

“What for?”

“Er-hostages. We might still be followed. But even the Navy might hesitate to attack us if they knew we’d got them on board.”

“It might also help to relieve your own boredom,” said the captain cynically.

March swallowed.

Friede switched a glance to him for just long enough to sum him up like a butcher inspecting a sample of steer beef on the hoof, and said: “It might be possible if you were prepared to share your relief with the rest of the crew. But even then it might give just as much trouble as relief. Apart from jealousies, seamen are superstitious. A wise commander humours them. This isn’t a time to risk troubles that we can eliminate.”

He might have been devoting excessively laborious precautions to planning a picnic.

March paced his corner of the room in short zigzags to which he tried to give the same air of casualness.

“The Foreign Investment Pool will be blown up,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That means - that means almost everything I had.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Then - then I’m not going to have very much left.”

“My friend,” said the captain, with terrifying simplicity, “have you stopped to consider how you would be able to reach any of your resources after Gilbeck’s confession has reinforced Templar’s report to Washington?”

Randolph March came to a halt in his pacing. It was as if the full meaning of the place where he had arrived was dawning on him at that time. His face was suddenly old and ugly, and his eyes emptied as though they were taking in a vista of the years that were left to him.

Simon saw him without pity, even with an arctic and eternal satisfaction. For what March had been and for what he had done there could be no excuse that could stand up to judgment, for what he suffered on account of it there could be no sympathy that was not maudlin; and in a world where civilisation was fighting for its very life there was no room for such inanities. It was that kind of vacuous sentimentality which had allowed the powers of the jungle to grow strong - that perverse broadmindedness which insisted on acknowledging every argument for the other side while discounting all the irrefutable evidence on its own side, which strained every nerve to make excuses for a murderer while it pigeonholed the sufferings of the victims who did not need any excuse. It was against such injustices masquerading under the name of Justice that the Saint had always waged his relentless battle; and now at this time he was glad that Randolph March had to suffer even a fraction of what had been suffered by the men and women and children who had been crushed under the juggernaut to which he had freely given his aid.

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 high 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 maneater out of a mouse. His eyes sparkled with a wide hollow brilliance. “Damn you-“

His voice cracked, but not his muscular coordination. 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 hop-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 unhurriedly, to another guard who was halfway 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 coldness. “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 round 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 explosive 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 stain. That was how Friede would have seen it. But Patricia Holm broke the silence first, in a voice that held only practical anxiety.

“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 …