The Saint in Miami s-22 Page 19

  He awoke refreshed after an hour of concentrated oblivion, to find Charlie Halwuk squatting beside him.

  "Lostman's River three miles," announced the Indian, as if there had been no interruption. He found a stick, and rapidly drew an intricate outline in the soil. "We here now. He made a cross, and indicated the space between the cross and the indentations of the coastline. "In here, quicksand. Plenty bad. No can do. We go this way." A wide spiralling hook. "Too bad. Twelve miles-maybe more."

  "It's been about that distance ever since I can remember,'' said the Saint.

  Charlie Halwuk stared reflectively up towards the red ball of the sun.

  "Plenty rain. We go on?"

  "You spoke about rain last night," Simon retorted. "If you could produce some, it might freshen us up. Do we pay your people for the meal?"

  "You give chief big boy's coat. He make you son."

  The Saint chuckled.

  "I've already got one daddy in Miami. See if you can talk Hoppy into it."

  While the Indian went to his task, Simon found some water and rinsed his face. Gallipolis followed his example. Shaking tepid drops out of his curly hair, the Greek studied Simon with a sort of unwilling perplexity.

  "I had you all wrong, mister," he said. "When I saw you in that monkey suit tonight, I didn't really think you could take three hours of this. Now I won't even back Charlie Halwuk to stand up longer than you."

  "Don't put up your money too quickly," said the Saint "We haven't arrived yet"

  But he smiled when he said it, in spite of himself. He was taking a new lease of confidence. He had lived soft, by these standards, for a long time; but he knew now that he was the same man that he had always been. With the short rest, strength had flowed back into him. A half-forgotten indomita­ble resilience picked him up again and loosened his thews with freshness. If he failed, he knew now, it would not be be­cause he had failed himself.

  He checked the level of the gas tank again, and found that their fuel was more than half gone. He poured in their reserve supply with a silent prayer that it would be enough.

  Then, as he climbed into the driving seat again, he saw a historic sight.

  Across the clearing, followed by Charlie Halwuk, and at a more respectful distance by the rest of the Seminole village- braves, squaws, and papooses-came Mr Hoppy Uniatz. Arm in arm with him walked the chief, proudly wearing Mr Uniatz's appalling blazer. In exchange, Mr Uniatz had acquired a ruffle-pleated Seminole shirt with a pattern of vivid rainbow stripes.

  The procession reached the marsh buggy, and stopped. The chief put both his hands on Hoppy's shoulders and made what sounded like a short oration. The rest of the tribe grunted approvingly. The chief stepped back like a French general who has just bestowed a medal.

  Hoppy got into the marsh buggy and said hoarsely: "Boss, get me outa here."

  The tribe stood like wooden totem poles, silently watching, as Simon engaged the clutches and the huge wheels rolled again.

  "I never knew," said the Saint, in an awed voice, "that you were a graduate of the Dale Carnegie Institute."

  Mr Uniatz swallowed bashfully.

  "Chief say him come back," interpreted Charlie Halwuk complacently. "Marry chief's daughter. Damn good."

  The heat beat down until it felt like a tangible weight on Simon's scalp, and he felt certain that at any moment the shallow patches of water about them would break into a boil. But it hardly seemed to affect him physically any more. He was getting his second wind, and the discomfort was almost welcome because it left him no energy to feed into his imagination. He didn't want to do too much thinking. There were too many things in the background of his mind that were not good to think about. He wanted to black them out and con­centrate on nothing but the grim task of getting to the only place where thinking would do any good.

  And then came the rain.

  A crackling sound, as sharp as the sound of a brush fire, heralded the foresweep of a blast of humid air. Black storm-clouds drove westwards before it and curtained the brazen sun with palls of gunmetal. For seconds the world seemed to stand motionless under the strain of a supernatural compression. Then the clogged skies burst open and let loose the deluge that Charlie Halwuk had prophesied.

