The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 22

  He was too slow with both moves.

  The Saint leaped at him a fraction of a second sooner. It was no time for drawing-room niceties, and Simon was not in the mood to take chances with a gorilla of that build. As he went in, his left knee led for the groin while his fist simultaneously pistoned into the vital plexus just under the parting of the ribs. It was like punching a pad of solid rubber, but the man buckled with agony, and then Simon had him. He had him on the ground and he had the massive arms pinioned in a leg scissors, and because he dared not risk another gasp he had his hands locked on the brawny neck and his thumbs crushing mercilessly into the man’s windpipe. And after a little while something seemed to give way, and the guard was quite still.

  Simon got up and rolled him back into the thickest shadow.

  He listened for a few seconds, and could hear nothing but the insect and owl concerto. Satisfied that the scuffle had raised no alarm, he tried the door that the man had stepped away from. It was locked, but a search of the guard’s pockets produced a key that fitted. Knowing then that he must be very near the end of his original quest, Simon turned the lock and confidently went in.

  He found himself in a small, barely-furnished room lighted with a single dim hanging bulb. The room was stifling. A slim brown-haired girl lay on an iron cot with her face buried in the pillow. She started up as the Saint came in, showing him brown eyes made dull with fear and hopelessness, set in the face of a wayward Madonna. A frail grey-haired man sitting in a cheap wooden chair beside the cot raised a haggard, unshaven face and made a protective movement towards her with one thin arm.

  “What is it now?” he asked tiredly, and tried ineffectually to stiffen the gaze of his weak eyes.

  Simon looked at him with triumph and bitterness and pity blending in his long comprehensive glance.

  “Lawrence Gilbeck, I presume,” he said unoriginally. “I’m Simon Templar. I believe Justine sent for me.”

  4

  The flare of half-incredulous relief that leaped into the girl’s eyes died again slowly into a more hopeless despair.

  “So you came,” she said in a low voice. “And I got you into this—you and Pat. Now you’ll die here with us.”

  “It’s no use,” echoed Gilbeck stupidly. “Justine told me, but you shouldn’t have come. You don’t know what you’re up against. There isn’t anything you can do.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said the Saint grimly.

  He switched out the light, and presently found his way to the dim glow of the window. Pulling the curtain aside, he aimed his flashlight through the screen in the direction of where he had left the rest of the party, and blinked it three times. The flashes could hardly have been seen from the March Hare. He dropped the curtain back and spoke quietly into the dark.

  “Follow me out, and try not to make a sound.”

  He crossed to the door and opened it. It was full night outside now, and the moon had not yet risen. Simon let them pass him out of the steaming prison and closed the door again and locked it and dropped the key. That would take care of any other surprise visitors for long enough to let him know that an alarm had been raised, and he knew that the guard would never tell his story to any mortal ears.

  He led them across to the shadow of the storehouses at the end of the pier, and from there into the edge of the jungle directly opposite, where he knew Charlie Halwuk would lead the others in answer to his summons. He stopped when he thought it would be safe enough to talk. From where he squatted on a dead log, he still had a fan-shaped field of vision that held the lodge at one edge and the storehouses at the other, with most of the clearing and the March Hare in the distance in between. With an old soldier’s trick, he lighted himself a cigarette without letting any more light escape than a glow-worm would have made.

  “Justine,” he said, “have you seen Pat?”

  “No.” Her voice was ragged, perplexed. “Isn’t she with you?”

  “They caught her,” said the Saint passionlessly. “Along with a friend of mine named Peter Quentin, who means quite a lot to me too…They’re probably still on the yacht. I rather expected it. Friede would keep them as close to him as he could, for safety.”

  There was a subdued crackling in the underbrush, but it was not made by Charlie Halwuk, who had already reached the Saint’s side like a shadow. The noise was made by Karen and Hoppy and the Greek as they followed him.

  The moon was just starting to tip the horizon then, spreading a faint glimmer ahead of it by which they could all see each other after a fashion. The Saint moved his cigarette like an indicative firefly.

