The Saint in Miami (27 page)

“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!”

VIII
How Simon Templar Fought
the Last Round, and Heinrich
Friede Went His Way

“If we get out of here,” said the Saint, “I’ll give you a lake of it. If we get out.”

But he spoke so quickly that the line didn’t waste an instant. He knew quite simply what that single shot meant, on their side and the other. But there was no use in arguing about it. It had saved everything and blown everything to hell, with one catastrophic explosion. And that was that.

“Get back behind those storehouses-everybody,” he snapped. “Charlie, get moving.”

He stooped, and in one flowing movement shoved the motorboat away, snatched up the sub-machine-gun that had tumbled out of the Greek’s lifeless hands and raced after Karen and Hoppy towards the clump of small buildings at the end of the pier. He crouched there with them in partial shelter, and jerked his automatic out of its holster to give it to Karen Leith.

“You said you could use it,” he reminded her. “Now show me. The fat’s in the fire, but I think we can create a diversion while the boat gets clear.”

From out in the anchorage came sounds of disorganised movement and some confused shouting. To the right of them, a door of the lodge was flung open, flinging a long strip of pallid illumination across the open shore; and Simon remembered the second lighted window which he had not waited to investigate after he had located Gilbeck and Justine. But only one man came plunging out, and then stopped uncertainly while he tried to orient himself to the disturbance.

He stayed in the beam of light from the doorway just one instant too long, Hoppy’s Betsy snorted in its earsplitting bass, and the man’s arms and legs seemed to whirl wide of his body like the limbs of a spun marionette before he fell to the ground. He kicked twice after he was down, and then he was quite still.

Mr Uniatz lowered the gun which he had been holding poised for a finishing shot.

“Chees, boss,” he said disgustedly. “I ain’t been gettin’ enough practice. I t’ought I was gonna hafta waste anudder sinker on him.”

Simon thought he saw a dim alteration in the silhouette of the submarine’s conning tower, as if something might be emerging from it In any case, an extra shot would not be wasted if it kept the general attention centered in their direction and away from the water. He plugged a bullet somewhere in the right direction, and heard it ricochet whining into the night.