The Saint in Miami (31 page)

“A sweet set-up,” Peter commented at length. “I just wish I could have had your pal Heinrich to myself for a few minutes.”

It seemed like the only thing to say. But Hoppy Uniatz had other ideas.

“Boss,” he said heavily, “I still don’t get it.”

“Get what?” Simon asked, very kindly.

“About de Pool.”

“Hoppy, I tried to tell you-“

“I know, boss. Dis here ain’t de Pool, at all. But you hear what March says before dey give him de woiks? He says after we come here de Pool is all blown up. We ain’t never blown up nut’n. So dey must be some udder hijackers tryin’ to muscle in on dis shine. I don’t get it,” said Mr Uniatz, reiterating his major premise.

It’s just a general craze for blowing things up,” Simon explained. “It’ll die out after a while, like miniature golf and the Handies.”

There was another lull. There should have been so much to say at a time like that, and yet at that time there seemed to be so tittle that was worth saying.

Outside, above the slow pacing of the sentry, the heavier tramping back and forth of laden men went on, with the sounds of creaking tackle and clunking wood, of muttering voices and the intermittent sharp spur of commands.

Karen Leith said reflectively: “I don’t know how the rest of you are getting on, but I’m supposed to have been trained in all the tricks of getting out of ropes, and I’m afraid these knots are too good for me.”

“For me too,” said Peter.

Even the Saint seemed to have stopped struggling.

Patricia said in a sudden eerie whisper: “What’s moving around in here?”

“Shut up,” said the Saint’s low voice. “Just keep on talking as you have been.”

And the sound came from a different part of the room from where he had last spoken. In the dim moonlight their straining eyes watched a shadow move-a shadow that crept here and there on the floor. But it was not Randolph March come to life again, as the first ghostly brush of horror in their flesh had suggested, for his shape could still be seen lying where it had fallen.

They were tongue-tied for a while, trying to frame sentences that would sound natural.

At last Peter said, with purpose: “If only Hoppy and I were loose we could jump the guy at the door and get his gun and kill some more of the swine before they got us.”

“But they would get you, Peter.” Again the Saint’s voice came from another place. “There are plenty of them, and one gun-load wouldn’t go very far.”

“If we were loose,” said Patricia, taking her tone from Peter, “we could sneak off and hide in the jungle. They couldn’t afford to spend much time hunting for us.”

“But they’d still get away,” said the Saint.

“Maybe dey wouldn’t have room for all de liquor,” said Mr Uniatz, developing his own fairy-tale. “Maybe dey gotta leave a whole case, so we can find it.”

“If I could get out,” Karen said, “I’d do anything to try and stop the submarine.”

With what?” Peter demanded.

“I wish I knew.”

There was a tiny snapping sound, a very thin long-drawn squeak, then a slurred rustle.

Peter made a restive movement
“I know it’s all quite stupid,” he remarked, “but I wish you’d give us some of your ideas, Skipper. Just to pass the time. What would you do if you could do anything?”

There was no answer.

The silence dragged through long tingling seconds.

Patricia said softly, and not quite steadily: “Simon …”

The Saint did not answer. Or was it an answer when two spaced finger-taps beat almost inaudibly on the floor?.

There was nothing else. They had lost track of the moving shadow, although there might have been a new angular patch of blackness in one dark comer near where the shadow had last moved. But the square of luminance from the window had spread itself on the floor in a way that built up deceptive outlines. In the straining of their eyes, all shadows seemed to run together and dissolve like ephemeral fluids. Each of them at some time tried to count other shapes that could be dimly distinguished and identified. One, two, three-and the counter … and begin again.

But it was quiet. The ears could create sound in protest, as the eyes could create form and movement. The magnified sifflation of a breath, the screak of a cot-spring, the pulse of their own blood-stream-anything could be built into what the mind wanted to make of it. It even seemed to Karen once that something moved underneath her, like a snake slithering under the floor, so that her skin tightened with instinctive fear.

Presently Peter spoke.

