The Saint in Miami

kept any­thing back. But I'm just as much in the dark as I ever was- with the only difference that I'm not wondering any more whether I'm just dreaming that there's dirty work going on, like an old maid looking under the bed for lecherous burglars. The fact that Jennet took a shot at me this morning proves that someone is interested in my nuisance value, whether the shot was only meant for a warning or not. And since your boy friend Randy and his captain are the only people I'd flaunted my nuisance value at so far, they must be in it up to the neck. A baby could put all that together. But that's all.'

'And one other thing,' she said. 'You have a reputation.'

'That's true.' He admitted it without vanity or self-satisfaction, as a cold fact. 'Moreover, I'm still doing my best to live up to it ... Now it's your turn. You told me this morning I could ask you this tonight, and I'm asking.'

'Your glass is empty,' she said.

His grip had relaxed while he talked, and he let her release herself without tightening it again. She made no attempt to massage her wrist, although the red print of his fingers on her satin skin made him realise how he had forgotten his strength. She had a strength of her own which he had sensed as a core of steel no less finely tempered than his underneath the outward beauty of satin and softness and gossamer, and he wondered why it should be so blandly assumed that women with Tanagra bodies and magazine-cover faces could only be either vapid or vicious inside.

He went back to the portable bar and stirred the shaker and refilled his glass, and said: 'If you want to welsh on that, perhaps you've got a reason.'

'You're asking me what I know,' she replied. 'I don't suppose you'd believe me if I told you I don't know much more than you've said already.'

'What you actually said I could ask is what your place is in this party.'

She let him light her a cigarette, and her amazing eyes were like amethysts under his ruthless scrutiny.

'I run around with Randolph March,' she said.

'For what you hope to get out of it?'

'For what I hope to get out of it,' she said, without winc­ing.

'Then why are you going out with me?'

'Because I want to.'

'Do you expect to get anything valuable out of me?'

'Probably nothing but a few more kicks in the teeth.'

He felt cheap, but he had to harden his heart, even though he was hurting himself as much as he could hope to hurt her.

'Does it make any difference to you if March is mixed up in some dirty work?' he inquired relentlessly.

'A lot of difference.'

'If you could get the goods on him, you could make some­thing out of it.'

'That's right. I could.'

'Meanwhile, you'll string along with him. And I'm sure he expects you to bring back all the information you can squeeze out of me. Your job is to keep him in touch with what I think and find out what I'm going to do.'

'Exactly that.'

'What would you say if I told you I'd figured all that out long ago, and decided I didn't care?-That I knew you'd been put to watch me, but I didn't think you could do me any harm, and so I didn't give a damn?-That I knew you might be dangerous, but I didn't mind, because I liked dan­ger and it was fun to be with you. Suppose I told you I was taking a chance with my eyes open, and I didn't give a hoot in hell for any harm you could do. Because I believed you'd break down before you saw me put on the spot. And the hell with it, anyway. Then what?'

'God damn you,' she said in a low voice, 'I'd love you.'

He was shaken. He hadn't meant to goad her so far, or have so much said.

He wanted to take a step towards her, but he knew he must not. And she said: 'But I'd call you a fool. And I'd love you for that, too. But it couldn't make any difference.'

He glanced at his cigarette, and flipped dead ashes on to the terrace. He finished his drink, with leisured appreciation. And he knew that those things made no difference either. In a ridiculous reckless way he was happy, happier than he had been since the beginning of the adventure. With no good rea­son, and at the same time with all the reasons in the world.

When he was sure enough of himself, he put out his hand.

'Then let's have another cocktail at the Roney Plaza,' he said, 'and decide where we'll go to dinner. Ana see how it turns out.'

She stood up.

Her quiet acceptance seemed even grateful, but there was far more behind it than he could put together at once. It was so hard to penetrate that dazzling and intoxicating outer per­fection. She was all white mist and moonbeams, cold flame of hair and cool redness of soft lips; and swords behind them.

But she took his hand.

'Let's have tonight,' she said.

She could have said it in twenty ways. And perhaps she said it in all of them at once, or none. But the only certain thing was that for one brief moment, for the second time that day, her mouth had been yielding against his. And this time he had not moved at all.

At eleven thirty she was still with him. When he had looked at his watch and suggested that it was time they left the res­taurant, she had said: 'I can't stop you taking me home, but you can't stop me calling a taxi and going straight to the Palmleaf Fan.'

So they were driving northwards, and on their right the sea lapped a pebbly strip of beach only about eight feet below them. The houses had thinned out and become scarce, and on the left a tangled barrier of shrubbery grew high out of grassy dunes. Only an occasional car dimmed its lights in meeting and flashed by. The road narrowed, and held down their speed with short scenic-railway undulations.

Simon drove with a cigarette clipped lightly between two fingers, and a deep lazy devilment altered the alignment of one eyebrow to an extent that only a micrometer could have measured. But there was a siren song in the wind that his blood answered, and when he put the cigarette to his lips his blue eyes danced with lights that were not all reflected from the glowing end.

He was insane; but he always had been. There could be nothing much screwier than going out to what looked more and more like an elaborately organised rendezvous with des­tiny in the company of a girl who had freely declared herself a wanderer from the enemy camp. And yet he didn't care. He had told her the literal truth, within its limits, exactly as he believed she had told him. The evening had been worth it, and they had bargained for that. They had had four hours for which he would have fought an army. Adventures could be good or bad, trivial or ponderous; but there had been four hours that would live longer than memory. Even though nothing more of the least importance had been said. They had known each other; and behind the screens of sophisti­cated patter and unforgettable cross-purposes their own selves had walked together, clear-eyed, like children in a walled garden.

And all that was over now, except for remembrance.

'We're nearly there,' she said.

And all he had to be sure of now was that the automatic rode easily in his shoulder holster, without marring the set of a jacket which had been cut to allow for such extra impedi­menta, and that his knife was loose in its sheath under his sleeve, and that the atavistic physiognomy of Hoppy Uniatz, whom he had stopped to collect on the way without any protest from her, still nodded somnolently in the back seat.

Ahead and to the left, the sand dunes flattened into a shallow gully with a wooden arch at its entrance. Over the arch a single dim bulb flickered in an erratic way that sent crazy shadows writhing across the road. As the Saint slowed down, he saw that the effect was caused by the uncannily lifelike effigy of a Negro boy which reclined on top of the arch with a palmleaf fan in one dangling hand. The fan, in front of the light, moved restlessly in the breeze and created the flickering shadows.

'This is the place,' she said. 'It's about half a mile in.'

'Looks like a cheerful spot for an ambush,' he remarked, and turned the car into the shell road.

Flame fanned past his ear, and a report like the crack of doom left the drum bruised and singing. Fragments of some­thing showered from above, and the largest of them .fell sol­idly into his lap. He glanced at it as he