The Saint in Miami (11 page)

The Saint shrugged defeatedly. After all, there was still only one positive way to find out.

He tested the freeness of his gun in his shoulder holster, dropped to the ground, and began to crawl.

4
The palmetto bushes made a barrier that jabbed stinging points through his light clothing. Saw-edged grass rasped smartingly against his face and neck. His shirt was soaked with perspiration before he had gone fifty yards; and he was cursing artistically under his breath by the time the sandy ground pitched sharply up, barring his way with the dredged-out bank of the canal.

The bank was bare of vegetation. He lay flat and wriggled his way to the top of the ten-foot rise of sand and clay. Working one eye warily over the summit, he took stock again of the houseboat twenty paces away. The boarded windows stared blankly back at him. Except for a pair of grey socks dangling limply from a line on the top deck near the bow, the ancient craft might have been abandoned for years.

A foot from his head, something moved; and the dampness of his shirt turned cold.

It was something that had been so still, blending so well into the baked desolation of its background, that without the movement he might have missed it entirely. The movement brought it to life in mosaic coils of deadly beauty, while he lay rigid and felt his muscles tautening like shrinking leather. Black, unwinking eyes stared impersonally into his, making the skin of his face creep as if cobwebs had touched it. Then the coils straightened fluidly out, and a five-foot cottonmouth moccasin slithered gracefully away.

The Saint used his forearm to wipe clammy dew from his brow. There might not actually be any sniper waiting on the barge for him to show himself, but the dangers of his present method of approach had been unmistakably demonstrated.

In any case, the decision to abandon them was now virtually taken out of his hands. Between the point he had reached, and the sluggish water where the barge floated, there was literally no cover at all. The space had to be crossed, and the only way was to do it quickly.

He raised himself up on to his toes and fingertips, and took off over the top like a sprinter. Bent low to the ground, he shot across those few perilous yards with the sure-footed soundlessness of a fiddler crab scooting for its hole, and boarded the stern with no more uproar than a fragment of rising mist.

There was no shot.

He stood with his back to the bulkhead and got his breath, listening to a clink of chips and a mumble of voices that were audible through a torn screen door. But it seemed that the sounds came from some distance away amidships, and he opened the door and sidled through into dimness. As his eyes adjusted themselves to the gloom, he saw an oil stove, racked-up dishes, a sink, and a stained table. Across from him was another door, and beyond that he found a narrow hall The voices came from an open door which made a rectangle of light in the dark passage. A game seemed to be unconcernedly in progress, and there were no other symptoms at all of an alarm. Unless the stage had been very carefully set for him, his entrance seemed to have been achieved without a hitch.

And once again, there was only one way to find out.

He sauntered noiselessly down the hall and walked into the open room.

Five men sat around a baize-covered table. A tired-looking man in a green eyeshade sat with his back to a window dealing stud. An even more tired-looking cigarette drooped from his lower lip. As he called the bets in a tired monotone, the cigarette wobbled up and down. The five men raised their heads from the cards as the Saint came in. One of them looked horsy; the other three were in shirtsleeves and seemed about as menacing as bookkeepers on a holiday.

The dealer flipped up five cards and said: “King bets.” He lowered his eyeshade again and continued in his breath-saving tone: “Five dollar limit stud. The house kitty’s fifty cents out of each pot over five dollars. It’s an open game. Don’t stand around watching. If you want to play, take a chair.”

He shoved one out beside him with some pedal jugglery, while he dealt the second round, and Simon sat down because the chair faced the door.

The dealer pushed chips in front of him.

“The yellows are five, the blues one, the reds a half, and the whites a quarter. Fifty bucks, and you pay now.”

Simon peeled money off his roll, and looked over the room while the hand was finished. There was nothing much to it. A double gasoline lantern hung over the table. The light from the window, which was on the water side of the barge and open, cut a square shaft of light through a fog of cigarette and cigar smoke. The walls had two or three Petty drawings tacked up on them.

The dealer ladled chips towards a winner, gathered up cards, and shuffled them with the speed of a boy’s stick rattling along a picket fence. He dealt once around face down, and a second round face up. The Saint was high with a queen.

