The Saint in Miami

1

Heat came with the morning — a sticky oppressive heat that stewed itself softeningly into every bone and cartilage. The Saint had known jungles and deserts, but he had never felt himself overwhelmed with such torrid enervation. The mists fled before the sun, leaving the swampland a visible vastness of tangled draperies that seemed to have neither beginning nor end; but over the riotously intertwining foliage the humidity still weighed down like an invisible blanket. His arms ached with the strain of fighting the twin clutch levers, and his whole body felt as if it had been left overnight in a Finnish bath.

"How much further, Charlie?"

Simon found that his voice also had sunk into a lower key. He used his sleeve to wipe perspiration from the clutch handles.

The Indian pointed away from where the climbing sun was slanting into their eyes and said: "Over there. Maybe ten miles. Maybe fifteen. Maybe more. Dunno."

"For Christ's sake," Simon swore. "I thought it was only ten miles when we left the road. Now it's maybe more. What am I doing — driving this goddam tank backwards?"

"Plenty hard," said the Indian impassively. "No can go straight. Plenty long way round."

"We should have gone back to Miami and bought an aeroplane," said the Saint dispiritedly.

"If you wanted to land anywhere in this country," said Gallipolis, "you'd have to get out with a parachute."

It was only too plain, as Simon stared at the landscape ahead, that the Greek was not exaggerating. Simon took time off to light another cigarette, and admitted it. There was nothing else to do but what they were doing.

Charlie Halwuk said: "Can go back."

Simon caught the glint in the Seminole's flat black eyes and twisted his lips back to the reckless smile that so seldom left them.

"I'm hungry and sleepy and the mosquitoes have taken enough blood out of me for a transfusion, and I've tooled this cockeyed charabanc around all night through stuff that I didn't think anything on wheels would go through," he drawled. "After that, what's another day more or less? I always wanted to see these Everglades, anyway. Let's have some breakfast, and I'll drive on."

They built a small fire to boil water to make coffee, since that was the only way to disguise the colour of the swamp water and at the same time reduce its probable bacterial content. They ate corned beef and canned beans cold — or as cold as the outside temperature allowed them to be, which was really lukewarm. And the Saint drove on.

On and on.

It was like winding through a labyrinth with walls which only Charlie Halwuk could see. There was the sun now to give Simon a sense of direction, but that would have been no help to him if he had been alone. The trail that Charlie Halwuk knew would have looked on a map like the track of an intoxicated eel. And always the wilderness opened before them with sullen hostility and timeless patience, as though it were a sentient hungry thing that knew they must weaken in the end and be devoured…

The marsh buggy chugged through endless alternations of jungle and swamp and grass and groves where the ghostly remnants of cypress trees spired upwards to make circular pincushions of mysterious pools. As the heat grew more stifling, jutting ends of logs became the sun-roofs of assorted turtles basking in friendly fashion beside deadly cotton-mouths. As the buggy approached, snakes and turtles quietly slipped away, leaving nothing but widening circles in stream or pool; and roseate spoonbills, blacknecked stilts, burrowing owls and stately herons rose before their intrusion and took refuge in the air. But only once the Seminole caught Simon's arm as a small bird much like a falcon rose before them.

"Look," he whispered.

The Saint's eyes followed the speeding flash of blue and grey.

"Everglade kite," said Charlie Halwuk. "Maybe last time white man ever see. One time plenty. No more. Twenty, thirty maybe now. Soon come be gone like Indian. White man never see!"

Time crawled on as slowly as they moved.

The marsh buggy took to shallow milky water. Simon wrenched it along the serpentine course for a few hundred yards, and then the denseness of a bayhead barred them with a wiry thorny wall. The soil about them was a deep quaking humus that clung like salve to the broad soft tyres. Following Charlie Halwuk's pointing, the Saint turned south and skirted the impenetrable barrier until he found a knoll of comparatively higher and drier ground. He stopped there for another brief rest and a cigarette.

Mr Uniatz moved his Neanderthal bulk, yawned with the daintiness of a breathing switch engine, and said: "Dis jalopy is makin' me seasick, boss. When do we eat again?"

Simon saw from his watch that it was after one o'clock.

"Very soon, I think," he said, and started the buggy again.

Almost at once, as if in answer to the movement, a dog hidden somewhere in the undergrowth yapped loudly. Others joined in, shattering the barren deadness with their snarling bedlam. The noise was so sharp and savage and unexpected that the Saint's hackles rose and Gallipolis fumbled for his gun; but the Indian showed a trace of pleasure.

"Chikee there," he said. "My people camp. We get plenty sofkee. Drive on."

In a hundred yards the bayhead fell away. Simon pulled up in astonishment.

They had run into a great moss-draped amphitheatre floored with dry loamy ground. A fire burned in the centre, blazing brightly in the hub of ten enormous logs arranged like the spokes of a wheel. High above the fire was a roof of thatched palmetto leaves supported by four uprights driven into the ground. Pots and pans interspersed with dried meat and herbs hung from the rafters. At one corner of the tribal fireplace was a mortar hollowed from the head of a cypress log, where their arrival failed to interrupt an ancient squaw who sat pounding corn with a wooden pestle.

Chikees formed a square around the central kitchen. They were similar to the roofed fireplace, except that they had floors of plaited saplings raised several feet above the ground. Blanketed forms roused from the floors at the stopping of the marsh buggy, while others rose from where they had been sitting on the fire logs; and when Simon stepped down and stretched his aching limbs he found himself surrounded by a curious group of them.

Charlie Halwuk spoke quickly, and the circle of faces lightened. A clatter of welcome, which Simon decided was friendly, broke out in the liquid Seminole tongue.

"They give us sofkee," interpreted Charlie Halwuk, and got down.

