The Saint in Miami

1

"I'm Simon Templar." The Saint locked hands around his knee.

Curtains veiled the Greek's swimming eyes.

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

"Who told you?"

Gallipolis shrugged.

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

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

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

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

"I'm looking for a guy named Jesse Rogers."

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

"So?"

"Do you know him?"

"Sure."

It was a spine-tickling sensation, having to take all the initiative while growing more firmly convinced that Gallipolis would give no illuminating facial reaction until something fatal was said, and then fatal would be the only word for it

"Do you want to tell me anything about him?"

"Why not?" The Greek's candour seemed engagingly unfeigned. "He's an entertainer — sings smutty songs at the piano. He plays here sometimes."

"When?"

"Oh, not professionally. I mean he gambles. He works every night at a dive uptown called the Palmleaf Fan. You could have found him there. Why did you have to come and make trouble here?"

Simon decided that he couldn't be any worse off if he played a line of equally calculated frankness.

I never heard of him until this morning, or you either," he said. "Not until a friend of yours who calls himself Lafe Jennet took a shot at me and missed me by about three inches."

"You're wrong both ways, Mr Saint." Gallipolis was still grinning, but mechanically. "Jennet isn't a friend of mine; and he didn't take a shot at you, or he'd have hit you. He could put a bullet up the rear end of a southbound flea."

"I wouldn't be any less excited," said the Saint, "if he could pop a bedbug in the starboard eye. The point is that I hate being shot at, even in fun. So I told Lafe that I'd have to send him back to the chain-gang where he belongs, after playing a few other games with him, unless he told me where he got his humorous idea. He told me that someone he met out on this barge blackmailed him into it"

Gallipolis considered his machine-gun and said: "Meaning me?"

"No — this fellow Rogers. He said he didn't know anything about him except that he often hung out around here. So I thought I'd drop out and see."

"You could have come to the door and asked."

"How did I know you weren't in on it?"

The houseboat was silent except for the sounds of breaking furniture and a body bumping up and down on the floor.

"The bear came over the mountain," said Gallipolis eventually, "to see what he could see. It's a good story, anyhow. Where's Jennet now?"

"He's waiting in the woods with a friend of mine."

"That's a good story, too."

"How do you think I found this boat if Jennet didn't show me?" Simon asked patiently.

"You want to fetch him in?"

The question was almost casual; but Simon knew that it was a challenge, and might become more than that Gallipolis still had him guessing.

But he had to balance the situation entirely by his own system of accountancy. It had seemed like a good idea at first to leave Jennet behind, not knowing what might be waiting on the barge. But he had found out more about that since — at least, enough for the present. He was a prisoner under the nozzle of a sub-machine-gun, which was an irrevocable temporary fact, regardless of what anyone was thinking or whatever other scheming might be going on. He had no further use for Mr. Jennet. And he had told Hoppy to come after him if he hadn't returned by nightfall; but Jennet would be a handicap to that, and in any event Hoppy could have been knocked off with ease, being no Indian fighter, before he had moved his own length into the open… It didn't seem as if ceding the point could make anything much worse, and it might even make some things clearer.

"If you want him badly enough," said the Saint; and he had covered all those points in such a lightning survey that his hesitation could barely have been timed with a stopwatch.

"I just want to know if all this is on the up-and-up," said Gallipolis, and he might even have been telling the truth. "You'd better take your gun out first and slide it across the floor. If you want to try shooting it out, okay, but you're making a mistake. A Tommy gun is better than an automatic, no matter how good you are."

Simon obeyed, cautiously. The gun he was giving up meant nothing to him, being the one he had taken from March's captain, and Gallipolis handled his weapon as if he had wielded it before.

The Greek leaned against the lengthwise end of the bar, and it slid creakingly sideways, disclosing a good-sized hole in the floor under it. He toed the Luger into the hole and said: "Stand up and turn around. I've been suspicious ever since my ma got raped in Athens. I want to see if you've got any more."

Simon stood still with outstretched arms while Gallipolis explored him. The Greek's touch was quick and thorough. He ended the frisking by patting Simon inside of each thigh.

"Don't get me wrong," he said, "but I've got a bullet hole in my shoulder from a fellow I thought I'd disarmed. He was wearing a crotch gun, and when I turned around he pulled it on me by zipping open his fly."

The Saint said: "Gosh, what fun!" and forebore to mention the knife strapped to his forearm.

"Come along," said Gallipolis, backing into the passage, "But don't get too close."

He stopped outside the poker room and rapped on the door. Still keeping Simon covered, he said through the panels: "You fellows stay inside until I say it's clear. We're having visitors. If you want to work on Frank some more, keep him on the table. He makes a noise when he hits the floor."

He motioned Simon in the opposite direction.

At the other end of the hallway, facing the kitchen entrance, another door gave into a sort of reception room which covered the forward end of the barge. They had to zigzag around a counter which practically bisected it and at the same time provided an effective barrier against any too rapid entry or exit. On the other side of the counter was another screen door.

"You go out and call 'em," said Gallipolis. "I can watch you from here."

Simon stepped out on to the short cramped foredeck and semaphored with his arms. After a while he saw Mr Uniatz step out of cover, herding Lafe Jennet ahead of him.

I just wouldn't shoot too quickly, comrade," Simon said, in a tone of moderate counsel. "Some other friends of mine know where I am, and if I don't get home they might pay you a call and ask questions."

"Some of your fairy tales seem to be true," Gallipolis acknowledged impersonally. "Well see what happens. I never shoot till I have to." He was watching the approaching duo at an edgewise angle through the door. "If this big baboon belongs to you, tell him to put his gun away before he comes in."

"I'll tell him," said the Saint, "but you'd better play down the ukulele. Hoppy is kind of sensitive about some things. If you wave that chopper in his face the wrong way, he might try to shoot it out regardless. You'd do much better to be sociable. Welcome him with liquor, and he'll drink out of your hand."

