The Saint in Miami (The Saint Series) Page 26

  “ ‘O,’ ” said the Saint.

  Nobody stirred. It was a stillness in which pins could have dropped on velvet with an ear-stunning clatter.

  “I’ll challenge you,” Peter said at last. “There’s no such word.”

  “Riflolver,” said the Saint.

  There was a quick march of steps outside, and the door was opened. The single light went on.

  Heinrich Friede stood in the entrance, with the sentry just behind him. His lips were flattened over his teeth in a smile of sneering vindictiveness that embraced them all, so that the creases that ran down from his nose cut deeper into his face.

  “We are about to leave,” he said. “I hope you have enjoyed the anticipation of your own departure. You will not have much longer to wait—perhaps half an hour. I shall press the button as soon as we have reached open water.”

  Peter and Patricia and Karen and Hoppy looked at him once, but after that they looked more at the Saint. It might have seemed like a tribute to personality or a gesture of loyalty, but the truth was many times more mundane. They were simply letting their eyes confirm the incomprehensible evidence that their ears had offered a few seconds before.

  For the Saint was there, sitting at the end of one cot, exactly as they had seen him last, with his hands behind him and the bruises of Friede’s violence swelling in his face and his shabby clothes sandy and dishevelled. Only perhaps the reckless disdain of his blue eyes burned brighter and more invincible.

  “I hope you have a nice voyage, Heinrich,” he said.

  “It is a waste of time to tell you,” Friede said, “but I should like one particular thought to cheer your last moments. You, in your unimportant dissolution, are only a symbol of what you represent. Just as you have tried to fight us and have been out-generaled and destroyed, so everyone on earth who tries to fight us will be destroyed. The little damage you have done will be repaired; your own futility cannot be repaired. Console yourselves with that. The rest of your tribe will soon follow you into your extinction, except those whom we keep for slaves as you once kept other inferior races. So you see, all you have achieved and all you die for is nothing.”

  The Saint’s eyes were unmoving pools of sapphire.

  “It is a waste of time to tell you,” he mocked. “But I wish you could know one thing before you die. All that you and your kind will destroy the world for is no more in history than a forest fire. You’ll bring your great gifts of blackness and desolation, but one day the trees will be green again and nobody will remember you.”

  “I leave you to your fantasy,” said the captain.

  And he was gone, with another click of the switch and a slam of the door.

  They heard him striding away, his footfalls dying on the ground outside, waking again hollowly on the planking of the pier, then ceasing altogether. They heard the last crack of command, and a soft plash of water. The seconds ticked away.

  “Simon,” said Patricia.

  “Quiet,” said the Saint tensely.

  They had only their hearing to build a picture with, and the sounds that reached them seemed to come through the wrong end of an auditory telescope. Even the sentry’s footsteps had ceased, and the endless whine of mosquitoes and the chirrup of other insects built up an obscuring fog in which other sounds were confused.

  But there might have been some scuffing of wood, and the ring of a distant tramping on metal. There were voices, and a repetition of the deep steady hum that they had heard before, which drowned out the insects for a while, and then was bafflingly equal with them, and then sank away until it was lost in its turn. Then there seemed to be nothing at all but the soft swish of water against the shore and among the mangrove roots.

  The owl came back and began moaning again.

  But still the Saint kept silence, while minutes seemed to drag out into hours, before he felt sure enough to move.

  Then light seemed to crash into the room like thunder as he flipped the switch.

  They stared at him as he stood smiling, with his knife in his hand.

  “I’m sorry, boys and girls,” he said, “but I couldn’t take any chances on being overheard.”

  “We understand,” said Peter Quentin. “You’re so considerate that we’re dazzled to look at you.”

  Simon was cutting Patricia free. She kissed him as the last cord fell away, and massaged her wrists as he went over to Karen Leith.

  As he freed her, she said, “I think—I think we all thought you were loose before.”

  “I was,” said the Saint.

  “Of course,” said Peter Quentin, as his turn came, “you wouldn’t have cared to tell anyone.”