  “Miss Leith, Mr Uniatz, Mr Gallipolis, and Mr Halwuk,” he introduced. “Our travelling League of Nations…These are some Gilbeck people I came here to rescue, among other things.”

  The two girls studied each other in silence, and then Justine said uncertainly, “I’m frightened.”

  Karen put an arm round her, but she still looked at the Saint.

  Lawrence Gilbeck shook his head like a punch-drunk prize-fighter, and said, “I don’t want any of you to take any risks for me, but I would like to save her.”

  “You’re getting soft-hearted in your old age, aren’t you?” Simon remarked with carefully-measured vitriol. “You threw in your wealth on the side of the most high-powered mob of gangsters who have ever pillaged the world. You weren’t worried about an odd hundred American seamen who were to be blown to pieces by Friede’s submarine. But you are worried about your darling daughter. You got her into this—you played with fire and got yourself burned. What made you get so sentimental?”

  “It was the submarine—so help me God!” Gilbeck said with a groan. “I didn’t know anything about it, at first. I went into March’s Foreign Investment Pool as an ordinary business proposition. I knew they were buying Nazi bonds, but there’s no harm in that. Or there wasn’t. America was a neutral country, and there’s nothing wrong with buying anything in the market if you think it’ll show a profit. I was in it as deep as I could be before I found out the truth about March’s scheme.”

  “And what is the truth?” Simon asked mercilessly.

  Gilbeck ran trembling fingers through his sparse, dishevelled hair. At that moment he looked less like the popular conception of a Wolf of Wall Street than anything that could be imagined.

  “The truth is that they were ready to stop at nothing—nothing at all—to try and alienate American sympathy from the Allies.”

  “We’d figured that out too,” said the Saint. “And I’m still waiting for the truth about yourself.”

  “I’m guilty,” said the millionaire feverishly. “Guilty as hell. But I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t. It just crept up on me. Look.” The words came faster, the desperate outpouring of vain remorse. “We were going to make money because March convinced me that these Nazi bonds were going to rise. Then the war started. The bonds fell lower. We had our money in ’em. We had to want them to go up. Then the only thing was to hope the Germans would win. We had to hope that, if we wanted to save our money. So we couldn’t be unsympathetic, could we? In fact, if we could do a little to help them—You see? We’d be helping ourselves. So we couldn’t be hostile to the Bund, could we? And other things. Little things. Helping to spread propaganda—the stuff about ‘Well, after all, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other’ and ‘We helped the Allies once and they never paid their war debt’ and ‘Look what the British did in India and South Africa.’ You know. And the cleverest of all propagandas—to discount any facts that the Allies could advance on their side by saying that they were just propaganda too. And from there it went to some discreet lobbying in Washington. Supporting Isolationist Congressmen, Criticising Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Trying to block the repeal of the Arms Embargo and the Johnson Act—anything that would obstruct American help to the Allies. You know.”

  “Go on.”

  Gilbeck swallowed so that his mouth twitched.

  “That’s all. That’s how it was. Just like
that. Step by step. One thing led to another—so gradually and so harmlessly—so logically that I didn’t see where I was getting to. Until they thought I was completely sewn up, and didn’t care what they told me. God knows how many other men they made slaves of in the same way. But they’d got me. I’d always known that March had been to Germany a lot, and said that the Nazis were very much maligned, but I only thought of that as a private eccentricity. He’d had dinner with Goebbels and gone hunting with Goering and even visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and he thought they were all charming people. Anything that was said against them was ‘all propaganda.’ Only as this went on it got worse. He said once that he wouldn’t mind seeing Hitler running this country—men like us would be much better off, with no more labour troubles and that sort of thing. He even hinted that he wouldn’t mind helping to get him here…That was when I was going mad—when Justine wrote to you. But I couldn’t do anything. I’d let myself slip too far. They could have ruined me—I think I could even have been sent to jail…Then March told me about the submarine.”

