The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 17

“Dey’s a fortune in it, pal,” he informed Gallipolis in a whisper which vibrated the houseboat like the lowing of a Miura bull.

  “If there is,” said the Greek, “I’d like to know how.”

  “Because it don’t cost nut’n,” Hoppy said witheringly.

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t cost anything?”

  “Because it comes outa de Pool.”

  “Gallipolis lowered one eyelid and studied Hoppy out of the other eye.

  “I wonder who’s ribbing who now?” he said. “That stuff just comes from a still, bud. It used to be a good racket, but now the Revenuers go about in airplanes and spot them from the sky.”

  “Well, where is dis still?” Hoppy persisted challengingly. “I know a lotta lugs who’d pay big dough for de distribution.”

  The Greek reached down and brought up another bottle. His smile veiled the undecided alertness of his gentle eyes.

  “Tell me the gag, friend,” he invited. “There’s something screwy when the Saint wants to start selling shine.”

  Mr Uniatz laved his throat again. He was face to face with a situation, but the various steps by which he had reached it were not entirely clear. He was, however, acutely conscious of the secondary motive for his visit which he had worked out on the way. The essential rightness of his idea appealed to him more than ever at this stage. He needed some pertinent information to put bones into his Theory. The problem was how to get it. All Greeks were dumb and unresponsive, in Hoppy’s racial perspective, and this one appeared to be a typical specimen. Mr Uniatz felt some of the identical delirious frustration which, had he only known it, was one of his own principal contributions to Simon Templar’s intellectual overhead.

  Confronted with the need for greater extremes of initiative, Hoppy decided that the only thing was to put more cards on the table.

  “Listen, youse. De boss don’t wanna sell dis stuff. He wants to bust up de Pool.”

  “What pool?” asked Gallipolis, and opened his weary eye.

  “De Foreign Pool,” said Mr Uniatz, suffering. “De Pool where March gets it from.”

  The Greek walked over to where the hanging lamp was smoking in the centre of the room and turned it low.

  “What March?” he asked as he returned to the bar.

  “Randolph March,” groaned Mr Uniatz. “De guy what has de Pool where—”

  “You mean the medicine millionaire?”

  Mr Uniatz cocked his ears, but decided to give nothing away. He had heard nothing about medicines before, but it might be a lead.

  “Maybe,” he said sapiently. “Anyhow, dis March has de Pool, an’ nobody knows where it’s at, an’ dat’s what we wanna know. Now all you gotta do is tell me where dis stuff comes from.”

  “You’re making me a little dizzy, big boy,” said Gallipolis with a smile. “Are you trying to tell me that March is selling this stuff?”

  “Soitenly,” said Hoppy. “It don’t cost him nut’n, so it pays for all his dames. So if we get de Pool, maybe de boss won’t mind cuttin’ you in.”

  The Greek dug out another bottle and poured himself a drink.

  “I feel a little tired, mister. Suppose we sit down.” He led the way to one of the tables and kicked out the opposite chair. When Hoppy was seated across from him, Gallipolis drank and shuddered. “I’ve been peddling this stuff for a good many years,” he said, “but this is the first time I’ve heard that March was making it.”

  “De Saint is always de foist to hear anyt’ing,” Hoppy assured him proudly.

  The Greek’s eyes might have been starting to glaze with pardonable vagueness, but he kept on with his heroic effort.

  “You think March is making shine at the Pool.”

  “So he has got a Pool!” Hoppy caught him triumphantly.

  Gallipolis wiped a hand back over his curly hair.

  “I suppose you could call it that,” he answered exhaustedly. “He calls it a hunting lodge. But he did have a coupla dredgers and a gang of men working all summer to cut out a channel and a yacht basin so he could take his boat in. I guess that’s the Pool you mean.”

  Mr Uniatz tilted his bottle again, and gave his oesophagus another sluicing of caustic lotion. His hand did not tremble, because such manifestations of excitement were not possible to a man whose nervous system was assembled out of a few casually connected ganglions of scrap iron and old rope, but the internal incandescence of his accomplishment came as close to causing some such synaptic earthquake as anything else ever had. The swell of vindication in his chest made him look a little bit like an inflated bullfrog.

