Simon allowed his glance to shift with a subtle hint of nervousness.
'Not yet. But-'
'Ah, then where is the letter?'
'I've still got it'
'Where?'
'At the house.'
'It would be so much better if you could produce it to Mr March and prove that you're telling the truth.' The captain's eyes were as hard and flickerless as agates. 'Perhaps you didn't really leave it at home. Perhaps you still have it with you.'
He took one step closer.
The Saint's left hand stirred involuntarily towards his breast pocket. At least, the movement looked involuntary-a defensive gesture that was checked almost as soon as it began. But the captain saw it, and interpreted it as he was meant to interpret it. He took two more steps, and reached towards the pocket. Which was exactly what Simon had been arranging for him to do.
A lot of things happened all at once, with the speed and efficiency of a highly specialised juggling routine. They can only be catalogued laboriously here, but their actual sequence was so swift that it defeated the eye.
The Saint made a half turn and a neat flick of his right wrist which jarred the bubbling contents of his champagne glass squarely into the captain's eyes. Simultaneously the fingers of the Saint's left hand closed like spring-steel clamps on the wrist behind the captain's Luger. Meanwhile, all the unexpected physical agility which justified Hoppy Uniatz's professional name, and compensated with such liberality for the primeval sluggishness of his intellect, surged into volcanic activity. One of his massive feet swung up from the rear in a dropkick arc which terminated explosively on the base of the captain's spine; and almost immediately, as if the kick had only been timed to elevate the captain to meet it, the top of the captain's skull served as a landing field for the whisky bottle for which by this time Mr Uniatz had no further practical use. The captain lay down on the deck in a disinterested manner, and Simon Templar turned his Luger in the direction of Randolph March's slackly drooping jaw.
'I'm sorry we can't stay now,' he murmured. 'But I'm afraid your skipper had some unsociable ideas. Also it's getting to be time for Hoppy's beauty sleep. But we'll be seeing you again-especially if Lawrence Gilbeck and Justine don't show up very soon. Try not to forget that, Randy . . .'
His voice was very gentle, but his eyes were no softer than frozen sapphires. And then, as quickly and elusively as it had come, the chill fell away from him as he turned to smile at the girl, who had not moved at all in those last hectic seconds.
'You'll remember, won't you?' he said. 'Any time you feel like some more fun, you know where to find me.'
She didn't answer, any more than March, but the recollection of her raptly contemplative gaze stayed in his mind all the way home and until he fell asleep.
He was breakfasting heartily on fried chicken and waffles served under the shade of a gaudily striped umbrella when Peter Quentin and Patricia joined him on the patio.
'You must have been tired.' Patricia slipped her bath robe back from her brown shoulders, and draped slender tanned legs and sandalled feet along the length of a cane chair. 'Peter and I have been swimming for two hours. We thought you were going to sleep all day.
'If we hadn't heard you snoring,' said Peter, 'we could have hoped you were dead.'
The Saint's white teeth denuded a chicken bone.
'Early rising is the burden of the proletariat and the affectation of millionaires,' he said. 'Being neither, I try to achieve a very happy mean.' Holding the bone in one hand, he used it as a pointer to indicate the retreating form of a billowy Negress who was waddling away into the background with a tray. 'Where did the Black Narcissus come from? She wasn't here yesterday. She says her name's Desdemona, and I find it hard to believe.'
'Don't talk with your mouth full,' Patricia told him. 'She showed up this morning with a coloured chauffeur named Even. It was their day off yesterday.'
'That's interesting.' Simon stirred his coffee. 'And the Fillipino houseboy was downtown on some errand. So nobody actually saw how Gilbeck and Justine left.'
'They phoned,' she said; and he nodded.
'I've helped people to make phone calls myself, in my day.'
Peter Quentin hoisted his powerful trunk-clad form on to a sunwarmed coping, and swung his sandy feet.
'If the Gilbecks don't show up today, skipper, so we just stick around?'
Simon leaned back and glanced around contentedly at the semi-tropical scene. The house sprawled out around him, cool and spacious under the roof of Cuban tile. A riot of poinsettias, hibiscus, and azaleas bordered the inner wall of the estate and overflowed into the patio. On the other side of the house, a palm-lined driveway swept in a horseshoe towards Collins Avenue. The heightened colours drawn in flashing sunwashed lines made a picture- book setting for the ocean's incredible blue.
'I like the place,' said the Saint 'Gilbeck or no Gilbeck, I think I'll stay. Even without the succulent Justine. Desdemona cooks with the thistledown touch of a fairy queen. It's true that she sometimes looks at me with what a more sensitive man might think was black disapproval, but I feel I can win her. I'm sure that shell learn to love me before we part.'
'It'll be one of your biggest and blackest failures if she doesn't,' said Patricia.
Simon ignored her scathingly, and lighted a cigarette.
'Here in the midst of this epicurean if somewhat decadent Paradise,' he said, 'we can exist in sumptuous and sybaritic splendour at Comrade Gilbeck's expense, even though we may have to deny ourselves such British luxuries as bubble-and-squeak and toad-in-the-hole. It's a beautiful place to live. Also it's full of fascinating people.'
'You haven't tried the restaurant where I had dinner last night, when I was out sleuthing for you,' said Peter Quentin. 'They served me a very fat pork chop fried in peanut oil, and coffee with canned milk which turned it a disappointed grey. There was also a plate of grass and other vegetable matter, garnished with a mayonnaise compounded of machine oil and soap flakes.'
'The fascinating people are the principal attraction,' Patricia explained. 'Particularly the one with red hair.'
The Saint half closed his eyes.
'Darling, I'm afraid our one and only Hoppy must have been embroidering the story. I told you last night exactly what happened. The whole thing was most casual. Somehow she has fallen under the baleful spell of March's Gastric Ambrosia, but naturally my superior beauty impressed her. I judged her to be a demure little thing, unversed in the ways of the world and unskilled in duplicity.'
'And shy,' said Patricia.
'Perhaps. But certainly not lacking-at least in several major points which a crude man might find attractive in that particular type of girl.'
'I suppose that's why you offered to find some more fun for her.'
'So long as she has her fun,' Peter observed, 'it can't really matter if you get us all bumped off.'
Simon created a perfect smoke-ring.
'We don't have to worry about that for the present. I think our murders will be temporarily postponed on account of the hitch which I contrived last night.'
'You mean that letter you invented?'
Simon refrained from answering while Desdemona hove alongside to collect the dishes. When the last of them was on the tray supported by her ample arm, she asked stoically: 'When is you-all goin' away?'
The Saint flipped a half dollar in the air, caught it, and placed it on the edge of the laden tray.
'That was one of the best breakfasts I ever ate, Desdemona,' he told her. 'I think we'll wait until Mr Gilbeck gets back.' He added deliberately: 'Are you sure they didn't give you any idea how long they'd be away?'
' 'Deed they didn't.' Desdemona's eyes grew round as they moved from Simon to the shiny coin. 'Sometimes they's gone a week acruisin'. Sometimes 'tain't moh than foh a day.'
She departed stolidly on that enlightening note, and Peter grinned.
'You'd better try some folding money next time,' he suggested. 'She doesn't seem to thaw for silver.'