He spoke idly, but his nonchalance was mostly simulated. Behind it, he was trying to make sense out of an absurd idea that had been gathering strength in his subconscious.

The barge was authentic — a cheap hangout where cheap gamblers could lose their money breaking a grandmotherly law. But with that there went an enforced deduction that the Greek also might be authentic. And if Gallipolis was genuine, and Jennet was likewise, within their limitations, then there was nothing left but the absurd idea that they were only carefully placed stepping-stones to something else. And an idea like that did a superlative job of making everything meaningless and chaotic… It made it difficult even for such an actor as the Saint to throw off all artificiality as he watched Hoppy and Lafe Jennet reach the bank of the canal.

"Hi, boss." Mr Uniatz used the back of one hand to clear trickling sweat from his eyes. Patches of damp under the arms of his blazer testified further to his discomfort "What makes out?"

"Come on in," said the Saint encouragingly. "They've got a bar."

"A bar!" Mr Uniatz's face grew slowly radiant from within, as he appeared to gradually comprehend the all-foreseeing beneficence of a Providence which had not neglected to mitigate the horrors of even such a Godforsaken spot as that with Elysian springs of distilled consolation. Gathering new strength from the thought, he speeded the hesitant Mr Jennet up the rickety gangplank with his knees. "Gwan, youse," said Mr Uniatz. "Whaddaya waitin' for?"

"Put your gun away," said the Saint "You won't need it."

"But—"

"Put it away," said the Saint.

Gallipolis spoke softly and said: "You come in now."

Simon complied, and cleared the doorway. Jennet came in next, boosted by Mr Uniatz's ready knee. Mr Uniatz followed, and saw the Thompson gun. His hand started to move, and nothing but the Saint's steady nerves and ancient familiarity with Mr Uniatz's reflexes could have stopped the movement short of disaster. But the Saint said, exactly at the critical moment, in a voice of level confidence: "Don't be scared, Hoppy. It's just a house custom."

In spite of which he felt hollow in the pit of his stomach for an instant, until Hoppy's arm relaxed. All the theories in the world would have little bearing on the subject if Gallipolis had cause to get nervous.

"Okay, boss." Mr Uniatz had been in houses with unusual customs before. "Where is dis bar?"

"Through there," said Gallipolis.

They all went through. Gallipolis came last, heeling the door shut behind him. He crossed to behind the bar and laid the weight of his gun on the counter. He reached behind him, without averting his eyes, and hitched over a bottle. With a repetition of the same movement he brought over four glasses, wearing them on his fingers like outsized thimbles, and plunked them on the bar beside the bottle.

"Help yourselves," he said, "and let's hear more about this."

It was the merest chance that Simon happened to be standing in a position which gave him a direct sight through the shutter peephole on to a lone black shape that was stalking across the waste outside. It was an additional accident of eyesight and observation which identified the figure to him with instant certainty, even at that distance, and even though the identification left him windmilling on the brink of the ultimate chaos whose possibility he had barely divined three minutes ago.

Very deliberately he uncorked the bottle and poured himself out a glass.

"Before we do that," he said, "maybe you'd better put the thunder iron away."

"For why?" The Greek's voice had a delicate edge of invitation.

"Because, literally, we're all in the same boat," Simon remarked conversationally. "You've taken away my gun, but Hoppy still has a concealed arsenal. And you can't even conceal yours. It might make it awkward to explain things to the Sheriff — and I just happened to see him ambling over this way."

2

Gallipolis turned back from a quick stare through the peephole, and Simon had an uneasy feeling that the crisis would have no amusing features at all if the Greek failed to grasp his cue.

Gallipolis said, in a low and rapid monotone: "What sort of a plant is this? There's more men hidden in the trees. I saw them move. I've a notion to drill you, you dirty stool!"

Oddly, his surprise seemed as sincere as his anger. But there was no time to puzzle out nuances like that. The Saint said: "Drilling me won't get you anywhere. And if you don't know how Haskins got here, I don't either."

"Talk fast," said Gallipolis, "and don't lie. The Sheriff never spotted this barge. Who tipped him off?"

"On my word of honour," said the Saint steadily, "I wish I knew."

Over the bar, Gallipolis gazed at him with relentless penetration. The slender fingers of his right hand twined with deceptive laxness about the pistol grip of his weapon. The liquid eyes roved through impenetrable fancies, as though he were working out lyrics for a ballad entitled "Death Comes to the Houseboat", or something else equally delightful. But when he grinned again, he looked exactly the same as he had before.

"Look, master mind," he said. "The Sheriff is your problem. You brought Jennet here. Nobody can prove I ever saw him before. If this is a plant, it stinks. If it isn't, you find a way out of it"

"We can both find a way out of it, if you'll give me a chance. But get rid of the typewriter, or you're in deeper than anyone."

Gallipolis digested the thought, and seemed to make his choice.

"This is a hell of a way to make a living," he remarked, and gave a tired sigh. The hole in the floor under the bar was still exposed. He deposited the sub-machine-gun tenderly in it, and slid the bar back, and said: "I may be a sucker, but I just wish I knew when you were levelling. There's something screwy going on, but I don't get it."

"Neither do I," said the Saint, and his manner was almost friendly.

Gallipolis looked hopeful.

"If you want to scram now, you've still got time."

"I think I'll stay."

"I was afraid so," said Gallipolis sadly. It was at that moment that another sound made itself heard.

It was a raucous and rasping sound, a primitive ululation that seemed to bear little relation to any vocal effort that might have been wrung from the diaphragm of an articulate human being. An experienced African hunter might have associated it with some of the more hideous rumblings of the wild, such as the howl of an enraged rhinoceros, or the baffled bellow of a water-buffalo which has arrived at it's favourite wallow only to find it parched and dry. This doughty hunter would have been pardonably deceived. The sound did have a human origin, if Mr Uniatz can be broadly classified as human. It was his rendition of a groan.