  “Dat’s gotta be it,” he said earnestly. “Dey dig it out so dey can get more water outa de spring. Dey haul it out in de yacht an’ pretend it’s medicine. Now me an’ de boss go down an’ take over dis racket. You know where to find dis Pool?”

  Gallipolis tilted his chair on the rear legs and rocked it back and forth.

  “Sure, mister, I know where it is.” Being a comparative stranger, he could be forgiven for not following all the involutions of Hoppy’s thought, and it seemed harmless to humour him. “An old moonshiner that I buy stuff from told me. He used to have a still near there, but he got chased out when they started working.”

  Mr Uniatz leaned forward grimly.

  “Coujja take us to it?”

  The Greek’s eyes narrowed.

  “You say there’s something in it for me?”

  “Can ya take us dere?”

  “Well,” said Gallipolis slowly, “maybe I could. Or I could find a guy who could take you. But how much would there be in it for me?”

  “Plenty,” said the Saint.

  He stood in the open doorway, debonair and immaculate, smiling, with a cigarette between his lips and a glint in his eyes like summer lightning in a blue sky. He knew that he had come to the last lap of his chase, by the grace of God and the thirst of Hoppy Uniatz.

  2

  “Old home week,” said Gallipolis. His voice was as mild as a summer breeze on the olive-clad slopes of Macedonia. “Get yourself a glass and sit down, Mr Saint. I suppose you’re also dry.”

  “I’ll pass up the liquid fire.” Simon sat down and fixed Mr Uniatz with a sardonic eye. “It’s a good job I figured out that I’d find you here, Hoppy.”

  Something in his tone that sounded like a reproof even to Hoppy’s pachydermatous sensitivity, made Mr Uniatz sit up with a pained look of reproach on his battered countenance.

  “Lookit, boss,” he objected aggrievedly. “Ya tell me to come here, dontcha, when we are in de clip jernt? So after we hear Rogers I say can I go now, anja say to take all de time I want—”

  “I know,” said the Saint patiently. “That’s the way I worked it out, in the end. It took me quite a long time, though…Never mind. You’ve done a swell night’s work.”

  “Dat’s what I t’ink, boss,” said Mr Uniatz, cheering. “I woiked out everyt’ing on my own. Gallipolis is okay. We cut him in, an’ he takes us to de Pool.”

  The Saint settled back and smiled. He had a feeling of dumb gratitude that made him conscious of the inadequacy of words. It was a coincidence that made him giddy to contemplate, of course, and yet it was not the first time that the glutinous rivers of Mr Uniatz’s lucubration had wound their way to results that swifter brains sought in vain. But the recurrence of the miracle took nothing away from the Saint’s pristine homage to its perfection. He had boarded the barge, silently as he always moved, just in time to hear Gallipolis make the speech which had tumbled with the clear brilliance of a diamond through the obscurity of a dead end which had brought him within inches of cold despair, and he had not even had time to adjust his eyes to the light that had destroyed the dark.

  His strong fingers drummed on the table edge.

  “This afternoon you offered me a job, Gallipolis. I’d like to change it around tonight and offer you one.”

  “For plenty?” The white teeth flashed.

  “For plenty.”

  “I may be runnin
g a stud juke, but I have a conscience.” Gallipolis filled his glass again. “If I have to step on it too badly, the price comes high.”

  “I want to know one thing first,” said the Saint. “Were you just stringing Hoppy along when you told him about this hunting anchorage or whatever it’s called that March has got?”

  “No, sir.”

  Simon drew the glowing end of his cigarette an eighth of an inch nearer his mouth, and exhaled smoke like the timed drift of sand spilling through an hour-glass.