“At a time like this,” he said loudly, “the Saint would begin to tell one of his interminable stories about a bow-legged bed-bug named Aristophagus, who would find himself in a number of complicated and quite unprintable dilemmas. Not having Simon’s virginal mind, I can’t really reputise for him. So let’s play some other silly game. We all try to give the name of a song with our names in it. Like if your name was Mary, you’d say Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. Or Hoppy could say Hopping This Find You As It Leaves Me, In Love.”

There was another inevitable lull.

“Pat Up four Troubles In your Old Kit Bag” said Patricia.

“You started it, Peter,” Karen observed. “Where are you?”

“Peter Me Of Love,” said Mr Quentin engagingly.

“Karen Me Back To Old Virginny,” she answered.

“This is getting worse and worse,” said Patricia. “When do we get down to Holm Sweet Holm?”

It was something fantastic to remember and yet coldly dreadful to go through. Somehow, with feverish desperation they kept their voices going. They worked through every name that they all knew, and gravitated from there into emptier and wilder devices. And the time crawled by.

The square patch of moonlight moved across the floor and slid gruesomely over part of the inanimate face of Randolph March. The sentry shuffled endlessly back and forth outside. The speed tender had made three or four droning trips across the bay. The laboured tramping to and fro of the men shifting stores had dwindled; the underplay of their voices had died to rare guttural murmurs, and the barking of commands had become more infrequent. New sounds had also entered the audible background-clankings of metal distorted by the echoes of water, voices muffled by distance and mingled with vague scrapings and splashings. For a while there had been a humming noise that had stopped again.

They had no way to keep track of the minutes that had passed. But each one of them knew how their little span of life had been going by. And not one of them had yet uttered any speculation about the one voice that none of them had heard for so long.

Karen Leith said at last almost in a sigh: “They must be nearly ready to sail by now.”

“We did what we could,” said Patricia Holm.

“Chees,” said Hoppy Uniatz, “dese mugs ain’t never been raised right. I see plenty a suckers take de heat, but dey always get a smoke an’ a pull from de bottle foist. I never see nobody get de woiks wit’ a toist in him like I got.”

With all of them crowded in there, the sweltering heat had filled up the room so that it was like a physical compression, which cramped breathing and weighed into the brain with a relentless pressure that tempted thought into the hazy liberty of delirium. Another snake might have rustled under the floor beneath Peter Quentin, There might have been a repetition of the scuffling sound that he had heard before, the thin creak, and the snap, and a muffled thudding that was not quite the same. The shadows that had been still might have begun moving again. He would not have been sure.

He said roughly: “I hate to remind you, but we weren’t talking about your grisly past. We were in the middle of a hot spelling game, and it’s up to you, Hoppy. It goes R-I-F-L. And I think we’ve got you for another life.

“O,” said the Saint.

Nobody stirred. It was a stillness in which pins could have dropped on velvet with an ear-stunning clatter.

“I’ll challenge you,” Peter said at last. “There’s no such word.”

“Riflolver,” said the Saint.

There was a quick march of steps outside, and the door was opened. The single light went on.

Heinrich Friede stood in the entrance, with the sentry just behind him, His lips were flattened over his teeth in a smile of sneering vindictiveness that embraced them all, so that the creases that ran down from his nose cut deeper into his face.

“We are about to leave,” he said. “I hope you have enjoyed the anticipation of your own departure. You will not have much longer to wait-perhaps half an hour. I shall press the button as soon as we have reached open water.”

Peter and Patricia and Karen and Hoppy looked at him once, but after that they looked more at the Saint. It might have seemed like a tribute to personality or a gesture of loyalty; but the truth was many times more mundane. They were simply letting their eyes confirm the incomprehensible evidence that their ears had offered a few seconds before.

For the Saint was there, sitting at the end of one cot, exactly as they had seen him last, with his hands behind him and the bruises of Friede’s violence swelling in his face and his shabby clothes sandy and dishevelled. Only perhaps the reckless disdain of his blue eyes burned brighter and more invincible.

“I hope you have a nice voyage, Heinrich,” he said.