  “I had something to do,” Simon said. He finished with Peter and went on to Hoppy. “I knew there must be a trapdoor in the floor or something, and eventually I found it. The lock was a bit awkward, but I mixed my wood-carving and my strong-man act, and sort of persuaded it. Then I had to do my worm impersonation with some wriggling and burrowing under the outside shingles—luckily the place is built on piles instead of straight foundations, and the walls don’t go into the ground. Eventually I got outside and prowled here and there.”

  “Boss,” said Mr Uniatz, loosening his cramped limbs, “dijja find anyt’ing to drink?”

  “There should be something left on the March Hare,” said the Saint, “but I didn’t investigate.”

  He went to the door and opened it, standing just outside and filling his lungs with relatively fresh air, while he tamped one of the last two cigarettes from his case. Patricia joined him and took the other one. They stood with their arms linked together, looking across the anchorage where the March Hare still rode in darkness under the moon, but a sheet of unrippled water lay where the submarine had been.

  There Peter Quentin joined them.

  “I don’t want to disrupt an idyll,” he observed diffidently, “but personally I shouldn’t mind being a bit further off when Friede gives his farewell broadcast.”

  “You needn’t worry,” said the Saint. “I found it under the floor when I got down there—it was what I was looking for under the trapdoor anyhow. A very innocent packing-case labelled ‘Tomato Soup’. I hauled it out with me.”

  “Where did you dump it?” Peter asked suspiciously.

  “I parked it with a lot of other cases of canned food that the crew were ferrying out to the submarine. Or they may have been ammunition—I couldn’t be sure. Anyway it was quite a difficult business, getting it out on the pier and making it look natural. But I made it, and managed to get back in time.”

  Karen and Hoppy had completed the group while he talked.

  And down to the south-west, where his eyes had been fixed, a pillar of jagged crimson climbed into the blue-grey sky, stamping sharp filigree out of the massed blackness of the jungle and flickering spectrally over the intent turning of their faces. Seconds later the concussion pounded upon their eardrums, mingling with a tornado rush of wind that bowed the trees and drew weird whisperings out of the scrub. It seemed like a deafened age before the shuddering earth grew still again.

  “And I think Heinrich has pressed the button,” said the Saint.

  EPILOGUE

  Simon Templar was watching an errant fly that was trying to gorge itself into a drunken stupor on a drop of Ron Rey that had been spilled on the polished bar of the Dempsey-Vanderbilt. He seemed to have been watching it for a long time, and he was a little tired of making bets with himself on how much longer it would be before it keeled over—or, alternatively, whether it could keep up its ingurgitation until Karen Leith came. With a final movement of impatience he pushed his glass across to the bartender and pantomimed a refill; while the fly, which by virtue of either heredity or environment must have been a kind of insect Uniatz, took off across wind and zoomed away with only the slightest detectable wobble in its course.

  Some silent-footed newcomer pulled out the adjoining stool, and the Saint turned, prepared either to bluff the seventh would-be intruder out of his
right to the place, or to put on an expression of long-suffering reproach if it should actually be Karen herself. But he had no chance to do either.

  At his side, the lengthy funebrial form of Sheriff Newton Haskins dripped black coat-tails down the back of his perch.

  He looked at Simon with a fair rendition of surprise.

  “Well, dang my eyes? Wheah did you come from, son?”

  “I was here first,” said the Saint. “If you remember.”

  The sheriff’s lean jaws champed once on nothing. As though the motion reminded him of an omission, Haskins drew one hand slowly out of a pocket and bit off a chew from a fresh length of plug.

  “Waitin’ for someone?” he queried conversationally.

  “For youth, beauty, glamour, and red hair.” Simon’s gaze was cool and impudent. “Maybe you think you fill some of those qualifications, but to tell you the truth I hadn’t noticed it.”

  “Nope,” Haskins said. “I guess that wouldn’t be me. But they let all sorts o’ people in heah. I happened to be out this way huntin’ for a dangerous killer. I sorter worked up a thirst, like. ‘Newt,’ I says, ‘what better place to kill a thirst than in the nearest bar?’ So in I comes. I see you heah all alone, so I jest thought you might like some company.”

  “What a mind-reader you must be,” murmured the Saint.

  He directed the bartender’s attention with his thumb as the fresh drink he had ordered was delivered.

