The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Read online

  THE ADVENTURES OF THE SAINT

  Enter the Saint (1930), The Saint Closes the Case (1930), The Avenging Saint (1930), Featuring the Saint (1931), Alias the Saint (1931), The Saint Meets His Match (1931), The Saint Versus Scotland Yard (1932), The Saint’s Getaway (1932), The Saint and Mr Teal (1933), The Brighter Buccaneer (1933), The Saint in London (1934), The Saint Intervenes (1934), The Saint Goes On (1934), The Saint in New York (1935), Saint Overboard (1936), The Saint in Action (1937), The Saint Bids Diamonds (1937), The Saint Plays with Fire (1938), Follow the Saint (1938), The Happy Highwayman (1939), The Saint in Miami (1940), The Saint Goes West (1942), The Saint Steps In (1943), The Saint on Guard (1944), The Saint Sees It Through (1946), Call for the Saint (1948), Saint Errant (1948), The Saint in Europe (1953), The Saint on the Spanish Main (1955), The Saint Around the World (1956), Thanks to the Saint (1957), Señor Saint (1958), Saint to the Rescue (1959), Trust the Saint (1962), The Saint in the Sun (1963), Vendetta for the Saint (1964), The Saint on TV (1968), The Saint Returns (1968), The Saint and the Fiction Makers (1968), The Saint Abroad (1969), The Saint in Pursuit (1970), The Saint and the People Importers (1971), Catch the Saint (1975), The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (1976), Send for the Saint (1977), The Saint in Trouble (1978), The Saint and the Templar Treasure (1978), Count On the Saint (1980), Salvage for the Saint (1983)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2014 Interfund (London) Ltd.

  Foreword © 2014 James Reasoner

  Publication History and Author Biography © 2014 Ian Dickerson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477842812

  ISBN-10: 1477842810

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  To Baynard H. Kendrick,

  Because he introduced me to so many of the scenes in this story

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  CHAPTER ONE HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DEALT WITH PHANTOMS, AND HOPPY UNIATZ CLUNG STRICTLY TO FACTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER TWO HOW MR UNIATZ FOUND A GOOD USE FOR EMPTIES, AND SHERIFF HASKINS SPOKE OF HIS PROBLEMS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER THREE HOW SIMON TEMPLAR MADE A PLEASURE OF NECESSITY AND PATRICIA HOLM WAS NOT IMPRESSED

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER FOUR HOW MR GALLIPOLIS BECAME HOSPITABLE AND KAREN LEITH KEPT HER DATE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER FIVE HOW SIMON TEMPLAR SAW SUNDRY GIRLS AND SHERIFF HASKINS SPOKE OF DEMOCRACY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER SIX HOW HOPPY UNIATZ ROSE ON HIS BRAIN WAVE, AND GALLIPOLIS INTRODUCED ANOTHER VEHICLE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER SEVEN HOW SIMON TEMPLAR FOUND A NEAT RECIPE FOR ROAST PORK AND HOPPY COULD NO LONGER CONTROL HIS TOIST

  1

  2

  3

  4

  CHAPTER EIGHT HOW SIMON TEMPLAR FOUGHT THE LAST ROUND AND HEINRICH FRIEDE WENT ON HIS WAY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  EPILOGUE

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

  THE SAINT CLUB

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original edition and includes vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation that might differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, allowing only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  When I was a teenager back in the 1960s, I worked as a volunteer at the little public library in our town, which had been founded only a few years earlier and stocked with donations from the community. Donations continued to be the main source of the library’s books for several years after that, and one of my jobs was to sort and process them so we could get them on the shelves.

  One day I came in and found two folding tables pushed together and piled high with books someone had given to the library. It was the largest single donation I recall. As I began to work my way through them, I realized that most of the books were mysteries, my favorite choice of reading matter at the time. One of them, a rather cheap-looking green hardback, intrigued me. It had a drawing on the front of a jaunty stick figure with a halo. The author was someone I’d never heard of: Leslie Charteris. And the title was intriguing, too. The Saint in Miami.

  Because I was a volunteer at the library, I didn’t get paid. But one of the perks of the job was that I got to take home any of those donated books I wanted to and read them before they were ever put on the shelves. I took The Saint in Miami home with me, sat down, opened it, and started to read…and nothing was the same after that. Almost immediately, I was a Saint fan for life.

  There were several more Saint books in that same donation, and I read them right away and began looking for more. I found a paperback copy of The Avenging Saint, published by the Fiction Publishing Company, and I ordered more of those editions through the mail. The big public library in the county seat had a copy of The First Saint Omnibus, a treasure trove of novellas that kept me happily occupied for a couple of weeks. I scoured other libraries in the area as well as used bookstores, and over the next few decades I managed to read, as best I recall, every book in the series.

