The Saint in Miami

instinctively trod home the accelerator, and for an instant a ghostly chill walked like a spider up his back. He had to force himself to pick up the black horror; and then suddenly he went weak with helpless laughter.

'What is it?' Karen whispered.

'It's nothing, darling,' he said. 'Nothing but the hand of a plaster Negro-detached by Hoppy's ever-ready Betsy.'

Mr Uniatz leaned over the back of the front seat and stared at the hand remorsefully as Simon tossed it out.

'Chees, boss,' he said awkwardly, 'I am half asleep when I see him, an' I t'ink he is goin' to jump on us.' He tried to cover his mortification with a jaunty emphasis on the silver lining. 'One t'ing,' he said, 'if he's plastered he won't know who done it.'

Karen brushed off her dress.

'He's just a big overgrown kid, isn't he?' she said in a tact­ful undertone. 'When are you thinking of sending him to school?'

'We tried once,' said the Saint, 'but he killed his teacher in the third grade, and the teacher in the fourth grade thought he'd had enough education.'

It was fortunate that there was half a mile from the en­trance arch to the premises, he reflected, so that it was un­likely that anyone at the Palmleaf Fan would have been alarmed by the shot.

The road swung right in a horseshoe. His headlights ran along a thatched wall ten feet high, broken only by a single door, and picked up the sheen of a line of parked cars. There was not a vast number of them, and he imagined that the crowd would not get really thick until the other night spots were tiredly closing and the diehard drinkers flocked out to this hidden oasis for a last two or three or six nightcaps. Simon parked himself in the line, and as he switched off the engine he heard music filtering out from behind the impres­sive stockade.

'Well, keed,' he said, as Mr Uniatz gouged himself out of the back, 'here we go again.'

She sat beside him for a moment without moving.

'If anything goes wrong,' she said, 'I couldn't help it You won't believe me, but I wanted to tell you.'

He could see the pale symmetry of her face in the dimness, the full lips slightly parted and her eyes bright and yet stilled, and the scent of her hair was in his nostrils; but beyond those things there was nothing that he could reach, and he knew that that was not delusion. Then her fingers brushed his hand on the wheel briefly, and she opened the door.

He got out on his side, and settled his jacket with a wry and reckless grin. So what the hell? . . . And as they crossed to the entrance she said in a matter-of-fact way that clinched the tacit acceptance of their return to grim rules that had been half forgotten: 'It's easier to get in here if you're known. Let me fix it'

'It's a pipe, boss,' declared Mr Uniatz intrusively. 'When de lookout opens de window, I reach t'ru an' squeeze his t'roat till he opens de door.'

'Let's give her a chance to get us in peacefully first,' Simon suggested diplomatically.

It was all strictly practical and businesslike again.

A hidden floodlight beat down on them, and a slit opened in the door-perhaps someone else had thought of Hoppy's method of presenting his credentials, for the slit was too nar­row for even a baby's hand to pass through. But there was no need for violence. Eyes scanned them, and saw Karen, and the door opened. It reminded Simon a shade nostalgically of the glad and giddy days of the great American jest that was once known as Prohibition.

The door closed behind them as they entered, operated by a stiffly tuxedoed cut-throat of a type Simon had seen & thou­sand times before.

'Good evening, Miss Leith.'

The blue-chinned watchdog approved the Saint, and veiled his startlement at Hoppy's appearance with a mechanical smile and an equally mechanical bow.

A flagged pathway led to the entrance of the building it­self, which was a rambling Spanish-type bungalow. The sec­ond door opened as they reached it, doubtless warned by a buzzer from the gate.

They went into a vestibule full of bamboo and Chinese lanterns. Another blue-chinned tuxedo said: 'A table tonight. Miss Leith? Or are you going back?'

'A table,' she said.

As they followed him, the Saint took her arm and asked: 'Where is 'back'?'

'They have gambling rooms with anything you want. If you've got a few thousand dollars you're tired of keeping, they'll be delighted to help you out' '

I tried that once today,' said the Saint reminiscently.

They went through into a large dimly lighted dining room. The tables were grouped around three sides of a central dance floor and on the fourth side, facing them, an orchestra played on a dais. Back against one side wall was a long bar. Grotesquely carved coconut masks with lights behind them glowered sullenly from the walls. At either end of the bar a stuffed alligator mounted on its hind legs proffered a tray of matches. Electric bulbs scattered over the raftered ceiling struggled to throw light downwards through close rows of pendent palmetto fans, and only succeeded in enhancing the atmospheric gloom. The collective decorative scheme was a bizarre monstrosity faithfully carried out with justifiable con­tempt for the healthy taste of probable patrons, but with highly functional regard for the twin problems of reducing the visible need for superfluous cleaning and concealing the presence of cockroaches in the chop suey; and Simon recog­nised that it was entirely in tune with the demand that it had been designed for.

A silky head waiter, proportionately less blue-jowled as his position demanded, ushered them towards a table on the floor; but the Saint stopped him.

'If nobody minds,' he said, 'I'd rather have a booth at the back.'

The major-domo changed his course with an air of shrivell­ing reproach. He might have been more argumentative, but it seemed as if Karen's presence restrained him. As they sat down he said: 'Will Mr March be joining you?'-and he said it as if to imply that Mr March would have had other ideas about good seating.

Karen dazzled him with her smile and said: 'I don't think so.'

She ordered Benedictine; and the Saint asked for a bottle of Peter Dawson, more with an eye to Mr Uniatz's inexhausti­ble capacity than his own more modest requirements.

The orchestra struck up another number, and multi­coloured spotlights turned on at each comer of the room threw moving rainbows on the floor. Karen glanced at him al­most with invitation.

'All right,' he said resignedly.

They danced. He hadn't wanted to, and he had to keep his mind away from what they were doing. She had a lightness and grace and rhythm that would have made it seem easy to float away into unending voids of rapturous isolation; her yielding slenderness was too close to him for what he had to remember. He tried to forget her, and concentrate on a study of the human contents of the room.

And he realised that there were some things about the clientele of the Palmleaf Fan which were more than somewhat queer.

He wasn't thinking of the more obvious queernesses, either; although it dawned on him in passing that some of the groups of highly made-up girls who sat at inferior tables with an air of hoping to be invited to better ones were a trifle sinewy in the arms and neck, while on the other hand some of the delicate-featured young men who sat apart from them were too-well-developed in the chest for the breadth of their shoulders. Those eccentricities were standard in the honky-tonks of Miami. The more unusual queerness was in some of the cash customers.

There was, of course, a good proportion of unmistakable sightseers, not-so-tired business men, visiting firemen, shallow-brained socialites, flashy mobsters, and self-con­sciously hilarious collegians-the ordinary cross- section of any Miami night spot. But among them there was a more than ordinary leavening of personalities who unobtrusively failed to fit in-who danced without abandon, and drank with more intensity of purpose than enthusiasm, and talked too earnestly when they talked at all, and viewed the scene when they were not talking with a detachment that was nei­ther bored nor disapproving nor cynical nor envious but something quite inscrutably, different. Many of them were young, but without youthfulness-the men hard and clean-cut but dull- looking, a few girls who were blonde but dowdy and sometimes bovine. The older men tended to be stout and stolid, with none of the elan of truant executives. There was one phrase that summed up the common charac­ teristic of this unorthodox element, he knew, but it dodged annoyingly through the back of his mind, and he was still trying to corner it when the music stopped.

They went back to the table, and he sat down in the secure position he had chosen with his back to the wall.