“Queen bets.” The cigarette moved up and down.

The Saint squeezed his hole card up, peeped at it, and flattened it down. He had a pair, back to back, and he didn’t like to start that well in a game.

“A buck,” he said, and tossed a blue chip in.

The dealer stayed on a ten. Two of the bookkeepers dropped out, but the horsy man with a nine and the other bookkeeper with a seven spot stayed in. More cards fluttered from the dealer’s agile hand, and finished up by leaving him a second ten.

“Pair of tens bets,” he droned, and pushed out a yellow chip with a finger stained with nicotine to match it.

The horsy man said “Nuts!” and rid himself of his cards. The surviving bookkeeper with a seven and a jack showing spent five dollars. Simon figured him for a pair of jacks, and looked down at his own visible queen which had gotten married to a king.

“Let’s make it expensive,” he said, and flipped two yellows in.

The dealer stayed, but the bookkeeper folded up with a sigh. Simon got another king. The dealer gave himself an ace of spades. He removed the stub of his cigarette and said: “You bet, friend.”

“The works,” said Simon with an angelic smile, and used both hands to shove in his entire pile.

“Don’t clown, brother.” The dealer ran his thumb along the edge of the pack and snapped it with a flourish. “I told you there’s a five buck limit on this game.”

Simon’s eyebrows rose in an arch of sanctimonious perplexity.

“What game?’

“Don’t be funny,” the dealer advised. “The game you’re in now.”

“Oh,” said the Saint in a voice of silk and honey. “I wasn’t betting on the game. I just want all the money back for my chips.”

“See here,” said the dealer dangerously, “what sort of a place do you think this is?”

The invisible coldness of angry men waiting for an explanation slid down like an avalanching glacier and crystallised the atmosphere of the room; but the Saint was utterly at ease. He leaned back in his chair and favoured the dealer with his most benevolent and carefree smile.

“I think,” he said, “that it’s the sort of place where ugly little runts like you give suckers a nice game with a marked deck.” He sat up again; and suddenly, without warning, he snatched the pack out of the dealer’s hand and smeared it in front of the other players. “Look for yourselves, boys. It’s all done in the veins of the leaf in the left-hand corner. Nothing to notice if you aren’t looking for it, but as plain as a billboard when you know the code. It’s nice work, but it gives the house too much of an edge for my money.”

The horsy man picked up some cards with a grin which held nothing but trouble.

“If you’re right about this, guy, there’s more coming to me than I’ve lost here today.”

“Use your eyes,” said the Saint cynically. “I don’t know how many of you are in with him, but the rest of you can see it. You might like to do something about it. Personally, I’ll have my dough back and talk to the manager.”

“You’ll do that,” muttered the dealer.

There was the sound of one padding step in the alleyway outside, and a new man showed in the doorway with a sub-machine-gun covering the room.

The Saint knew an instant of frozen expectancy when all the other close calls he had ever had passed in review before the immutable knowledge that some day somewhere there must be a call too close to dodge, and he thought: “This is it.” For a flash the whole set-up seemed entirely rational and obvious. A gambling barge, a quarrel over a card game, a few shots, and the whole thing might be settled in a way in which Randolph March couldn’t possibly be implicated. Only a supreme combination of intuition and will-power kept his right hand from starting a hopeless dive for the butt of the Luger under his arm. It was a more than human feat to sit there without movement and expect the tearing shock of lead; but he thought: “That’s what they’re waiting for. They want to be able to say I fired first. I won’t give them that break, anyway.” But there were goose-pimples all over his body. The horsy man forced a laugh that clicked his teeth together, and stammered: “G-good God, Gallipolis, what’s the ripper for?”

There was still no shooting, and it seemed to Simon that he had stopped breathing for a long time. In a detached but still partly incredulous way he began to take in the details of the prospective gunner.

Any cooperative reader who has been herded along the paths of romance and adventure by well-trained authors before, knows that a Greek must be fat, swarthy, and apparently freshly rubbed down with oil. It is this chronicler’s discouraging task to try to convince such an audience that Mr Gallipolis most inconsiderately declined to conform to these simple requirements. His figure was svelte, almost feminine. Limpid eyes showed tar-black in a sunburnt face crowned with crisp black curls. He wore a pink polo shirt open at the neck, khaki pants, and very clean white tennis shoes. He leaned against the door jamb and exhibited flawless white teeth in a grin. His hands on the double grips of the Thompson gun were as slender as a girl’s.

