The Saint in Miami

1

Simon Templar lay stretched out on the sands in front of Lawrence Gilbeck's modest twenty-five-room bungalow, and allowed the cottony breakers pushing their way in from the Atlantic to lull him with the gentle roar of their disintegration on the slope at his feet.

Although it was an hour after a late dinner, the sand was still warm from the day's sun. Overhead, the celebrated Miami moon, by kind permission of the Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Public Relations, floated among the stars like a piece of luminous cheese, looking more like the product of one of Earl Carroll's electricians than a manifestation of nature. The moon dripped down a silvery opalescence which left black shadows in the areas it missed. The shadows deepened the tiny indentations beside Simon's nose, and for a moment gave an entirely false suggestion of care and worry to his face he looked at Patricia Holm.

That the appearance of care was false, Patricia knew. Commonplace care was a disease of modern existence which was incapable of infecting the exuberant life of that amazing modern buccaneer who was better known to most of the world by his queer nickname of "The Saint" than by the names which were recorded on his birth certificate. Worry he might cause to the plodding members of many police forces throughout the world; worry he certainly had caused, in lavish and sometimes even fatal doses, to very many members of that loosely knit fraternity which is popularly referred to as the Underworld, even when it lives in much greater luxury than most respectable people; but the worry stopped there. It was something quite external to the Saint. If it ever touched him at all, it was in the form of a perverse and irresponsible worry — a small irking worry that life might one day become dull, that the gods of gay and perilous adventure who had blessed him so extravagantly through all his life so far might one day desert him, leaving nothing but the humdrum uneventfulness which ordinary mortals accept as a substitute for living…

He reached out a brown hand and trickled sand through his fingers on to the arm which Patricia was using as a pillow for her spun-gold hair.

"You know such fascinating people, darling," he said. "These Gilbecks must be specially good samples. I suppose it's that open-handed New World hospitality I've read about. Turn your house over to a gang of strangers, and just leave them to it. I expect it has a lot of good points, too. Your guests don't have a chance to get on your nerves. Probably they'll send us a wire in a month or two from Honolulu or somewhere. 'So nice to have had you with us. Do come again.' "

Patricia moved her rounded arm to ward off the trickle of sand which threatened her hair.

"Something must have happened," she said seriously. "Justine wouldn't write me that she was in trouble and then go away."

"But she did," Simon insisted. " 'Come,' she writes you. 'All is not well. My father is moping about the house, bowed down with some mysterious grief and woe. Something Sinister is Going On.' So what do we do?"

"I remember," said Patricia. "But keep on talking if it amuses you."

"On the contrary," said the Saint, "it hurts me. It scarifies my sensitive soul… We gird up our loins and fly out here to the rescue of the beauteous Justine and her distraught papa. And are they here?"

He formed a human question mark by pulling up his knees and looking at them.

Patricia supplied the answer: "No, they aren't here."

"Exactly," Simon agreed. "They aren't here. Instead of finding them on the doorstep, waiting to welcome us with stuffed tarpon, potted coconuts, and poi, we are met by nothing more convivial than a Filipino houseboy with a cold. He informs us in a hoarse gust of germs that Comrade Gilbeck and this voluptuous daughter you've described so lushly have hoisted the anchor on their yacht, which I think is most appropriately named the Mirage, and departed for ports unknown."

"You make a good story of it."

"I have to. Otherwise I'd be weeping over it. The whole mushy business depresses me. I'm afraid our hosts have taken a powder, as Hoppy would say."

"Well," protested Patricia, "you can't blame me for it."

"Furthermore," Simon continued, "I don't believe there ever was any reason for Justine to send for you. Probably Papa had just taken a flier in Consolidated Toothpicks, and then some dentist proclaimed that toothpicks destroy the teeth, and the bottom fell out of the market. After she wrote that letter another dentist came back and said that toothpicks not only prevent decay but also cure cancer, nervous B.O., and athlete's foot The market boomed again, Pappy rejoiced, and they climbed into their canoe and paddled happily away to celebrate, forgetting all about us."

"Maybe that's what happened."

Simon sat up, with a shrug of his wide shoulders, and brushed the sand impatiently from his long legs.

He looked at her, and almost forgot everything else. A trick of that musical-comedy moon made her seem scarcely real. She was part of his life, the most enduring keystone of his happiness, unchanging as the stars; yet at that moment she seemed to have blended into the warm magic of the Florida night, become remote and doubly beautiful, like some cast-up fantasy of moonbeams and mother of pearl. The banter began to die out of his blue eyes. He touched her, and so felt the detachment of her mind which had helped the illusion.

"You really think something has happened, don't you?" he said soberly.

"I'm sure of it."

A breeze sprang up from the ocean and danced inland, stirring the palm fronds behind them. It seemed to touch the Saint with a chill; and yet he knew there was no chill in the wind. He had felt this other kind of chill so many times before, like the points of a million spectral needles, frozen and feathery-thin, probing every pore with a touch as light as a cobweb. In the past it had led him into the shadow of death more often than he could remember; and yet even more often than that its same impartial touch had warned him of danger in time to escape the falling shadow. It was the chill of adventure — the stirring of a ghostly prescience that was for ever rooted in his uncanny attunement to the whispering wavelengths of battle and sudden death. And he felt it then, as he gazed out at the shimmering vagueness of the sea.

"Look." He slid an arm behind Patricia's shoulders and helped her to sit up. "There's quite a big ship out there. I've been watching it. And it seems to be heading in. I could see the port light a few minutes ago, and now the starboard light's visible too. We must be looking directly at her bow."

"Perhaps the Gilbecks are coming back, after all," she said.

"It's much too big for them," he said quietly. "But why would a ship that size be heading straight for the shore — as close as that?"

Patricia stared at it.