  “We’re waiting,” said the Saint inexorably.

  “That was too much. Even for me. It wasn’t like killing people indirectly, with political manoeuvres. You could forget about that, if you tried hard. Talk yourself out of it. But this was direct murder.” Gilbeck twisted his hands together. “That was when I found a little belated courage. I knew there was only one thing I could do. I had to expose the plot, whatever it cost me—even if I lost everything I had and went to jail for it. It might even have been a relief in the end, if I could take my medicine and not be haunted any more. Only—I still didn’t have quite enough courage. I still wanted to make a last attempt to save myself. I thought if I told March and Friede that I’d decided to expose them and take the consequences, I might make them give up their ideas.”

  “Yes,” said the Saint.

  “That was the day you were expected.” Gilbeck’s voice fell lower, but it seemed to gain steadiness with the security of confession. “Justine hadn’t told me then who you were—she just said you were friends of hers. I knew that March was fishing down the Keys. I thought I could go down in the Mirage and talk to him and still be back to meet you. I—didn’t know what a fool I was.”

  “What happened?”

  “You know how you found us…They—laughed…”

  “The Mirage was found abandoned at Wildcat Key,” said the Saint. “What happened to the crew?”

  Justine Gilbeck suddenly sobbed, and buried her face in Karen’s shoulder.

  “I see,” said the Saint, in a quiet glacial breath.

  “I wished they had killed us too, then,” Gilbeck said. “But they hadn’t quite made up their minds if we could still be useful. They brought us here in a speedboat. They threatened—horrible things. And under that room—where we were—there are a hundred pounds of high explosives, with a radio detonator that Friede said he could fire from five hundred miles away, from the March Hare or the submarine, just by sending the right signal. He told us that if anything went wrong he’d do it. But—there was something about a letter you said I’d left. That was afterwards. I didn’t know anything about it, but they wouldn’t believe me. They promised to torture us…”

  “I know about that, too. I’ll tell you one day.”

  The Saint sat still, while a hundred other things turned through his brain. He knew everything now, and all mysteries had been made clear. There was nothing left—except the most important thing of all…

  He moved over closer to Gilbeck, and the cigarette end in his cupped hands shifted a little to throw a fraction more light on to the millionaire’s face.

  “Brother,” he said, and his voice was a thing that merely uttered the form of words, with no more warmth or persuasion than a printed page, “if you were free again, what would you do—now?”

  “I swear by everything I know,” Gilbeck answered, “that I’d do what I meant to do before—only without any compromise. I’d tell everything, and I’d be glad to take my punishment for what I’ve had a hand in.”

  The Saint stared at him for seconds longer, but even at the end he knew that he had found an ultimate sincerity bred of remorse and suffering that no man would shake again.

  He moved his hands, and let Gilbeck’s anguished face fall back again into the dark.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m going to give you your chance.”

  He went back and found Charlie Halwuk in the gloom.

  “Charlie,” he said, “how far is the nearest town up the coast?”

  The Indian studied.

  “Chokoloskee. Maybe fifteen, maybe twenty miles by Cannon Bay.”

  “Is there a telephone there?”

  “No telephone. Plenty fishing.”

  “Where is the nearest phone?”

  “Everglades. Three, four miles more.”

  “There’s a small motor-boat here at the dock. Could you take it to Everglades in the dark?”

  “Sure. Me fish plenty. Know all ways from Chokoloskee round Florida Bay.”

  Simon turned.

  “The dock is straight ahead,” he said, so that they could all hear. “Get going—and be quiet about it.”

  The file started off, led by the Indian, while Simon paused to hiss out his cigarette in a pool of mud. As Lawrence Gilbeck passed him, he saw that the millionaire walked in a pitiful imitation of a man reborn; yet he knew that the real rebirth was in the spirit.

  He overtook them on the pier, dropped into the pilot cockpit, and ventured an instantaneous glint of his flashlight on the fuel gauge. Miraculously perhaps, it showed clear full.

