The Saint in Miami (20 page)

The road looked a little different by night Hoppy made two false turn-offs, and wasted fifteen minutes getting out of a patch of soft sand, before he found the place where Simon had parked the car that afternoon. When he reached the flat open country beyond the trees he still wasn’t sure of his direction. He struck off in what he hoped was the way, letting the growing parchedness of his throat guide him in much the same manner that a camel’s instinct leads it to an oasis. Even with this intuitive pilotage, his wide-striped flannels were bedraggled from clutching palmettos when the barge at last showed black against the sky.

As Hoppy put his weight on the gangplank a streak of light fanned across the deck, and Gallipolis stepped out of the door. His flashlight streamed over Hoppy and clicked off.

“By the beard of Xerxes!” said Gallipolis. “Hullo, bad news. What brings you?”

“Uniatz is de name.” Hoppy plodded on up and went inside. The heat of the closed and oil-lighted bar struck at him in a wave. “I come out to get some more of dat Florida water, see? I gotta toist.”

Gallipolis stopped at the end of the bar. Over his invariable white-toothed grin, his fawn-like eyes stared at Mr Uniatz suspiciously.

“What’s the matter-all the joints in town closed up?”

“Dey ain’t woit wastin’ time in,” Mr Uniatz told him feelingly. “A lot of fairies wit’ goils’ clothes on … Dey ain’t got none of dis stuff dat I want, neider. De water you say comes outa de springs.”

“Oh.”

Gallipolis secured a bottle and glass and slid them along the bar. Hoppy ignored the glass and picked up the bottle. A long draught of the corrosive nectar, to be savoured with the inenarrable contentment which the divine fruit of such a pilgrimage deserved, washed gratifyingly around Mr Uniatz’s atrophied taste buds, flowed past his tonsils like Elysian vitriol, and swilled into his stomach with the comforting tang of boiling acid. He liked it. He felt as if angels had picked him up and breathed into him. His memory of the first taste that afternoon had not deceived him. In fact, it had barely done justice to the beverage.

The Greek watched his performance with a certain awe.

“Bud,” he said, “if I hadn’t seen you hose yourself out with this shine before, and if your story about hauling all the way out here to get some more of it wasn’t so lousy, I’d think this was a stall.”

Hoppy either did not grasp or did not choose to take up the aspersion on his motives. He waved the bottle at the empty room, breathing deeply while he felt his potion soaking in.

“Sorta quiet in dis jemt tonight, ain’t it, pal?” he remarked with comradely interest.

“After you and the Sheriff were here I had to tell the gang to stay home for a bit.” The Greek’s eyes were softly watchful. “What’s the Saint doing now?”

“He’s still out wit’ a skoit. I gotta go back after a bit, but he says I can take my time.”

Mr Uniatz picked up the bottle again and made another experiment. The result was conclusive. There had been no mistake. This was the stuff. At long last, after so many arid years of search and endeavour, Mr Uniatz knew that he had discovered a fluid which was sufficiently potent to penetrate the calloused linings of his intestines and imbue his being with a very faint but fundamentally satisfying glow. It was the goods.

He put down the bottle only because, not having been half full when it was handed to him, it was now quite empty, and reverently exhaled a quantity of pent-up air tainted with dynamite fumes. One spatulate finger stabbed at the bottle as it would touch a holy relic.

“Dey’s a fortune in it, pal,” he informed Gallipolis in a whisper which vibrated the houseboat like the lowing of a Miura bull.

“If there is,” said the Greek, “I’d like to know how.”

“Because it don’t cost nut’n,” Hoppy said witheringly.

“What do you mean, it doesn’t cost anything?”

“Because it comes outa de Pool.”

Gallipolis lowered one eyelid and studied Hoppy out of the other eye.

“I wonder who’s ribbing who now?” he said. “That stuff just comes from a still, bud. It used to be a good racket, but now the Revenuers go about in airplanes and spot them from the sky.”

“Well, where is dis still?” Hoppy persisted challengingly. “I know a lotta lugs who’d pay big dough for de distribution.”

The Greek reached down and brought up another bottle. His smile veiled the undecided alertness of his gentle eyes.

“Tell me the gag, friend,” he invited. “There’s something screwy when the Saint wants to start selling shine.”