Out on the ocean, a beam of silver light streamed out suddenly from a searchlight on the vessel's forepeak. It held steady for a second, then turned erratically as if it were hunting for something. The ray swung downwards, struck the water close to the cobbled pathway of moonlight, and swept quickly over the sea, lancing the surface like a scalpel of pure luminance. Leaking rays caught the figures of men behind it and silhouetted them against the whiteness of the superstructure.

Not until then did Simon realise that the ship was even closer to the shore than he had thought. He stood up and raised Patricia to her feet

"You've felt that there was something wrong all evening," he said, "and I guess your hunch was right There's something wrong out there."

"It looks as if someone had fallen overboard," she said,"and they're trying to pick them up."

"I wonder," said the Saint

He didn't know; but his answer came instantly. Even as he spoke, things happened as if his words had cued them. The searchlight went out, and with it the porthole and deck lights. Black as a collier, the vessel slid into the dappled lane of reflected moonlight

A finger of intense radiance appeared suddenly on one of her sides, unfolded upwards with a swift blossoming, and pointed into the sky with a burst of glare that momentarily erased the brilliance of the boon. Answering that splash of fire, the entire ship heaved as though a cyclopean hand had struck it from below. For an instant the blaze wrapped it from stem to stern; and then it seemed to vomit all its insides towards the sky in one black and scarlet shower.

The rumble of thunder that started from that cataclysmic disruption rolled against Simon's eardrums a split second later.

He caught Patricia's hand and dragged her hastily up the sloping beach to where a fringe of palms and a wall of pinkish stone bordered the lawn. She felt herself lifted effortlessly through the air for an instant, and then he was crouching beside her under the shelter of the wall. For a fleeting indefinable lull, the world seemed to stand still. On nearby Collins Avenue, automobiles had stopped while their drivers stared curiously out to sea. The breeze had gone rustling away across the flats of Florida, but the air was filled with a new and more frightening roar.

"What is it?" she said.

"A small tidal wave from the explosion. Hold everything," he said, and then it hit.

The piled-up crest of white hissed deliriously as it drove up the beach. It smashed against the sloping sand, gained height as it ploughed on, and broke in one giant comber against the wall. Simon held her as the water fell on them like an avalanche. There was a moment of cold crushing confusion; and then the flood was flattened out and harmless, receding down the beach, leaving no mark except a line of rubble on the lawn.

"And there goes that thousand-dollar Schiaparelli model," said the Saint, surveying the sodden wreckage of her dress as they stood up. "Just another casualty to this blitzkrieg business. "

His eyes ambled grimly over the scene, watching a gamboling rush of figures towards the shore. The nearer sounds of moving traffic churned into a pulsing immobility, and a long

distance away some female screamed stupidly… And then he looked down directly at his feet, and stood frozen in half incredulous rigidity.

Not more than a yard from him, a round-faced youth stared up at him unseeingly from the ground. Clad in a blue seaman's uniform, he lay on his back in the sprawled limpness of death. The wave that had hurled him in had left a small pile of seaweed against one twisted arm. The wrist of that arm was tangled in the looped cords of an ordinary lifebelt. Simon leaned down and looked closer. The moonlight was strong enough for him to read the ship's name that was painted on the belt, and as he read it his blood turned cold…

It seemed to him that he stared at it for a space of crawling minutes, while the letters charred themselves blackly into his brain. And yet with another unshaken sense he knew that it was actually no more than a few seconds by the clock before he was able to spur himself out of the trance of eerie and unbelieving dread that spelled from that simple name.

When he spoke, his voice was almost abnormally quiet and even. There was nothing but the steely fierceness of his grip on Patricia's arm to hint at the chaos of fantastic doubts and questions that were screaming through his brain.

"Give me a hand, darling, he said. "I want to get him into the house before anyone else sees him.''

There was something in his voice that she knew him too well to question. Obediently but uncomprehending, she bent over and tugged at the sailor's feet while Simon put hands under his shoulders. The man was heavy with water-logged flaccidness.

They were halfway across the lawn with their burden when a shadow moved on the porch of the guest house. Simon let go his end of the load abruptly, and Patricia hurriedly followed his example. The shadow detached itself from the house and stealthily drew nearer.

The moonlight shed itself with pardonable coyness over a pair of white flannels with inch wide stripes surmounted by a five-coloured blazer which might have been tailored for Man Mountain Dean. Above the blazer, and peering at the Saint, was the kind of face which unscientific mothers used to describe when trying to frighten their recalcitrant young.

"Is dat you, boss?" asked the face.

It had a voice that was slightly reminiscent of a klaxon with laryngitis, but at that moment Simon found it almost melodious. The face from which it issued, instead of giving him heart failure, seemed like a thing of beauty. From long familiarity with its abstruse code of expressions, he perceived that the deep furrows in the place where Nature had neglected to put a brow, far from foreboding a homicidal attack, were indicative of anxiety.

"Yes, Hoppy," he said in quick relief. "This is us. Don't stand there gawping. Come and help."

Hoppy Uniatz lumbered forward with the gait of a happy bear. It was not his role to criticise or argue. His was the part of blind and joyful obedience. To him, the Saint was a man who worked strange wonders, who plotted gigantic schemes which did into beautiful fruition with supernatural simplicity, who moved with a godlike nonchalance in those labyrinths of thought and cerebration which to Mr. Uniatz were indistinguishable from the paths of purgatory. Thought, to Hoppy Uniatz was a process involving acute agony in the upper part of the head; and life had really only become worth living to him on that blissful day when he had discovered that the Saint was quite capable of doing all the thinking for both of them. From that moment he had become an uninvited but irremovable attachment, hitching his wagon complacently to that lucky star.

He looked down admiringly at the body on the ground

"Chees, boss," he got out after a time. "I hear de bang when you boin him, but I can't figger out what it is. De nerz almost knocks me off de porch. What new kinda cannon is dat?

"There are times, Hoppy," said the Saint, "when I fed that you and I should get married. As it happens, it was quite a big kind of cannon; only it wasn't mine. Now help me get this stiff inside. Take him into my room and strip the uniform off him, and make sure that none of the servants see you."

