The Saint in Miami (19 page)

“It must be very comforting to have that philosophic outlook,” commented the Saint.

Haskins put his big gun stoically away.

“Son,” he remarked, “it’s always been a policy of the law in this country to let bad little boys alone when they want to play. We let these bunches o’ tin soldiers march an’ drill around in our peaceful country, an’ wave their swastikas, an’ heil Hitler, an’ make the goddamdest dirty cracks about democracy, on account of it’s the policy of democracy to let everybody shout his own opinions, even when it’s his opinion that nobody who don’t agree with him ought to be allowed even to whisper what he thinks. We let ‘em tear hell out o’ the Constitootion on account of the Constitootion says anybody can tear anything out of it he wants to. We let em use all the freedom that the founders of this country gave their lives to give us, to try an’ take that freedom away. We’re so plumb scared of gettin’ accused o’ bein’ the same as they are that we even let ‘em train an’ arm a private army to put over their ideas, rather ‘n give ‘em the chance to say we denied ‘em the liberty they want to take away from us. That’s why we’re the greatest country in the world, an’ everybody else laughs ‘emselves sick lookin’ at us.”

There was a moment’s silence before Simon could say, evenly enough: “I hope nobody can ever lick your screwy country … But do you need me here any more?”

“By this time,” Rogers said, “they know that the plot’s misfired. You can slip out the back way with us.”

“I left Haskins’ red-headed flame in the main room,” said the Saint. “And another friend of mine in the gents’ relief station. I can’t just ditch them. If the gang knows that the plot has misfired, they can guess you and Haskins are here with some deputies. They’ll be too scared to make trouble without plenty more planning. You go the way Haskins came, and I’ll get out the way I came in. I can take care of myself.”

“Check with me at the local FBI office in the morning?” Rogers said.

There was no need for picayune hair-splitting. Their eyes met in the understanding of men among men-an unspoken bond of strength greeting strength. Death had brushed by them lightly, and left them alive to carry on. Both of them knew it.

“If I can,” said the Saint, and was gone.

He went quickly back down the long corridor. He had his own plan of campaign, clear now that its objectives were no longer eddying reflections in a distorting mirror, to iron out; and he knew that time was more vital now than it had ever been … The vacuous twittering went on in the men’s dressing room. The pretty black-haired girl, who had apparently completed her act with the usual disasters to her costume, met him at the turn of the passage with what was left of it in her hand and nothing else to obscure the artistic tailoring of her birthday suit. Once again, they passed each other with hardly a glance. He would have passed the Queen of Sheba with the same disinterest. He wanted to see Karen Leith …

And she was not there.

Neither was Hoppy Uniatz.

It was more than a temporary absence, a prolonged nose-powdering or hand-washing expedition. The table where they had been was cleared and freshly laid, ready to receive new tenants. There was not a personal relic left on it to let anyone anticipate a return.

Simon’s glance swept over the room, and discovered other changes. Quite a fair number of new customers had arrived while he was away, but the place was not much more crowded. He hit on the reason in a moment It was because space had been made by the departure of other patrons. The Strength through Joy boys and girls were no longer to be seen. And incidentally, he was unable to catch sight of the waiter who had taken him backstage, either. It was perhaps not very surprising. The whole of one certain element in the place had been neatly and unfussily evacuated, and nothing but the regular honky-tonk front was left.

The most conspicuous disappearance was that of March and Friede. Their ringside table had already been taken over by another party, and Simon noticed that their girl companions were once more on offer in the wallflower line.

The Saint located the head waiter. He crossed the room very coolly and recklessly, and his eyes were everywhere, like shifting pools of blue ice. He backed the head waiter against the wall and held him there by the simple process of standing tall and square-shouldered in front of him.

“Where are the people who were with me?” he asked.

“I don’t know, monsieur.”

The man looked helpless and tried to edge sideways out of the trap. The Saint stopped that by treading hard on his toe.

“Drop the Brooklyn French, Alphonse,” he advised bleakly. “And don’t make any mistakes. It’d take me just thirty seconds to do things to your face that a plastic surgeon ‘ll take six months to put right. And if I see any of your bouncers coming this way I’ll start shooting. Now do we talk or do we wreck the joint?”

