The Saint on the Spanish Main (6 page)

He tried to keep his eyes level, but there
was a reckless
glint
in them that would not be smothered altogether.

“What about you, Gloria?”

“If I let you down,” she vowed,
“you can take any
Saintly revenge you can think of.”

Simon Templar grinned.

“You’ve got a deal, darling.”

She leaned over to mould her mouth against
his, ig
noring the
looseness of the green robe. This time he could not keep quite still.

5

And so the shadows of the spindly coconut
palms were
growing longer and cooler as the Saint strolled west
wards
along the lazy curve of Bimini’s one uncongested street.

The radiophone contact with Miami had been
surpris
ingly fast and adequate. The charter plane service had
been
willing and competently businesslike. For Simon
Templar to pack up
for a weekend or a trip around the world was practically the same operation,
and he had done it so often that he could complete it in a matter of
minutes
without even being conscious of an interruption
in whatever train of
thought he was pursuing. He had
plenty of time left to amble up to the
Colleen
and make
an absolutely essential adieu.

He thumped on the deck with a bottle which he
had
purchased on the way; and Patsy O’Kevin came out
into the cockpit
blinking a little, like a groundhog pre
maturely disturbed from hibernation.

“Why, ‘tis yerself again,” observed
the captain superfluously. Then he got the bottle in good focus and went on
with expanding cordiality: “An’ welcome as the tonic
I think I’m
seein’ there in yer hand.”

He disappeared again for what seemed like a
fraction of a second, and reappeared providently armed with a couple of
glasses.

“It’s only Peter Dawson,” said the
Saint, removing
the cap from the bottle. “They seem to be fresh out
of
Irish whisky today. Will you condescend to rinse out your gullet with
Scotch?”

“So long as it’s good Gaelic liquor,
I’ll not be complainin’.” O’Kevin kept his glass held out, as if by in
stinct,
until only a miracle of surface tension kept the
bulging contents from running over the
rim; but his
bright green eyes clung
shrewdly and inquisitively to the
Saint’s
face. “An’ whatever it is ye’re celebratin’, Simon,
‘tis happy I am to celebrate wid ye.”

The Saint filled the second glass, and looked
around.

“Where’s Des?” he asked.

“He got talkin’ to Mike Lerner this
afternoon—ye
ought to meet him yerself, the great fisherman who lives
here. I guess Mike must o’ liked the mettle av him, for he took the lad
off to see his aquarium an’ the labora
tory which he built for the University o’
Miami, an’ if
I’m not lucky Mike will be
givin’ him a job an’ I’ll be
lookin’
for a new mate next month.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Simon
said, and most sincere
ly meant it.

“Des is a good lad,” O’Kevin said
grudgingly. “But
not to be mentioned in the same toast wid
yerself.
Which, by
yer leave, I shall now drink to ye.”

He raised his glass, emptied two-thirds of
it, wiped his
lips on the back of his hand, and exhaled a rich aromatic
sigh.

“An’ now,” he persisted
remorselessly, “tell me what
it is that ye’re drinkin’ to.”

“This, Patsy, is a farewell drink.”

“Where are ye goin’?”

“Away.”

“Widout iver gettin’ to know
Gloria?”

“No. Not quite without that.”

O’Kevin squinted at him.

“It was just like I towld ye, wasn’t
it, Simon me b’y?”

“I wouldn’t call her a rock in the harbor,” said the
Saint.

O’Kevin chuckled and slapped his leg.

“Faith, an’ it does me heart good to see that look in
yer eye! Would ye be tellin’ me just a little
more, which
it should be me roight
to know as the godfather av it?”

Simon lighted a cigarette and gave a
comprehensive account of his interrupted siesta. That is, except for the
physical
details about which chivalry and good taste im
posed a gentlemanly
reticence which may have been
quite exasperating to his audience. But he
gave a very
careful and methodical account of the conversation, as
much to
clarify his own recollection as anything.

“So tomorrow ye’ll be with her again in
Nassau,”
O’Kevin said wistfully, holding out his glass for a
refill.

“No,” said the Saint.

The captain frowned.

“Maybe ye’re roight, an’ I shouldn’t be
havin’ anoth
er
drop, at that,” he said. “It sounded to me exactly as if ye said
No.”

“I did.” Simon poured again
hospitably, and put
down the bottle. “You see, she hasn’t any intention
of
going there. The job was very delicately handled—first to establish
that she was going to Nassau anyhow, then
to get me interested and you might even
say excited,
then to dampen me down again
with nervous misgivings
about the
obvious risks of having an affair with her then
and there. I cued her a bit with that last switch, but she
could easily have done it without my help if
she’d had
to. Then, she had to put
over the argument for my leav
ing at
once, and without her. That was fairly easy too,
and I helped her again, being a kind soul under my gruff
exterior.”

“Ye’re imaginin’ things, Simon. Her
arguments were
only good sense.”