These were orders of a type that Hoppy could understand. They dealt with simple, concrete things in a manner to which he was by no means unaccustomed. Without further conversation, he picked the youth up in his arms and returned rapidly into the shadows. The lifebelt still dangled from the corpse's wrist.

Simon turned back to Patricia. She was watching him with a quiet intentness.

"I expect we could do with a drink," he said.

"I could.".

"You know what happened?"

"I'm getting an idea.

The lean planes of his face were picked out vividly for a moment as he lighted a cigarette.

"That ship was torpedoed," he said. "And you saw the lifebelt?"

"I only read part of it," she said. "But I saw the letters HMS."

"That was enough," he said flatly. "As a matter of fact, it was HMS Triton. And as you know, that's a British submarine."

She said shakily: "It can't be true—"

"We've got to find out." His face was lighted again in the ripening glow of his cigarette. "I'm going to borrow Gilbeck's speedboat and take a trip out to sea and find out if there's anything else to pick up where the wreck happened. D'you want to see if you can locate Peter while I get it warmed up? He should have got back by now."

There was no need for her to answer. He watched her go, and turned in the direction of the private dock. As he walked, he looked out over the ocean again. Close down to the horizon he saw a single light, that moved slowly southwards and then vanished.

2

Lawrence Gilbeck's twin-screw speedboat shuddered protestingly as the Saint drove her wide open to the top of an inbound comber. For a moment she hung on the crest with both whirling propellers free; then they clutched the water again, and she dived into the trough like a toboggan racing down a bank of smooth ice. Curtains of spray leapt six feet into the air on each side of her as she settled down to a steady forty knots. The name painted on her counter said Meteor, and Simon had to admit that she could live up to it

From his place on the other side of the boat, crouching behind the slope of the forward windshield, Peter Quentin spoke across Patricia.

"It'll be a great comfort to all the invalids who've come south for the winter," he said, "to know that you're here."

He spoke in a tone of detached resignation, like a martyr who has made up his mind to die bravely so long ago that the tedious details of his execution have become merely an inevitable anticlimax. He hunched his prizefighter's shoulders up around his ears and crinkled his pleasantly pugnacious features in an attempt to penetrate the darkness ahead.

Simon flicked his cigarette-end to leeward, and watched its red spark snap back far beyond the stem in the passing rush of wind.

"After all," he said, "the Gilbecks did leave word for us to make ourselves at home. Surely they couldn't object to our taking this old tub out for a spin. She was sitting in the boat-house just rusting away."

"Their Scotch wasn't rusting away," Peter remarked, operating skilfully on the bottle clamped between his feet "I always understood that it improved with age."

"Only up to a point," said the Saint gravely. "After that it's inclined to become anaemic and waste away. A tragedy which it is the duty of any right-minded citizen to forestall. Hand it over. Pat and I are chilly after our shower bath."

He examined the label and sipped an approving sample before he handed the bottle to Patricia.

"Mr Peter Dawson's best," he told her, raising his voice against the roar of the engine as he opened the throttle wider. "Pass it back to me before Hoppy gets it and we have to consign a dead one to the sea."

Somewhere within the small globule of protopathic tissue surrounded by Mr Uniatz's skull a glimmer of remote comprehension came to life as the Saint's words drifted back to him. He leaned over from his seat behind.

"Any time you say to t'row him out, boss," he stated reassuringly, "I got him ready."

Through years of association with the paleolithic machinery which Mr Uniatz's parents had bequeathed to him as a substitute for the racial ability of homo sapiens to think and reason, Simon Templar had acquired an impregnable patience with those strange divagations of continuity with which Hoppy was wont to enliven an ordinary conversation. He took a firmer grip on the wheel and said: "Who have you got ready?"

"De dead one," said Hoppy, exercising a no less noble degree of patience and restraint in elucidating such a simple and straightforward announcement as he had made. "De stiff. Any time ya ready, I can t'row him in."

Simon painfully worked out the association of ideas as the Meteor ate up the silver-speckled water.

"I was referring," he explained kindly, "to our bottle of Peter Dawson, which will certainly be a dead one two minutes after you get your hands on it"

"Oh," said Mr Uniatz, settling back again. "I t'ought ya was talkin' about de stiff here. I got me feet on him, but he don't bodder me none. Any time ya ready."

Patricia gave Simon back the bottle.

"I noticed that Hoppy brought a sack down to the boat," she said, with the slightest of tremors in her voice. "I wondered if that was what was in it… But has it occurred to you that every coast-guard boat for a hundred miles will be headed here? We might have a lot of explaining to do if they got curious about Hoppy's footrest."

Simon didn't argue. Part of what she said was already obvious. Not so far ahead of them, many new lights were rising and falling in the swell, and searchlights were smearing long skinny fingers over the ocean. The Saint had no definite plan yet, but he had seldom used a plan in any adventure. Instinct, impulse, a fluid openness of approach that kept his whole campaign plastic and effortlessly adaptable to almost any unexpected development — those were the only consistent principles in anything he did.

"I brought him along because we couldn't leave him in the house," he said at length. "The servants might have found him. We may drop him overboard out here or not — I haven't made up my mind yet."

"What about the lifebelt?" said Patricia.

"I peeled the name off and burnt it. There's, nothing else to identify it There wasn't any identification in his clothes."

"What I want to know," said Peter, "is how would a single sailor get lost overboard from a submarine at a time like that."

"How do you know he was the only one?" said Patricia.

Simon put a fresh cigarette between his lips and lighted it, cupping his hands adroitly around the match.

"You're both on the wrong tack," he said. "What makes you think he came off a submarine?"