  This was no gentle shower greening the fields of England, no light drizzle blending with the sea spray on the coasts of Maine. It was flat and hard and tropically brutal, pounding straight down to gouge a million tiny craters out of the swamp water and blot out all vision beyond a few yards with its grey dripping wall.

  They drove on. Their clothes were soaked as suddenly as the storm struck, but each sodden body turned into a ball of steam. It stung their faces like a sort of soggy hail, and smashed in thousands of tiny dancing shell-bursts over the engine cowling. But the marsh buggy kept going, as ponder­ous and impervious as a great groping tortoise. Time had no more significance; it ceased to exist, smothered under the bor­derless avalanche of leaden wet.

  As the afternoon wore on there was an almost imperceptible change.

  "Quit soon now," said Charlie Halwuk.

  Twenty minutes later the beating in the hammocks and bayheads was still, as abruptly as it had begun, and bars of light from the setting sun broke through the vanishing clouds.

  The marsh buggy completed the fording of another sluggishly rolling stream, and Simon stopped to squeeze some of the dripping water out of his hair.

  And then he was aware of another strange noise.

  It was like nothing he had ever heard before. Superficially, it was nothing but a chorus of ferocious squeals and gruntings. But it had a savagery and a blood lust in it that was worse than the roar of a tiger or a panther's scream-a shrill bestial fury that sent cold trickles crimping up his spine.

  "What on earth is that?" he asked.

  "Plenty wild porkers," said Charlie Halwuk. "Plenty bad. They catch somebody. Plenty better we go other way."

  Simon had started the marsh buggy moving when the full meaning of the speech dawned on him. He let go the clutch levers.

  "You mean somebody?" he demanded incredulously. "A man?"

  The Indian pointed down the stream to the right Simon could see nothing at first; but with a sudden reckless defiance he used opposite brake and clutch to jerk the buggy around and plunge it back towards the stream.

  "No can help," Charlie Halwuk said sharply. "Porkers tear you up plenty quick. Plenty better you stop."

  "To hell with it," said the Saint grittily. "If wild pigs have caught a man there, I'm not going to run away."

  And then he saw it.

  Straight ahead was a mass of tangled roots which might have bordered a mangrove island. A single tree stood up above the level of undergrowth, and a flutter of human cloth­ing moved in its branches. At the base of the tree a clear patch of ground was dappled with darting black evil shad­ows; and as the buggy ploughed nearer the grunting of slavering tusked mouths swelled in a vicious crescendo.

  "Those hogs are meaner than wildcats," said Gallipolis, rising with his machine gun. "Better let me use this on 'em."

  "Wait a minute," said the Saint, and turned to the Indian. "How far are we from the lodge now, Charlie?"

  "Maybe mile. Maybe little more."

  "Could you hear shooting that far in this country?"

  "Hear it more. Shooting no good anyhow. Porkers worse than wild boar."

  Simon's mouth set in a stubborn line. If he had behaved as he perhaps should have behaved on that mission, he would have shut his eyes and gone on. But to leave any innocent human being to that horrible squalling doom was more than the flesh he was built out of could have done. Besides, any human being who was found so close to March's secret hideaway might be a more important rescue than he could guess.

  He reversed the buggy and watched the course of the stream for a few seconds. It rippled deep into the roots along the shore of the islet . . .

  Before anyone could have forestalled his intention, Simon grabbed a wrench and opened the drain plug under t
he gasoline tank.

  "What the hell!" yelled Gallipolis; and the Saint smiled at him satanically.

  "Get tough about it and I'll let it all go," he said gently, and the Greek sank back as Mr Uniatz crowded the muzzle of a warning Betsy into his sacro-iliac.

  Simon dumped about two gallons, and then tightened the plug again while the floating oil spread into smudged rainbows as the moving water carried it downstream.

  He flicked lighted matches into it until it flashed into flame. Burning brightly, it floated down to the rain-soaked island and seeped its fire in among the knotted roots. The feet of the savage pigs were suddenly enveloped in a sheet of fire, and their ravening grunts turned into ear-splitting shrieks of terror. There was a wild rush into the water, where their lean black bodies churned frantically away from the searing blaze. Most of them reached the opposite shore and went on with­out stopping through the rustling underbrush like a frenzied herd of Gadarene swine.

