The Saint in Miami (18 page)

Simon stretched out his long legs and blew smoke towards the ceiling.

“That’s very kind of you, Sheriff.”

“Way down in my heart,” Haskins declared dryly, “I’m a soft, lovin’ sort of man.” His gaze brushed over the Saint’s dinner clothes. “So you hadn’t no idea of killin’ Jesse. At least, not right now. You dolled yourself all up an’ just come out here on a party, like. You wouldn’t by any chance have brought along that red-headed girl?”

“As a matter of fact,” said the Saint blandly, “I did.”

“You’ve got the ball now, son,” Haskins said. “Keep goin’.”

Simon’s mind raced warily ahead, trying to cover all the conceivable ramifications of possibility. And yet he couldn’t find a single one which seemed to take a dangerous direction. That was the fantastic part of it. For once in his life, he could face any inquisition without a shadow on his conscience. And in that fact alone there was something more disconcerting than there would have been in any need for lies. Subterfuge and evasion were things that one expected in such adventures with the regularity of treads on a tractor. But Haskins was interested in nothing that the Saint had to conceal. The Saint’s only secrets were the lifebelt twisted on to the wrist of the drowned boy, the planting of the body on the March Hare, the interview that had followed, and a brief glimpse of a submerging submarine. And Haskins knew nothing about any of those things-even the opposition had co-operated in concealing some of them. The only things that Haskins was concerned with could be dissected under arc lights without any fear that Simon could anticipate. There was no problem of inventing a convincing lie. There was only the much more devastating problem of making the truth believable. “I haven’t one single thing to hide,” said the Saint, who was obsessed with the hollowness of his own candour even while he said it. “You know just as much as I do-unless you know any more.”

“Don’t stop, son.”

The Saint pulled at his cigarette, marshalling the simple facts. When there was no obvious direction for a lie, what could be safer than the naked truth?

“You know why I’m in Miami. Gilbeck sent for me. I showed you his daughter’s letter. I don’t know one single thing more than what was in it, about what the trouble was. Now the Gilbecks have disappeared, and naturally I’m afraid there’s dirty work in it. Naturally, too, I want to find them. But I didn’t know where to begin.”

“You made a good start, anyhow.”

“Somebody else made the start-somebody who knew I was looking for them. Jennet shot at me. We caught him and grilled him-maybe that was overstepping the technicalities a bit, but I told you we’d done it. He told us he’d been coerced by Rogers, whom he didn’t know anything about except that he’d met him on that barge of Gallipolis’s. So I went out there, and that’s where you met us again. I told you the story then. But Gallipolis had already told me that Rogers worked here, which he didn’t tell you. So I came here.”

“So you an’ Gallipolis was holdin’ out on me.” The Sheriffs voice was gentle and chiding. “Well …”

“Gallipolis is a bit prejudiced against the Law,” said the Saint, with a slight smile. “Personally, I didn’t give it a thought. I like taking care of myself. Besides, I’ve found that my motives are sometimes misunderstood when I try to interest the Law in my troubles.”

“Mebbe that’s so.”

“Look,” Simon insisted, “how hard did you try to give me the benefit of the doubt when you found that note of mine on the Mirage? Not any longer than it took you to get out to Gilbeck’s and start calling me names-“

“Just a minute, son.” Haskins elongated his neck a couple of inches. “Who told you that was where I found that note?”

The Saint sighed out a steady feather of smoke.

“Probably,” he said, without batting an eyelid, “the same mysterious person who tipped you off that the Mirage was at Wildcat Key.”

It was not such a wild shot in the dark, after all. The Sheriff blinked a little, and then found dogged consolation in his chew.

“Son,” he remarked, “I don’t mind tellin’ you I’ve been get-tin’ a mite tired of bein’ called to the phone to receive messages from a voice belongin’ to A Friend. First thing it was a drowned sailor on the March Hare. Then it was to look for the Mirage at Wildcat Key. Then it was to see what you were doin’ with Gallipolis on his barge, takin’ an escaped convict there. Tonight it was Jesse Rogers.”

“You mean he called you?’ Simon took another puzzled glance at the recumbent figure on the divan.

“That’s right, son,” Haskins replied unexpectedly. “But A Friend called him first. A Friend told him the jig was up an’ there was a long box waitin’ for him tonight. So he called me. That warn’t much more ‘n an hour ago. So I come out. I tramp across country an’ let myself in the back, rememberin’ about you an’ not wantin’ to spoil anythin’. Jesse an’ me kind of got together. So when he went on, I hid me in the closet.”