"Well—"

"The submarine wasn't sunk, was it?" said the Saint. "It did the sinking. So why should it have lost any of its crew? Furthermore, he wasn't wearing a British naval uniform — just ordinary sort of seaman's clothes. He might have come off the ship that was sunk. Or off anything. The only incriminating thing was the lifebelt. A submarine might have lost that. But his wrist was tangled up in the cords in quite a peculiar way. It wasn't at all easy to get it off — and it must have been nearly as difficult to get it on. If he'd just caught hold of it when he was drowning, he wouldn't have tied himself up to it like that. And incidentally, how did he manage to drown so quickly? I could have held my breath from the time the torpedo blew off until I saw him lying at my feet, and not even felt uncomfortable."

Peter took the bottle out of Patricia's hands and drew a gulp from it.

"Just because Justine Gilbeck wrote a mysterious letter to Pat," he said, without too much conviction, "you're determined to find a mystery somewhere."

"I didn't say that this had anything to do with that. I did say it was a bit queer for us all to come to Miami on a frantic invitation, and then find that the girl who sent the invitation isn't here."

"Probably somebody told her about your reputation," Peter said. "There are a few oldfashioned girls left, although you never seem to meet them."

"I'll ask you one other question," said the Saint. "Since when has the British Navy adopted the jolly Nazi sport of sinking neutral ships without warning?… Now give me another turn with that medicine."

He took the bottle and tilted it up, feeling the drink forge his blood into a glow. Then, without looking round, he extended his arm backwards and felt the bottle engulfed by Mr Uniatz's ready paw. But the glow remained. Perhaps it had its roots in something even more ethereal than the whisky, but something nevertheless more permanent. He couldn't have told anyone why he felt so sure, and yet he knew that he couldn't possibly be so wrong. The far fantastic bugles of adventure were ringing in his ears, and he knew that they never lied, even though the sounds they made might be confused and incomprehensible for a while. He had lived through all this before…

Patricia said: "You're taking it for granted that there's some connection between these two things."

"I'm only taking the laws of probability and gravitation for granted," he said. "We come here and find one screwy situation. Within twelve hours and practically spitting distance, we run into another screwy situation. It's just a good natural bet that they could raise their hats to each other."

"You mean that the kid who was washed ashore with the lifebelt was part of some deep dark plot that Gilbeck is mixed up in somehow," said Peter Quentin.

"That's what I was thinking," said the Saint

Patricia Holm stared out at the roving lights that wavered over their bow. She had had even more years than Peter Quentin in which to learn that those wild surmises of the Saint were usually as direct and accurate as if some sixth sense perceived them, as simple and positive as optical vision was to ordinary human beings.

She said: "Why did you want Peter to check up on this fellow March? What has he got to do with anything?"

"What did Peter find out?" countered the Saint

"Not much," Peter said moodily. "And I know a lot of more amusing ways of wasting an afternoon and evening in this town… I found out that he owns one of the islands in Biscayne Bay with one of these cute little shacks like Gilbeck's on it, about the size of the Roney Plaza, with three swimming pools and a private landing field. He also has a yacht in the Bay — a little runabout of two or three hundred tons with twin Diesels and everything else you can think of except torpedo tubes… As you suspected, he's the celebrated Randolph March who inherited all those patent-medicine millions when he was twentyone. Half a dozen show girls have retired in luxury on the proceeds of divorcing him, but he didn't even notice it The ones he doesn't bother to marry do just about as well. It's rumoured that he likes a sprinkle of marijuana in his cigarettes, and the night club owners hang out flags when he's here."

"Is that all?"

"Well," Peter admitted reluctantly, "I did hear something else. Some broker chappie — I ran him down and scraped an acquaintance with him in a bar — said that March had a big load of money in something called the Foreign Investment Pool."

The Saint smiled.

"In which Lawrence Gilbeck also has plenty of shekels," he said, "as I found out by looking through some of the papers in his desk."

"But that's nothing," Peter protested. "It's just an ordinary investment. If they both had their money in General Motors—"

"They didn't," said the Saint. "They had it in a Foreign Investment Pool.'"

The Meteor canted up the side of a long roller, and above the sound of the engine a deep glug floated forward as Mr Uniatz throatily inhaled the last swallow from his bottle. It was followed by a splash as he regretfully tossed the empty bottle far out over the side.

"You still haven't told us why you were interested in March," said Patricia.

"Because he phoned Gilbeck twice today," said the Saint simply.

Peter clutched his brow.

"Naturally," he said, "that hangs him. Anyone who phones anybody else is always mixed up in some dirty business.

"Twice," said the Saint calmly. The houseboy took the first call, and told March that Gilbeck was away. March left word to have Gilbeck call him when he got back. Two hours later he phoned again. I took the call. He was very careful to make sure I got his name."

"A sinister symptom," Peter agreed, wagging his head gravely. "Only the most double-dyed villains worry about having their names spelt right"

"You ass," said the Saint disapassionately, "he'd already left his name once. He'd already been told that Gilbeck was away. So why should he go through the routine again?"

"You tell us," said Peter. "This is making me seasick."

Simon drew at his cigarette again.

"Maybe he knew Gilbeck wasn't there, all the time. Maybe he just wanted to impress on that dumb Filipino that Randolph March was trying to get hold of Gilbeck and hadn't seen him."

"But why?" asked Patricia desperately.

"Look at it this way," said the Saint. "Lawrence Gilbeck and Justine left unexpectedly this morning, without saying where they were going or when they'd be back. Now suppose Gilbeck was mixed up with Comrade March in some fruity skulduggery, and Comrade March found it necessary to the welfare of several million dollars to get him out of the way. Comrade March would naturally have an alibi to prove he hadn't been anywhere near Gilbeck on the day Gilbeck disappeared, and a little artistic touch like that telephone routine wouldn't do the alibi any harm."

Peter searched weakly for the second bottle which he had thoughtfully provided.

"I give it up," he said, "You ought to write mystery stories and earn an honest living."

"And still," said Patricia, "we're waiting to know why all this should have anything to do with that ship being sunk."

