Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Miami

Simon Templar lay stretched out on the sands in front of Lawrence Gilbeck's modest twenty-five-room bungalow, and allowed the cottony breakers pushing their way in from the Atlantic to lull him with the gentle roar of their disintegration on the slope at his feet.

Although it was an hour after a late dinner, the sand was still warm from the day's sun. Overhead, the celebrated Miami moon, by kind permission of the Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Public Relations, floated among the stars like a piece of luminous cheese, looking more like the product of one of Earl Carroll's electricians than a manifestation of nature. The moon dripped down a silvery opalescence which left black shadows in the areas it missed. The shadows deepened the tiny indentations beside Simon's nose, and for a moment gave an entirely false suggestion of care and worry to his face he looked at Patricia Holm.

That the appearance of care was false, Patricia knew. Commonplace care was a disease of modern existence which was incapable of infecting the exuberant life of that amazing modern buccaneer who was better known to most of the world by his queer nickname of "The Saint" than by the names which were recorded on his birth certificate. Worry he might cause to the plodding members of many police forces throughout the world; worry he certainly had caused, in lavish and sometimes even fatal doses, to very many members of that loosely knit fraternity which is popularly referred to as the Underworld, even when it lives in much greater luxury than most respectable people; but the worry stopped there. It was something quite external to the Saint. If it ever touched him at all, it was in the form of a perverse and irresponsible worry — a small irking worry that life might one day become dull, that the gods of gay and perilous adventure who had blessed him so extravagantly through all his life so far might one day desert him, leaving nothing but the humdrum uneventfulness which ordinary mortals accept as a substitute for living…

He reached out a brown hand and trickled sand through his fingers on to the arm which Patricia was using as a pillow for her spun-gold hair.

"You know such fascinating people, darling," he said. "These Gilbecks must be specially good samples. I suppose it's that open-handed New World hospitality I've read about. Turn your house over to a gang of strangers, and just leave them to it. I expect it has a lot of good points, too. Your guests don't have a chance to get on your nerves. Probably they'll send us a wire in a month or two from Honolulu or somewhere. 'So nice to have had you with us. Do come again.' "

Patricia moved her rounded arm to ward off the trickle of sand which threatened her hair.

"Something must have happened," she said seriously. "Justine wouldn't write me that she was in trouble and then go away."

"But she did," Simon insisted. " 'Come,' she writes you. 'All is not well. My father is moping about the house, bowed down with some mysterious grief and woe. Something Sinister is Going On.' So what do we do?"

"I remember," said Patricia. "But keep on talking if it amuses you."

"On the contrary," said the Saint, "it hurts me. It scarifies my sensitive soul… We gird up our loins and fly out here to the rescue of the beauteous Justine and her distraught papa. And are they here?"

He formed a human question mark by pulling up his knees and looking at them.

Patricia supplied the answer: "No, they aren't here."

"Exactly," Simon agreed. "They aren't here. Instead of finding them on the doorstep, waiting to welcome us with stuffed tarpon, potted coconuts, and poi, we are met by nothing more convivial than a Filipino houseboy with a cold. He informs us in a hoarse gust of germs that Comrade Gilbeck and this voluptuous daughter you've described so lushly have hoisted the anchor on their yacht, which I think is most appropriately named the Mirage, and departed for ports unknown."

"You make a good story of it."

"I have to. Otherwise I'd be weeping over it. The whole mushy business depresses me. I'm afraid our hosts have taken a powder, as Hoppy would say."

"Well," protested Patricia, "you can't blame me for it."

"Furthermore," Simon continued, "I don't believe there ever was any reason for Justine to send for you. Probably Papa had just taken a flier in Consolidated Toothpicks, and then some dentist proclaimed that toothpicks destroy the teeth, and the bottom fell out of the market. After she wrote that letter another dentist came back and said that toothpicks not only prevent decay but also cure cancer, nervous B.O., and athlete's foot The market boomed again, Pappy rejoiced, and they climbed into their canoe and paddled happily away to celebrate, forgetting all about us."

"Maybe that's what happened."

Simon sat up, with a shrug of his wide shoulders, and brushed the sand impatiently from his long legs.

He looked at her, and almost forgot everything else. A trick of that musical-comedy moon made her seem scarcely real. She was part of his life, the most enduring keystone of his happiness, unchanging as the stars; yet at that moment she seemed to have blended into the warm magic of the Florida night, become remote and doubly beautiful, like some cast-up fantasy of moonbeams and mother of pearl. The banter began to die out of his blue eyes. He touched her, and so felt the detachment of her mind which had helped the illusion.

"You really think something has happened, don't you?" he said soberly.

"I'm sure of it."

A breeze sprang up from the ocean and danced inland, stirring the palm fronds behind them. It seemed to touch the Saint with a chill; and yet he knew there was no chill in the wind. He had felt this other kind of chill so many times before, like the points of a million spectral needles, frozen and feathery-thin, probing every pore with a touch as light as a cobweb. In the past it had led him into the shadow of death more often than he could remember; and yet even more often than that its same impartial touch had warned him of danger in time to escape the falling shadow. It was the chill of adventure — the stirring of a ghostly prescience that was for ever rooted in his uncanny attunement to the whispering wavelengths of battle and sudden death. And he felt it then, as he gazed out at the shimmering vagueness of the sea.

"Look." He slid an arm behind Patricia's shoulders and helped her to sit up. "There's quite a big ship out there. I've been watching it. And it seems to be heading in. I could see the port light a few minutes ago, and now the starboard light's visible too. We must be looking directly at her bow."

"Perhaps the Gilbecks are coming back, after all," she said.

"It's much too big for them," he said quietly. "But why would a ship that size be heading straight for the shore — as close as that?"

Patricia stared at it.

Out on the ocean, a beam of silver light streamed out suddenly from a searchlight on the vessel's forepeak. It held steady for a second, then turned erratically as if it were hunting for something. The ray swung downwards, struck the water close to the cobbled pathway of moonlight, and swept quickly over the sea, lancing the surface like a scalpel of pure luminance. Leaking rays caught the figures of men behind it and silhouetted them against the whiteness of the superstructure.

Not until then did Simon realise that the ship was even closer to the shore than he had thought. He stood up and raised Patricia to her feet