The Saint’s brows were beginning to draw imperceptibly together.

“What for?”

“For Hans an’ Fritz heah.” Haskins shifted his cud from one side of his mouth to the other and gave the first side a rest “It seems like your smartness sort of slipped a cog, son. If I hadn’t ‘a’ done that, an’ taken those fancy shootin’ irons away from ‘em when they come in-the way we figgered it, you an’ Jesse, or what was left o’ you, would be lyin’ on the floor waitin’ for the coroner.”

Simon looked at the two guns on the dressing table again, and at Tweedledum and Tweedledee again, and at Jesse Rogers again, and felt as if he was balanced on a pinnacle of crumbling ice above an interplanetary maelstrom of emptiness.

“You’ve taken the ball again,” he said. “It’s all yours. Now you keep going.”

“It was a mighty clever idea, accordin’ to Jesse’s tip from A Friend an’ the way we worked it out,” Haskins proceeded luxuriously. “After Jesse had done his act, he got a message that you wanted to see him-“

“Wait,” Simon interrupted. “I hadn’t got as far as that. He beat me to it. I got a message that he wanted to see me.”

Haskins barely twitched one shaggy eyebrow.

“That’s what the waiter told him, anyhow. I don’t misbelieve you, son. Mebbe the waiter was just doin’ his part. It don’t make no difference. One way or another, you get here. An’ when you walk in the door, like you did just now, Hans an’ Fritz are already holdin’ Rogers up. Hans will shoot you with the Magnum, while Fritz shoots Jesse with that British gun. Then they leave the right guns beside each o’ you, an’ duck out the window. When everybody comes rushin’ in, it looks just like you’d killed each other in a gun fight-particularly since about four people know that you’ve been trailin’ Jesse all day with a grudge agin him on account of he hired Lafe Jennet to take a shot at you. Havin’ come in on some o’ that myself this afternoon, I’d ‘a’ been most liable to figger that was the way of it myself.” The Sheriff scratched one leg with the toe of the opposite boot. “Thinkin’ it all over, son, it shuah seems to me that somebody was takin’ an awful lot of trouble to see that you an’ Jesse was both got rid of together with no questions asked.”

Simon Templar put his cigarette to his lips and filled his lungs with warm soothing vapour and forgot to let it out again. His whole being seemed to stand still in the same cumulative and timeless stasis that affected the expansion of his ribs.

But through those fleeting seconds, his brain absorbed fact and association and deduction as completely and meticulously as his lung tissues ingested the smoke. Every molecule of factual knowledge was seeping into its predestined pore. The pattern was all falling into place. Every piece had its revealed significance, even to the most trivial fragments. He didn’t know whether to feel stupid or triumphant. Certainly he had expended an astronomical amount of time and energy and cerebration on the trail of a wild goose; but had it been really wasted? The wild goose-to cross metaphors with a lavishness that only a pedant could criticise in the circumstances-had come home to roost There were only a few vacant spaces left …

“It makes sense, Sheriff.” Even the naturalness of his own voice surprised him. “I’ve spent about twelve hours letting myself be nursed into the most beautifully elaborate set-up I ever heard of. But how about Jesse? Did he really tell Jennet to shoot at me?”

Rogers spoke for the first time, without any expression.

“I did. I didn’t have to tell him to hit you, so I thought I’d pass on the order and see what happened.”

“You see, son,” Haskins explained, “you got yourself mixed up in some powerful big organisin’. I found out tonight that Jesse was workin’ heah as what you’d call an undercover man for the Department of Justice. It didn’t surprise me so much, neither. I’ve knowed for a long time that this place was the local headquarters of Mr Hitler’s Nazi-American Bund.”

4
“Of course,” said the Saint, with an ecstatic lilt in his voice that was too zephyrous for anyone else there to hear. “Of course …”

And he felt as if a fresh wind from out of doors had blown through his head, leaving it clean and light, with all the dark tangles swept away. Everything else was set in its niche now, to be seen clearly from every angle. The only thing that amazed him was that he had failed to find the connecting link long ago. Those last words of Raskins’ had supplied it.