  “Bring me a water glass,” said Haskins, “an’ a bottle o’ rye.”

  He pulled a bowl of pretzels closer, and munched one absently on the port side of his mouth where the traffic didn’t interfere with his other chewing.

  “Who was this dangerous killer?” Simon asked. “It sounds quite exciting. Did you catch him?”

  “Son—” The sheriff’s mouth was slightly overloaded. He poured half a tumbler of rye into the water glass and tossed it down. “This warn’t exactly a killin’. Mo’ like wholesale slaughter, you might call it. Then, it wasn’t exackly in my county, neither.”

  “Really?” said the Saint politely. “Then where was it?”

  “Way down in the Everglades, in a place even half the conchs down theah couldn’t find. But I heard tell it was shuah one helluva mess. Seems like there was almost a dozen plumb dead bodies left lyin’ around. Even that feller Gallipolis we was talkin’ to got himself shot down theah.”

  “Did he? How extraordinary! Do you think he could have tried to play both ends against the middle just once too often?”

  “Mebbe.” The sheriff’s wise old eyes held the Saint’s tantalising blue ones. “You wouldn’t know nuth’n about none o’ them bodies now, would you, son?”

  “Corpses?” Simon protested. “Cadavers? Lying around?…What a horrible thought. I always bury my dead bodies in a climate like this. It’s so much more hygienic…Unless you leave them to drown, and then of course the barracuda take care of them.”

  “Yep, that’s what I thought,” Haskins said sagely. “The Coastguard’s been sorter pumpin’ me, son. Gilbeck says you pulled him out of a hot spot over on Lostman’s River. Seems like you was still waitin’ theah when the Coastguard cutter comes nosin’ around. Had one helluvan explosion offa that coast night before last, too. The Navy seems to think somebody blew up a submarine.”

  The Saint sipped his drink.

  “It sounds fair enough,” he remarked. “The first time we met was on account of an explosion. There were a few small bangs in between. And now we can finish on a last big blow-up. It rounds everything out so nicely…Or have you got some extra professional reason for all these questions?”

  Haskins reloaded his glass and repeated his remarkable feat of finding a third separate passage through his mouth. He wiped his lips with his large spotted cotton handkerchief.

  “No, son,” he admitted. “Professionally speakin’, I ain’t got no business to ask questions. Seems a whole lot o’ big fellers come down from Washington to take charge, an’ they tell all us local officers not to meddle with any of it. Seems it ain’t supposed to be any concern of ours even if our respected citizen Randolph March is one o’ those dead bodies out in Lostman’s River. We ain’t even supposed to discuss it with nobody till they get ready to issue an official report from the State Department. But you can’t blame me for bein’ curious.”

  “Naturally I don’t blame you,” Simon agreed gravely.

  Haskins rubbed the side of his long nose, hopefully at first, then with increasing depression.

  “Well,” he said at last, “that shuah is plumb understandin’ of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the Saint. “But those guys from Washington told me the same thing too. And since they were good enough not to keep me locked up, I think I ought to play ball with them. They’ll break the whole story as soon as they’re set for it.”

  Haskins drank again, gloomily.

  “O’ course,” he said, “I don’t rightly know if that covers a feller in Ochopee who’s swore out a warrant agin you for assaultin’ him an’ stealin’ his blasted car.”

  “Are you going to serve it?”

  “Nope,” Haskins said. “I tore it up. I figured it warn’t legal. Who the hell ever heard o’ callin’ a boat with ten-foot wheels on it a car?”

  Simon lighted a cigarette with some care.

  “Daddy,” he said softly, “I was wondering whether you ever switched from rye whisky if a friend of yours offered to buy a quart of champagne.”

  “That, son,” said the sheriff, “is something that nobody of my acquaintance has ever offered to buy, but with the thirst I’m luggin’ around today I might give anythin’ a try.”

  Simon caught the elusive bartender and placed the order.

  “And after all,” he said, “who ever heard of calling a mild scalp massage an assault?”

  “I dunno as I’d go all that way with you,” Haskins demurred judicially. “But seein’ as this feller was workin’ for Mr March, in a manner o’ speakin’, I figured mebbe no one would care very much.”