  The blazing gas smoked blackly, and died out without hav­ing been able to set fire to the freshly sodden mangroves. Simon nosed the marsh buggy into the island, grasped an overhanging bough, and pulled himself up on to relatively dry land in time to catch the slight limp figure that fell more than it climbed down out of the tree in which it had found precarious sanctuary.

  The reddening sun that was slipping down under the hori­zon struck a last flare of even more vivid red from the tousled mane of her hair. Incredibly, it was Karen Leith.

  "I was just wondering where you'd got to," murmured the Saint, in classical understatement.

  In place of the billowy white dress of the night before, she wore a blue slack suit that might once have been trickily cut in a stylish travesty of a labourer's dungarees. Now, muddy and torn and bedraggled, it was something that no self-respecting labourer would have been seen in. And yet he discovered with a little surprise, that she had a quality which could transcend even those detractions. The wet clinging clothes only revealed new harmonies in her figure, and the grime on her tired face seemed if anything to enhance the fairness of its modelling. It was something that Simon took in at this time without letting it sway the icy detachment that was creeping into him.

  Hoppy Uniatz was impressed for a different reason. His eyes had a somewhat crustacean aspect as they goggled at the girl.

  "Boss," he said earnestly as though he were trying to argue the apparition away. "I leave you wit' dis wren in de clip jernt."

  "That's right, Hoppy," said the Saint "You don't bring her out here witcha."

  "No, Hoppy."

  "Den how," demanded Mr Uniatz logically, "can she be sittin" up in dat tree?"

  Gallipolis mopped his steaming forehead with a wet ban­danna and said: "This whole damn business is getting too much for me."

  "Have any of you got a cigarette?" asked the girl calmly.

  Simon took out his case. The contents were on the damp side, but the metal had saved them from total dissolution. He offered it to her, and helped himself. He noticed that her slim hands were soiled and scarred, and yet their unsteadiness was so rigidly controlled that he had to look closely for it.

  "Well," he said, after he had given her a light, "I know that this life of sin is full of mysteries, but for once I think Hoppy has got something."

  Her deep violet eyes studied the Martian contours of the marsh buggy, and then deliberately went over the four men -Hoppy, Gallipolis, Charlie Halwuk, lastly the Saint. Simon realised that none of them could have looked much more civilised than she did, and wondered if she saw the same stony purposefulness in all of them that he saw in her. He had to hand that to her also. In spite of the ordeal that she had just been through she was keyed with the same delicate inner core of steel that he had sensed in her once before.

  "Apparently," she said, "we're all literally in the same boat."

  "Marsh buggy," Simon corrected disinterestedly. "It runs on land too, believe it or not. It isn't exactly a Rolls Royce, but it's a lot more use in the Everglades."

  "On land?" Her voice had a quick lift "You mean this thing can take us out of the swamps?"

  "It brought us in."

  "Simon," she said, "thank God you brought it. Don't let's waste any more time. I've got to get to the road-"

  The Saint sat on the side of the buggy, his forearms on his knees. He eased his lungs of a long plume of smoke. The mantle of his detachment wrapped him in a cold armour of aloofness and gave his blue eyes an impersonal hardness that she had never seen before.

  "I think you're taking a lot for granted, darling," he said in a voice of tempered tungsten. "The only question at the mo­ment is whether we should take you with us where we're going, or whether we should turn you loose again to keep walking."

  The shadow that passed through her eyes might have been dark and dull with pain; but the eyes themselves never flinched.

  "I know," she said. "I should have begun at the beginning."

  "Try it now," he suggested dispassionately.

  She drew the end of her cigarette hot and bright.

  "All right," she said, in a tone that attempted to match his. "I suppose you know that Captain Heinrich Friede is one of the chief Nazi secret agents in the United States."