He didn’t even seem to pay any special attention to the Saint. His eyes enfolded the dealer in a melting embrace.

“Why did you push the buzzer, Frank?” he inquired liquidly. “There’s no stick-up here.”

“That’s what you think,” said Frank. “This cheapskate you let in here was trying to pull a fast one and welsh on us.”

The Greek said: “So?” and his eyes wrapped themselves around Simon. “Who the hell are you and how did you get on board? I never saw you before.”

“I came in the back door,” said the Saint. “I sat in the game and accused your dealer of cheating, that’s all”

Gallipolis’s face grew long with melancholy.

“Were you cheating, Frank?”

“Hell, no! He was getting in too deep, so he tried to start something.”

“That’s a lot of malarky!” said one of the bookkeepers boldly. “He didn’t start anything. He said these cards were crooked, and they are. We’ve seen ‘em.”

Gallipolis looked amused.

“I have a hell of a time with dealers,” he told the Saint “How much you got coming?”

“Fifty dollars.”

“Give him his money,” repeated Gallipolis, with a broadening smile.

The dealer produced a ten and two twenties and slapped them on the table. Gallipolis stepped aside and spoke to the Saint again.

”Come on, mister. You must have something on your mind or you wouldn’t have come in the back door. We can talk it over in the bar.”

Simon took his money and stood up, admiring the way Gallipolis handled his gun. As Simon walked around the table, the Greek edged along the wall to keep the other players out of the line of fire. He was behind Simon when the Saint reached the door.

“Take it easy,” he recommended, as the Saint stepped outside. “If you start running I can drop you before you make the end of the hall.” He turned back to the other players. “See what you can get out of Frank, boys. If you’re still short anything, see me before you go.”

As Gallipolis left the room, the horsy man said: “Did you ever eat a pack of cards, Quickfingers?” and left the table to close the door.

The bar furniture comprised a simple pinewood counter and three kitchen tables flanked with chairs. The Saint, walking with a circumspect negation of haste, reached it alive, which he had at no time taken for granted. He discovered that the landward windows were shuttered to conceal an inside coating of thin steel. A square hole provided an outlook from the window at one end of the bar, and would also, Simon decided, have served very well for a gun port.

Gallipolis rested the machine gun on the counter and nodded Simon to a chair. He studied the Saint with his ever-present grin.

“Well, you’re on board. So what? You don’t look like a heist man. What are you, a Sam?” He answered his own question with a shake of his curly head. “No, you don’t look like the law. Give, friend, give. Who are you, and what do you want?”

IV
How Mr Gallipolis Became
Hospitable, and Karen Leith
Kept Her Date

“I’m Simon Templar.” The Saint locked hands around his knee.

Curtains veiled the Greek’s swimming eyes.

“So? The Saint? I heard you were in the southlands.”

“Who told you?”

Gallipolis shrugged.

“News leaks out fast to a boat like this. I thought you were big time-the biggest of the lot. What the hell’s the idea of picking on me?”

Muffled noises came from the poker room, followed by curses and a groan. The Saint said: “I’m afraid your customers really are feeding that pack of cards to Frank. I wonder if he’s got a good digestion.”

“He had it coming,” said Gallipolis, still grinning. “But you didn’t come out here just for that. What else have I got that you want?”

The Saint found a smoke, thumbed his lighter, and inhaled pensively.

“I’m looking for a guy named Jesse Rogers.”

The Greek’s face remained pleasantly receptive, with just a faint upward movement of his strongly marked black brows. Simon could picture his expression staying exactly the same right up until his forefinger squeezed a trigger.

“So?”

“Do you know him?”

“Sure.”

It was a spine-tickling sensation, having to take all the initiative while growing more firmly convinced that Gallipolis would give no illuminating facial reaction until something fatal was said, and then fatal would be the only word for it
“Do you want to tell me anything about him?”