  When I was asked to write an introduction for one of the Saint reissues, I didn’t hesitate to say yes or to ask if I could write the one for The Saint in Miami, the book that started it all for me. I wanted to reread it first, of course, and while I have at least one paperback edition of the novel around here somewhere, I thought it would be nice if I read the same edition I did back in the sixties. Not the same exact copy, of course. The library got rid of it in a book sale a long time ago. Sold it to me, in fact, for a quarter, but that copy was lost in a fire in 2008. But I knew it was published by Triangle Books, a line of cheap hardback reprints published in the forties, and when I checked online, I found that copies of that edition were available for a reasonable price. So in due course, one arrived in the mail, I sat down, opened it, and began to read…

  Revisiting any favorite thing from your youth is a dangerous proposition. This seems to be especially true with books. Inevitably, when you reread things that almost magically thrilled and enthralled you when you were young, you’re going to encounter some of them that make you think, “Wait a minute. Did I actually like this when I was a kid?” So it was with a slight sense of trepidation that I tackled The Saint in Miami. I had reread it before, but even that was more than thirty years ago. Would it hold up now? Would it be as exciting, as amusing, as just plain good now as it was then?

  In a word, yes.

  Since you’re about to read the book, quit
e possibly for the first time, I won’t say much about the plot. In the tense days shortly before the United States becomes involved in World War II, Simon Templar, his beautiful long-time girlfriend, Patricia Holm, their stalwart friend, Peter Quentin, and the colorful and none-too-bright former gangster, Hoppy Uniatz, who has become sort of the group’s mascot, arrive in Miami Beach in response to a letter from one of Patricia’s friends asking for help. When they get there, they find that Pat’s friend and her father are missing, and shortly after that a ship is torpedoed and blown up right in front of their eyes. A dead body washes ashore at Simon’s feet.

  Well, naturally, that’s too much temptation for even a Saint to withstand. Simon has to get to the bottom of the whole sinister affair, which launches a fast-paced adventure that climaxes in one of the most suspenseful scenes I’ve ever read. The Saint in Miami truly defines edge-of-the-seat entertainment, and it’s told in Charteris’s breezy, finely polished prose that manages to be funny, hardboiled, and exciting all at the same time.

  I didn’t have to worry about this book not holding up. It might as well have been written yesterday by a master author at the top of his game. In fact, it was even better than I thought it would be, as the bishop said to the actress. But you’re about to discover that for yourself, because…The Saint is back.

  —James Reasoner

  CHAPTER ONE

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR DEALT WITH PHANTOMS, AND HOPPY UNIATZ CLUNG STRICTLY TO FACTS

  1

  Simon Templar lay stretched out on the sands in front of Lawrence Gilbeck’s modest twenty-five-room bungalow, and allowed the cottony breakers pushing their way in from the Atlantic to lull him with the gentle roar of their disintegration on the slope at his feet.

  Although it was an hour after a late dinner, the sand was still warm from the day’s sun. Overhead, the celebrated Miami moon, by kind permission of the Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Public Relations, floated among the stars like a piece of luminous cheese, looking more like the product of one of Earl Carroll’s electricians than a manifestation of nature. The moon dripped down a silvery opalescence which left black shadows in the areas it missed. The shadows deepened the tiny indentations beside Simon’s nose, and for a moment gave an entirely false suggestion of care and worry to his face as he looked at Patricia Holm.

  That the appearance of care was false, Patricia knew. Commonplace care was a disease of modern existence which was incapable of infecting the exuberant life of that amazing modern buccaneer who was better known to most of the world by his queer nickname of “The Saint” than by the names which were recorded on his birth certificate. Worry he might cause to the plodding members of many police forces throughout the world; worry he certainly had caused, in lavish and sometimes even fatal doses, to very many members of that loosely-knit fraternity which is popularly referred to as the Underworld, even when it lives in much greater luxury than most respectable people, but the worry stopped there. It was something quite external to the Saint. If it ever touched him at all, it was in the form of a perverse and irresponsible worry—a small irking worry that life might one day become dull, that the gods of gay and perilous adventure who had blessed him so extravagantly through all his life so far might one day desert him, leaving nothing but the humdrum uneventfulness which ordinary mortals accept as a substitute for living…

  He reached out a brown hand and trickled sand through his fingers on to the arm which Patricia was using as a pillow for her spun-gold hair.

  “You know such fascinating people, darling,” he said. “These Gilbecks must be specially good samples. I suppose it’s that open-handed New World hospitality I’ve read about. Turn your house over to a gang of strangers, and just leave them to it. I expect it has a lot of good points, too. Your guests don’t have a chance to get on your nerves. Probably they’ll send us a wire in a month or two from Honolulu or somewhere. ‘So nice to have had you with us. Do come again.’ ”

  Patricia moved her rounded arm to ward off the trickle of sand which threatened her hair.

  “Something must have happened,” she said seriously. “Justine wouldn’t write me that she was in trouble and then go away.”

  “But she did,” Simon insisted. “ ‘Come,’ she writes you. ‘All is not well. My father is moping about the house, bowed down with some mysterious grief and woe. Something Sinister is Going On.’ So what do we do?”

  “I remember,” said Patricia. “But keep on talking if it amuses you.”

  “On the contrary,” said the Saint, “it hurts me. It scarifies my sensitive soul…We gird up our loins and fly out here to the rescue of the beauteous Justine and her distraught papa. And are they here?”