Mr Uniatz followed stiffly, and Gallipolis without his gun. One of the Seminoles reached out suddenly and felt the material of Hoppy's blazer. He made a comment which brought back several excited echoes. More Indians crowded up, chatterring guttural enthusiasm for the screaming colours of the blazer, and formed a guard of honour to escort Hoppy to a log which served as a chair. Charlie Halwuk watched the demonstration with a certain possessive pride.

"Him damn good man," he said, reverting to a previous impression.

"Boss," Hoppy said pathetically, "what goes on?"

"They like you," said the Saint. "You seem to have carried away half of the Seminole nation with your irresistible charm. For God's sake try to look as if you appreciated it."

A wizened Indian, whom Charlie Halwuk treated with the deference due to a chief, ceremoniously passed out sofkee in coconut bowls. It proved to be ground cornmeal mush, undoubtedly wholesome enough, but a dish which any gourmet could have spared from his menu. Fortunately the other items were more appetising. There came turkey stew, sweet potatoes, and cowpeas. There were also oranges. Simon bit into one, and found his mouth suddenly curdled into an acidulous ball.

"Plenty wild, plenty sour," said Charlie contentedly. "You eatum long time, then like'um."

Simon decided that that was another exotic taste which he could afford not to acquire.

When the meal was finished, the Greek's eyelids were drooping and Mr Uniatz was snoring majestically in the shade watched by an immobile circle of worshippers. The Saint felt his own eyes growing heavy. Against all his deeper impulses, he forced himself to let the insidious lethargy take its course. To give time to sleep, in the circumstances, seemed like a kind of treason; and yet he knew that it was as vital as eating. If he were to arrive at the destination where he was going with any of his faculties below their peak, he might almost as well not make the trip at all.

He awoke refreshed after an hour of concentrated oblivion, to find Charlie Halwuk squatting beside him.

"Lostman's River three miles," announced the Indian, as if there had been no interruption. He found a stick, and rapidly drew an intricate outline in the soil. "We here now. He made a cross, and indicated the space between the cross and the indentations of the coastline. "In here, quicksand. Plenty bad. No can do. We go this way." A wide spiralling hook. "Too bad. Twelve miles — maybe more."

"It's been about that distance ever since I can remember,'' said the Saint.

Charlie Halwuk stared reflectively up towards the red ball of the sun.

"Plenty rain. We go on?"

"You spoke about rain last night," Simon retorted. "If you could produce some, it might freshen us up. Do we pay your people for the meal?"

"You give chief big boy's coat. He make you son."

The Saint chuckled.

"I've already got one daddy in Miami. See if you can talk Hoppy into it."

While the Indian went to his task, Simon found some water and rinsed his face. Gallipolis followed his example. Shaking tepid drops out of his curly hair, the Greek studied Simon with a sort of unwilling perplexity.

"I had you all wrong, mister," he said. "When I saw you in that monkey suit tonight, I didn't really think you could take three hours of this. Now I won't even back Charlie Halwuk to stand up longer than you."

"Don't put up your money too quickly," said the Saint "We haven't arrived yet"

But he smiled when he said it, in spite of himself. He was taking a new lease of confidence. He had lived soft, by these standards, for a long time; but he knew now that he was the same man that he had always been. With the short rest, strength had flowed back into him. A half-forgotten indomitable resilience picked him up again and loosened his thews with freshness. If he failed, he knew now, it would not be because he had failed himself.

He checked the level of the gas tank again, and found that their fuel was more than half gone. He poured in their reserve supply with a silent prayer that it would be enough.

Then, as he climbed into the driving seat again, he saw a historic sight.

Across the clearing, followed by Charlie Halwuk, and at a more respectful distance by the rest of the Seminole village — braves, squaws, and papooses — came Mr Hoppy Uniatz. Arm in arm with him walked the chief, proudly wearing Mr Uniatz's appalling blazer. In exchange, Mr Uniatz had acquired a ruffle-pleated Seminole shirt with a pattern of vivid rainbow stripes.

The procession reached the marsh buggy, and stopped. The chief put both his hands on Hoppy's shoulders and made what sounded like a short oration. The rest of the tribe grunted approvingly. The chief stepped back like a French general who has just bestowed a medal.

Hoppy got into the marsh buggy and said hoarsely: "Boss, get me outa here."

The tribe stood like wooden totem poles, silently watching, as Simon engaged the clutches and the huge wheels rolled again.

"I never knew," said the Saint, in an awed voice, "that you were a graduate of the Dale Carnegie Institute."

Mr Uniatz swallowed bashfully.

"Chief say him come back," interpreted Charlie Halwuk complacently. "Marry chief's daughter. Damn good."

The heat beat down until it felt like a tangible weight on Simon's scalp, and he felt certain that at any moment the shallow patches of water about them would break into a boil. But it hardly seemed to affect him physically any more. He was getting his second wind, and the discomfort was almost welcome because it left him no energy to feed into his imagination. He didn't want to do too much thinking. There were too many things in the background of his mind that were not good to think about. He wanted to black them out and concentrate on nothing but the grim task of getting to the only place where thinking would do any good.

And then came the rain.

A crackling sound, as sharp as the sound of a brush fire, heralded the foresweep of a blast of humid air. Black storm-clouds drove westwards before it and curtained the brazen sun with palls of gunmetal. For seconds the world seemed to stand motionless under the strain of a supernatural compression. Then the clogged skies burst open and let loose the deluge that Charlie Halwuk had prophesied.

This was no gentle shower greening the fields of England, no light drizzle blending with the sea spray on the coasts of Maine. It was flat and hard and tropically brutal, pounding straight down to gouge a million tiny craters out of the swamp water and blot out all vision beyond a few yards with its grey dripping wall.