“Oh,” said the head waiter, recovering his memory, “you mean the big fellow and the red-haired lady?”

“That’s better,” said the Saint. “What happened to the big fellow?”

“He left.”

“When?”

“But that was when you were still at the table, sir. He got up and went right out. The doorman didn’t stop him because you were still here to take care of the check.”

Simon began to have a weird and awful understanding, but he bottled it down within himself.

He said: “All right. Now what about the lady?”

“She went as soon as you left the table, sir.”

“Alone?”

The man’s mouth compressed. _
“Did she by any chance leave with Mr March?” Simon suggested.

The man swallowed. There were guests close by, and waiters hovering within earshot, but the Saint didn’t give a damn. Not for anything that might start. He kicked the head waiter thoughtfully on the shin.

“Yes, sir. She went over and spoke to him, and they left almost at once.”

“Including Captain Friede?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Saint nodded.

“You’re a good boy, Alphonse,” he said mildly. “And just because you told me the truth I’ll pay my check.”

“There is no check, sir,” said the head waiter. “Mr March took care of it.”

Simon went out of the Palmleaf Fan with his hands at his sides, balanced like the triggers that his fingers itched to be on, walking a little stiffly with the cold anger that was in him. Nobody tried to interfere with him; and he didn’t know, or care much, whether it was because they had had no instructions or because he looked too plainly hopeful that someone would make a move. But he walked past the two door guards with the contempt of reckless defiance, and was disappointed that it was so easy. That last patronising gesture of March’s was something that he would have liked to wipe out before he left.

But as the Cadillac streaked down the oceanside road he realised that it could hardly have been any other way. March and Friede must have been informed within a few seconds of the misfiring of their plot. There was still nothing that could have officially linked them with it, so they might well have stayed and brazened it out; but that would have been purely negative. Their quick departure had not so much the air of a getaway as of a rapid reorganisation.

And again he had to remember Karen. It had seemed once that she was the most likely person to have warned Rogers. But she had had ample chance to warn Simon himself direct, and had not. And immediately he left, she had gone back to March. She was one of the remaining riddles to which he still had no clue. Unless her part was so simple and sordid that he did not want to see it …

He tried to shrug her out of his mind.

Everything now seemed to hang on time. It was certain that Friede and March would feel forced to move fast. He wanted to move faster. There was no longer any motive for caution, and wildness would be given full rein once more. All he needed was the supporting troops who had been waiting for his call.

The car swung into the horseshoe drive and stopped in front of the Gilbeck home. And Simon sat still behind the wheel for the time it took him to light a cigarette.

Peter and Patricia would never have gone to bed until they heard from him. And they wouldn’t have gone out, because he had told them to stand by. But except for a single light burning in the servants’ quarters the house was in blackness. He went into the hall, and through it to the patio. The lights were out there also, and his ears could pick up no sound but the rustle of palm fronds and the ceaseless muted roaring of the surf.

He turned from the patio into the kitchen. “Where are Miss Holm and Mr Quentin?” he rapped, and Desdemona looked up from a love pulp and marked her place with a black thumb.

“Dey’s in de jailhouse,” she said placidly. The Saint’s eyes froze into chips of steel. “What jail?”

“Lawdy, man, how should I know? De she’iff man come an’ took ‘em away, not fifteen minutes ago. I ‘spect dey’s lookin’ for you, too,” said the Negress, with the morbid satisfaction of watching her direst foreboding fulfilled.

Simon went back to the hall and picked up the telephone. There was a chance that Newt Haskins might have gone through into the public quarters of the Palmleaf Fan, prowling around to see what he could see and trying to quietly annoy the management. And as a matter of fact, he had.

“I should have known better than to let you kid me,” said the Saint scorchingly. “But why couldn’t you tell me that all the time I was talking to you your deputies were picking up my friends? And what are the charges, and what are you trying to do?”

There was a longish silence.

