Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Miami

"Okay," said Haskins. "But don't hang around here. There's nothing you can do."

The spotlight went out, a muffled bell clanged aboard the police launch, and she moved away. Simon eased in the Meteor's clutch, let her pick up speed, and headed round in a wide circle.

"I wonder how long it's going to take that lanky sheriff to figure out that you're you," Peter said meditatively. "Of course you couldn't help talking back to him so that he'd pay particular attention to you."

"I didn't know he was the sheriff then," said the Saint without worry. "Anyway, there'd be something wrong with our destiny if we didn't get in an argument with the Law. And don't get soft-hearted and pass that bottle back to Hoppy. He's had his share."

He settled down more comfortably behind the wheel, and worked the Meteor's bow to port until they were running southwards, parallel with the coast It was the direction in which that single light had moved which he had seen immediately after the explosion, but he didn't know why he should remember it now. On the surface, he was only heading that way because he had enjoyed the outward run, and it seemed too soon to go home.

The ocean was a vast peaceful rolling plain in which they floated halfway to the stars. Along the shore moved a life of ease and play and exquisite frippery, marked by a million fixed and crawling and flickering lights. Among those lights, invisible at the distance, cavorted the ephemerae of civilisation, a strange conglomeration of men and women arbitrarily divided into two incommiscible species. There was the class which might have sober interests and responsibilities elsewhere, but in Miami had no time for anything but diversion; and there was the class which might play elsewhere, if it had the chance, but in Miami existed only to minister to the visiting players. There went the politicians and the pimps, the show girls and society matrons, the millionaires and the tycoons and the literati, the prostitutes and the gamblers and the punks. Simon listened to the lulling drone of the Meteor and felt as if he had been suddenly taken infinitely far away from that world. It was such a tenuous thing, that culture on which such playgrounds grew like exotic flowers. It was so fragile and easily destroyed, balanced on nothing more tangible than a state of mind. In a twinkling that coastline could be darkened, smudged into an efficient modern blackout more deadly than anything in those days which had once been called the Dark Ages. The best brains in the world had worked for a century to diminish Space; had worked so well that no haven was safe from the roaring wings of impersonal death…

Even a few seconds ago, the ocean on either side of them had been coloured with the flat soft hues of a deadened rainbow. It was the same caressing water of the Gulf Stream which day by day lapped the smooth tingling bodies of bathers near the shore. But out there it had been covered with sluggish oil, keeping down the blood of shattered men who would never play any more. It was so much easier to tear down than to build…

"Look, boy," said Patricia suddenly.

The Saint stiffened and came out of his trance as she caught his arm. She was pointing to starboard, and he looked out in the direction where her finger led his eyes with an uncanny crawling sensation creeping up the joints of his spine as if it had been negotiating the rungs of a ladder.

"Chees, boss," said Mr Uniatz, in a voice of awe, "it's a sea-soipent!"

For once in a lifetime, Simon was inclined to agree with one of Hoppy Uniatz's spontaneous impressions.

Just above the surface of the water, reflecting the moon-glow with metallic dullness, moving sluggishly and with a deceptive air of slothfulness, drifted a weird phantasm of the sea. No living movement flexed its wave-washed surface, and yet it was indubitably in motion, splashing its ways forward with logy ponderousness. A sort of truncated oval tower rose from its back and ploughed rigidly through its own creaming wash.

Instinctively Simon spun the Meteor's wheel; but even before the swift craft could swing around the apparition was gone. A bow wave formed against the conning tower, climbed up it, and engulfed it in a miniature maelstrom. For a few seconds he stared in fascination at the single piece of evidence which told him he had not been dreaming: something like a short stubby pipe which went on driving through the water, trailing a thin white wake behind. While he looked, the top of the periscope moved, turned about, and fixed the Meteor with a malevolent mechanical eye. Then even that was gone, and the last trace of the submarine was erased by the smooth-flowing surface of the sea. Peter Quentin drew a deep breath, and rubbed his eyes. "I suppose we all saw it," he said.

"I seen it," declared Mr. Uniatz. "I could of bopped it, too, if ya hadn't told me to put my Betsy away."

Simon grinned with his lips.

"The only thing that's any good for bopping those sea-serpents is a depth charge," he said. "And I'm afraid that's one thing we forgot to bring with us… But did anyone see any markings on it?" None of them answered. The speedboat lifted her bow under his touch on the throttle and ate up the miles toward the shore. Simon said: "Neither did I."

He sat quietly, almost lazily, at the wheel; but there was a tension in him that they could feel under his repose. It reached out invisible filaments to grip Peter and Patricia with the Saint's own stillness of half-formed clairvoyance, while their minds struggled to get conscious hold of the chimeras that swam smokily out of the night's memories. The only mind which was quite untroubled by any of these things belonged to Hoppy Uniatz; but it is not yet known whether anything more psychic than a sledge-hammer would have been capable of penetrating the protective shield of armour plate surrounding that embryonic organ. Peter reopened his reserve bottle.

"We got rid of the name on the lifebelt," he said hesitantly. "If we all swore the submarine had swastikas on it, we might gum things up a bit."

"I had thought of that," said the Saint. "But I'm afraid you might gum them the wrong way. Your passport would be against you. There may have been some other lifebelt or another stray clue that we didn't pick up. Then we should just make matters worse. They could say we were just part of a clumsy plot to try and hand it on Hitler. It's too much risk to take… Besides which, it wouldn't help us at all with this Gilbeck-March palaver."

"You're still very sure that they're connected," said Patricia.

Simon swung the wheel again, and a quartering comber sped them through the inlet into the comparative quiet of Biscayne Bay.

I'm not quite sure," he said. "But I'm going to try and make sure tonight."

The plan had begun to shape itself almost subconsciously while they raced over the sea. The outlines of it were still loose and undefined, but the nucleus was more than enough. He knew now what he was going to do with the body of the youth that lay under Hoppy's elephantine brogues, and his forthright mind saw nothing ghoulish in the idea. The owner of the body could have no practical interest any longer in what happened to it: it was an article as impersonal as a leg of mutton, a piece of merchandise to be used in the most profitable way Simon could see. He knew that the idea that had come to him was crazy, but his best ideas had always been that way. There were immovable boundaries to the world of speculation and theory: beyond those frontiers there was no way to travel except by direct action. And the more straightforward and direct it was, the better he liked it He had never found any better place to meet trouble than halfway.

Close by the rocks of the County Causeway, bordering the ship channel, he slowed up the Meteor and began to edge her in to the treacherous bank.