Simon turned and looked at him.

For perhaps the first time in his life, Mr Uniatz stood gazing at a bottle without making any attempt to assimilate its contents, gripped in a kind of horripilant torpor like a rabbit fascinated by a snake.

"What's the matter?" Simon demanded with real alarm.

Mr Uniatz tried to speak, only to find himself impeded by the bulk of a painfully dust-caked tongue. Mutely he pointed with a trembling finger, which indicated the contents of the bottle better than words. In a shaft of afternoon sunlight through the gun port, the liquid gleamed with the translucent clarity of a draught from the backyard pump — refreshing, innocuous, unsullied, colourless, and clear. A shudder of abhorrence jarred his gargantuan frame. To one who in his opulent days had quaffed the finest and most potent liquors on the market, such an offering was an affront. To one who in less prosperous times had uncomplainingly got by with snacks of rubbing alcohol, lemon extract, Jamaica ginger, or bay rum, this disgusting fluid promised to titillate his palate about as much as a feather would tickle an armadillo.

"It's a bottle of dat stinkin' Florida water, boss," Hoppy got out miserably. "I smelled dat stuff before. Dis ain't no bar — it's a wash-room."

Gallipolis turned insultedly from staring through the window.

"That's the hottest water you ever tasted, big boy. It comes fresh from a local spring. Why don't you try it?" He filled his own glass, grinned at Simon, and said: "Here's to crime!"

The Saint sniffed his portion experimentally. It didn't seem at first as if Hoppy could be entirely wrong. The bad-egg bouquet brought back memories of sulphur springs flowing through fetid swamps. But Hoppy had to be given a lesson in good manners.

Simon closed his eyes and drank the liquor down.

He realized the gravity of his error before the saber-toothed distillation of pine knots and turpentine was half through making scar tissue of his tongue. But by that time it was far too late. He tried to gasp out "Water!", but the descending decoction had temporarily cauterised his throat in one clean searing tonsillectomy. Smouldering vocal cavities excavated into strange shapes by the toxic stream sent out the request in an impotent whisper. Tear ducts dilated in salty sympathy. He propped himself feebly against the bar, believing that the power of speech was lost to him for ever.

Through a watery haze he watched Hoppy Uniatz, reassured, lift up the bottle, tilt back his head to the position of a baying wolf, and lower the contents by three full inches before he straightened his neck again.

"Chees, boss…"

Mr Uniatz momentarily released his lips from the bottle with the partly satiated air of a suckling baby. He stared at it with a slightly blank expression. Then, as if to batter his incredulous senses into conviction, he raised the bottle a second time. The level had dropped another four inches when he set it down again, and even Lafe Jennet's graven scowl softened in compulsive admiration.

"Chees, boss," said Mr Uniatz, "if dat's de local spring water I ain't drinkin' nut'n else from now on!"

The Saint wiped his scorched lips with his handkerchief, and looked at it as if he expected to find brown holes in the cloth. He was even incapable of paying much attention to the entrance of Sheriff Haskins into the bar. He breathed with his mouth open, ventilating his anguished mucous tissues, while Haskins draped himself against the door and said: "Hullo, son."

"Hullo, daddy." The Saint valiantly tried to coax his voice back into operation. "It's nice to see you again so soon. You know Mr Gallipolis? — Sheriff Haskins."

"Shuah, I know him." Haskins chewed ruminatively. "He's a smart young feller. Runs a nice quiet juke we've knowed about for a yeah or more. I figgered to raid it one o' these days, but I gave up the idea." He nodded tolerantly towards the reddening Greek. "He ain't big enough to use that much gas on. I'd have no time for anythin' else if I started knockin' off every ten-cent joint around Miami that runs a poker game an' sells a bad brand o' shine."

Gallipolis leaned his elbows on the" bar.

"Then what did you come for, Sheriff?"

"This."

Haskins moved like a striking rattler, snatching off the dark glasses that Simon had bought for Jennet.

Jennet snarled like a dog, and snatched at the bottle on the bar. It must always be in doubt whether Hoppy Uniatz's even faster response was the automatic action of a co-operative citizen or the functioning of a no less reflex instinct to retain possession of his newly discovered elixir. But no matter what his motivation might have been, the result was adequate. One of his iron paws grabbed Jennet's wrist, and the other wrenched the bottle away. There was a click of metal as Haskins deftly handcuffed the struggling convict.

"Thanks," said the Sheriff dryly, giving Hoppy the benefit of the doubt, and at the same time giving Mr Uniatz his first and only accolade from the Law. "You re wanted up near Olustee, Lafe, to do some road work you ain't never finished. Might think you were a tourist, the way you were ridin' around town.'

"I was kidnapped," Jennet whined. "Why don't you arrest them, too?" His manacled hands indicated the Saint and Hoppy. "They drug me out here at the point of a gun."

"Now, that's right interestin'," said Haskins.

He turned his back on Jennet and walked to a place beside Simon at the bar. He moved his left thumb, and Gallipolis produced another bottle of shine, Hoppy having cautiously taken the first bottle out of range of further accidents. Haskins refilled the Saint's glass, and poured himself a liberal drink.

Simon Templar contemplated the repeat order of nectar unenthusiastically. The stuff had an inexhaustible range of effects. At the moment, the first dose was still with him: his throat was cooling a little, but his stomach now felt as if he had swallowed an ingot of molten lead. Besides which, he wanted to think quickly. If there were going to be a lot of questions to answer, he had to decide on his answering line. And disintegrating as the idea might seem, he simply couldn't perceive any line more straightforward, more obvious, more foolproof, more unchallengeable, more secure against future complications, and more utterly disarming, than the strict and irrefutable truth — so far as it went. It was a strange conclusion to come to, but he knew that subterfuge was a burden that was only worth sustaining when its objective was clearly seen, and for the life of him he couldn't see any objective now. So he watched in silent awe while the Sheriff filtered his four ounces of sulphuretted hydrochloric acid past his uvula without disturbing his chew.