The Saint gazed ahead, and the clean-cut buccaneering lines of his face were carved out of the dark in a mask of bronze by the dim glow of the instrument panel. He knew as well as they did that there were many other possible explanations; that he was building a complete edifice of speculation on a mere pin point of foundation. But much better than they ever could, he knew that that ghostly tingle in his scalp was more to be trusted than any formal logic. And there was one other thing which had come out of Peter's report, which seemed to tie all the loose fragments of fact together like a nebulous cord.

He pointed.

"That ship," he said, "was some sort of Foreign Investment — to somebody."

Red and green dots that marked a floating village of motley craft rushed up to meet them. A trim white fifty-footer, coldly ornate with shining brass, detached itself from the welter or boats, made a tight foaming turn, and cut across their bow. Simon reversed the propellers and topped the Meteor with the smoothness of hydraulic brakes.

The fifty-footer was earmarked with the official dignity of the Law. A spotlight snapped on, washed the Meteor in its glare, and revealed a lanky man in a cardigan jacket and a black slouch hat standing in the bow.

The man put a megaphone to his lips and shouted: "You better get the hell on in — there's too many boats out here now."

"Why don't you go on in yourself and make room for us?" asked the Saint pleasantly.

"On account of my name's Sheriff Haskin," came the answer. "Better do what I tell you, son."

The simple statement held its own implications for Hoppy Uniatz. It conflicted with all his conditioned reflexes to be using a sacked-up cadaver for a footrest, and to have a policeman, even a policeman as incongruously uniformed as the man on the cruiser, dallying with him at such short range. The only natural method of handling such a situation presented itself to him automatically.

"Boss," he volunteered raucously, leaning forward on the Saint's ear, "I brung my Betsy. I can give him de woiks, an' we can get away easy."

"Put it away," snarled the Saint. He was troubled by a feeling that the spotlight on the police boat was holding them just a little too long. To face it out, he looked straight into the light and shouted amiably: "What happened?"

"A tanker blew up."

Sheriff Haskins yelled the answer back through his megaphone, and waved his free hand. Water boiled at the cruiser's stem, and she began to edge nearer. Thirty feet from the Meteor she reversed again. Haskins stood silent for a time, leaning across the rail and steadying himself against the police boat's roll. Simon had a physical sensation of the sheriff's scrutiny behind the shield of the adhesive spotlight

He was prepared for the question when the sheriff asked: "Haven't I seen you before?"

"You might have," he said cheerfully. "I drove around town for awhile this afternoon. We're staying with Lawrence Gilbeck at Miami Beach, but we only got here today."

"Okay," said Haskins. "But don't hang around here. There's nothing you can do."

The spotlight went out, a muffled bell clanged aboard the police launch, and she moved away. Simon eased in the Meteor's clutch, let her pick up speed, and headed round in a wide circle.

"I wonder how long it's going to take that lanky sheriff to figure out that you're you," Peter said meditatively. "Of course you couldn't help talking back to him so that he'd pay particular attention to you."

"I didn't know he was the sheriff then," said the Saint without worry. "Anyway, there'd be something wrong with our destiny if we didn't get in an argument with the Law. And don't get soft-hearted and pass that bottle back to Hoppy. He's had his share."

He settled down more comfortably behind the wheel, and worked the Meteor's bow to port until they were running southwards, parallel with the coast It was the direction in which that single light had moved which he had seen immediately after the explosion, but he didn't know why he should remember it now. On the surface, he was only heading that way because he had enjoyed the outward run, and it seemed too soon to go home.

The ocean was a vast peaceful rolling plain in which they floated halfway to the stars. Along the shore moved a life of ease and play and exquisite frippery, marked by a million fixed and crawling and flickering lights. Among those lights, invisible at the distance, cavorted the ephemerae of civilisation, a strange conglomeration of men and women arbitrarily divided into two incommiscible species. There was the class which might have sober interests and responsibilities elsewhere, but in Miami had no time for anything but diversion; and there was the class which might play elsewhere, if it had the chance, but in Miami existed only to minister to the visiting players. There went the politicians and the pimps, the show girls and society matrons, the millionaires and the tycoons and the literati, the prostitutes and the gamblers and the punks. Simon listened to the lulling drone of the Meteor and felt as if he had been suddenly taken infinitely far away from that world. It was such a tenuous thing, that culture on which such playgrounds grew like exotic flowers. It was so fragile and easily destroyed, balanced on nothing more tangible than a state of mind. In a twinkling that coastline could be darkened, smudged into an efficient modern blackout more deadly than anything in those days which had once been called the Dark Ages. The best brains in the world had worked for a century to diminish Space; had worked so well that no haven was safe from the roaring wings of impersonal death…

Even a few seconds ago, the ocean on either side of them had been coloured with the flat soft hues of a deadened rainbow. It was the same caressing water of the Gulf Stream which day by day lapped the smooth tingling bodies of bathers near the shore. But out there it had been covered with sluggish oil, keeping down the blood of shattered men who would never play any more. It was so much easier to tear down than to build…

"Look, boy," said Patricia suddenly.

The Saint stiffened and came out of his trance as she caught his arm. She was pointing to starboard, and he looked out in the direction where her finger led his eyes with an uncanny crawling sensation creeping up the joints of his spine as if it had been negotiating the rungs of a ladder.

"Chees, boss," said Mr Uniatz, in a voice of awe, "it's a sea-soipent!"

For once in a lifetime, Simon was inclined to agree with one of Hoppy Uniatz's spontaneous impressions.

Just above the surface of the water, reflecting the moon-glow with metallic dullness, moving sluggishly and with a deceptive air of slothfulness, drifted a weird phantasm of the sea. No living movement flexed its wave-washed surface, and yet it was indubitably in motion, splashing its ways forward with logy ponderousness. A sort of truncated oval tower rose from its back and ploughed rigidly through its own creaming wash.