They drove on. Their clothes were soaked as suddenly as the storm struck, but each sodden body turned into a ball of steam. It stung their faces like a sort of soggy hail, and smashed in thousands of tiny dancing shell-bursts over the engine cowling. But the marsh buggy kept going, as ponderous and impervious as a great groping tortoise. Time had no more significance; it ceased to exist, smothered under the borderless avalanche of leaden wet.

As the afternoon wore on there was an almost imperceptible change.

"Quit soon now," said Charlie Halwuk.

Twenty minutes later the beating in the hammocks and bayheads was still, as abruptly as it had begun, and bars of light from the setting sun broke through the vanishing clouds.

The marsh buggy completed the fording of another sluggishly rolling stream, and Simon stopped to squeeze some of the dripping water out of his hair.

And then he was aware of another strange noise.

It was like nothing he had ever heard before. Superficially, it was nothing but a chorus of ferocious squeals and gruntings. But it had a savagery and a blood lust in it that was worse than the roar of a tiger or a panther's scream — a shrill bestial fury that sent cold trickles crimping up his spine.

"What on earth is that?" he asked.

"Plenty wild porkers," said Charlie Halwuk. "Plenty bad. They catch somebody. Plenty better we go other way."

Simon had started the marsh buggy moving when the full meaning of the speech dawned on him. He let go the clutch levers.

"You mean somebody?" he demanded incredulously. "A man?"

The Indian pointed down the stream to the right Simon could see nothing at first; but with a sudden reckless defiance he used opposite brake and clutch to jerk the buggy around and plunge it back towards the stream.

"No can help," Charlie Halwuk said sharply. "Porkers tear you up plenty quick. Plenty better you stop."

"To hell with it," said the Saint grittily. "If wild pigs have caught a man there, I'm not going to run away."

And then he saw it.

Straight ahead was a mass of tangled roots which might have bordered a mangrove island. A single tree stood up above the level of undergrowth, and a flutter of human clothing moved in its branches. At the base of the tree a clear patch of ground was dappled with darting black evil shadows; and as the buggy ploughed nearer the grunting of slavering tusked mouths swelled in a vicious crescendo.

"Those hogs are meaner than wildcats," said Gallipolis, rising with his machine gun. "Better let me use this on 'em."

"Wait a minute," said the Saint, and turned to the Indian. "How far are we from the lodge now, Charlie?"

"Maybe mile. Maybe little more."

"Could you hear shooting that far in this country?"

"Hear it more. Shooting no good anyhow. Porkers worse than wild boar."

Simon's mouth set in a stubborn line. If he had behaved as he perhaps should have behaved on that mission, he would have shut his eyes and gone on. But to leave any innocent human being to that horrible squalling doom was more than the flesh he was built out of could have done. Besides, any human being who was found so close to March's secret hideaway might be a more important rescue than he could guess.

He reversed the buggy and watched the course of the stream for a few seconds. It rippled deep into the roots along the shore of the islet…

Before anyone could have forestalled his intention, Simon grabbed a wrench and opened the drain plug under the gasoline tank.

"What the hell!" yelled Gallipolis; and the Saint smiled at him satanically.

"Get tough about it and I'll let it all go," he said gently, and the Greek sank back as Mr Uniatz crowded the muzzle of a warning Betsy into his sacroiliac.

Simon dumped about two gallons, and then tightened the plug again while the floating oil spread into smudged rainbows as the moving water carried it downstream.

He flicked lighted matches into it until it flashed into flame. Burning brightly, it floated down to the rain-soaked island and seeped its fire in among the knotted roots. The feet of the savage pigs were suddenly enveloped in a sheet of fire, and their ravening grunts turned into ear-splitting shrieks of terror. There was a wild rush into the water, where their lean black bodies churned frantically away from the searing blaze. Most of them reached the opposite shore and went on without stopping through the rustling underbrush like a frenzied herd of Gadarene swine.

The blazing gas smoked blackly, and died out without having been able to set fire to the freshly sodden mangroves. Simon nosed the marsh buggy into the island, grasped an overhanging bough, and pulled himself up on to relatively dry land in time to catch the slight limp figure that fell more than it climbed down out of the tree in which it had found precarious sanctuary.

The reddening sun that was slipping down under the horizon struck a last flare of even more vivid red from the tousled mane of her hair. Incredibly, it was Karen Leith.

2

"I was just wondering where you'd got to," murmured the Saint, in classical understatement.

In place of the billowy white dress of the night before, she wore a blue slack suit that might once have been trickily cut in a stylish travesty of a labourer's dungarees. Now, muddy and torn and bedraggled, it was something that no self-respecting labourer would have been seen in. And yet he discovered with a little surprise, that she had a quality which could transcend even those detractions. The wet clinging clothes only revealed new harmonies in her figure, and the grime on her tired face seemed if anything to enhance the fairness of its modelling. It was something that Simon took in at this time without letting it sway the icy detachment that was creeping into him.

Hoppy Uniatz was impressed for a different reason. His eyes had a somewhat crustacean aspect as they goggled at the girl.

"Boss," he said earnestly as though he were trying to argue the apparition away. "I leave you wit' dis wren in de clip jernt."

"That's right, Hoppy," said the Saint

"You don't bring her out here witcha."

"No, Hoppy."

"Den how," demanded Mr Uniatz logically, "can she be sittin" up in dat tree?"

Gallipolis mopped his steaming forehead with a wet bandanna and said: "This whole damn business is getting too much for me."

"Have any of you got a cigarette?" asked the girl calmly.

Simon took out his case. The contents were on the damp side, but the metal had saved them from total dissolution. He offered it to her, and helped himself. He noticed that her slim hands were soiled and scarred, and yet their unsteadiness was so rigidly controlled that he had to look closely for it.