Mr Uniatz laved his throat again. He was face to face with a situation, but the various steps by which he had reached it were not entirely clear. He was, however, acutely conscious of the secondary motive for his visit which he had worked out on the way. The essential rightness of his idea appealed to him more than ever at this stage. He needed some pertinent information to put bones into his Theory. The problem was how to get it, All Greeks were dumb and unresponsive, in Hoppy’s racial perspective, and this one appeared to be a typical specimen. Mr Uniatz felt some of the identical delirious frustration which, had he only known it, was one of his own principal contributions to Simon Templar’s intellectual overhead.

Confronted with the need for greater extremes of initiative, Hoppy decided that the only tiling was to put more cards on the table.

“Listen, youse. De boss don’t wanna sell dis stuff. He wants to bust up de Pool.”

“What pool?” asked Gallipolis, and opened his weary eye.

“De Foreign Pool,” said Mr Uniatz, suffering. “De pool where March gets it from.”

The Greek walked over to where the hanging lamp was smoking in the centre of the room and turned it low.

“What March?” he asked as he returned to the bar.

“Randolph March,” groaned Mr Uniatz. “De guy what has de Pool where-“

“You mean the medicine millionaire?”

Mr Uniatz cocked his ears, but decided to give nothing away. He had heard nothing about medicines before, but it might be a lead.

” Maybe,” he said sapiently. “Anyhow, dis March has de Pool, an’ nobody knows where it’s at, an’ dat’s what we wanna know. Now all you gotta do is tell me where dis stuff comes from.”

“You’re making me a little dizzy, big boy,” said Gallipolis with a smile. “Are you trying to tell me that March is selling this stuff?”

“Soitenly,” said Hoppy. “It don’t cost him nut’n, so it pays for all his dames. So if we get de Pool, maybe de boss won’t mind cuttin’ you in.”

The Greek dug out another bottle and poured himself a drink.

“I feel a little tired, mister. Suppose we sit down.” He led the way to one of the tables and kicked out the opposite chair. When Hoppy was seated across from him, Gallipolis drank and shuddered. “I’ve been peddling this stuff for a good many years,” he said, “but this is the first time I’ve heard that March was making it.”

“De Saint is always de foist to hear anyt’ing,” Hoppy assured him proudly.

The Greek’s eyes might have been starting to glaze with pardonable vagueness, but he kept on with his heroic effort.

“You think March is making shine at the Pool.”

“So he has got a Pool!” Hoppy caught him triumphantly.

Gallipolis wiped a hand back over his curly hair.

“I suppose you could call it that,” he answered exhaustedly. “He calls it a hunting lodge. But he did have a coupla dredgers and a gang of men working all summer to cut out a channel and a yacht basin so he could take his boat in, I guess that’s the Pool you mean.”

Mr Uniatz tilted his bottle again, and gave his oesophagus another sluicing of caustic lotion. His hand did not tremble, because such manifestations of excitement were not possible to a man whose nervous system was assembled out of a few casually connected ganglions of scrap iron and old rope; but the internal incandescence of his accomplishment came as close to causing some such synaptic earthquake as anything else ever had. The swell of vindication in his chest made him look a little bit like an inflated bullfrog.

“Dat’s gotta be it,” he said earnestly. “Dey dig it out so dey can get more water outa de spring. Dey haul it out in de yacht an’ pretend it’s medicine. Now me an’ de boss go down an’ take over this racket You know where to find dis Pool?”

Gallipolis tilted his chair on the rear legs and rocked it back and forth.

“Sure, mister, I know where it is.” Being a comparative stranger, he could be forgiven for not following all the involutions of Hoppy’s thought, and it seemed harmless to humour him. “An old moonshiner that I buy stuff from told me. He used to have a still near there, but he got chased out when they started working.”

Mr Uniatz leaned forward grimly.

“Coujja take us to it?”

The Greek’s eyes narrowed.

“You say there’s something in it for me?”

“Can ya take us dere?”

“Well,” said Gallipolis slowly, “maybe I could. Or I could find a guy who could take you. But how much would there be in it for me?”

“Plenty,” said the Saint.

He stood in the open doorway, debonair and immaculate, smiling, with a cigarette between his lips and a glint in his eyes like summer lightning in a blue sky. He knew that he had come to the last lap of his chase, by the grace of God and the thirst of Hoppy Uniatz.

2
“Old home week,” said Gallipolis. His voice was as mild as a summer breeze on the olive-clad slopes of Macedonia. “Get yourself a glass and sit down, Mr Saint. I suppose you’re also dry.”

