The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series) Read online

  “I’ve been thinkin’, Mr Templar,” Patsy O’Kevin said. “So long as ye’re headed for Bimini anyhow, an’ if it isn’t too soon for ye, maybe ye’d like to be goin’ over with me tomorrow? It won’t cost ye nothin’, an’ we could do a bit o’ fishin’ on the way, an’ if we’re lucky we’ll catch one that’ll make this loud-mouth Mucklow wish he’d used that sardine o’ his for live bait.”

  “Take him up on it, Simon,” Don said. “You might even catch one of those pink sea-serpents he sees after a week on rum and coconut water.”

  “That’s too nice an offer to pass up, Patsy,” said the Saint straightly. “Thank you. I’d love it. What time do we sail?”

  So if it hadn’t happened like that he would never have met Mr Clinton Uckrose. Or (to supply a new focus of sex interest) Gloria…

  2

  Mr Uckrose, Simon learned on the way over, was an American, rich and retired, living in Europe. He had been in the jewelry manufacturing business in New York, but had sold out to his partner, and had become a legal resident of the principality of Monaco, by which device he escaped paying any income tax on his invested capital, since the profits from the Monte Carlo Casino absolve the happy inhabitants of Monaco from any such depressing obligation. He was so morbidly apprehensive about jeopardizing this delicate but agreeable situation that nothing would induce him to set foot in the United States again, for fear that by touching American soil he might provide the IRS with grounds for some claim against him. Although he had become a regular winter visitor in Nassau, and liked to get in some big-game fishing during his stay, he flew directly to the Bahamas via London and Bermuda, and refused to take the short fifty-minute additional flight to Miami for his sport: instead, he took a Bahamian Airways plane to Bimini, most westerly of the islands and only some fifty miles off the Florida coast, and sent for a charter boat to come over and join him there. A former business connection of Uckrose’s had recommended Patsy O’Kevin the first time, and this would make the third consecutive year that the stocky Irishman had been booked for the same assignment.

  This had not made O’Kevin any more enthusiastic about it.

  “It’s not that he’s stingy, Simon, which I’ll be so bowld as to call ye. An’ wid the competition these days, a captain should give thanks for ivry charter he gets. But there’s not a drap o’ real fisherman’s blood in him.” O’Kevin watched approvingly as the Saint used a sharpened brass tube to core the spine out of a ballyhoo, the slender little bait fish that looks so aptly like a miniature of some of the big billed fishes it is used to lure. “Niver would Mr Uckrose soil his hands by puttin’ thim closer to a fish than the other end av a rod.”

  Simon slid the ballyhoo on to a hook and bound it with a few deft twists of leader wire. Now when it went in the water it would troll with its limp tail fluttering exactly as if it were swimming alive.

  “I’m just a free-loader,” he said lightly. “If I were paying for this, I might expect service too.”

  “Niver would Mr Uckrose use that rod an’ six-thread line,” O’Kevin persisted. “All he’ll use is the heaviest tackle I’ve got, so that whiniver he hooks anything, so long as the hook holds, he can just harse it in. If I had a derrick an’ a power winch, he’d be usin’ that. An’ any toime there’s a little braize blowin’, we’ll stay right at the dock, Mr Uckrose is afraid he’ll be seasick.”

  “That isn’t his fault, Patsy.”

  “Thin he shouldn’t be tryin’ to pretend he’s a fisherman,” said O’Kevin arbitrarily. “For it seems all he cares about is to come in wid some fish, he doesn’t care what kind it is or how it was caught, just so he can be havin’ his picture taken with it, an’ send it to his friends if it’s eatable or have it stuffed if it isn’t, so they’ll think what a great spartsman he is, when there’s no spart to it. An’ that’s the kind o’ client I’d like to be rich enough to turn down.” The captain spat forcefully to lee. “Now get that bait in the water, Simon, before I start thinkin’ ye’re a man after Uckrose’s heart rather than me own!”

  Simon laughed, and put the bait over the side.