  Charlie Halwuk slipped in beside him and said, “How many go?”

  “Not me,” said the Saint. “I’m staying. How many others?”

  “Take two. More, we go out by sea. Take plenty water. Long time.”

  Simon climbed back on to the dock.

  “Karen and Justine,” he said. “Get in.”

  Justine Gilbeck got in, lowered by Hoppy’s mighty arm, but Karen Leith was still at the Saint’s side.

  “I heard,” she said. “I’m not going. Send Gilbeck.”

  “You have to go,” said the Saint frozenly.

  Gilbeck was close enough to hear. He touched Simon with a trembling hand.

  “Please leave me,” he said. “Send the girls.”

  “The others are going to have to stay here, and whatever they do won’t be easy,” Karen said unfalteringly, but she was speaking only to the Saint. “If there’s going to be trouble, you only want people who can be useful. I know how to handle guns. What good would he be?”

  “And the British Secret Service?” Simon asked.

  “I only have to get my message out. None of the others can take it—not even you. You have reputations against you. Gilbeck’s name is on his side. He can even talk direct to the State Department, which none of us can do. And they’d have to listen to him.”

  The Saint had no quick answer, because he knew there was no answer to the truth. And because he could say nothing quickly, he was silent while the girl turned away from him to Gilbeck.

  “You can do my job for me,” she said. “I’ve been working on March for the British Secret Service. Before you do anything else, call the British Ambassador of the Naval Attaché, in Washington. My name is Karen Leith. And you must give them the word ‘Polonaise.’ Will you remember that?”

  “Yes. Karen Leith. Polonaise. But—”

  “Then just tell them everything you’ve told us. And say that we’re still here. That’s all. Now hurry.”

  With a sudden certainty of resolution, the Saint picked Gilbeck’s light body up before he could protest again, and dumped him lightly and silently as a feather into the boat. He thrust the revolver he had taken from the strangled guard into the millionaire’s skinny hands.

  “Take this, in case of accidents. And stop arguing. If you want this second chance, you’ve got to do what you’re told.” He turned to Charlie Halwuk, going on in th
e same crisply urgent undertone. “There’s a couple of long oars in the back. Don’t start the engine until you’re well away.”

  The Seminole nodded sagely. “Me paddle plenty far.”

  “Think you can get away if you’re followed?”

  “Tide plenty high. White man never catch me.”

  “Good.” Simon straightened up, releasing the painter from the cleat where it was hitched. “Then get going.”

  “Just a minute,” said Gallipolis.

  There was a queer emphasis in the way he said it, an abnormal timbre in his musical voice that gave the conventional phrase something it should never have had. There was a satiny menace in it that sent clammy tentacles of hideous intuition frisking up Simon Templar’s spinal cord as he turned.

  The Greek stood ten feet away, starlight touching his white teeth as he smiled his flashing smile, and glinting dully against the barrel of his ready Tommy gun.

  “Stay right where you are,” he said in his melancholy tone, “because I’m handy with this. If the folks in that boat think they can make a getaway I’ll show them. The second they start to push away from this dock I’ll drop them in a pile.”

  Simon’s tall form was still and rigid, while a bitterness such as he had never known ate through him like consuming acid, and he frozenly reckoned his chances of covering those ten feet of intervening space before the crashing stream of lead would melt him inevitably into tattered pulp.

  “Forget it, mister,” Gallipolis went on, as though he had read the thought. “You wouldn’t get half-way. I’m going to take a hand in this auction, before you send off that put-put. All you bid was one grand, and it sounds as if Randolph March would pay me more than that for you.”

  The Saint remained motionless, with a strange cold pulse beating in his forehead.

  Behind Gallipolis, on the edge of the dock, a small flat animal was crawling. As he watched it, it had been joined by its mate, and it came to him incredulously that these small animals were in reality hamlike human hands, and that what he had taken for a long black nose was the barrel of a gun.