The Bund. And those fearfully earnest merrymakers outside. Karen had practically told him when she put the words “Kraft durch Freude” into his mouth-and he’d been too preoccupied to grasp it. And the whole atmosphere of the trap into which he had so nearly fallen. Its grim, far-ranging, tortuous Teutonic thoroughness. One could almost see the imprint of the fine hand of Himmler. But between the master hand of Himmler and its victims, in this as in every other corner of that incredible worldwide web of intrigue and sabotage, a more fantastic secret society than any blood-dnd-thunder writer of fiction would ever have dared to try and make convincing, there had to be major intermediaries, graduates summa cum laude of the Himmler school of technique. And who was the intermediary here, the local lieutenant of this greater gangsterism than the petty caesars of civil crime had ever dreamed of? Well, not a lieutenant. A captain. Captain Friede. The man who Simon had always sensed was the real commander even when March seemed to give the orders. It could be no one else. The finger pointed to him beyond any mortal doubt. Sometimes there could be uncertainties; but sometimes there was a clarity of vision that amounted to inspiration, that logic might justify but could not assail. It had to be Friede. And through him, the other threads linked with March, with Gilbeck, with the Foreign Investment Pool, with a torpedoed tanker, even with a drowned sailor with a life belt bearing the name of a British submarine tangled to his wrist. Everything, everything hooked up. … There were still a few minor questions, but their solution would be direct and unequivocal. The groping was over, and all that was ahead lay straight as an arrow’s flight …

“Of course,” said the Saint, after a million years, “Jesse can’t have been quite so much under cover as he thought. Somebody had suspected him. and this was the neatest way to get rid of both of us together.”

“That’s what I think.” Rogers sat up, at last, and Simon discovered that the old-young eyes behind his glasses could be unexpectedly penetrating. “I’ve been watching you all this time, and I know you’ve been telling the truth. But Haskins didn’t ask why they should want to get rid of you.”

Simon chain-lighted another cigarette. Because of divers accidents, he had been able to reconstruct far more than either Rogers or Haskins. And that was where his incurable madness came back, that gay and crazy quirk of his very own that had led him into so many hairbreadth perils and so much more fun. They had provided the one vital clue, but they still couldn’t have his adventure.

The only thing I can think of,” he said, “is that this disappearance of the Gilbecks has something to do with it. They knew my reputation, and they knew I’d be bound to take an active interest in that, and they may have thought I was too dangerous to leave at large. That is, if I was ever important at all. They may have just wanted any scapegoat at all, and heard that I was in town, and thought I’d be good enough if I could be manoeuvred into a sufficiently compromising background. But the disappearance of the Gilbecks does seem to have some connection, since Haskins was first put on to me when A Friend sent him to find my note on the Mirage.”

His air of baffled candour could not have been more convincing.

“And you still haven’t any idea what connection Gilbeck could have with this?” Rogers asked, watching him.

“Not the slightest,” Simon lied tremorlessly. “If I had, I could catch up on a lot of sleep.”

Rogers sat for a moment longer, and then stood up. He went to the window and whistled softly. Two deputies loomed up in the dark outside. Rogers turned away, and Haskins said: “Boys, the two lads in the corner have gotten themselves a queer idea that Miami Beach is the Siegfried Line. I want you to take ‘em into town an’ tuck ‘em away so their patriotic passions can get a chance to cool.” He gathered up the two revolvers by the barrels with his left hand, and held them out “You better take these along, too, so you can book ‘em for concealed firearms.”

“You’ll hear more of this,” rasped Tweedledum, as the Sheriff’s revolver waved him towards the window. “We’ve got our legal rights-“

Haskins screwed up one eye and said: “Our county Gestapo knows all about ‘em, an’ I’m afraid they’ll give you more breaks than you’d get at home. In the meantime I’m goin’ to send you some writin’ paper an’ let you write your boss an’ tell him to keep his goddam Weltanschauung at home!”

When the two men had gone out through the window, Simon said boldly: “If you knew all this before, why didn’t you do something about the place?”

“Sometimes a place like this is useful,” said Rogers. “If we know where the small fry are meeting, it gives us a chance to keep track of some of the big fish.”

“Then who is the big fish here?”

“That’s what I was sent here to find out.” Rogers shrugged. “It seems as if he spotted me before I could spot him. I hope it doesn’t make much difference. Somebody else will pick up where I left off, and in the end we’ll know him. Even if their plot had worked, it wouldn’t have really mattered.”