Instinctively Simon spun the Meteor's wheel; but even before the swift craft could swing around the apparition was gone. A bow wave formed against the conning tower, climbed up it, and engulfed it in a miniature maelstrom. For a few seconds he stared in fascination at the single piece of evidence which told him he had not been dreaming: something like a short stubby pipe which went on driving through the water, trailing a thin white wake behind. While he looked, the top of the periscope moved, turned about, and fixed the Meteor with a malevolent mechanical eye. Then even that was gone, and the last trace of the submarine was erased by the smooth-flowing surface of the sea. Peter Quentin drew a deep breath, and rubbed his eyes. "I suppose we all saw it," he said.

"I seen it," declared Mr. Uniatz. "I could of bopped it, too, if ya hadn't told me to put my Betsy away."

Simon grinned with his lips.

"The only thing that's any good for bopping those sea-serpents is a depth charge," he said. "And I'm afraid that's one thing we forgot to bring with us… But did anyone see any markings on it?" None of them answered. The speedboat lifted her bow under his touch on the throttle and ate up the miles toward the shore. Simon said: "Neither did I."

He sat quietly, almost lazily, at the wheel; but there was a tension in him that they could feel under his repose. It reached out invisible filaments to grip Peter and Patricia with the Saint's own stillness of half-formed clairvoyance, while their minds struggled to get conscious hold of the chimeras that swam smokily out of the night's memories. The only mind which was quite untroubled by any of these things belonged to Hoppy Uniatz; but it is not yet known whether anything more psychic than a sledge-hammer would have been capable of penetrating the protective shield of armour plate surrounding that embryonic organ. Peter reopened his reserve bottle.

"We got rid of the name on the lifebelt," he said hesitantly. "If we all swore the submarine had swastikas on it, we might gum things up a bit."

"I had thought of that," said the Saint. "But I'm afraid you might gum them the wrong way. Your passport would be against you. There may have been some other lifebelt or another stray clue that we didn't pick up. Then we should just make matters worse. They could say we were just part of a clumsy plot to try and hand it on Hitler. It's too much risk to take… Besides which, it wouldn't help us at all with this Gilbeck-March palaver."

"You're still very sure that they're connected," said Patricia.

Simon swung the wheel again, and a quartering comber sped them through the inlet into the comparative quiet of Biscayne Bay.

I'm not quite sure," he said. "But I'm going to try and make sure tonight."

The plan had begun to shape itself almost subconsciously while they raced over the sea. The outlines of it were still loose and undefined, but the nucleus was more than enough. He knew now what he was going to do with the body of the youth that lay under Hoppy's elephantine brogues, and his forthright mind saw nothing ghoulish in the idea. The owner of the body could have no practical interest any longer in what happened to it: it was an article as impersonal as a leg of mutton, a piece of merchandise to be used in the most profitable way Simon could see. He knew that the idea that had come to him was crazy, but his best ideas had always been that way. There were immovable boundaries to the world of speculation and theory: beyond those frontiers there was no way to travel except by direct action. And the more straightforward and direct it was, the better he liked it He had never found any better place to meet trouble than halfway.

Close by the rocks of the County Causeway, bordering the ship channel, he slowed up the Meteor and began to edge her in to the treacherous bank.

"Pat, old darling," he said, "you and Peter are going ashore. Hoppy and I are going to pay a call on Comrade March."

She looked at him with troubled blue eyes.

"Why can't we all go?"

"Because we're too big a party for an expedition like this. And because somebody ought to be back at Gilbeck's to hold the fort in case anything turns up there. And lastly because if anything goes wrong, Hoppy and I might need an alibi. Get going, kids."

The Meteor delicately nosed the bank. Peter Quentin jumped out on to the rocks and helped Patricia to follow him. He looked back unwillingly.

"March's place is called Landmark Island," he said. "It's right next to where his yacht's anchored. The yacht is a big grey thing with one funnel, and it's called the March Hare. If you're not home in two hours we'll come look for you."

Simon waved his hand as the Meteor drifted away in the current Scarcely waiting till they were clear, he stole a notch or two out of the throttle and turned the sleek speedster away in a wide arc. A big passenger ship was crawling up the channel behind him, looming doubly large beside the speeding cars on the Causeway. It's whistle howled piercingly as they crossed under its bow; and the Saint smiled.

"Bellow your head off, brother," he said softly. "Maybe you're lucky you didn't sail two hours ago."

They headed down the bay at a moderate and inconspicuous pace that hardly raised the voice of the engine above a mutter; and Mr. Uniatz sat up on the narrow strip of deck behind the Saint and tried to bring the conversation back to fundamentals,

"Boss," he said, "do we bump dis guy March?"

"That remains to be seen," Simon told him. "Meanwhile you can take the sack off that sailor."

Mr Uniatz clung with the pride of parenthood to his original idea.

"He's better in de sack, boss, when we t'row him in. I got it weighted down wit' some old iron I find in de garage."

"Take him out of the sack," Simon ordered. "You can throw the sack and the old iron in, but make sure he doesn't go with them."

He switched off the engine as Hoppy began moodily to obey. Ahead of them loomed the grey hull of the March Hare. Besides the riding lights, other subdued lights burned on her, illuminating her deck and superstructure with a friendly glow, and at the same time vouching for the fact that there were still people on board who might not be quite so friendly. But to Simon Templar that was merely an interesting detail.

The delight of his own audacity crept warmingly through his veins as the speedboat drifted silently towards the anchored yacht. The Meteor heeled slightly as Hoppy lowered the weighted sack into the bay.

"Now whadda we do?" asked Mr Uniatz hoarsely. "He ain't got nut'n on but his unnerwear."

Simon caught the anchor chain and made fast to it, steadying the Meteor with deft but heroic strength to ease her against the hull without a sound that might have attracted the attention of the crew. The moon was over the March Hare's stem, and it was dark at the bow. His job began to look almost easy.

''I'm going on board," he said. "You wait here. When I let down a rope to you, pass up the body."