"Well," he said, after he had given her a light, "I know that this life of sin is full of mysteries, but for once I think Hoppy has got something."

Her deep violet eyes studied the Martian contours of the marsh buggy, and then deliberately went over the four men — Hoppy, Gallipolis, Charlie Halwuk, lastly the Saint. Simon realised that none of them could have looked much more civilised than she did, and wondered if she saw the same stony purposefulness in all of them that he saw in her. He had to hand that to her also. In spite of the ordeal that she had just been through she was keyed with the same delicate inner core of steel that he had sensed in her once before.

"Apparently," she said, "we're all literally in the same boat."

"Marsh buggy," Simon corrected disinterestedly. "It runs on land too, believe it or not. It isn't exactly a Rolls Royce, but it's a lot more use in the Everglades."

"On land?" Her voice had a quick lift "You mean this thing can take us out of the swamps?"

"It brought us in."

"Simon," she said, "thank God you brought it. Don't let's waste any more time. I've got to get to the road—"

The Saint sat on the side of the buggy, his forearms on his knees. He eased his lungs of a long plume of smoke. The mantle of his detachment wrapped him in a cold armour of aloofness and gave his blue eyes an impersonal hardness that she had never seen before.

"I think you're taking a lot for granted, darling," he said in a voice of tempered tungsten. "The only question at the moment is whether we should take you with us where we're going, or whether we should turn you loose again to keep walking."

The shadow that passed through her eyes might have been dark and dull with pain; but the eyes themselves never flinched.

"I know," she said. "I should have begun at the beginning."

"Try it now," he suggested dispassionately.

She drew the end of her cigarette hot and bright.

"All right," she said, in a tone that attempted to match his. "I suppose you know that Captain Heinrich Friede is one of the chief Nazi secret agents in the United States."

"I figured that out." Simon flicked ashes into the oozing creek. "And your dear Randolph March is his principal stooge, or a sort of playboy financier of the Fifth Column. Go on from there."

"You know that Randolph March has a hidden harbour that he calls a hunting lodge somewhere over there."

"Hoppy found that out. All by himself. I can still top you. He keeps a German U-boat parked in it, and they go out and torpedo tankers."

"That's right."

"You're quite sure it is? You've seen this submarine?"

"I saw it today for the first time. It's there now."

"And what else?"

"The March Hare."

"Once again we don't fall over backwards. You know that because you were on board. As a matter of fact, I happened to see you."

"There are two other people on board."

"I know. Friends of mine. Arrested by phoney deputy sheriffs." The Saint's voice had the silky edge of a razor. "How were they when you left them?"

"They were still all right They'll still be all right — according to what you do. They're hostages for you."

Then we're still waiting for you to contribute. When do you start paying your way with something we don't know already or hadn't guessed for ourselves?"

She seemed to be holding herself in with terrible patience. "What else is there that matters?"

"There's still the minor detail of what your stake is in this carnival." Simon's voice was without emotion, his face a smooth carving in brown marble. "We seem to keep running into you in a whole lot of funny places — most of them somewhere near Randolph March. You were with him and Friede when I met you. You came to visit me just at the time when one of their stooges twice removed took a shot at me that started a most ingenious trail towards my tombstone. You keep quiet about Rogers until I'd planted the very evidence against myself that I was meant to plant. You came with me to the Palmleaf Fan to be in at the death; and when the death failed to take place, you joined up with Randy and Friede again and beetled off, I skipped a lot of that while it was going on because it was fun, as I told you. But the fun is all over now, Ginger. It's nothing but straight answers — or else."

Her lips gave a funny little quirk.

"Dear man," she said, "who do you think tipped off Rogers?"

He lifted his eyes to hers.

"According to the Sheriff," he replied unyieldingly, "it was a mysterious kibitzer called A Friend. If that was you, say so."

"It was."

"Then why didn't you say anything to me?"

"I told you before dinner, last night — you had to go through it all, in case you got anything else out of it. And then, if I'd told you at the Palmleaf Fan, you know you'd have still gone in to Rogers anyhow, and the plot would have worked. But I knew he belonged to the FBI, and I knew he'd be more cautious. I hoped that if I told him it might save you from being killed."

"That was nice of you," said the Saint politely. "So after you'd done that, you went back to March and Friede and helped them to kidnap my friends."

"I didn't. I wanted to cover myself. I went over and said that I didn't know what went on, but you'd said something just as you left that sounded as if you already knew what the trap was and you'd organised things to take care of it. A couple of minutes later the waiter came and whispered to Friede, and he said I was right. He was raging. He gave a lot of orders in German that I couldn't catch, and we all left. While they were getting the March Hare ready to sail, some men brought your friends on board."

"I saw you enjoying the joke with Randy as you went past the Causeway."

"I had to stay with them then. The one thing that mattered was to find out where they were going."

Without shifting his eyes, the Saint blew smoke at the mosquitoes that were starting to rise in thickening clouds into the twilight.

"You still have a last chance to come clean," he said ruthlessly. "Who are you working for?"

She seemed to make up her mind after a hopeless struggle.

"The British Secret Service," she said.

Simon looked at her for a moment longer.

Then he put his face in his hands.

It was a few seconds before he raised it again. And then the expression in his face and eyes had changed as if he had taken off an ugly mask.

It was all clear now — all of it. And he felt as if he had taken the last step out of suffocating darkness into fresh air and the light of the day. He didn't even have to ask himself whether she was telling the truth. If the unshadowed straightness of her wonderful eyes had not been enough, the circumstantial evidence would have been. No lie could have fitted every niche and filigree of the pattern so completely, He could only be astounded that that was the one answer he had never guessed.

Impulsively he reached out for her hand,

"Karen," he said, "why didn't you tell me?"