Haskins said: “There ain’t no charges, son, an’ I didn’t send any deputies to pick up any friends o’ yours.”

“What about the Miami police?”

“Unless your friends have been robbin’ a house, they’d hardly make a move without talkin’ to me. It looks like you’re barkin’ up the wrong tree, son.”

“Maybe I’m not, after all,” said the Saint softly, and cradled the instrument before Haskins could make any more reply.

In a matter of seconds he was back in the car, scattering gravel and sand from the driveway as he ripped out of it. It all seemed so plain now that he wondered how any doubt could have detained him for a moment. And the idea that had been part formed in his mind on the way down from the Palmleaf Fan was now a consuming objective which blotted out everything else on his horizon. To face the last cards, and fight out a showdown on Landmark Island or the March Hare …

The Cadillac screamed on to the County Causeway with supreme disregard for the risk of speed cops. And just beyond the turn-off to Star Island it stopped, oblivious to the exasperated honking of horns behind.

There was no chance to mistake the trim grey shape feeling its way along the steamship channel towards the Government Cut and the open sea. The March Hare had already sailed. One couldn’t reach it in a car. One couldn’t swim after it. One might overtake it with a speedboat, but there would still be no way to get on board. And on board, beyond a question, were Patricia Holm and Peter Quentin. He couldn’t see them; but he could see Karen Leith. She stood leaning on the after rail beside Randolph March, watching the traffic on the Causeway and laughing with him.

VI
How Hoppy Uniatz Rode on
His Brain Wave, and Gallipolis
Introduced Another Vehicle

What in the absence of a better phrase we must loosely refer to as the thinking processes of Hoppy Uniatz were blissfully uncluttered by teleological complications such as any worry about consequences. His mind, if we must use the word, was a one-way street through which infrequent ideas rolled with the remorseless grandeur of cold molasses towards an unalterable destination. Once it was started, any idea that got caught in this treacly rolling stream was stuck there until it had been through everything that the works had to offer, like a fly in a drop of glue on a Ford production belt
What Simon Templar sometimes remembered too late, as he had done in this instance, was that the traffic in Mr Uniatz’s constricted mental thoroughfares moved at such a different rate from that of everybody else that one was apt to overlook the fact that it really did keep moving. In which error one did Mr Uniatz a grave injustice. It was true that an all-foreseeing Providence, designing his skull principally to resist the impact of blackjacks and beer bottles, had been left with little space to spare for grey matter; but nevertheless some room had been found for a substance in which a planted thought could take root and grow with the ageless inevitability of a forming stalagmite. The only trouble with this adagio germination was that the planting of the seed was liable to have been forgotten by the time the resultant blossom coyly showed its head.

It had been like that in this case; and to Hoppy Uniatz it was all so straightforward that he would have been dumbfounded to learn that the Saint had lost touch with the scenario even for a moment.

Hoppy had only a minor difficulty over transportation. He guessed that the Saint might not like to be left without a car, and so he passed up the Cadillac and selected instead a flaming red Lincoln which caught his eye further down the line. There were no keys in it, but that was an elementary problem, which was quickly solved by tearing the wires loose from the ignition lock and making some experimental connections. A beam of pleasure that would have made a baby scream for its mother spread over his homely face as the engine fired, and in a glow of happy innocence he swung the Lincoln out in a spurt of sand and headed off like Parsifal on the spoor of his Grail.

He had few doubts of his ability to finally find his way to the barge-having been there once, that was another relatively minor problem to a man who in his day had safely shepherded trucks of beer and such other valuable cargo over back roads to other equally well-hidden harbours. He turned unerringly on 63rd Street, sped south on Pinetree Drive, and took Dade Boulevard to the Venetian Way. And before he reached the Tamiami Trial he was warmed with another heart-swelling realisation which he had worked out white he drove. This trip need not be regarded as a purely selfish expedition for the gratification of his own thirst. Hoppy remembered that that afternoon he had produced, out of his own head, a theory which the Saint had perhaps been too busy to appreciate. Now, while the Saint was disporting himself with the red-haired wren, he, Uniatz, would be tirelessly following up his Clue …