"Gawd A'mighty," Haskins exclaimed huskily, eyeing his glass in mild astonishment "Must have squeezed that out of a panther. Did you come all the way out here to get a drink of that scorpion's milk? Give me an answer, son."

"I'm glad somebody else thinks it's powerful," said the Saint relievedly. "Actually, Sheriff, I came out here looking for a man."

Haskins found a place between vest and pants, and scratched himself over the belt of his gun.

"I'll feel a sight better, son, if you tell me more."

"There's nothing much to hide." Simon felt even more certain of the rightness of his decision. "A few minutes after you left this morning, Jennet took a shot at me from the bushes. If you want to, we can drive back in and you can dig his mushroom bullet out of the Gilbecks' wall."

The Sheriff pushed back his hat, found a wisp of hair, twisted it into a point, and said: "Well, now!"

"My friend Hoppy Uniatz — that's him over there, under the bottle — caught Jennet. We also got a rifle with his fingerprints on it — it must have 'em, because he wasn't wearing gloves. You can have that, too, if you want to come back for it, and prove that it fired the bullet in the wall."

Haskins' shrewd grey eyes stayed on the Saint's face.

"Guess you wouldn't be so keen for me to prove it, son, if it warn't true," he conceded. "So I'll save myself the trouble. But it still don't say what you're doin' with Lafe out here."

"After we caught him," said the Saint, "we worked on him a little. Nothing really rough, of course — he didn't make us go that far. But we persuaded him to talk. I didn't have the least idea why he or anybody else should be shooting at me. He told me he was forced to do it by a guy named Jesse Rogers who knew he was a lamster; and he said he met this Rogers out here. So we just naturally came out for a look-see."

"That's a lie," said Gallipolis. "Jennet was just playing for time. He hasn't been here since he was sent up, and you can't prove anything else."

"That was only what he told me," Simon confessed.

Haskins replaced his corkscrewed forelock.

"I shuah am bein' offered a lot of easy provin' to do," he observed morosely. "What I want is the things you-all ain't so ready to show me. How about this guy Rogers?"

"He comes here," said Gallipolis. "But he's been coming on and off for two years."

"Know anythin' about him?"

"No more than anybody else who comes here. I know what he looks like and how much he spends."

The Greek's limpid-eyed sincerity was as transparent as it had been when he told Simon quite a different story.

Haskins ambled over to a comer and ejected his chew with off-hand accuracy into a convenient cuspidor.

"This business is gettin' so danged tangled up," he announced as he came back, "it's like watchin' a snake eatin' its own tail. If it keeps on long enough there won't be nuth'n left at all."

"Perhaps," Simon advanced mildly, "you'd save yourself a lot of headaches if you took Lafe back to your office and saw what you could get out of him there."

The Sheriff was troubled. He searched beyond the Saint's serious tone for some justification of his feeling of being taken for a ride. It was difficult to define the glint in the Saint's scapegrace blue eyes as one of open mockery; and yet…

"An' where will you be," he asked, "while that's goin' on?"

"I might see if I can get a line on this Rogers bird," said the Saint. "But you know where to get in touch with me if you need me again."

"Look, son." Haskins' long nose moved closer, backed by a narrowing stare. "Whether or not you know it, you've done me a right smart good turn today. Lafe's meaner 'n gar broth, an' wanted bad. I'll be plenty happy to see him tucked away. But I don't want no more trouble on account o' you. Suppose now we all go back to town peaceable like, an' you leave the findin' of this Rogers to me."

Simon took out a pack of cigarettes and meditatively selected one.

He felt even more uncannily as if he were a puppet that was being taken through some conspicuous but meaningless part of a complex choreography, while the real motif was still running in incomprehensible counterpoint Too many people seemed to be too completely genuine to too little purpose.

There was, of course, the girl Karen, who might be classed as an unknown quantity. But it was impossible to visualise the pickle-pussed Lafe Jennet, no matter what his status as a marksman might be, as an embryo Machiavelli. Gallipolis had displayed several paradoxical characteristics, but the Saint felt ridiculously and unreasonably certain that among all of them there was a perplexity which contradicted the part of a conspirator. And there could be no doubt at all about the Sheriff. Newt Haskins might speak with a drawl and chew tobacco and move slothfully under the southern sun, but his slothfulness was that of a lizard which could wake into lightning swiftness. He had quite unmistakably the rare gem-like clarity of character of a man whom no fear or fortune could ever swerve from his arid conception of duty. And yet his arrival that afternoon had a timeliness which seemed to be an integral part of an elusive pattern.

No abstract extrapolation could ever make order out of it, Simon concluded. And so the only thing still was to find out — to let his own natural impulses take their course, and see where they led him.

"I just hate being shot at," he said amicably, "especially by proxy. And I don't think I'd be violating any law by looking for a guy named Rogers if I wanted to. Or would I?"

Haskins stared at him for the briefest part of a minute. His lean weatherbeaten face was as unemotional as a piece of old leather.

"No. son," he said at last. "Just lookin' for a guy named Rogers won't be violatin' no laws…" He turned abruptly, grasped Jennet by the collar, and propelled him towards the door. "Git goin', Lafe." He glanced back at the Saint once more, from the doorway. "I'll be around," he said, and went out.

Simon lounged languidly against the bar, and tried to put a smoke-ring over the neck of a bottle.

Gallipolis used the peephole to assure himself that Haskins and Jennet had really gone. He turned his face back from the aperture with a discouraged air.