"How could I?" But her face and voice were without rancour. "I wouldn't have been any more use if I'd been suspected. I'd put too much into getting where I was. Even for you, I couldn't endanger any of it. I knew you were supposed to be a sort of romantic Robin Hood, but how could I know how much of that was to be trusted? I couldn't take a chance. Until now — I've got to."

"Finish it now," he said quietly.

She put her cigarette back to her lips and drew at it more evenly than she had done since he lighted it. It was as though a die had been cast and a decision made, and now for the first time she could rest a little while and let herself go with the tide.

"It started as a very ordinary assignment," she said. "The Foreign Office knew about Randolph March, as they know about most people who might give them trouble one day. They knew he'd spent a lot of time in Germany since 1933, and had a lot of powerful Nazi friends, and a lot of leanings towards their point of view. But he isn't the first rich man who's thought the Nazi system might be a good thing. You know the technique — you scare a rich man into the Fascist camp with the bogey of Communism, because he's worried about his possessions, and you scare the poor man into the Communist camp with the bogey of capitalism; and then the Communists and the fascists make an alliance and clean up… Well, after Czechoslovakia, they found out that March was doing some heavy speculation in Nazi bonds."

"Through the Foreign Investment Pool?"

She nodded.

"So when the real war started, he was somebody to be watched. It was more or less routine at first — until I found out about Friede. Of course, I had to pretend that I had Nazi sympathies myself, but it was a long time before they'd open up at all. Even then, they never let me get near anything important — most of what I did find out was from listening at keyholes. Until last night… But before that, I'd heard the word 'submarine' once. I suppose I'd worked out the tanker business more or less the way you did. But if that was the scheme, I had to find the submarine base. That's why I went with them last night because it seemed almost certain that they'd be going there. I was right. So as soon as I knew all I had to know, I slipped away. That was this morning… I saw from the map that the road couldn't be very far away, and I'd have made it by now if those wild pigs hadn't attacked me."

The Saint thought back over the country they had traversed, and smiled rather grimly.

"I don't suppose they've even bothered to try and catch you," he said. Because they know better. We've been pushing this wall-eyed wheelbarrow through the swamp for about fourteen hours with an Indian guide who has X-ray eyes; and we haven't arrived yet"

"But I've got to get out!" she said desperately. "You can take me. I can identify myself to the British Ambassador in Washington. I've only got to get to a telephone. He'll drop a word to the State Department, and in half an hour the Navy and the Coastguard will be here."

"Looking for a most illegal German submarine base," said the Saint. "But not particularly interested in a couple of friends of mine."

She stared at him almost incredulously.

"Are you still thinking about them?"

"It's a weakness of mine," he said.

She sat still.

Then she let the stub of her cigarette fall carefully into the stream. She reached out and took his own cigarette-case out of his pocket, and helped herself to another. She waited until he gave her a match.

She said: "For three months I've let myself be pawed by Randolph March and leered at by Heinrich Friede. I've pretended to sympathise with a philosophy that stinks to high heaven. I've let myself gloat over the invasion of peaceful countries and the bombing of helpless women and children and the enslaving of one nation after another. I've made myself laugh at the slaughter of my own people and the plundering of Jews and the torture of concentration camps. I've even let you walk blindly into what might have been your death, while all my heart loved you, because I'm not big enough to decide who is to live and who is to die while the civilisation that made us is trying to save all the lights in the world from going out. And all you can think of is your friends!"

Simon Templar gazed at her with clear eyes of bitter blue.

For a long time. While the intensely even tones of her voice seemed to hang in the sultry air and beat back savagely into his brain.

Lake an automaton, he lighted the fresh cigarette he had taken, and put his cigarette-case away. In the infinite silence, every scintilla of feeling seemed to empty out of his face, leaving nothing but a fine-drawn shell that was as readable as graven stone.

The mask turned towards Hoppy Uniatz.

"Do you think you could drive this thing?"

"Sure, boss," said Mr Uniatz expansively. "I loin it on de farm at de reform school."

The Saint's eyebrows barely moved.

"Of course, you wouldn't have thought of volunteering before." His accent was amazingly limpid and precise. "Will you take it back the way Charlie Halwuk tells you?" He turned to the motionless Indian. "Which way is where we were going, Charlie?"

The Seminole raised a mahogany arm.

"Plenty straight into sun. No can miss now."

Simon stood up, and caught a bough over his head, and swung himself swiftly on to the quivering shore.

"Thanks — Karen," he said.

Her lips were white.

"What are you doing?" she asked shakily.

His smile was suddenly gay and careless again.

"You've got enough men to look after you, darling. I'm going to see if I can find Patricia and Peter before the Navy gets there. Give my love to the Ambassador." He waved his hand. "On your way, Hoppy — and take care of them."

"Okay, boss," said Mr Uniatz valiantly.

He hauled back on the clutch levers. The giant wheels made a quarter turn, and stalled. Hoppy started the engine again and raced it up. Too late, the Saint saw what had happened. A log that had drifted down while they were talking had nosed in between the back wheels and embedded itself in the soft bank of the stream. But by the time he saw it, he could do nothing. Never a man to waste time on niggling finesse, Mr Uniatz had slammed the clutches home while the engine roared at full throttle. There was a deafening screech of rending metal, and every moving part came to a shuddering standstill with an unmistakably irrevocable kind of finality.

Mr Uniatz pumped homicidally at the starter, and succeeded in producing a slow spark and a soft puff of expiring smoke.

"Let it rest," said the Saint wearily, and glanced at Karen again. "I did my best, darling, but I think Fate had other ideas."

3

"I'll have to go on on foot," said the girl. "The way I started. If I had a guide—"

"What about it, Charlie?' Simon interrupted. The Seminole shook his head impassively.