  O’Kevin’s mate eased off the throttles as the Colleen knifed her trim forty-foot hull out of the green coastal water into the deep blue of the Gulf Stream, a boundary almost as sharply marked as the division between a river and its bank. He was a thin dark intense-looking young man who never opened his mouth unless he was directly spoken to, and not always then. “We call him Des,” O’Kevin said, “after the chap in those Philip Wylie stories.” His air of nervous compression suggested the mute strain of a hunting dog on a leash.

  When the Saint threw the brake on his reel, O’Kevin reached for the line, nipped it in a clothes-pin, and hauled it out to the end of one of the outriggers that had already been lowered to stand out from the boat’s side like a long sensitive antenna. With the outrigger holding it clear of the Colleen’s wake, the ballyhoo wiggled and skipped enticingly through the tops of the waves far behind them. The Saint settled the butt of the rod securely in the socket between his thighs, leaned comfortably back in the fishing chair, and watched the trail of the bait lazily with his blue eyes narrowed against the glare. Patsy opened a cold can of beer and put it into his hand. “This was the life,” Simon thought, feeling the sun warm his bare back and letting his weight balance harmoniously with the gentle surge and roll of the boat, and he didn’t give a damn about Mr Uckrose or any of his shortcomings.

  “Now, Mrs Uckrose is diff’rent altogether,” Patsy said presently, as if some obscure need for this amplification had been worrying him. “Gloria’s her name, an’ glorious she is to look at, though I’m thinkin’ she needs a stronger hand on the tiller than Uckrose is man enough to be givin’ her. If I were as young as yerself—”

  “Sail!” shouted Des, in a sudden hysterical bark.

  Simon had already seen it himself, the long dorsal fin that lanced the water behind and to one side of the diving and flirting ballyhoo. It disappeared, then showed again briefly on the other side of the bait, still following it.

  Suddenly the line broke out of the light grip of the clothes-pin that held it at the end of the outrigger, and the slack of it drifted astern from the Saint’s rod tip.

  It must perhaps be explained to those who have not yet been initiated into this form of angling that a member of the swordfish family does not attack a lure like a bass hitting a plug or a trout rising to a fly. It first strikes its intended victim with its bill, to kill or stun it: this is the blow that jerks the line from the outrigger, and with the line released the bait is for a few seconds no longer towed by the boat and drops back with convincing lifelessness, while the fish that struck it circles into position to take a comfortable gulp at the prospective snack. The precise timing of this wait is a matter of fine judgment curbing the excitement of a suspense that makes seconds seem to stretch out into minutes.

  “Now!” howled O’Kevin, and even as he said it the Saint had flipped the drag on his reel, and was lifting his rod tip up and back. “And again!” yelled the captain, dancing a little jig, but already the Saint was rearing back again, so that the slender rod tip bowed in a sharp curve, tightening the line strongly yet with a controlled smoothness that would not snap it. “Again! That’s right! That should’ve hooked the spalpeen—”

  A hundred and fifty yards astern the fish shot up out of the water, shaking its head furiously, the whole magnificent streamlined length of it seeming to walk upright on its thrashing tail. The sunlight flashed on its silver belly, shone on the sleek midnight blue of its back, stenciled the outline of the enormous spread sail of dorsal fin from which the fish took its name. Then after what seemed like an incredible period of levitation it fell back into the sea with a mighty splash. The reel under Simon’s hand whined in protest as the line tore off it.

  “Holy Mother of God,” said O’Kevin reverently. “That’s the biggest grandfather av a sailfish these owld eyes iver hope to be gladdened be the sight av. If it weighs one pound it’ll wei
gh a hundred an’ twenty. No, it’s bigger’n that. It’s twenty pounds bigger. It’s a world’s record!…Des! Is it dreamin’ ye are?” As if waking out of a trance himself, he scrambled back to the wheel, pushed his mate aside, hauled back on the clutches, and gunned the engines, his gnarled hands moving with the lightning accuracy of a concert pianist’s. “Howld on, Simon me boy,” he breathed. “Play him as gently as if ye had him tied to a cobweb, an’ me an’ the Colleen will do the rest!”