"The hell with it." He waggled his curly head from side to side, and looked at the Saint "Are you going too, or have you got any more trouble?"

"You've still got my gun," Simon reminded him.

The Greek seemed to brood about it. Then he slid back the bar and picked out the Luger from his cache. He handed it to Simon butt foremost.

"Okay," he said. "Now what?"

Simon holstered the gun.

"Why didn't you tell the Sheriff what you told me about Rogers?"

"Hell," said Gallipolis, "I should help him? I hope you find Rogers. He might have made trouble for me here."

"What else do you know?"

"Not a thing, friend." Gallipolis replaced the bar, with a movement of gentle finality. "I guess I better see what's left of Frank. You wouldn't want to take a job dealing stud for me?" Before Simon could think of any fitting way of declining the compliment, he answered his own question with a mournful "No," and disappeared down the hall.

The Saint straightened himself with an infinitesimally preoccupied shrug.

"I guess we might as well blow, too, Hoppy," he said. "But it all looks too damned easy."

"Dat's what I t'ought," agreed Mr Uniatz complacently.

For once it was Simon Templar who did the delayed take. He had reached the foot of the gangplank, busy with other thoughts, when it dawned abashingly on him that his low esteem for Hoppy's mental alertness might after all have been unjust He half stopped.

"How did you work it out?"

Mr Uniatz removed the bottle neck from his lips with a noise like a dying drain.

"It's easy, boss." Mr Uniatz expanded with pleasure at being accepted, if only temporarily, into the usually closed councils of the Saint's gigantic brain. "All we gotta do is find de Pool."

A faint frown began to mar the Saint's heartening attention.

"What pool?"

"De Pool you talk to March about on de boat," Hoppy explained darkly. "I got it all figgered out. De Greek says it comes from a spring, but dat's a stall. It comes from dis Foreign Pool we're lookin' for. Dat's de racket I got it all figgered out," said Mr Uniatz, clinching his point with rhetorical simplicity.

3

Simon Templar had enjoyed a long drink which did not peel the last remaining membranes from his throat; he had told his inconclusive story to Peter and Patricia; he had showered refreshingly; and he had changed at leisure into dress trousers, soft shirt, and cummerbund. He was perfecting the set of a maroon bow tie when Desdemona knocked on his door and proclaimed disapprovingly: "Dey's a lady to see you."

"Who is it?" he asked, from habit, but his circulation changed tempo like a schoolboy's.

"Same one who was here dis mawnin'."

He heard the Negress flat-footing disdainfully away as he slipped into a fresh white mess jacket.

Karen Leith was in the patio, and her loveliness almost stopped him. She was wearing some unelaborately costly trifle of white, gathered close about breast and waist and billowing into extravagant fullness below. The tinted patio lights touched the folds with some of the sunset colours of her hair. Otherwise it was all white, except for a thin green chiffon handkerchief tucked into a narrow gold belt at her waist.

"So you made it," said the Saint

"You asked me."

Her lips were so fresh and cool, smiling at him, that it was an effort not to repeat his performance of the morning, even though there could be no excuse for it now.

"I couldn't believe I was so irresistible," he said.

"I thought it over all day, and decided to come… Besides, it made Randy so mad."

"Doesn't that matter?"

"He hasn't bought me — yet."

"But you told him."

"Why not? I'm free, white, and — twentyfive. I had to tell him, anyway. I asked Haskins not to tell, but I realised I couldn't trust him. Suppose he'd gone ambling off in his quiet crafty way and told Randy, just to see what he could stir up. It'd 've looked quite bad if I hadn't said it first."

They were still holding hands, and Simon became conscious of it rather foolishly. Even though she hadn't tried to draw away. There was either too little reason for it, or too much. He released her fingers, and went to the portable bar which he had thoughtfully ordered out before he went to dress.

"Are you sure that was all?" he asked, as he brewed cocktails with a practised hand.

"Of course, I did wonder how you made out on your trip this afternoon."

"As you see, I came back alive."

"Did you find the barge, and the mysterious Mr Rogers?"

"The barge, but not Mr Rogers. He wasn't there. I'm going to meet him tonight." Simon handed her a glass. "But it's nice of you to be interested. It's a pity, though, because I shall have to take you home early."

"What for?" she objected. "I'm a long time out of the vicarage. I could even enjoy going to a place like the Palmleaf Fan."

The Saint was a man whose nerves of steel and impregnable imperturbability are by this time as familiar as the contour of their own bottoms to all patrons of circulating libraries and movie theatres, not to mention the purchasers of popular magazines and newspapers. It cannot therefore be plausibly stated that he staggered on his feet. But it must also be revealed that he came as close to it as he was ever likely to come. So ft can only be recorded that he picked up his own drink and subsided circumspectly into the nearest chair.

"Let me get this straight," he said. "I forced a fugitive from a chain gang, under threats of hideous torture, to guide me to a gambling barge that looked like a prop from a Grand Guignol show. I crawled for miles on my stomach like a serpent, ruining an excellent pair of pants and getting myself stuck in all kinds of intimate places with an assortment of needle points which no good housewife would leave on a potted palm. I had a contest in hypnotism with a singularly evil-looking cottonmouth moccasin on the bank of a very stagnant canal. I exposed a crooked stud dealer, and was offered his job by a curly-haired Greek with a machine gun. Some thoughtful soul even took the trouble to send the Sheriff after me again, and I had to distract his attention by giving him our friend Jennet as a scapegoat And do you know where that got me?"

"I think so." She could even look demure. "You found out that Rogers worked at the Palmleaf Fan."

Simon swallowed a mouthful of blended alcohols with a voracity that would have done credit to Mr Uniatz.

"When did you find it out?"

"Oh, several days ago."

"Of course, you couldn't have told me right away, instead of letting me wriggle all over Florida like a boy scout trying for an Eagle badge. I mean, we could have spent the afternoon playing backgammon or visiting an alligator farm, or something else harmless and diverting."

