Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Miami

There was no need for her to answer. He watched her go, and turned in the direction of the private dock. As he walked, he looked out over the ocean again. Close down to the horizon he saw a single light, that moved slowly southwards and then vanished.

Lawrence Gilbeck's twin-screw speedboat shuddered protestingly as the Saint drove her wide open to the top of an inbound comber. For a moment she hung on the crest with both whirling propellers free; then they clutched the water again, and she dived into the trough like a toboggan racing down a bank of smooth ice. Curtains of spray leapt six feet into the air on each side of her as she settled down to a steady forty knots. The name painted on her counter said Meteor, and Simon had to admit that she could live up to it

From his place on the other side of the boat, crouching behind the slope of the forward windshield, Peter Quentin spoke across Patricia.

"It'll be a great comfort to all the invalids who've come south for the winter," he said, "to know that you're here."

He spoke in a tone of detached resignation, like a martyr who has made up his mind to die bravely so long ago that the tedious details of his execution have become merely an inevitable anticlimax. He hunched his prizefighter's shoulders up around his ears and crinkled his pleasantly pugnacious features in an attempt to penetrate the darkness ahead.

Simon flicked his cigarette-end to leeward, and watched its red spark snap back far beyond the stem in the passing rush of wind.

"After all," he said, "the Gilbecks did leave word for us to make ourselves at home. Surely they couldn't object to our taking this old tub out for a spin. She was sitting in the boat-house just rusting away."

"Their Scotch wasn't rusting away," Peter remarked, operating skilfully on the bottle clamped between his feet "I always understood that it improved with age."

"Only up to a point," said the Saint gravely. "After that it's inclined to become anaemic and waste away. A tragedy which it is the duty of any right-minded citizen to forestall. Hand it over. Pat and I are chilly after our shower bath."

He examined the label and sipped an approving sample before he handed the bottle to Patricia.

"Mr Peter Dawson's best," he told her, raising his voice against the roar of the engine as he opened the throttle wider. "Pass it back to me before Hoppy gets it and we have to consign a dead one to the sea."

Somewhere within the small globule of protopathic tissue surrounded by Mr Uniatz's skull a glimmer of remote comprehension came to life as the Saint's words drifted back to him. He leaned over from his seat behind.

"Any time you say to t'row him out, boss," he stated reassuringly, "I got him ready."

Through years of association with the paleolithic machinery which Mr Uniatz's parents had bequeathed to him as a substitute for the racial ability of homo sapiens to think and reason, Simon Templar had acquired an impregnable patience with those strange divagations of continuity with which Hoppy was wont to enliven an ordinary conversation. He took a firmer grip on the wheel and said: "Who have you got ready?"

"De dead one," said Hoppy, exercising a no less noble degree of patience and restraint in elucidating such a simple and straightforward announcement as he had made. "De stiff. Any time ya ready, I can t'row him in."

Simon painfully worked out the association of ideas as the Meteor ate up the silver-speckled water.

"I was referring," he explained kindly, "to our bottle of Peter Dawson, which will certainly be a dead one two minutes after you get your hands on it"

"Oh," said Mr Uniatz, settling back again. "I t'ought ya was talkin' about de stiff here. I got me feet on him, but he don't bodder me none. Any time ya ready."

Patricia gave Simon back the bottle.

"I noticed that Hoppy brought a sack down to the boat," she said, with the slightest of tremors in her voice. "I wondered if that was what was in it… But has it occurred to you that every coast-guard boat for a hundred miles will be headed here? We might have a lot of explaining to do if they got curious about Hoppy's footrest."

Simon didn't argue. Part of what she said was already obvious. Not so far ahead of them, many new lights were rising and falling in the swell, and searchlights were smearing long skinny fingers over the ocean. The Saint had no definite plan yet, but he had seldom used a plan in any adventure. Instinct, impulse, a fluid openness of approach that kept his whole campaign plastic and effortlessly adaptable to almost any unexpected development — those were the only consistent principles in anything he did.

"I brought him along because we couldn't leave him in the house," he said at length. "The servants might have found him. We may drop him overboard out here or not — I haven't made up my mind yet."

"What about the lifebelt?" said Patricia.

"I peeled the name off and burnt it. There's, nothing else to identify it There wasn't any identification in his clothes."

"What I want to know," said Peter, "is how would a single sailor get lost overboard from a submarine at a time like that."

"How do you know he was the only one?" said Patricia.

Simon put a fresh cigarette between his lips and lighted it, cupping his hands adroitly around the match.

"You're both on the wrong tack," he said. "What makes you think he came off a submarine?"

"Well—"

"The submarine wasn't sunk, was it?" said the Saint. "It did the sinking. So why should it have lost any of its crew? Furthermore, he wasn't wearing a British naval uniform — just ordinary sort of seaman's clothes. He might have come off the ship that was sunk. Or off anything. The only incriminating thing was the lifebelt. A submarine might have lost that. But his wrist was tangled up in the cords in quite a peculiar way. It wasn't at all easy to get it off — and it must have been nearly as difficult to get it on. If he'd just caught hold of it when he was drowning, he wouldn't have tied himself up to it like that. And incidentally, how did he manage to drown so quickly? I could have held my breath from the time the torpedo blew off until I saw him lying at my feet, and not even felt uncomfortable."

Peter took the bottle out of Patricia's hands and drew a gulp from it.

"Just because Justine Gilbeck wrote a mysterious letter to Pat," he said, without too much conviction, "you're determined to find a mystery somewhere."

"I didn't say that this had anything to do with that. I did say it was a bit queer for us all to come to Miami on a frantic invitation, and then find that the girl who sent the invitation isn't here."

"Probably somebody told her about your reputation," Peter said. "There are a few oldfashioned girls left, although you never seem to meet them."

"I'll ask you one other question," said the Saint. "Since when has the British Navy adopted the jolly Nazi sport of sinking neutral ships without warning?… Now give me another turn with that medicine."

He took the bottle and tilted it up, feeling the drink forge his blood into a glow. Then, without looking round, he extended his arm backwards and felt the bottle engulfed by Mr Uniatz's ready paw. But the glow remained. Perhaps it had its roots in something even more ethereal than the whisky, but something nevertheless more permanent. He couldn't have told anyone why he felt so sure, and yet he knew that he couldn't possibly be so wrong. The far fantastic bugles of adventure were ringing in his ears, and he knew that they never lied, even though the sounds they made might be confused and incomprehensible for a while. He had lived through all this before…

Patricia said: "You're taking it for granted that there's some connection between these two things."