  "I figured that out." Simon flicked ashes into the oozing creek. "And your dear Randolph March is his principal stooge, or a sort of playboy financier of the Fifth Column. Go on from there."

  "You know that Randolph March has a hidden harbour that he calls a hunting lodge somewhere over there."

  "Hoppy found that out. All by himself. I can still top you. He keeps a German U-boat parked in it, and they go out and torpedo tankers."

  "That's right."

  "You're quite sure it is? You've seen this submarine?"

  "I saw it today for the first time. It's there now."

  "And what else?"

  "The March Hare."

  "Once again we don't fall over backwards. You know that because you were on board. As a matter of fact, I happened to see you."

  "There are two other people on board."

  "I know. Friends of mine. Arrested by phoney deputy sheriffs." The Saint's voice had the silky edge of a razor. "How were they when you left them?"

  "They were still all right They'll still be all right-according to what you do. They're hostages for you."

  Then we're still waiting for you to contribute. When do you start paying your way with something we don't know already or hadn't guessed for ourselves?"

  She seemed to be holding herself in with terrible patience. "What else is there that matters?"

  "There's still the minor detail of what your stake is in this carnival." Simon's voice was without emotion, his face a smooth carving in brown marble. "We seem to keep running into you in a whole lot of funny places-most of them some­where near Randolph March. You were with him and Friede when I met you. You came to visit me just at the time when one of their stooges twice removed took a shot at me that started a most ingenious trail towards my tombstone. You keep quiet about Rogers until I'd planted the very evidence against myself that I was meant to plant. You came with me to the Palmleaf Fan to be in at the death; and when the death failed to take place, you joined up with Randy and Friede again and beetled off, I skipped a lot of that while it was going on because it was fun, as I told you. But the fun is all over now, Ginger. It's nothing but straight answers-or else."

  Her lips gave a funny little quirk.

  "Dear man," she said, "who do you think tipped off Rogers?"

  He lifted his eyes to hers.

  "According to the Sheriff," he replied unyieldingly, "it was a mysterious kibitzer called A Friend. If that was you, say so."

  "It was."

  "Then why didn't you say anything to me?"

  "I told you before dinner, last night-you had to go through it all, in case you got anything else out of it. And then, if I'd told you at the Palmleaf Fan, you know you'd have still gone in to Rogers anyhow, and the plot would have worked. But I knew he belonged to the FBI
, and I knew he'd be more cautious. I hoped that if I told him it might save you from being killed."

  "That was nice of you," said the Saint politely. "So after you'd done that, you went back to March and Friede and helped them to kidnap my friends."

  "I didn't. I wanted to cover myself. I went over and said that I didn't know what went on, but you'd said something just as you left that sounded as if you already knew what the trap was and you'd organised things to take care of it. A couple of minutes later the waiter came and whispered to Friede, and he said I was right. He was raging. He gave a lot of orders in German that I couldn't catch, and we all left. While they were getting the March Hare ready to sail, some men brought your friends on board."

  "I saw you enjoying the joke with Randy as you went past the Causeway."

  "I had to stay with them then. The one thing that mattered was to find out where they were going."

  Without shifting his eyes, the Saint blew smoke at the mos­quitoes that were starting to rise in thickening clouds into the twilight.

  "You still have a last chance to come clean," he said ruthlessly. "Who are you working for?"

  She seemed to make up her mind after a hopeless struggle.

  "The British Secret Service," she said.

  Simon looked at her for a moment longer.

  Then he put his face in his hands.

  It was a few seconds before he raised it again. And then the expression in his face and eyes had changed as if he had taken off an ugly mask.

  It was all clear now-all of it. And he felt as if he had taken the last step out of suffocating darkness into fresh air and the light of the day. He didn't even have to ask himself whether she was telling the truth. If the unshadowed straightness of her wonderful eyes had not been enough, the circumstantial evidence would have been. No lie could have fitted every niche and filigree of the pattern so completely, He could only be astounded that that was the one answer he had never guessed.