She was sitting on the arm of his chair now, and her slim fingers rested on his shoulder.

"My dear," she said "I hated to let you do it. But I wasn't sure what else there was. And would you have missed it?"

"You were just doing it for my own good?"

"I didn't know there was nothing else in it than tracking Rogers down. You had to find out. If you were going to follow a trail, you had to follow it exactly as it was laid out. I might have switched you into a short cut that led nowhere."

The Saint sat up.

"Karen," he said quietly, "how much more do you know?"

She sipped her drink.

This is nice," she said. "What is it?"

"Something I made up. I call it a Wedding Night."

"That sounds more like a perfume."

He took hold of her wrist with a grip that was more crushing than he realised.

"Why not answer the question?"

She lifted her glass again, and then looked at him levelly.

"Haven't I got just as much right to ask you the same question?"

"That's fair enough. I'll answer it. You know just about everything I know. You heard it on the March Hare last night. I shot the works — and half of them were guessworks. You also know what I found out today. I haven't kept anything back. But I'm just as much in the dark as I ever was — with the only difference that I'm not wondering any more whether I'm just dreaming that there's dirty work going on, like an old maid looking under the bed for lecherous burglars. The fact that Jennet took a shot at me this morning proves that someone is interested in my nuisance value, whether the shot was only meant for a warning or not. And since your boy friend Randy and his captain are the only people I'd flaunted my nuisance value at so far, they must be in it up to the neck. A baby could put all that together. But that's all."

"And one other thing," she said. "You have a reputation."

"That's true." He admitted it without vanity or self-satisfaction, as a cold fact. "Moreover, I'm still doing my best to live up to it… Now it's your turn. You told me this morning I could ask you this tonight, and I'm asking."

"Your glass is empty," she said.

His grip had relaxed while he talked, and he let her release herself without tightening it again. She made no attempt to massage her wrist, although the red print of his fingers on her satin skin made him realise how he had forgotten his strength. She had a strength of her own which he had sensed as a core of steel no less finely tempered than his underneath the outward beauty of satin and softness and gossamer, and he wondered why it should be so blandly assumed that women with Tanagra bodies and magazine-cover faces could only be either vapid or vicious inside.

He went back to the portable bar and stirred the shaker and refilled his glass, and said: "If you want to welsh on that, perhaps you've got a reason."

"You're asking me what I know," she replied. "I don't suppose you'd believe me if I told you I don't know much more than you've said already."

"What you actually said I could ask is what your place is in this party."

She let him light her a cigarette, and her amazing eyes were like amethysts under his ruthless scrutiny.

"I run around with Randolph March," she said.

"For what you hope to get out of it?"

"For what I hope to get out of it," she said, without wincing.

"Then why are you going out with me?"

"Because I want to."

"Do you expect to get anything valuable out of me?"

"Probably nothing but a few more kicks in the teeth."

He felt cheap, but he had to harden his heart, even though he was hurting himself as much as he could hope to hurt her.

"Does it make any difference to you if March is mixed up in some dirty work?" he inquired relentlessly.

"A lot of difference."

"If you could get the goods on him, you could make something out of it."

"That's right. I could."

"Meanwhile, you'll string along with him. And I'm sure he expects you to bring back all the information you can squeeze out of me. Your job is to keep him in touch with what I think and find out what I'm going to do."

"Exactly that."

"What would you say if I told you I'd figured all that out long ago, and decided I didn't care? — That I knew you'd been put to watch me, but I didn't think you could do me any harm, and so I didn't give a damn? — That I knew you might be dangerous, but I didn't mind, because I liked danger and it was fun to be with you. Suppose I told you I was taking a chance with my eyes open, and I didn't give a hoot in hell for any harm you could do. Because I believed you'd break down before you saw me put on the spot. And the hell with it, anyway. Then what?"

"God damn you," she said in a low voice, "I'd love you."

He was shaken. He hadn't meant to goad her so far, or have so much said.

He wanted to take a step towards her, but he knew he must not. And she said: "But I'd call you a fool. And I'd love you for that, too. But it couldn't make any difference."

He glanced at his cigarette, and flipped dead ashes on to the terrace. He finished his drink, with leisured appreciation. And he knew that those things made no difference either. In a ridiculous reckless way he was happy, happier than he had been since the beginning of the adventure. With no good reason, and at the same time with all the reasons in the world.

When he was sure enough of himself, he put out his hand.

"Then let's have another cocktail at the Roney Plaza," he said, "and decide where we'll go to dinner. Ana see how it turns out."

She stood up.

Her quiet acceptance seemed even grateful, but there was far more behind it than he could put together at once. It was so hard to penetrate that dazzling and intoxicating outer perfection. She was all white mist and moonbeams, cold flame of hair and cool redness of soft lips; and swords behind them.

But she took his hand.

"Let's have tonight," she said.

She could have said it in twenty ways. And perhaps she said it in all of them at once, or none. But the only certain thing was that for one brief moment, for the second time that day, her mouth had been yielding against his. And this time he had not moved at all.

At eleven thirty she was still with him. When he had looked at his watch and suggested that it was time they left the restaurant, she had said: "I can't stop you taking me home, but you can't stop me calling a taxi and going straight to the Palmleaf Fan."

So they were driving northwards, and on their right the sea lapped a pebbly strip of beach only about eight feet below them. The houses had thinned out and become scarce, and on the left a tangled barrier of shrubbery grew high out of grassy dunes. Only an occasional car dimmed its lights in meeting and flashed by. The road narrowed, and held down their speed with short scenic-railway undulations.

Simon drove with a cigarette clipped lightly between two fingers, and a deep lazy devilment altered the alignment of one eyebrow to an extent that only a micrometer could have measured. But there was a siren song in the wind that his blood answered, and when he put the cigarette to his lips his blue eyes danced with lights that were not all reflected from the glowing end.

