Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Miami

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…"