The Saint in Miami (26 page)

“If man come, I hear,” stated Charlie Halwuk.

He parted branches and moved on. The procession formed behind him.

The Indian’s course was deceptively casual to watch, but it was like trying to follow the course of a dodging jackrabbit. He ducked under vines, found passage through tight-packed foliage, and used roots and tufts of grass as stepping-stones with the sure-footedness of a mountain goat. Behind Simon and the girl, Gallipolis began a whispering flow of his inexhaustible Greek profanities. Bringing up the rear, Hoppy Uniatz, who in spite of his nickname had never had any practice in the art of agile skipping about on treacherous knolls, uttered occasional louder epithets as he floundered along.

Presently they came to another narrow stream.

“Cross here,” said Charlie Halwuk, and forded out into the knee-deep water.

The others waded after him. They were nearly across to the opposite bank when Simon noticed that the densest of hammocks screened the shore to bar their way. The Indian slipped sideways along it, working upstream. Then he held up his hand, stopped for a moment, and returned to Simon.

“Go down other way,” he said imperturbably. “Crocodile up there. Make bad to get out.”

“Crocodiles!” The girl’s fingers tightened on Simon’s arm, and he knew she was thinking of her own crossing of that same brackish water some time before. “I didn’t know there were any in Florida.”

“Plenty here,” said Charlie.

He moved on noiselessly through the water, found a clump of bushes which looked no different to Simon than the rest, and pushed them aside like a gateway on to the shore. The Saint climbed after him into a cavernous cathedral dank with dripping Spanish moss and roofed with a lacework of twisted branches, so dark that it gave the illusion that night had already fallen. They went on.

The journey became a nightmare race against fleeting time, with every obstacle that the most prolific combination of soil and moisture could erect to impede them. Gallipolis kept up his blasphemous monotone; but Mr. Uniatz, whose chassis had been designed for weight-lifting rather than crosscountry running, was reduced to an asthmatic grunting. And always the Indian ahead was a tireless space-eating will-o’-the-wisp that kept just a few yards in the lead but could never be overtaken, even though the ground grew firmer at last and the thorny scrub began to thin out. Karen stumbled against the Saint, and for a while his arm held her up; but presently she pulled herself free and fought on indomitably at his side again.

And then, at last, Charlie Halwuk stopped and looked back. Simon caught up with him, and found himself gazing through a last thin screen of vines into the pinkish afterglow of the vanished sun. A breeze stirred, wrinkling water that lay in a wide roseate pool. The Indian pointed.

“Lostman’s River,” he said.

Simon stared at it while the shadows deepened perceptibly, Karen Leith came up beside him and clung to his arm, but he scarcely noticed her. He was feeling an absurd weakness that foreran a new flood of strength as he let himself bathe in the mad magnificent knowledge that they had made it, in spite of everything. They were there.

This was the secret outpost of the conspiracy, the field headquarters of March and Friede. He took it in.

The March Hare was there, riding at anchor in the broad pool, a slash of pastel grey across the river with porthole lights beginning to reflect themselves in the darkening water like orderly ranks of stars. Between it and the shore was moored a whale-backed shape of a deeper and more glossy grey, most of it hardly breaking the surface, but with its periscope and conning tower outlined in sharp silhouette against the sheen of the pool.

To his right, a small dock shaped like a slender capital T pointed from the water into the shore, at a place where a group of corrugated-iron buildings, probably storehouses, clustered around a huge aluminum-painted fuel storage tank. Tied up to the dock was a small open motorboat, rubbing gently against the piling in the river current. A little further on, another long low building broke the dusk with two yellow lighted windows, but even they were not much more than a hundred yards from where he stood.

On his other side, Hoppy breathed heavily and drained the last drops from the bottle he had brought with him from the abandoned marsh buggy, and dumped it into the undergrowth. Its extinction hardly seemed to reach his attention under the stress of the awe-inspiring realisation that was silting up in the small hollow space inside his head.

“Boss,” Mr Uniatz said reverently, “is dis de Pool?”

“This is it,” said the Saint.

“Boss-” Mr Uniatz wriggled with the brontosaurian stirring of an almost unconquerable eagerness. “Can I try it?”

“No,” Simon said ruthlessly. “You stay here with everybody else. I’m going ahead to reconnoitre. The rest of you keep quiet and don’t move until I give you a signal. Gallipolis, let’s have your flashlight. When I “blink it this way, come after me.”

He pressed Karen’s hand for a moment as he released himself from her arm. Then he was gone.

He stayed just within the edge of the jungle, for the river bank had been cleared for some distance around the lodge. Mud sucked at his boots, and more mosquitoes found him to make a buzzing and stinging hell out of every step; but already with his natural instinct for the wilds he was learning the tricks of movement in that new kind of country, and he felt a boyish land of excitement at the awareness of his increasing skill.

He waded through a narrow winding arm of the river that crossed his path, circumnavigating another evil cottonrnouth that curled like an almost indiscernible sentinel in a clump of lilies; and then he was almost directly behind the lodge. The river broadened in front of the building, arching out towards the Gulf in a sheltering bay. There was more dark formidable land on the other side, it’s coastline dimly broken by other tortuous creeks that carried the drainage of the Everglades out to sea; and he had to admit that the submarine base had been chosen with a master tactician’s eye. Without knowing every secret marker of the channel that had been dredged to it, no one could have found it by water in anything larger than a skiff; and even then only a Seminole pilot would be likely to escape getting lost among the myriad islands and shoals that still lay between it and the sea.

Silently as a roaming panther, Simon stepped out of the sheltering jungle and crossed the clearing towards the blacker shadow under the wall of the lodge, where one of the lighted windows was like a square hole in the darkness striped with narrow black lines. As he reached it he saw that they were bars, and his pulses gained a beat in the rate of their steady rhythm. But a curtain inside made it impossible to see through.

He shifted towards the corner which might bring him round to a door.

An owl hooted mournfully in the thickets behind him, where the shrill chorus of innumerable insects made a background din above which one might have been tempted to believe that no slight sound could have been heard. And yet as Simon turned the corner he did hear a different sound-a sharp rustle that jerked his muscles into involuntary tension like the warning trill of a rattlesnake.

Then he saw that it was not a snake, but a man who had stepped out of the shadow of the doorway.

They stared at each other for an instant in the stillness of surprise.

Out there in the open, there was just enough relief from the darkness for Simon to see him. He was a huge crop-headed bull-necked man in dirty ducks, naked to the waist, with a boiler chest matted with thick hair. A revolver hung in a holster at his hip, and one of his great hands grabbed for it while the other reached for the Saint.

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 curtains aside, he aimed his flashlight through the screen in the direction of where he had left the rest of his party, and blinked it three times. The flashes could hardly have been seen from the March Hare. He dropped the curtains 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 prizefighter, 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 Fool 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.”