  “You mean it was nothing but curiosity that brought you here?”

  The sheriff hunched his sinewy black shoulders and stared up at the clock over the bar. He shuffled a little stiffly on the stool.

  “Son,” he said, “I told you once I had a sorter weakness for red-heads myself. This afternoon it seemed that I ought to check up on one that we both like. She was packin’ bags in an almighty hurry when I got theah. Seems she had to catch a plane to somewheres in South America this evening. I reckon she just made it by now. But she took time off to write a letter an’ asked me to give it to you after the plane left.”

  He dragged an envelope out of an inner pocket and laid it on the bar.

  Simon picked it up and opened it with hands of surgical precision.

  Dear Saint:

  When I made a date for tonight, I meant it. But it doesn’t seem as if any of us belong to ourselves any more. And there is so little time.

  I’ve had new orders already, to begin at once—and that means at once. I’ll barely have time to pack. I can’t even say good-bye to you. I had thought of calling you to meet me at the airport, but now Haskins is here and I think I’ll send this note by him instead. The other would have been much harder for both of us.

  I could say Thank you, Thank you, a million times, and it wouldn’t mean anything. You know yourself just how much you’ve done, as I know it too, and as they know it by now in London as well as Washington. That should be enough for both of us. But we both know that it’s still only a beginning. Both of us will have so much more to do before we can sit back in our armchairs again.

  And just for myself alone, it isn’t enough either. That’s why I’d rather write this than have to see you again. I can’t help it, darling. In spite of all the impossibilities, I still want that evening we never had.

  So silly, isn’t it? But if miracles happen and both of us are still alive when all this is over—we might meet somewhere. It won’t ever happen
, of course, but I want to think about it now.

  Good-bye. I love you.

  Karen

  Dry champagne frothed on the bar. Simon looked at the label on the bottle as he folded the letter slowly and put it away. Bollinger ’28. That was what they had drunk when they first met. He could see her still as he had seen her then, with her pale perfect face and flaming hair, and the deep violet of her eyes. And he saw her as she had last been beside him, with his gun speaking from her hand. And so—that was the story…

  Abruptly he raised his glass.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  Sheriff Haskins held him with that shrewd timeless gaze.

  “I’ll say that to her too, son.”

  “You’ve been a good father to me, Daddy.” The Saint split a paper match with his thumbnail and twirled it in his glass, absently swizzling bubbles out of the wine. “Do you mind if I’m curious too? I’m not so used to all this co-operation from the Law.”

  Haskins’s jutting Adam’s apple took a downward journey and vanished behind his black string tie.

  “Well, son, it’s like this. A lot o’ strange critters bed down together peaceable-like when a panther’s on the prowl. Let ’em get to fightin’ too much among themselves, an’ the crazy cat will gollop ’em all. Take rabbits, now.” The sheriff filled his glass again and smiled ruminatively. “I reckon if enough rabbits ganged up together an’ got properly mad, they could put a bobcat on the run. Most times the folks in this country are homelovin’ an’ peaceful as rabbits—but it seems to me that the time for a little gangin’ up an’ gettin’ mad has more ’n come. You’ve sorter helped me straighten that out in my mind.”

  Simon looked at him through the smoke of his cigarette.

  “Even though I broke your sacred law?”

  “There ain’t no law,” Haskins declared slowly, “when some son-of-a-bitch is tryin’ to take over the whole of creation, an’ usin’ what laws there are to try an’ make it easier for himself. Like he lets little countries believe in laws of neutrality, which means they don’t begin gangin’ up on him until after he’s jumped on ’em. An’ like he uses their laws o’ liberty to sneak in his spies an’ start fightin’ ’em long before he comes out an’ calls it a war. I done a powerful lot o’ thinkin’ since we had a talk the other night. Some folks are gonna blind themselves to it, an’ the politicians are gonna help bail it up so they can keep gettin’ votes from the people who don’t want to think, but when I see a lot o’ thugs drillin’ right under my nose, screamin’ against our kind o’ government an’ generally thinkin’ they’re bigger ’n the country they live in, I jest know the whole stinkin’ business is gettin’ too close to home.”