  If this story were about nothing but fishing, the chronicler could happily devote several pages to a blow-by-blow account of the Saint’s tussle with that specimen of Istiophorus americanus, but they would be of interest mainly to fishermen. Those who have had a taste of light-tackle fishing for big-game fish know that when you have more than a hundred pounds of finny dynamite on the end of a line which is only guaranteed to support eighteen pounds of dead weight, you do not just crank the reel until you wind up your catch alongside the boat. All you can do is to apply firm and delicate pressure, keeping the line tight enough so that he cannot throw off the hook, yet not so taut that it would snap at a sudden movement. If he decides to take off for other latitudes, you cannot stop him, you can only keep this limited strain on him and wait for him to tire. But you also have only a limited length of line on your reel for him to run with, and if he takes all of it you have lost him, so the boat must follow him quickly on every run so that he never gets too far away. In this manoeuvring the boat captain’s skill is almost as vital as the fisherman’s.

  Patsy O’Kevin was obviously an expert captain, but on that occasion his eagerness turned his skill into a liability. He was so anxious not to let a probable record get away, so afraid of letting the Saint put too much strain on his frail line, that he followed the fish as closely as a seasoned stock horse herding a calf—so quickly and closely that the Saint had a job to keep any pressure on the fish at all. And so there were several more jumps, and many more runs, and time went on until it seemed to have lost meaning, and then at last there was a moment when the fish turned in its tracks and came towards the boat like a torpedo, the Saint reeling in frantically, and O’Kevin for once was slow, and fumbled over throwing the clutches from reverse to forward. The bellying line passed right under the transom, right through the churning of the propellers, and as the Saint mechanically went on winding a limp frayed end of nylon lifted clear of the wake.

  No more than a boat’s length off the starboard beam, the freed sailfish rose monstrously from the water for one last derisive pirouette.

  “I did it,” said O’Kevin brokenly. “There’s no one to blame but me. If ye’d be kinder to me than I deserve, Simon, would ye just be cuttin’ me throat before ye throw me overboard to the sharks?”

  “Forget it,” said the Saint, wiping the sweat from his face. “I was getting tired of the whole thing anyway.”

  He was amazed to see by his watch that the battle had lasted more than two and a half hours.

  “An’ almost all the time, that son av a whale was headin’ almost due south,” O’Kevin said. “We’re further from Bimini now than we were whin we left Miami.”

  Only the taciturn mate had no comment. O’Kevin turned the helm back to him, and a certain restrained melancholy settled over the whole party as the Colleen swung around and ploughed northwards again with the stream.

  After a belated lunch of sandwiches and beer had had their restorative effect, however, Patsy finally stopped shaking his head and muttering to himself and stomped aft to the bait box.

  “If ye’ll allow me to bend another bait to yer line, sorr,” he said, “we may yet meet the great-grandfather o’ that tadpole I lost for ye.”

  If this were really a fishing story, it would tell how the Saint presently hooked and fought and vanquished an even bigger sailfish, a leviathan that was likely to remain a world’s record for all time. Unfortunately the drab requirements of veracity to which your historian is subject will not permit him this pleasure.

  In fact, most of the northward troll yielded only one medium-sized barracuda. Then, with the islands of Bimini already clearly in sight, Simon hooked another sailfish, but it was quite a small one, only about fifty pounds, as they saw on its first jump. O’Kevin allowed Des to handle the boat, which he did efficiently enough, and in something less than an hour the exhausted fish was wallowing tamely alongside. O’Kevin reached down and grasped its bill with a gloved hand and lifted it half out of the water, his other hand sliding down the wire leader. He looked at Simon inquiringly.

  “Let it go,” said the Saint. “We’ll come back and catch him some day when he’s grown up.”

  So this only shows exactly how and why it was that it was late afternoon when the Colleen threaded her way between the tricky reefs and shoals that guard the harbor entrance of Bimini, half a day later than she should normally have arrived, and flying from one of her raised outriggers the pennant with which a sport fisherman proclaims that a sailfish has been brought to the boat and voluntarily released.

  The Commissioner was waiting to come aboard as they tied up. Acting as immigration, health, and customs officer combined, he glanced at their papers, accepted a drink and a cigarette, wished them a pleasant stay, and stepped back on the dock in less than fifteen minutes.