“Of course. They had to be. I told you
it was beau
tifully worked out. Even to the idea of my leaving ahead
of her. Because if she’d left first, as a decoy, there’d
always be
the risk that I mightn’t follow, and then she
wouldn’t be around to
freshen the proposition. That
gorgeous body of hers was always worth betting on.
And if I’d been really tiresome and refused to be
coaxed
the way they wanted at all, I
could still be maneuvered into bed, or near enough to it to stage a suitable
tableau
for Uckrose to come bursting in on, with Innutio or
maybe someone else for a witness, and start
pumping
lead like a properly
indignant husband.”.

“If that was the idea, Simon, ye’d be
lyin’ dead in yer
room already.”

“No, because then they’d have all the
fuss and bother
of a trial, and a British court might give Uckrose a lot
of
trouble no matter how much provocation he could
prove. It was much
smarter to try to get me out of the
way peacefully first, if it could be
done. But don’t think I didn’t have goose-pimples a few times, wondering if
they were
as smart as I wanted them to be.”

“But ye’d towld her ye had nothin’
against Uckrose,
exceptin’ perhaps his bad manners, so whoy would he be
wantin’ to
harm ye?”

“For fear of what I might find out,
Patsy. It’s funny
how scared some people get about that when they hear
my name.”

“But ye don’t honestly know of anything
wrong that
he’s doin’?”

Simon sipped his drink.

“Not specifically; not at this instant.
But I do know
that there is something to know. All the effort and in
genuity
that’s been put into trying to bamboozle me is
the proof that
there’s something for me to look for. Isn’t
it silly how panic
and a guilty conscience will make people put a rope around their own necks? If
I’d only
been left alone, I’d probably never have suspected any
thing.”

O’Kevin shook his head baffledly.

“Whoy should Uckrose be hidin’ anything
at all?” he
objected. “Whin ye towld Gloria ye weren’t after
him,
she towld ye herself it only proved he was crazy, as she’d
been afraid he was.”

“An ordinary crackpot with delusions of
persecution
doesn’t hire a bodyguard of Innutio’s type. That was her
clumsiest lie, when she said that he came through a New
York
detective agency. Licensed agencies just don’t sup
ply characters of
that kind. Innutio is a standard-brand
second-string
hoodlum, and Uckrose must know it:
therefore Uckrose is up to no good.
It’s as simple as
that. Gloria came to find out exactly how much I knew;
and
whatever that might have been I’m sure she had a
plan already worked
out for coping with it, using her
natural equipment, which is very
persuasive indeed.
When
I convinced her that I had no idea what Clinton
is worried about, it may have shaken her even more than
if I’d
known everything, but there was a prearranged
plan
for that situation too.… What will always intrigue
me is who is really the brains of the act. Gloria
is a great
performer, but does she
write her own material? Or do
we underrate Brother Uckrose?”

“Simon, me b’y, if it wasn’t for all those tales I’ve
heard about ye, I’d be thinkin’ ye had the same de
lusions as Uckrose! Is it sensible, now, to be
creditin’
him wid all kinds o’
wickedness, whin it’s more loikely
he’s just a little soft in the
head?”

The Saint finished the modest measure of Peter
Dawson which was all he had allowed himself, and set
down the
glass.

“What I’ve been telling you is only the
end of it,
Patsy,” he said. “The tip-off really started
way back in Miami.”

O’Kevin’s brow wrinkled with an effort of
concentration.

“Begorra, ‘tis soundin’ more like a
detective story
ivery blessed minute ye are. Beggin’ yer parden for one
second, I
left a pot on the stove which could be b’ilin’
over while I sit
here.”

He got up and ducked down the companion to the
saloon.

Without an instant’s hesitation, and moving
with the
silence of a hunting leopard, the Saint followed him.

O’Kevin turned from one of the bunk settees
with an
automatic
that he had snatched from under the pillow in
his
grip, but he was not expecting to find the Saint only
a foot away from him. His jaw fell slackly for a
split
second of pardonable paralysis,
and during that interval
the Saint hit it with a nicely calculated
uppercut, not too
light but not too
obliterative. The captain dropped qui
etly
on the bunk.

Simon picked up the gun and tossed it out through aft
open port-hole. Then he pulled a roll of adhesive
tape
from his pocket, and swiftly and
expertly taped
O’Kevin’s wrists
together behind his back, secured his
ankles
in the same way, and rolled him over and bent
him at the knees before
using several thicknesses of the
remaining
tape to link the wrist and ankle bindings to
gether. The jolt with which he had lifted the captain’s
chin had been so well measured that O’Kevin’s eyes
were opening again as the Saint
finished.

“On the subject of lies,” said the
Saint genially,
“You’d so obviously been taking a nap when I came
aboard
that I couldn’t believe you had any pot cooking.
Not that I blame you
for the try.”

The reply which O’Kevin started to make was
so man
ifestly irrelevant, and so offensive to the Saint’s refined
ears,
that Simon was obliged to use the rest of the tape
to seal up O’Kevin’s
mouth without further delay.

“I’m afraid it was you who made the
first mistake,
Patsy,” he said. “When Don Mucklow introduced
us
and said I was looking for you, your guilty conscience
couldn’t
swallow that as a figure of speech. After that, all
the talk about
fishing only sounded like a cover-up. And
when I said I was
headed for Bimini, all you could think
of was that I must be
on trail of this racket you’re in.”

He lighted a cigarette and enjoyed a
leisurely inhala
tion.