“I’ll pass up the liquid fire.” Simon sat down and fixed Mr Uniatz with a sardonic eye. “It’s a good job I figured out that I’d find you here, Hoppy.”

Something in his tone that sounded like a reproof, even to Hoppy’s pachydermatous sensitivity, made Mr Uniatz sit up with a pained look of reproach on his battered countenance.

“Lookit, boss,” he objected aggrievedly. “Ya tell me to come here, don’tcha, when we are in de clip jernt? So after we hear Rogers I say can I go now, anja say to take all de time I want-“

“I know,” said the Saint patiently. “That’s the way I worked it out, in the end. It took me quite a long time, though … Never mind. You’ve done a swell night’s work.”

“Dat’s what I t’ink, boss,” said Mr Uniatz cheering. “I woiked out everyt’ing on my own. Gallipolis is okay. We cut him in, an’ he takes us to de Pool.”

The Saint settled back and smiled. He had a feeling of dumb gratitude that made him conscious of the inadequacy of words. It was a coincidence that made him giddy to contemplate, of course; and yet it was not the first time that the glutinous rivers of Mr Uniatz’s lucubration had wound their way to results that swifter brains sought in vain. But the recurrence of the miracle took nothing away from the Saint’s pristine homage to its perfection. He had boarded the barge, silently as he always moved, just in time to hear Gallipolis make the speech which had tumbled with the clear brilliance of a diamond through the obscurity of a dead end which had brought him within inches of cold despair; and he had not even had time to adjust his eyes to the light that had destroyed the dark.

His strong fingers drummed on the table edge.

“This afternoon you offered me a job, Gallipolis. I’d like to change it around tonight and offer you one.”

“For plenty?” The white teeth flashed
“For plenty.”

“I may be running a stud juke, but I have a conscience.” Gallipolis filled his glass again. “If I have to step on it too badly, the price comes high.”

“I want to know one thing first,” said the Saint. “Were you just stringing Hoppy along when you told him about this hunting anchorage or whatever it’s called that March has got?”

“No, sir.”

Simon drew the glowing end of his cigarette an eighth of an inch nearer his mouth, and exhaled smoke like the timed drift of sand spilling through an hour-glass.

It was so beautiful, so perfect, so complete … And yet, twentyfour hours ago, it had seemed impossible that among the million coves of the Florida coastline he could ever find the base of the mysterious submarine which had first given him a hint of the magnitude of what he might be up against. Twentyfour minutes ago, it had seemed even more impossible that he could discover the destination of the March Hare in time for the knowledge to offer any hope … And now, with a word, both questions were answered at once. And once again the answer was so simple that he should have seen it at once-if he had only known enough … But no one who was not looking for what he was looking for would have thought anything of it. A man like March could have a hunting lodge in the Everglades without causing any comment; and if he wanted to dredge out a channel and an anchorage big enough to accommodate a vessel the size of the March Hare-well, that was the sort of eccentric luxury a millionaire could afford to indulge. Haskins might have known about it all the time and never seen any reason to mention it. And now the Saint couldn’t go back to Haskins …

Again the Saint brightened the tip of his cigarette.

“In that case,” he said, “you could do your little job of guide work.”

“Uh-huh.” Gallipolis drained his glass. “You could hire bloodhounds cheaper. How many people do I have to kill?”

“That all depends,” said the Saint benignly.

“I thought there was a gimmick in it,’ said the Greek. “Let’s quit beating around the bush. You’ve got something on Randolph March, and I don’t mean that boloney about him making shine. He’d be pretty big game, Mr Saint. I wonder if he mightn’t be too big for the likes of you and me.”

Simon’s eyes wandered estimatively over the room.

“You aren’t doing much business, are you?” he said.

“I can thank you for some of that. When the Sheriff starts calling at a place like this, you ease up and like it. The goodwill doesn’t last when they start loading your customers into a wagon and carting them off to the bastille.”

“If you had a grand,” said the Saint abstractedly, “you could open up somewhere else and have quite a nice joint.”

“Yes,” said Gallipolis. “If I left that much money, every sponge diver in Tarpon Springs would be pickled in red wine for three days after I die.” He rubbed slender fingers through his hair and looked at his palm. “If there really is that much dough in the world, mister, I can take you out to the middle of the Everglades and find you snowballs in a peat fire.”