"Indian go. Maybe three-four days. White man no can do. White man die plenty quick."

Karen Leith covered her eyes, just for a moment.

The Saint touched her shoulder.

"We may be able to steal a boat and get you out through the islands," he said. "But we've got to get to the base first. And we've got to step on it"

Without the bright beams of the marsh buggy to light the way, an attempt to get through the trackless Everglades at night was hopeless and might well be fatal. And there was not much more time. Florida twilights were short, and darkness would drop like spilled ink as soon as the sun was gone.

Simon stood up.

"Charlie, you lead. We've got to make Lostman's River before dark. Travel fast, but be as quiet as you can."

The Indian nodded and got out. The ground quivered badly under Simon, but Charlie Halwuk's moccasined feet seemed to possess some native buoyancy that prevented them from sinking.

Karen spoke to him with tormented calm.

"You'd better keep your eyes open, too. There may be a party out looking for me, in spite of what he said."

"If man come, I hear," stated Charlie Halwuk.

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

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

Presently they came to another narrow stream.

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

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

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

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

"Plenty here," said Charlie.

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

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

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

"Lostman's River," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Boss," Mr Uniatz said reverently, "is dis de Pool?"

"This is it," said the Saint.

"Boss—" Mr Uniatz wriggled with the brontosaurian stirring of an almost unconquerable eagerness. "Can I try it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was too slow with both moves.

The Saint leaped at him a fraction of a second sooner. It was no time for drawing-room niceties, and Simon was not in the mood to take chances with a gorilla of that build. As he went in, his left knee led for the groin while his fist simultaneously pistoned into the vital plexus just under the parting of the ribs. It was like punching a pad of solid rubber; but the man buckled with agony, and then Simon had him. He had him on the ground and he had the massive arms pinioned in a leg scissors, and because he dared not risk another gasp he had his hands locked on the brawny neck and his thumbs crushing mercilessly into the man's windpipe. And after a little while something seemed to give way, and the guard was quite still.

Simon got up and rolled him back into the thickest shadow. He listened for a few seconds, and could hear nothing but the insect and owl concerto. Satisfied that the scuffle had raised no alarm, he tried the door that the man had stepped away from. It was locked, but a search of the guard's pockets produced a key that fitted. Knowing then that he must be very near the end of his original quest, Simon turned the lock and confidently went in.

He found himself in a small barely furnished room lighted with a single dim hanging bulb. The room was stifling. A slim brown-haired girl lay on an iron cot with her face buried in the pillow. She started up as the Saint came in, showing him brown eyes made dull with fear and hopelessness, set in the face of a wayward Madonna. A frail grey-haired man sitting in a cheap wooden chair beside the cot raised a haggard unshaven face and made a protective movement towards her with one thin arm.

"What is it now?" he asked tiredly, and tried ineffectually to stiffen the gaze of his weak eyes.

Simon looked at him with triumph and bitterness and pity blending in his long comprehensive glance.

"Lawrence Gilbeck, I presume," he said unoriginally. "I'm Simon Templar. I believe Justine sent for me."

4

The flare of half-incredulous relief that leaped into the girl's eyes died again slowly into a more hopeless despair.

"So you came," she said in a low voice. "And I got you into this — you and Pat. Now you'll die here with us."

"It's no use," echoed Gilbeck stupidly. "Justine told me; but you shouldn't have come. You don't know what you're up against. There isn't anything you can do."

"That remains to be seen," said the Saint grimly.

He switched out the light, and presently found his way to the dim glow of the window. Pulling the curtains aside, he aimed his flashlight through the screen in the direction of where he had left the rest of his party, and blinked it three times. The flashes could hardly have been seen from the March Hare. He dropped the curtains back and spoke quietly into the dark.

"Follow me out, and try not to make a sound."

He crossed to the door and opened it. It was full night outside now, and the moon had not yet risen. Simon let them pass him out of the steaming prison, and closed the door again and locked it and dropped the key. That would take care of any other surprise visitors for long enough to let him know that an alarm had been raised; and he knew that the guard would never tell his story to any mortal ears.

He led them across to the shadow of the storehouses at the end of the pier and from there into the edge of the jungle directly opposite, where he knew Charlie Halwuk would lead the others in answer to his summons. He stopped when he thought it would be safe enough to talk. From where he squatted on a dead log, he still had a fan-shaped field of vision that held the lodge at one edge and the storehouses at the other, with most of the clearing and the March Hare in the distance in between. With an old soldier's trick, he lighted himself a cigarette without letting any more light escape than a glow-worm would have made.

"Justine," he said, "have you seen Pat?"

"No." Her voice was ragged, perplexed. "Isn't she with you?"

"They caught her," said the Saint passionlessly. "Along with a friend of mine named Peter Quentin, who means quite a lot to me too… They're probably still on the yacht. I rather expected it. Friede would keep them as close to him as he could for safety."

There was a subdued crackling in the underbrush, but it was not made by Charlie Halwuk, who had already reached the Saint's side like a shadow. The noise was made by Karen and Hoppy and the Greek as they followed him.

The moon was just starting to tip the horizon then, spreading a faint glimmer ahead of it by which they could all see each other after a fashion. The Saint moved his cigarette like an indicative firefly.

"Miss Leith, Mr Uniatz, Mr Gallipolis, and Mr Halwuk," he introduced. "Our travelling League of Nations… These are some Gilbeck people I came here to rescue, among other things."

The two girls studied each other in silence, and then Justine said uncertainly: "I'm frightened."

Karen put an arm round her, but she still looked at the Saint.

Lawrence Gilbeck shook his head like a punch-drunk prizefighter, and said: "I don't want any of you to take any risks for me, but I would like to save her."