He was insane; but he always had been. There could be nothing much screwier than going out to what looked more and more like an elaborately organised rendezvous with destiny in the company of a girl who had freely declared herself a wanderer from the enemy camp. And yet he didn't care. He had told her the literal truth, within its limits, exactly as he believed she had told him. The evening had been worth it, and they had bargained for that. They had had four hours for which he would have fought an army. Adventures could be good or bad, trivial or ponderous; but there had been four hours that would live longer than memory. Even though nothing more of the least importance had been said. They had known each other; and behind the screens of sophisticated patter and unforgettable cross-purposes their own selves had walked together, clear-eyed, like children in a walled garden.

And all that was over now, except for remembrance.

"We're nearly there," she said.

And all he had to be sure of now was that the automatic rode easily in his shoulder holster, without marring the set of a jacket which had been cut to allow for such extra impedimenta, and that his knife was loose in its sheath under his sleeve, and that the atavistic physiognomy of Hoppy Uniatz, whom he had stopped to collect on the way without any protest from her, still nodded somnolently in the back seat.

Ahead and to the left, the sand dunes flattened into a shallow gully with a wooden arch at its entrance. Over the arch a single dim bulb flickered in an erratic way that sent crazy shadows writhing across the road. As the Saint slowed down, he saw that the effect was caused by the uncannily lifelike effigy of a Negro boy which reclined on top of the arch with a palmleaf fan in one dangling hand. The fan, in front of the light, moved restlessly in the breeze and created the flickering shadows.

"This is the place," she said. "It's about half a mile in."

"Looks like a cheerful spot for an ambush," he remarked, and turned the car into the shell road.

Flame fanned past his ear, and a report like the crack of doom left the drum bruised and singing. Fragments of something showered from above, and the largest of them.fell solidly into his lap. He glanced at it as he instinctively trod home the accelerator, and for an instant a ghostly chill walked like a spider up his back. He had to force himself to pick up the black horror; and then suddenly he went weak with helpless laughter.

"What is it?" Karen whispered.

"It's nothing, darling," he said. "Nothing but the hand of a plaster Negro — detached by Hoppy's ever-ready Betsy."

Mr Uniatz leaned over the back of the front seat and stared at the hand remorsefully as Simon tossed it out.

"Chees, boss," he said awkwardly, "I am half asleep when I see him, an' I t'ink he is goin' to jump on us." He tried to cover his mortification with a jaunty emphasis on the silver lining. "One t'ing," he said, "if he's plastered he won't know who done it."

Karen brushed off her dress.

"He's just a big overgrown kid, isn't he?" she said in a tactful undertone. "When are you thinking of sending him to school?"

"We tried once," said the Saint, "but he killed his teacher in the third grade, and the teacher in the fourth grade thought he'd had enough education."

It was fortunate that there was half a mile from the entrance arch to the premises, he reflected, so that it was unlikely that anyone at the Palmleaf Fan would have been alarmed by the shot.

The road swung right in a horseshoe. His headlights ran along a thatched wall ten feet high, broken only by a single door, and picked up the sheen of a line of parked cars. There was not a vast number of them, and he imagined that the crowd would not get really thick until the other night spots were tiredly closing and the diehard drinkers flocked out to this hidden oasis for a last two or three or six nightcaps. Simon parked himself in the line, and as he switched off the engine he heard music filtering out from behind the impressive stockade.

"Well, keed," he said, as Mr Uniatz gouged himself out of the back, "here we go again."

She sat beside him for a moment without moving.

"If anything goes wrong," she said, "I couldn't help it You won't believe me, but I wanted to tell you."

He could see the pale symmetry of her face in the dimness, the full lips slightly parted and her eyes bright and yet stilled, and the scent of her hair was in his nostrils; but beyond those things there was nothing that he could reach, and he knew that that was not delusion. Then her fingers brushed his hand on the wheel briefly, and she opened the door.

He got out on his side, and settled his jacket with a wry and reckless grin. So what the hell?… And as they crossed to the entrance she said in a matter-of-fact way that clinched the tacit acceptance of their return to grim rules that had been half forgotten: "It's easier to get in here if you're known. Let me fix it"

"It's a pipe, boss," declared Mr Uniatz intrusively. "When de lookout opens de window, I reach t'ru an' squeeze his t'roat till he opens de door."

"Let's give her a chance to get us in peacefully first," Simon suggested diplomatically.

It was all strictly practical and businesslike again.

A hidden floodlight beat down on them, and a slit opened in the door — perhaps someone else had thought of Hoppy's method of presenting his credentials, for the slit was too narrow for even a baby's hand to pass through. But there was no need for violence. Eyes scanned them, and saw Karen, and the door opened. It reminded Simon a shade nostalgically of the glad and giddy days of the great American jest that was once known as Prohibition.

The door closed behind them as they entered, operated by a stiffly tuxedoed cut-throat of a type Simon had seen & thousand times before.

"Good evening, Miss Leith."

The blue-chinned watchdog approved the Saint, and veiled his startlement at Hoppy's appearance with a mechanical smile and an equally mechanical bow.

A flagged pathway led to the entrance of the building itself, which was a rambling Spanish-type bungalow. The second door opened as they reached it, doubtless warned by a buzzer from the gate.

They went into a vestibule full of bamboo and Chinese lanterns. Another blue-chinned tuxedo said: "A table tonight. Miss Leith? Or are you going back?"

"A table," she said.

As they followed him, the Saint took her arm and asked: "Where is 'back'?"

"They have gambling rooms with anything you want. If you've got a few thousand dollars you're tired of keeping, they'll be delighted to help you out" '

I tried that once today," said the Saint reminiscently.

