Haskins came, and I'll get out the way I came in. I can take care of myself.'
'Check with me at the local FBI office in the morning?' Rogers said.
There was no need for picayune hair-splitting. Their eyes met in the understanding of men among men-an unspoken bond of strength greeting strength. Death had brushed by them lightly, and left them alive to carry on. Both of them knew it.
'If I can,' said the Saint, and was gone.
He went quickly back down the long corridor. He had his own plan of campaign, clear now that its objectives were no longer eddying reflections in a distorting mirror, to iron out; and he knew that time was more vital now than it had ever been . . . The vacuous twittering went on in the men's dressing room. The pretty black-haired girl, who had apparently completed her act with the usual disasters to her costume, met him at the turn of the passage with what was left of it in her hand and nothing else to obscure the artistic tailoring of her birthday suit. Once again, they passed each other with hardly a glance. He would have passed the Queen of Sheba with the same disinterest. He wanted to see Karen Leith . . .
And she was not there.
Neither was Hoppy Uniatz.
It was more than a temporary absence, a prolonged nose-powdering or hand-washing expedition. The table where they had been was cleared and freshly laid, ready to receive new tenants. There was not a personal relic left on it to let anyone anticipate a return.
Simon's glance swept over the room, and discovered other changes. Quite a fair number of new customers had arrived while he was away, but the place was not much more crowded. He hit on the reason in a moment It was because space had been made by the departure of other patrons. The Strength through Joy boys and girls were no longer to be seen. And incidentally, he was unable to catch sight of the waiter who had taken him backstage, either. It was perhaps not very surprising. The whole of one certain element in the place had been neatly and unfussily evacuated, and nothing but the regular honky-tonk front was left.
The most conspicuous disappearance was that of March and Friede. Their ringside table had already been taken over by another party, and Simon noticed that their girl companions were once more on offer in the wallflower line.
The Saint located the head waiter. He crossed the room very coolly and recklessly, and his eyes were everywhere, like shifting pools of blue ice. He backed the head waiter against the wall and held him there by the simple process of standing tall and square-shouldered in front of him.
'Where are the people who were with me?' he asked.
'I don't know, monsieur.'
The man looked helpless and tried to edge sideways out of the trap. The Saint stopped that by treading hard on his toe.
'Drop the Brooklyn French, Alphonse,' he advised bleakly. 'And don't make any mistakes. It'd take me just thirty seconds to do things to your face that a plastic surgeon 'll take six months to put right. And if I see any of your bouncers coming this way I'll start shooting. Now do we talk or do we wreck the joint?'
'Oh,' said the head waiter, recovering his memory, 'you mean the big fellow and the red-haired lady?'
'That's better,' said the Saint. 'What happened to the big fellow?'
'He left.'
'When?'
'But that was when you were still at the table, sir. He got up and went right out. The doorman didn't stop him because you were still here to take care of the check.'
Simon began to have a weird and awful understanding, but he bottled it down within himself.
He said: 'All right. Now what about the lady?'
'She went as soon as you left the table, sir.'
'Alone?'
The man's mouth compressed. _ 'Did she by any chance leave with Mr March?' Simon suggested.
The man swallowed. There were guests close by, and waiters hovering within earshot, but the Saint didn't give a damn. Not for anything that might start. He kicked the head waiter thoughtfully on the shin.
'Yes, sir. She went over and spoke to him, and they left almost at once.'
'Including Captain Friede?'
'Yes, sir.'
The Saint nodded.
'You're a good boy, Alphonse,' he said mildly. 'And just because you told me the truth I'll pay my check.'
'There is no check, sir,' said the head waiter. 'Mr March took care of it.'
Simon went out of the Palmleaf Fan with his hands at his sides, balanced like the triggers that his fingers itched to be on, walking a little stiffly with the cold anger that was in him. Nobody tried to interfere with him; and he didn't know, or care much, whether it was because they had had no instructions or because he looked too plainly hopeful that someone would make a move. But he walked past the two door guards with the contempt of reckless defiance, and was disappointed that it was so easy. That last patronising gesture of March's was something that he would have liked to wipe out before he left.
But as the Cadillac streaked down the oceanside road he realised that it could hardly have been any other way. March and Friede must have been informed within a few seconds of the misfiring of their plot. There was still nothing that could have officially linked them with it, so they might well have stayed and brazened it out; but that would have been purely negative. Their quick departure had not so much the air of a getaway as of a rapid reorganisation.
And again he had to remember Karen. It had seemed once that she was the most likely person to have warned Rogers. But she had had ample chance to warn Simon himself direct, and had not. And immediately he left, she had gone back to March. She was one of the remaining riddles to which he still had no clue. Unless her part was so simple and sordid that he did not want to see it ...
He tried to shrug her out of his mind.
Everything now seemed to hang on time. It was certain that Friede and March would feel forced to move fast. He wanted to move faster. There was no longer any motive for caution, and wildness would be given full rein once more. All he needed was the supporting troops who had been waiting for his call.
The car swung into the horseshoe drive and stopped in front of the Gilbeck home. And Simon sat still behind the wheel for the time it took him to light a cigarette.
Peter and Patricia would never have gone to bed until they heard from him. And they wouldn't have gone out, because he had told them to stand by. But except for a single light burning in the servants' quarters the house was in blackness. He went into the hall, and through it to the patio. The lights were out there also, and his ears could pick up no sound but the rustle of palm fronds and the ceaseless muted roaring of the surf.
He turned from the patio into the kitchen. 'Where are Miss Holm and Mr Quentin?' he rapped, and Desdemona looked up from a love pulp and marked her place with a black thumb.
'Dey's in de jailhouse,' she said placidly. The Saint's eyes froze into chips of steel. 'What jail?'
'Lawdy, man, how should I know? De she'iff man come an' took 'em away, not fifteen minutes ago. I 'spect dey's lookin' for you, too,' said the Negress, with the morbid satisfaction of watching her direst foreboding fulfilled.
Simon went back to the hall and picked up the telephone. There was a chance that Newt Haskins might have gone through into the public quarters of the Palmleaf Fan, prowling around to see what he could see and trying to quietly annoy the management. And as a matter of fact, he had.
'I should have known better than to let you kid me,' said the Saint scorchingly. 'But why couldn't you tell me that all the time I was talking to you your deputies were picking up my friends? And what are the charges, and what are you trying to do?'
There was a longish silence.
Haskins said: 'There ain't no charges, son, an' I didn't send any deputies to pick up any friends o' yours.'
'What about the Miami police?'
'Unless your friends have been robbin' a house, they'd hardly make a move without talkin' to me. It looks like