“It is a waste of time to tell you,” Friede said, “but I should like one particular thought to cheer your last moment. You, in your unimportant dissolution, are only a symbol of what you represent. Just as you have tried to fight us and have been out-generalled and destroyed, so everyone on earth who tries to fight us will be destroyed. The little damage you have done will be repaired; your own futility can not be repaired. Console yourselves with that. The rest of your tribe will soon follow you into your extinction, except those whom we keep for slaves as you once kept other inferior races. So you see, all you have achieved and all you die for is nothing.”

The Saint’s eyes were unmoving pools of sapphire.“It is a waste of time to tell you,” he mocked. “But I wish you could know one thing before you die. All that you and your kind will destroy the world for is no more in history than a forest fire. You’ll bring your great gifts of blackness and desolation; but one day the trees will be green again and nobody will remember you.”

“I leave you to your fantasy,” said the captain.

And he was gone, with another click of the switch and a slam of the door.

They heard him striding away, his footfalls dying on the ground outside, waking again hollowly on the planking of the pier, then ceasing altogether. They heard the last crack of command, and a soft splash of water. The seconds ticked away.

“Simon,” said Patricia.

“Quiet,” said the Saint tensely.

They had only their hearing to build a picture with, and the sounds that reached them seemed to come through the wrong end of an auditory telescope. Even the sentry’s footsteps had ceased; and the endless whine of mosquitoes and the chirrup of other insects built up an obscuring fog in which other sounds were confused.

But there might have been some scuffling of wood, and the ring of a distant tramping on metal. There were voices, and a repetition of the deep steady hum that they had heard before, which drowned out the insects for a while, and then was bafflingly equal with them, and then sank away until it was lost in its turn. Then there seemed to be nothing at all but the soft swish of water against the shore and among the mangrove roots.

The owl came back and began moaning again.

But still the Saint kept silence, while minutes seemed to drag out into hours, before he felt sure enough to move.

Then light seemed to crash into the room like thunder as he flipped the switch.

They stared at him as he stood smiling, with his knife in his hand.

“I’m sorry, boys and girls,” he said, “but I couldn’t take any chances on being overheard.”

“We understand,” said Peter Quentin. “You’re so considerate that we’re dazzled to look at you.”

Simon was cutting Patricia free. She kissed him as the last cord fell away, and massaged her wrists as he went over to Karen Leith.

As he freed her, she said: “I think-I think we all thought you were loose before.”

“I was,” said the Saint.

“Of course,” said Peter Quentin, as his turn came, “you wouldn’t have cared to tell anyone.”

“I had something to do, Simon said. He finished with Peter and went on to Hoppy. “I knew there must be a trapdoor in the floor or something, and eventually I found it. The lock was a bit awkward, but I mixed my wood-carving and my strong-arm act, and sort of persuaded it. Then I had to do my worm impersonation with some wriggling and burrowing under the outside shingles-luckily the place is built on piles instead of straight foundations, and the walls don’t go into the ground. Eventually I got outside and prowled here and there.”

“Boss,” said Mr Uniatz, loosening his cramped limbs, “dijja find anyt’ing to drink?”

“There should be something left on the March Hare,” said the Saint, “but I didn’t investigate.”

He went to the door and opened it, standing just outside and filling his lungs with relatively fresh air, while he tamped one of the last two cigarettes from his case. Patricia joined him and took the other one. They stood with their arms linked together, looking across the anchorage where the March Hare still rode in darkness under the moon, but a sheet of unrippled water lay where the submarine had been. There Peter Quentin joined them.

“I don’t want to disrupt an idyll,” he observed diffidently, “but personally I shouldn’t mind being a bit further off when Friede gives his farewell broadcast.”

“You needn’t worry,” said the Saint. “I found it under the floor when I got down there-it was what I was looking for under the trapdoor anyhow. A very innocent packing case labelled ‘Tomato Soup.’ I hauled it out with me.”

“Where did you dump it?” Peter asked suspiciously.

“I parked it with a lot of other cases of canned food that the crew were ferrying out to the submarine. Or they may have been ammunition-I couldn’t be sure. Anyway it was quite a difficult business, getting it out on the pier and making it look natural. But I made it, and managed to get back in time.”