3

He stretched his muscles experimentally, and felt under the cuff of his left sleeve to make sure that the ivory-hilted throwing knife which had pulled him out of so many tight corners nested there snugly in the sheath strapped to his forearm. Over his head, the anchor chain slanted steeply up to the March Hare's flaring prow. He gripped the Meteor's foredeck with soft-shod feet and jumped for the chain, and hung there above the rippling tide as the speedboat floated under him to the length or the painter. Then he went swarming up the chain with the soundless agility of a monkey.

He reached the hawsehole, and swung both legs up to it Manoeuvering himself gingerly, he was able to get the fingers of one hand over the edge of the deck planking near the bow. With a quick muscular twist he sent the other hand up to join it, and chinned himself cautiously.

With his eyes on a level with his hands, he discerned a deck hand in white ducks leaning over the rail on the opposite side of the bow. Simon lowered himself again, and began to work his way aft with infinite patience, suspended from the edge of the deck by nothing but the grasp of his bent fingers.

When he was almost amidships he chinned himself again. This time the forward end of the deckhouse secured him from the danger of being caught at a disadvantage if the man in white had happened to rum round, and there was no one else to be seen from that angle. He freed one hand and reached up for the lowest bar of the rail. In a few seconds more he was standing on the deck and melting into the nearest pool of shadow.

From the stem of the yacht, soft voices and the tinkle of ice in glasses mingled with the faint music of a low-tuned radio. Motionless against the side of the deckhouse, Simon listened for an envious moment, and discovered that his throat was parched from the salt air and the neat whisky he had swallowed. The melodious sounds of tiny icebergs in cold fluid were almost more than his resolution could resist; but he knew that those amenities had to wait He started back towards the bow with the flowing stealth of a cat.

The seaman at the rail had not moved, and did not move as Simon crept up to him on noiseless rubber soles. The Saint studdied his position scientifically, and tapped him on the shoulder.

The man spun round with a hiccup of startlement With his mouth hanging open, he had time to glimpse the sheen of a shaded deck light on crisp black hair, the chiselled leanness of devil-may-care lines of cheekbone and jaw, a pair of mocking blue eyes and a reckless mouth that completed the picture of a younger and streamlined reincarnation of the privateers who once knew those coasts as the Spanish Main. It was a face which by no stretch of imagination could have belonged to any ally of his, and the seaman knew it intuitively; but his reactions were much too slow. As he reached defensively for a belaying pin socketed in the rail near by, a fist that seemed to be travelling with the weight and velocity of a power-diving aeroplane struck him accurately on the point of the chin, which he had carefully placed in the exact position where Simon had planned for him to put it.

Simon caught him neatly as he fell.

An open hatch just forward of the deckhouse gave him a view down a narrow companion into a lighted alleyway. Simon hitched the unconscious man on to his shoulder and carried him down.

The alley contained four doors labelled with neatly stencilled letters. The inscription on one door said STORES. Open, it revealed a dark locker which exhaled an odour of paint and tar. It took exactly three minutes to truss the victim, gag him with his own socks and handkerchief, and tuck him away inside. After which Simon examined the other resources of that very conveniently located storeroom.

He returned to the deck with a length of rope and a stout piece of wood slotted at each end, known to seafaring persons as a bosun's chair. He moved along the rail until he was directly over the Meteor, rigged the chair, and lowered it over the side.

A jacketed steward came out on deck amidships, carrying a tray, and turned aft. Simon crouched like a statue by the rail and watched him go. The steward had not even glanced in that direction when he emerged; but there was some slight difficulty in judging how long he would be gone, and on the return trip he could hardly help noticing Simon's operations at the bow.

Hoppy gave a couple of tugs at the rope to signal that the cargo was ready to load.

There was still no sign of the steward returning.

"Well," said the Saint, to his guardian angel, "We've got to take a chance some time."

He took a fresh grip on the rope and began to haul. The burden swung free at first, then bumped dully against the side as it came higher. The Saint threw all the supple power of his back and shoulders into the task of speeding its ascent, while he breathed a prayer that no member of the crew had been in a position to notice the thud and scrape of its contact. After what seemed like a year the lolling head of the body came in sight above the edge of the deck.

And then the Saint's tautly vigilant ears caught the scuff of the steward's returning footsteps.

Holding tightly to the rope, Simon stepped rapidly backwards until the deckhouse concealed him. There he fastened the rope to a handy stanchion with a couple of quick half-hitches.

The steward's footsteps pattered along the deck, slackened hesitantly, and shuffled to a dubious stop. The Saint held his breath. If the steward raised an alarm from where he stood, he might as well take a running dive over the side and hope for the best… But the steward's nerves where under phlegmatically good control. His footsteps picked up again, approaching stolidly, as he came on forward to investigate for himself.

Which was an unfortunate error of judgment on his part.

He came past the corner of the deckhouse into Simon's field of vision and stood still, looking down movelessly at the lifeless head of the boy dangling against the bottom of the rail. And Simon stepped up behind him like a phantom and enclosed his neck in the crook of an arm that was no more ghostly than a steel hawser…

The steward became gradually limp, carrying his perplexity with him into the land of dreams; and Simon picked him up and transported him over the same route that he had taken with the deck hand. He also treated him in exactly the same way, binding and gagging him and pouring him into the store locker with his still sleeping fellow crewman. The only distinction he made was to remove the steward's trim white jacket first. The Saint's humanitarian instincts made him reflect that the atmosphere of the store room might grow warmer later with its increasing population; and furthermore another use for that article of clothing was beginning to suggest itself to him.

It was a little short in the sleeves, but otherwise it fitted him fairly well, he decided as he shrugged himself into it on his way back to the deck.

He had an instant of alarm when he returned towards the dangling body and saw a ham-sized hand groping with very lifelike activity above the level of the deck. A moment later he had identified it. He grasped it, and assisted the perspiring Mr Uniatz to heave himself over the rail.