  It was so beautiful, so perfect, so complete…And yet, twenty-four hours ago, it had seemed impossible that among the million coves of the Florida coastline he could ever find the base of the mysterious submarine which had first given him a hint of the magnitude of what he might be up against. Twenty-four minutes ago, it had seemed even more impossible that he could discover the destination of the March Hare in time for the knowledge to offer any hope…And now, with a word, both questions were answered at once. And once again the answer was so simple that he should have seen it at once—if he had only known enough…But no one who was not looking for what he was looking for would have thought anything of it. A man like March could have a hunting lodge in the Everglades without causing any comment, and if he wanted to dredge out a channel and an anchorage big enough to accommodate a vessel the size of the March Hare—well, that was the sort of eccentric luxury a millionaire could afford to indulge. Haskins might have known about it all the time, and never seen any reason to mention it. And now the Saint couldn’t go back to Haskins…

  Again the Saint brightened the tip of his cigarette.

  “In that case,” he said, “you could do your little job of guide work.”

  “Uh-huh.” Gallipolis drained his glass. “You could hire bloodhounds cheaper. How many people do I have to kill?”

  “That all depends,” said the Saint benignly.

  “I thought there was a gimmick in it,” said the Greek. “Let’s quit beating around the bush. You’ve got something on Randolph March, and I don’t mean that boloney about him making shine. He’d be pretty big game, Mr Saint. I wonder if he mightn’t be too big for the likes of you and me.”

  Simon’s eyes wandered estimatively over the room.

  “You aren’t doing much business, are you?” he said.

  “I can thank you for some of that. When the sheriff starts calling at a place like this, you ease up and like it. The goodwill doesn’t last when they start loading your customers into a wagon and carting them off to the bastille.”

  “If you had a grand,” said the Saint abstractedly, “you could open up somewhere else and have quite a nice joint.”

  “Yes,” said Gallipolis. “If I left that much money, every sponge diver in Tarpon Springs would be pickled in red wine for three days after I die.” He rubbed slender fingers through his hair and looked at his palm. “If there really is that much dough in the world, mister, I can take you out to the middle of the Everglades and find you snowballs in a peat fire.”

  Simon took a roll out of his pocket and peeled off a bill.

  “What does this look like?”

  “Read it to me,” said the Greek. “My eyes are bad, and I can’t get by the first zero.”

  “It’s a century. Just for an advance. To earn the other nine, you take me to this place of March’s. And I want to get there the quickest way there is.”

  “The quickest way is overland through the swamps,” said Gallipolis tersely.

  He got up from the table and moved towards the back of the bar.

  The Saint said, deprecatingly, “It’s true I’m carrying a lot of money, but Hoppy and I are carrying other things too. They go bang when they see machine-guns.”

  “You’re damn near as suspicious as I am,” Gallipolis said petulantly. “I’m looking for a map. I thought we might study it a while.”

  He pulled out a folded sheet from behind the counter, while Hoppy’s gun hand tentatively relaxed from its hair-trigger hovering.

  Gallipolis spread out the map on the counter and said, “Turn up the lamp and come here.”

  Simon complied, and bent over the sheet beside him. The Greek pointed to a spot on the lower west coast of the state.

  “March’s lodge is somewhere in here on Lostman’s River, near Cannon Bay. The nearest town is Ochopee, and that’s about seventy miles from here on the Tamiami Trail.”

  The Saint gazed down at the vast green wilderness on the map marked “Everglades National Park.” Only the thin red line of the Tamiami Trail broke its featureless expanse of two thousand square miles or more. In all the rest of that area from the coastal creeks inland there was nothing else shown—nothing but the close-packed little spidery bird-tracks that cartographers use to indicate a swamp. It was as if exploration had glanced at the outlines and then decided to go and look somewhere else. Only a finger’s length from Miami on the large-scale map, they offered less informative detail than a map of the moon.

  And that was where he had to go—quickly.

  It had to be him; he knew that. He couldn’t run back crying for Haskins or Rogers. It was outside Haskins’s county, anyhow, and he could put decimal points in front of the probability of getting a strange sheriff interested. Rogers would not be much easier. Rogers would probably have to get authorisation from Washington, or an Act of Congress, or something. And what was the jurisdiction, anyway? What charges could he bring and substantiate? Any authorities would want at least some good evidence before going into violent action against a man like March. And there was not one shred of proof to give them—nothing but the Saint’s own suspicions and deductions and a little personal knowledge for which there was no other backing than his word. It would take hours to convince any hard-headed official that he wasn’t raving, even if he could ever do it at all; it might take days to get the machinery moving. The State Department would brood cautiously over the international issues…And he had to be quick.