"You're getting soft-hearted in your old age, aren't you?" Simon remarked with carefully measured vitriol. "You threw in your wealth on the side of the most high-powered mob of gangsters who have ever pillaged the world. You weren't worried about an odd hundred American seamen who were to be blown to pieces by Friede's submarine. But you are worried about your darling daughter. You got her into this — you played with fire and got yourself burned. What made you get so sentimental?"

"It was the submarine — so help me God!" Gilbeck said with a groan. "I didn't know anything about it, at first I went into March's Foreign Investment Fool as an ordinary business proposition. I knew they were buying Nazi bonds, but there's no harm in that. Or there wasn't. America was a neutral country, and there's nothing wrong with buying anything in the market if you think it'll show a profit. I was in it as deep as I could be before I found out the truth about March's scheme."

"And what is the truth?" Simon asked mercilessly.

Gilbeck ran trembling fingers through his sparse dishevelled hair. At that moment he looked less like the popular conception of a Wolf of Wall Street than anything that could be imagined.

"The truth is that they were ready to stop at nothing — nothing at all — to try and alienate American sympathy from the Allies."

"We'd figured that out too," said the Saint "And I'm still waiting for the truth about yourself."

"I'm guilty," said the millionaire feverishly. "Guilty as hell. But I didn't know. I swear I didn't. It just crept up on me. Look." The words came faster, the desperate outpouring of vain remorse. "We were going to make money because March convinced me that these Nazi bonds were going to rise. Then the war started. The bonds fell lower. We had our money in 'em. We had to want them to go up. Then the only thing was to hope the Germans would win. We had to hope that, if we wanted to save our money. So we couldn't be unsympathetic, could we? In fact, if we could do a little to help them — You see? We'd be helping ourselves. So we couldn't be hostile to the Bund, could we? And other things. Little things. Helping to spread propaganda — the stuff about 'Well, after all, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other' and 'We helped the Allies once and they never paid their war debt' and 'Look what the British did in India and South Africa'. You know. And the cleverest of all propagandas — to discount any facts that the Allies could advance on their side by saying that they were just propaganda too. And from there it went to some discreet lobbying in Washington. Supporting Isolationist Congressmen. Criticising Roosevelt's foreign policy. Trying to block the repeal of the Arms Embargo and the Johnson Act — anything that would obstruct American help to the Allies. You know."

Go on."

Gilbeck swallowed so that his mouth twitched.

"That's all. That's how it was. Just like that. Step by step. One thing led to another — so gradually and so harmlessly — so logically that I didn't see where I was getting to. Until they thought I was completely sewn up, and didn't care what they told me. God knows how many other men they made slaves of in the same way. But they'd got me. I'd always known that March had been to Germany a lot, and said that the Nazis were very much maligned; but I only thought of that as a private eccentricity. He'd had dinner with Goebbels and gone hunting with Goering and even visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and he thought they were all charming people. Anything that was said against them was 'all propaganda'. Only as this went on it got worse. He said once that he wouldn't mind seeing Hitler running this country — men like us would be much better off, with no more labour troubles and that sort of thing. He even hinted that he wouldn't mind helping to get him here… That was when I was going mad — when Justine wrote to you. But I couldn't do anything. I'd let myself slip too far. They could have ruined me — I think I could even have been sent to jail… Then March told me about the submarine."

"We're waiting," said the Saint inexorably.

"That was too much. Even for me. It wasn't like killing people indirectly, with political manoeuvres. You could forget about that, if you tried hard. Talk yourself out of it. But this was direct murder." Gilbeck twisted bis hands together. "That was when I found a little belated courage. I knew there was only one thing I could do. I had to expose the plot, whatever it cost me — even if I lost everything I had and went to jail for it. It might even have been a relief in the end, if I could take my medicine and not be haunted any more. Only — I still didn't have quite enough courage. I still wanted to make a last attempt to save myself. I thought if I told March and Friede that I'd decided to expose them and take the consequences, I might make them give up their idea."

"Yes," said the Saint.

"That was the day you were expected." Gilbeck's voice fell lower, but it seemed to gain steadiness with the security of confession. "Justine hadn't told me then who you were — she just said you were friends of hers. I thought that March was fishing down the Keys. I thought I could go down in the Mirage and talk to him and still be back to meet you. I — didn't know what a fool I was."

"What happened?"

"You know how you found us… They — laughed…"

"The Mirage was found abandoned at Wildcat Key," said the Saint. "What happened to the crew?"

Justine Gilbeck suddenly sobbed and buried her face in Karen's shoulder.

"I see," said the Saint, in a quiet glacial breath.

"I wished they had killed us too, then," Gilbeck said. "But they hadn't quite made up their minds if we could still be useful. They brought us here in a speedboat. They threatened — horrible things. And under that room — where we were — there are a hundred pounds of high explosive, with a radio detonator that Friede said he could fire from five hundred miles away, from the March Hare or the submarine, just by sending the right signal. He told us that if anything went wrong he'd do it. But — there was something about a letter you said I'd left. That was afterwards. I didn't know anything about it, but they wouldn't believe me. They promised to torture us…"

"I know about that, too. I'll tell you one day."

The Saint sat still, while a hundred other things turned through his brain. He knew everything now, and all mysteries had been made clear. There was nothing left — except the most important thing of all…

He moved over closer to Gilbeck, and the cigarette end in his cupped hands shifted a little to throw a fraction more light on to the millionaire's face.

"Brother," he said, and his voice was a thing that merely uttered the form of words, with no more warmth or persuasion than a printed page. "If you were free again, what would you do — now?"

"I swear by everything I know," Gilbeck answered, "that I'd do what I meant to do before — only without any compromise. I'd tell everything, and I'd be glad to take my punishment for what I've had a hand in."