They went through into a large dimly lighted dining room. The tables were grouped around three sides of a central dance floor and on the fourth side, facing them, an orchestra played on a dais. Back against one side wall was a long bar. Grotesquely carved coconut masks with lights behind them glowered sullenly from the walls. At either end of the bar a stuffed alligator mounted on its hind legs proffered a tray of matches. Electric bulbs scattered over the raftered ceiling struggled to throw light downwards through close rows of pendent palmetto fans, and only succeeded in enhancing the atmospheric gloom. The collective decorative scheme was a bizarre monstrosity faithfully carried out with justifiable contempt for the healthy taste of probable patrons, but with highly functional regard for the twin problems of reducing the visible need for superfluous cleaning and concealing the presence of cockroaches in the chop suey; and Simon recognised that it was entirely in tune with the demand that it had been designed for.

A silky head waiter, proportionately less blue-jowled as his position demanded, ushered them towards a table on the floor; but the Saint stopped him.

"If nobody minds," he said, "I'd rather have a booth at the back."

The majordomo changed his course with an air of shrivelling reproach. He might have been more argumentative, but it seemed as if Karen's presence restrained him. As they sat down he said: "Will Mr March be joining you?" — and he said it as if to imply that Mr March would have had other ideas about good seating.

Karen dazzled him with her smile and said: "I don't think so."

She ordered Benedictine; and the Saint asked for a bottle of Peter Dawson, more with an eye to Mr Uniatz's inexhaustible capacity than his own more modest requirements.

The orchestra struck up another number, and multicoloured spotlights turned on at each comer of the room threw moving rainbows on the floor. Karen glanced at him almost with invitation.

"All right," he said resignedly.

They danced. He hadn't wanted to, and he had to keep his mind away from what they were doing. She had a lightness and grace and rhythm that would have made it seem easy to float away into unending voids of rapturous isolation; her yielding slenderness was too close to him for what he had to remember. He tried to forget her, and concentrate on a study of the human contents of the room.

And he realised that there were some things about the clientele of the Palmleaf Fan which were more than somewhat queer.

He wasn't thinking of the more obvious queernesses, either; although it dawned on him in passing that some of the groups of highly made-up girls who sat at inferior tables with an air of hoping to be invited to better ones were a trifle sinewy in the arms and neck, while on the other hand some of the delicate-featured young men who sat apart from them were too-well-developed in the chest for the breadth of their shoulders. Those eccentricities were standard in the honky-tonks of Miami. The more unusual queerness was in some of the cash customers.

There was, of course, a good proportion of unmistakable sightseers, not-so-tired business men, visiting firemen, shallow-brained socialites, flashy mobsters, and self-consciously hilarious collegians — the ordinary cross-section of any Miami night spot. But among them there was a more than ordinary leavening of personalities who unobtrusively failed to fit in — who danced without abandon, and drank with more intensity of purpose than enthusiasm, and talked too earnestly when they talked at all, and viewed the scene when they were not talking with a detachment that was neither bored nor disapproving nor cynical nor envious but something quite inscrutably, different. Many of them were young, but without youthfulness — the men hard and clean-cut but dull-looking, a few girls who were blonde but dowdy and sometimes bovine. The older men tended to be stout and stolid, with none of the élan of truant executives. There was one phrase that summed up the common characteristic of this unorthodox element, he knew, but it dodged annoyingly through the back of his mind, and he was still trying to corner it when the music stopped.

They went back to the table, and he sat down in the secure position he had chosen with his back to the wall. Their order had been delivered, and Hoppy Uniatz was plaintively contemplating eight ounces of Scotch whisky which he had unprecedently poured into a glass.

"Boss," complained Mr Uniatz, "dis is a clip jernt."

"Very likely," Simon assented. "What have they done to your

Hoppy flourished his glass.

"De liquor," he said. "It's no good."

Simon poured some into his own glass, sniffed it, and sipped. Then he filled it up with water and ice and tried again.

"It seems all right to me," he said.

"Aw, sure, it's de McCoy. Only I just don't like it no more."

The Saint inspected him with a certain anxiety.

"What's the matter? Aren't you feeling well?"

"Hell, no, boss. I feel fine. Only I don't like it no more. It ain't got no kick after dat Florida pool water. I ast de waiter if he's got any, an' he gives me dat stuff." Hoppy pointed disgustedly at the carafe. "It just tastes like what ya wash in. I told him we ain't gonna pay for no fish-bath, an' he says he won't charge for it. I scared de pants off him. But dey try it on, just de same. Dat's what I mean, boss, it's a clip jemt," said Mr Uniatz, proving his contention.

The Saint sighed.

"What you'll have to do," he said consolingly, "is go back to Comrade Gallipolis and "ask him for some more."

He lighted a cigarette and returned to his faintly puzzled analysis of the room.

Karen Leith seemed to sense his vaguely irritated concentration without being surprised by it. She turned a cigarette between her own finger and thumb, and said: "What are you making of it?"

"It bothers me," he replied, frowning. "I've been in other joints with some of these fancy trimmings — I mean the boys and girls. I think I know just what sort of floor show they're going to put on. But I can't quite place some of the customers. They aren't very spontaneous about their fun. I've seen exactly the same thing before, somewhere." He was merely thinking aloud. "They look more as if they'd come out here because the doctor had told them to have a good time, by God, if it killed them. There's a phrase on the tip of my tongue that just hits it, if I could only get it out—"

"A sort of Kraft durch Freude?" she prompted him.

He snapped his fingers.

"Damn it, of course! It's Strength through Joy — or the other way round. Like in Berlin. With that awful Teutonic seriousness. 'All citizens will have a good time on Thursday night. By order.' The night life of this town must have got to a pretty grisly state…"

His voice trailed off, and his gaze settled across the room with an intentness that temporarily wiped every other thought out of his mind.

The head waiter was obsequiously ushering Randolph March and his captain to a table on the other side of the floor.