  He formed a human question mark by pulling up his knees and looking at them.

  Patricia supplied the answer: “No, they aren’t here.”

  “Exactly,” Simon agreed. “They aren’t here. Instead of finding them on the doorstep, waiting to welcome us with stuffed tarpon, potted coconuts, and poi, we are met by nothing more convivial than a Filipino houseboy with a cold. He informs us in a hoarse gust of germs that Comrade Gilbeck and this voluptuous daughter you’ve described so lushly have hoisted the anchor on their yacht, which I think is most appropriately named the Mirage, and departed for ports unknown.”

  “You make a good story of it.”

  “I have to. Otherwise I’d be weeping over it. The whole mushy business depresses me. I’m afraid our hosts have taken a powder, as Hoppy would say.”

  “Well,” protested Patricia, “you can’t blame me for it.”

  “Furthermore,” Simon continued, “I don’t believe there ever was any reason for Justine to send for you. Probably Papa had just taken a flier in Consolidated Toothpicks, and then some dentist proclaimed that toothpicks destroy the teeth, and the bottom fell out of the market. After she wrote that letter another dentist came back and said that toothpicks not only prevent decay but also cure cancer, nervous BO, and athlete’s foot. The market boomed again, Pappy rejoiced, and they climbed into their canoe and paddled happily away to celebrate, forgetting all about us.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened.”

  Simon sat up, with a shrug of his wide shoulders, and brushed the sand impatiently from his long legs.

  He looked at her, and almost forgot everything else. A trick of that musical-comedy moon made her seem scarcely real. She was part of his life, the most enduring keystone of his happiness, unchanging as the stars; yet at that moment she seemed to have blended into the warm magic of the Florida night, become remote and doubly beautiful, like some cast-up fantasy of moonbeams and mother of pearl. The banter began to die out of his blue eyes. He touched her, and so felt the detachment of her mind which had helped the illusion.

  “You really think something has happened, don’t you?” he said soberly.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  A breeze sprang up from the ocean and danced inland, stirring the palm fronds behind them. It seemed to touch the Saint with a chill, and yet he knew there was no chill in the wind. He had felt this other kind of chill so many times before, like the points of a million spectral needles, frozen and feathery-thin, probing every pore with a touch as light as a cobweb. In the past it had led him into the shadow of death more often than he could remember, and yet even more often than that its same impartial touch had warned him of danger in time to escape the falling shadow. It was the chill of adventure—the stirring of a ghostly prescience that was for ever rooted in his uncanny attunement to the whispering wave-lengths of battle and sudden death. And he felt it then, as he gazed out at the shimmering vagueness of the sea.

  “Look.” He slid an arm behind Patricia’s shoulders and helped her to sit up. “There’s quite a big ship out there. I’ve been watching it. And it seems to be heading in. I could see the port light a few minutes ago, and now the starboard light’s visible too. We must be looking directly at her bow.”

  “Perhaps the Gilbecks are coming back,
after all,” she said.

  “It’s much too big for them,” he said quietly. “But why would a ship that size be heading straight for the shore—as close as that?”

  Patricia stared at it.

  Out on the ocean, a beam of silver light streamed out suddenly from a searchlight on the vessel’s forepeak. It held steady for a second, then turned erratically as if it were hunting for something. The ray swung downwards, struck the water close to the cobbled pathway of moonlight, and swept quickly over the sea, lancing the surface like a scalpel of pure luminance. Leaking rays caught the figures of men behind it and silhouetted them against the whiteness of the superstructure.

  Not until then did Simon realise that the ship was even closer to the shore than he had thought. He stood up and raised Patricia to her feet.

  “You’ve felt that there was something wrong all evening,” he said, “and I guess your hunch was right. There’s something wrong out there.”

  “It looks as if someone had fallen overboard,” she said, “and they’re trying to pick them up.”

  “I wonder,” said the Saint.

  He didn’t know, but his answer came instantly. Even as he spoke, things happened as if his words had cued them. The searchlight went out, and with it the porthole and deck lights. Black as a collier, the vessel slid into the dappled lane of reflected moonlight.

  A finger of intense radiance appeared suddenly on one of her sides, unfolded upwards with a swift blossoming, and pointed into the sky with a burst of glare that momentarily erased the brilliance of the moon. Answering that splash of fire, the entire ship heaved as though a cyclopean hand had struck it from below. For an instant the blaze wrapped it from stem to stern, and then it seemed to vomit all its insides towards the sky in one black and scarlet shower.

  The clap of thunder that started from that cataclysmic disruption rolled against Simon’s eardrums a split second later.

  He caught Patricia’s hand and dragged her hastily up the sloping beach to where a fringe of palms and a wall of pinkish stone bordered the lawn. She felt herself lifted effortlessly through the air for an instant, and then he was crouching beside her under the shelter of the wall. For a fleeting, indefinable lull, the world seemed to stand still. On nearby Collins Avenue, automobiles had stopped while their drivers stared curiously out to sea. The breeze had gone rustling away across the flats of Florida, but the air was filled with a new and more frightening roar.