"I ought to push you back into the drink," he said severely. "I thought I told you to wait in the boat."

"De stiff stops goin' up," explained Hoppy, "so I t'ought dey mighta gotcha. Anyhow, dey ain't no more drink. I finish de udder bottle while I'm waitin'." He became aware of the uniform jacket which was now buttoned tightly over the Saint's torso, and stared at it with dawning comprehension. "I get it, boss," he said. "We're gonna raid de bar an' get some more."

He beamed at the prospect like an ecstatic votary at the gates of Paradise. Simon Templar had long been aware of the fact that Mr Uniatz's nebulous notions of an ideal after life were composed of something like floating out through eternity in an illimitable sea of celestial alcohol; but for once the condition of his own palate left him without the heart to crush the manifestations of that dream.

"I've heard you bring up a lot of worse ideas, Hoppy," he admitted. "But first of all we'd better finish lugging in the stiff, before somebody else comes along."

A brisk exploration along the starboard side disclosed that the door from which the steward had emerged gave into an alley athwartships from which a lounge opened forward, a dining saloon aft, and a broad stairway descended to the accommodations provided for the owner and his guests. Simon stood at the head of the staircase and listened. No sound came from below. While he stood there, Hoppy Uniatz caught up with him, with the body draped over one herculean shoulder.

Simon beckoned him on.

"We'll take him below," he said in a low voice. "Stay far enough behind me so that if anything blows up you'll be in the clear."

He stepped quietly down to the bottom and inspected the broad alleyway in which he found himself. He felt no particular anxiety at that point. Randolph March would have no reason to suspect that his yacht was in the hands of a boarding party. From the sounds Simon had heard on deck, Mr March was probably engrossed in a pleasant tete-a-tete which would effectively distract his attention from all such ideas. And all the crew who had not gone ashore were probably asleep, except the watchman who had already been disposed of, and the steward detailed to attend to Mr March's alcoholic requirements, who had encountered a similar doom but who could at a suitable moment be interestingly replaced…

The elements of the idea took firmer hold on his imagination as he tiptoed over the carpet. His shoes sank two inches into the resilient pile. He reached the door of a stateroom, listened for a moment, and opened it A pencil flashlight from his hip pocket discovered sycamore panelling and the silken covers or a double bed.

"This'll do, Hoppy," he said, and stood aside while Mr Uniatz brought his burden in.

He closed the door and switched on the lights.

"Put him in the bed and tuck him in," he said. "He deserves a bit of comfort now."

Hairbrushes and other personal toilet gadgets on the dressing-table suggested that the cabin might be in current occupation. Simon looked through a couple of drawers, and found a suit of rainbow silk pyjamas. He threw them on the bed as Hoppy pulled down the covers.

"Fix him up nicely," he said. "He's a guest of the management…" Another thought crossed his mind, and he went on speaking more to himself than to any audience. "Maybe he's been here before. And I wonder what he was then…"

He stood guard by the door while Hoppy carried out his commission, kindling a cigarette and keeping one ear alertly cocked for any sound of human movement in the alleyway outside. But there was none. So far, the adventure couldn't have gone more smoothly if it had been mounted on roller bearings. He began to feel a glutinous and godless exhilaration rising within him. There was no longer any doubt in his head that this was going to be one of his better evenings…

Hoppy Uniatz finished his task, and turned towards him with file air of a man who, having accomplished a worthy but tiresome duty, feels himself entitled to return to more important and more satisfying projects.

"Now, boss," said Mr Uniatz, "do we take de bar?"

The Saint nibbed his hands gently together.

"You are a single-minded man devoted to the life of action, Hoppy," he remarked. "But there are times when the wisdom of the ages speaks through your rosebud lips. I think we will take the bar.

The steward had come out on to the deck from the central alleyway. Returning to the head of the stairway, Simon considered the dining saloon which faced him. It seemed the most likely turning point in the trail; and he was not mistaken. When he went in, he found a very artistic glass and chromium bar set back in an alcove half the width of the deckhouse, the other half probably being taken up by the galley.

"Dis is it," said Mr Uniatz complacently. "What kind of Scotch have dey got?"

"Control yourself," said the Saint sternly. "It's that selfish attitude of yours, Hoppy, which is so discouraging to anyone who is trying to improve your character. Let us try to think first of others, as the good books tell us. We were obliged to remove Mr March's steward. Mr March, by this time, is probably getting quite impatient for his next round of drinks. Clearly it's our duty to substitute our services for this incapacitated factotum and see that he gets his gargle."

He investigated the selection of supplies with a critical eye, secure in the spell of silence which was guaranteed by Mr Uniatz's anguished efforts to interpret his last speech into words of one syllable. Finally he fixed his choice on a row of bottles whose labels met with his approval, and set them up on a tray. A pair of silver ice-buckets from the back of the bar were indispensable accessories, and a built-in refrigerator provided plentiful supplies of ice.

"Let's go," said the Saint.

He moved out on to the deck with his accumulation of booty. He no longer felt that there was any call for stealth. Quite boldly and carelessly he walked aft and came around the end of the deckhouse to an open verandah sheltered by white canvas awnings.

Randolph March was there — Simon recognised him at once from pictures he had seen in the tabloids. The pictures had not shown the colouring of the round pink face and straight fair hair, but they had possibly overemphasised the marks of premature dissipation under the eyes and the essential weakness of the mouth and chin. From the deck chair beside him, a girl with red hair and big violet eyes also looked up with a revelation of complete physical beauty that made Simon's sensitive heart lose its regular rhythm for an instant. She had been listening to something that March had been telling her when Simon came into sight, with an expression of rapt adoration to which any heir to the March millions could legitimately have been held entitled; but a lingering trace of the same expression still clung to her features as she turned, and was responsible for an intervening moment of speechlessness before the Saint could recapture his voice.

Then he recovered himself, and bowed to them both with mildly derisive elegance.

"Good evening, little people," murmured the Saint.