The Saint stared at him for seconds longer; but even at the end he knew that he had found an ultimate sincerity bred of remorse and suffering that no man would shake again.

He moved his hands, and let Gilbeck's anguished face fall back again into the dark.

"All right," he said. "I'm going to give you your chance."

He went back and found Charlie Halwuk in the gloom.

"Charlie," he said, "how far is the nearest town up the coast?"

The Indian studied.

"Chokoloskee. Maybe fifteen, maybe twenty miles by Cannon's Bay."

"Is there a telephone there?"

"No telephone. Plenty fishing."

"Where is the nearest phone?"

"Everglades. Three, four miles more."

"There's a small motorboat here at the dock. Could you take it to the Everglades in the dark?"

"Sure. Me fish plenty. Know all ways from Chokoloskee round Florida Bay."

Simon turned.

"The dock is straight ahead," he said, so that they could all hear. "Get going — and be quiet about it."

The file started off, led by the Indian, while Simon paused to hiss out his cigarette in a pool of mud. As Lawrence Gilbeck passed him, he saw that the millionaire walked in a pitiful imitation of a man reborn; yet he knew that the real rebirth was in the spirit.

He overtook them on the pier, dropped into the pilot cockpit, and ventured an instantaneous glint of his flashlight on the fuel gauge. Miraculously perhaps, it showed clear full.

Charlie Halwuk slipped in beside him and said: "How many go?"

"Not me," said the Saint. "I'm staying. How many others?"

"Take two. More, we go out by sea. Take plenty water. Long time."

"Karen and Justine," he said. "Get in."

Justine Gilbeck got in, lowered by Hoppy's mighty arm; but Karen Leith was still at the Saint's side.

"I heard," she said. "I'm not going. Send Gilbeck."

"You have to go," said the Saint frozenly.

Gilbeck was close enough to hear. He touched Simon with a trembling hand.

"Please leave me," he said. "Send the girls."

"The others are going to have to stay here, and whatever they do won't be easy," Karen said unfalteringly, but she was speaking only to the Saint. "If there's going to be trouble, you only want people who can be useful. I know how to handle guns. What good would he be?"

"And the British Secret Service?" Simon asked.

"I only have to get my message out. None of the others can take it — not even you. You have reputations against you. Gilbeck's name is on his side. He can even talk direct to the State Department, which none of us can do. And they'd have to listen to him,"

The Saint had no quick answer, because he knew there was no answer to the truth. And because he could say nothing quickly he was silent while the girl turned away from him to Gilbeck.

"You can do my job for me," she said. "I've been working on March for the British Secret Service. Before you do anything else, call the British Ambassador or the Naval Attache, in Washington. My name is Karen Leith. And you must give them the word 'Polonaise'. Will you remember that?"

"Yes. Karen Leith. Polonaise. But—"

"Then just tell them everything you've told us. And say that we're still here. That's all. Now hurry!"

With a sudden certainty of resolution, the Saint picked Gilbeck's light body up before he could protest again, and dumped him lightly and silently as a feather into the boat. He thrust the revolver he had taken from the strangled guard into the millionaire's skinny hands.

"Take this, in case of accidents. And stop arguing. If you want this second chance you've got to do what you're told." He turned to Charlie Halwuk, going on in the same crisply urgent undertone. "There's a couple of long oars in the back. Don't start the engine until you're well away."

The Seminole nodded sagely.

"Me paddle plenty far."

"Think you can get away if you're followed?"

"Tide plenty high. White man never catch me."

"Good." Simon straightened up, releasing the painter from the cleat where it was hitched. "Then get going."

"Just a minute," said Gallipolis.

There was a queer emphasis in the way he said it, an abnormal timbre in his musical voice that gave the conventional phrase something that it should never have had. There was a satiny menace in it that sent clammy tentacles of hideous intuition frisking up Simon Templar's spinal cord as he turned.

The Greek stood ten feet away, starlight touching his white teeth as he smiled his flashing smile and glinting dully against the barrel of his ready Tommy gun.

"Stay right where you are," he said in his melancholy tone, "because I'm handy with this. If the folks in that boat think they can make a getaway I'll show them. The second they start to push away from this dock I'll drop them in a pile."

Simon's tall form was still and rigid, while a bitterness such as he had never known ate through him like consuming acid, and he frozenly reckoned his chances of covering those ten feet of intervening space before the crashing stream of lead would melt him inevitably into tattered pulp.

"Forget it, mister," Gallipolis went on, as though he had read the thought. "You wouldn't get half way. I'm going to take a hand in this auction, before you send off that putput. All you bid was one grand, and it sounds as if Randolph March would pay me more than that for you."

The Saint remained motionless, with a strange cold pulse beating in his forehead.

Behind Gallipolis, on the edge of the dock, a small flat animal was crawling. As he watched it, it had been joined by its mate, and it came to him incredulously that these small animals were in reality hamlike human hands, and that what he had taken for a long black nose was the barrel of a gun.

Eliminating all doubt, the nose suddenly belched orange and purple fire, with a crashing roar that drowned all the impact of a heavy slug. But all at once Gallipolis had no face any more. It had dissolved into a formless smear as the flattened bullet spread through it from behind in an enlarging splash of brains and splintered bones. The Greek lurched as if he had been hit by a truck, and then dropped forward on to his face and hid the horror in the dark planking.

The horrific but at least integral face of Mr Uniatz rose dripping over the side of the pier into full view.

Dat son of a bitch," said Mr Uniatz, in a voice hoarse with righteous fury. "He's takin' us for a ride all de time. I got such a toist, boss, I can't wait no longer. So I drink a pint of dat slop before I find out it ain't what he has in de bottles. Dis ain't de pool we are lookin' for at all!"