  Simon had stayed behind in the cabin to pick up his suitcase. As he brought it out to the cockpit, O’Kevin was already on the pier talking to three people who stood there. Simon handed up his two-suiter, and as he swung himself up after it O’Kevin said, “This is the gintleman I was talkin’ about. Mr Templar—Mr and Mrs Uckrose.”

  Mr Clinton Uckrose was a somewhat pear-shaped man of medium height who looked about fifty-five, dressed in an immaculate white silk shirt and white shantung trousers with a gaudy necktie knotted around the waist for a belt. Under a peaked cap of native straw, his face also had a pear-shaped aspect, compounded of broad bloodhound jowls bracketing a congenially aggrieved mouth and a pair of old-fashioned pince-nez which seemed to pull his eyes closer together with their grip on his nose. He ignored the Saint’s proffered hand and did not even seem to have heard his name.

  “You’ve got a nerve!” he snarled.

  Simon looked down at his hand, saw nothing obviously contaminating about it, and tried offering it to Mrs Uckrose. She took it.

  Politeness required him to look into her eyes, which were interesting enough in a languorous brown-velvet way, but it was not easy to keep his gaze from wandering too pointedly over her other attractions, which were displayed as candidly as a pair of very short shorts and bra to match could do it. From the roots of her chestnut hair to the toes of her sandaled feet she was so evenly sun-tanned that she looked like a golden statue, but there was nothing statuesque about the lingering softness of her handshake. She could hardly have been more than half her husband’s age.

  Simon understood exactly what she made Patsy O’Kevin think of. He was thinking the same way himself.

  “What made you think you should take your friends joy-riding while I’m waiting for you here?” Uckrose was demanding of the captain.

  “He was comin’ here anyhow,” Patsy said, “so I thought it’d do no harm if he came wid me. O’ course, when we got to fishin’—”

  “When you got to fishing, you took the whole day instead of getting here as you were told to.” Uckrose pointed up at the nearest outrigger. “And what does that flag mean?”

  “It’s a release flag, sorr.”

  “It’s a release flag.” Uckrose had a trick of repeating the last thing that had been said to him in a tone that made it sound as if the speaker could only have uttered it as a gratuitous affront. “What does that mean?”

  “Mr Templar had a sailfish on, an’ we turned it loose.”

  “You turned it loose.” Uckrose’s jowls quivered. “How many days, how many weeks, have I fished with you, year after year, and I’ve never yet caught a sailfish?”

  “That’s the luck o’ the game, sorr.”

  “The luck of th
e game. But the very least you could have done was bring in the fish.”

  “It was Mr Templar’s fish,” Patsy said, with a little more emphasis on the name. “He said to break it off, so I did.”

  “It was only a little one,” Simon put in peaceably.

  “It was on my boat!” Uckrose blared. “It belonged to me. I could have sent it back to be mounted. What difference does it make who caught it?”

  Simon studied him with a degree of scientific incredulity.

  “Do you seriously mean,” he inquired, “that you’d have had my fish stuffed, and hung over your mantelpiece, and told everyone you caught it?”

  “You mind your own business!”

  The Saint nodded agreeably, and turned to O’Kevin.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this, Patsy,” he said. “But let’s just get you out again.” He put a hand in his pocket, brought out some money, and peeled off two fifty-dollar bills. “That should take care of today’s charter. Don’t charge Fat Stuff for it, and he can’t squawk. His time starts tomorrow. And thanks for the fishing—it was fun.”

  As O’Kevin hesitated, Simon tucked the two fifties into his shirt pocket and picked up his suitcase.

  Gloria Uckrose said, “Did I get the name right—Simon Templar?”

  Simon nodded, looking at her again, and this time taking no pains to control where his eyes wandered. With all his audacity he was not often crudely brash: there is a difference which the cut-rate Casanovas of the Mickey Spillane school would never understand. But Clinton Uckrose’s egregious rudeness had sparked an answering insolence in him that burned up into more outrageous devilment than solemn outrage.