  Quick, because of Patricia and Peter. Who were also the last and most important reason why he had to hesitate to call for official help. They were hostages for the Saint’s good behaviour—he didn’t need to receive any message from the Ungodly to tell him that. The counter-attack had been made with the breath-taking speed of blitzkrieg generalship. The pincers movement against himself had been balked, and without a pause one of the flanking columns had swung off and trapped Peter and Patricia. Yet even if Simon could enlist the forces of the Law and send them into the fight, Captain Friede would only have to drop the hostages overboard somewhere with a few lengths of anchor chain tied round them, and blandly protest his complete puzzlement about all the fuss. And the Saint had no doubt that that was exactly what he would do…

  “Ochopee.” The Saint’s voice was quiet and steely cool. “What is there there?”

  “Tomato farms,” said Gallipolis, “and nothing much more except a lot of water in the rainy season. But I know an Indian there. If there’s any guy living who can take you through the Glades to where you want to go, he’s it.”

  Simon laid a paper of matches along the scale of miles and began to measure distances.

  Gallipolis stopped him.

  “You’re on the wrong track. We pick up the Indian at Ochopee, but you couldn’t get down from there. You’ll have to come back thirty miles to where you see this elbow marked 27 in the Tamiami Trail. March’s place can only be about ten miles from there. Of course, it might be nearer twenty-five or thirty the way you’d have to go. If we started early tomorrow morning, we might be able to get in there by the following day.”

  The Saint figured quickly. It was a hundred miles to Ochopee and back to the bend of the elbow where they would enter the swamp. If that left March’s harbour only about ten miles away—

  “We aren’t going on bicycles,” he said, “We can drive to Ochopee in an hour and a half. We should be able to pick up your Indian and get back to the elbow in another hour easily. That ought to get us to Lostman’s River early in the morning.”


  The Greek cupped one hand and supported his chin with one arm on the bar.

  “Mister,” he said dreamily, “you’re talking about something you just don’t know. You’re talking about covering ten miles of Everglades. That’s oak and willow hammocks, and cypress and thorns and mud and quicksand and creek and diamond-back rattlesnakes and moccasins—and at night I’ll throw in a panther or two. This ain’t walking around Miami. That web-footed Indian might get you there alive if I can talk him into it, but even he’d have to do it by day.”

  Simon made rapid calculations on the course of the March Hare. The yacht could probably tick off twenty knots, and might do more with pushing. It was two hundred and fifty miles if she went around Key West to Cannon Bay on the Gulf, which would take her twelve hours or more. But if the submarine operated out of Lostman’s River too, the chances were that the astute Captain Friede knew other channels through the Keys which might save as much as a hundred miles.

  The Saint folded the hundred-dollar bill and flicked it towards Gallipolis, and said, “Let’s just pretend that Randolph March and I are having a private war. I want to pull a surprise attack, and I haven’t got time to mess around. Do we start right now, or do we play charades while the price goes down a hundred dollars an hour?”

  “What do you think?” asked Gallipolis.

  “I think,” said the Saint, “that we start now.”

  Gallipolis picked up the bill and tucked it away. He tilted back his head, pinched his lower lip, and studied Simon’s flawless Savile Row tailoring.

  “My Indian’s named Charlie Halwuk, and the last time I saw him he told me he was a hundred and two years old, which may be stretching it a bit—it’s a Seminole trick. What I’m trying to tell you is this. If he sees you in that rig-up, instead of starting out on any heap big hunting party, he’ll want to take you down to an Indian village and marry you to a squaw.”

  Simon looked down at his night club costume.

  “Have you got anything else?”

  “I’ve got some things a guy left here on account and never came back. He was about your size. Come along with me.”