gentle eyes.
'Tell me the gag, friend,' he invited. 'There's something screwy when the Saint wants to start selling shine.'
Mr Uniatz laved his throat again. He was face to face with a situation, but the various steps by which he had reached it were not entirely clear. He was, however, acutely conscious of the secondary motive for his visit which he had worked out on the way. The essential rightness of his idea appealed to him more than ever at this stage. He needed some pertinent information to put bones into his Theory. The problem was how to get it, All Greeks were dumb and unresponsive, in Hoppy's racial perspective, and this one appeared to be a typical specimen. Mr Uniatz felt some of the identical delirious frustration which, had he only known it, was one of his own principal contributions to Simon Templar's intellectual overhead.
Confronted with the need for greater extremes of initiative, Hoppy decided that the only tiling was to put more cards on the table.
'Listen, youse. De boss don't wanna sell dis stuff. He wants to bust up de Pool.'
'What pool?' asked Gallipolis, and opened his weary eye.
'De Foreign Pool,' said Mr Uniatz, suffering. 'De pool where March gets it from.'
The Greek walked over to where the hanging lamp was smoking in the centre of the room and turned it low.
'What March?' he asked as he returned to the bar.
'Randolph March,' groaned Mr Uniatz. 'De guy what has de Pool where-'
'You mean the medicine millionaire?'
Mr Uniatz cocked his ears, but decided to give nothing away. He had heard nothing about medicines before, but it might be a lead.
' Maybe,' he said sapiently. 'Anyhow, dis March has de Pool, an' nobody knows where it's at, an' dat's what we wanna know. Now all you gotta do is tell me where dis stuff comes from.'
'You're making me a little dizzy, big boy,' said Gallipolis with a smile. 'Are you trying to tell me that March is selling this stuff?'
'Soitenly,' said Hoppy. 'It don't cost him nut'n, so it pays for all his dames. So if we get de Pool, maybe de boss won't mind cuttin' you in.'
The Greek dug out another bottle and poured himself a drink.
'I feel a little tired, mister. Suppose we sit down.' He led the way to one of the tables and kicked out the opposite chair. When Hoppy was seated across from him, Gallipolis drank and shuddered. 'I've been peddling this stuff for a good many years,' he said, 'but this is the first time I've heard that March was making it.'
'De Saint is always de foist to hear anyt'ing,' Hoppy assured him proudly.
The Greek's eyes might have been starting to glaze with pardonable vagueness, but he kept on with his heroic effort.
'You think March is making shine at the Pool.'
'So he has got a Pool!' Hoppy caught him triumphantly.
Gallipolis wiped a hand back over his curly hair.
'I suppose you could call it that,' he answered exhaustedly. 'He calls it a hunting lodge. But he did have a coupla dredgers and a gang of men working all summer to cut out a channel and a yacht basin so he could take his boat in, I guess that's the Pool you mean.'
Mr Uniatz tilted his bottle again, and gave his oesophagus another sluicing of caustic lotion. His hand did not tremble, because such manifestations of excitement were not possible to a man whose nervous system was assembled out of a few casually connected ganglions of scrap iron and old rope; but the internal incandescence of his accomplishment came as close to causing some such synaptic earthquake as anything else ever had. The swell of vindication in his chest made him look a little bit like an inflated bullfrog.
'Dat's gotta be it,' he said earnestly. 'Dey dig it out so dey can get more water outa de spring. Dey haul it out in de yacht an' pretend it's medicine. Now me an' de boss go down an' take over this racket You know where to find dis Pool?'
Gallipolis tilted his chair on the rear legs and rocked it back and forth.
'Sure, mister, I know where it is.' Being a comparative stranger, he could be forgiven for not following all the involutions of Hoppy's thought, and it seemed harmless to humour him. 'An old moonshiner that I buy stuff from told me. He used to have a still near there, but he got chased out when they started working.'
Mr Uniatz leaned forward grimly.
'Coujja take us to it?'
The Greek's eyes narrowed.
'You say there's something in it for me?'
'Can ya take us dere?'
'Well,' said Gallipolis slowly, 'maybe I could. Or I could find a guy who could take you. But how much would there be in it for me?'
'Plenty,' said the Saint.
He stood in the open doorway, debonair and immaculate, smiling, with a cigarette between his lips and a glint in his eyes like summer lightning in a blue sky. He knew that he had come to the last lap of his chase, by the grace of God and the thirst of Hoppy Uniatz.
'Old home week,' said Gallipolis. His voice was as mild as a summer breeze on the olive-clad slopes of Macedonia. 'Get yourself a glass and sit down, Mr Saint. I suppose you're also dry.'
'I'll pass up the liquid fire.' Simon sat down and fixed Mr Uniatz with a sardonic eye. 'It's a good job I figured out that I'd find you here, Hoppy.'
Something in his tone that sounded like a reproof, even to Hoppy's pachydermatous sensitivity, made Mr Uniatz sit up with a pained look of reproach on his battered countenance.
'Lookit, boss,' he objected aggrievedly. 'Ya tell me to come here, don'tcha, when we are in de clip jernt? So after we hear Rogers I say can I go now, anja say to take all de time I want-'
'I know,' said the Saint patiently. 'That's the way I worked it out, in the end. It took me quite a long time, though . . . Never mind. You've done a swell night's work.'
'Dat's what I t'ink, boss,' said Mr Uniatz cheering. 'I woiked out everyt'ing on my own. Gallipolis is okay. We cut him in, an' he takes us to de Pool.'
The Saint settled back and smiled. He had a feeling of dumb gratitude that made him conscious of the inadequacy of words. It was a coincidence that made him giddy to contemplate, of course; and yet it was not the first time that the glutinous rivers of Mr Uniatz's lucubration had wound their way to results that swifter brains sought in vain. But the recurrence of the miracle took nothing away from the Saint's pristine homage to its perfection. He had boarded the barge, silently as he always moved, just in time to hear Gallipolis make the speech which had tumbled with the clear brilliance of a diamond through the obscurity of a dead end which had brought him within inches of cold despair; and he had not even had time to adjust his eyes to the light that had destroyed the dark.
His strong fingers drummed on the table edge.
'This afternoon you offered me a job, Gallipolis. I'd like to change it around tonight and offer you one.'
'For plenty?' The white teeth flashed 'For plenty.'
'I may be running a stud juke, but I have a conscience.' Gallipolis filled his glass again. 'If I have to step on it too badly, the price comes high.'
'I want to know one thing first,' said the Saint. 'Were you just stringing Hoppy along when you told him about this hunting anchorage or whatever it's called that March has got?'
'No, sir.'
Simon drew the glowing end of his cigarette an eighth of an inch nearer his mouth, and exhaled smoke like the timed drift of sand spilling through an hour-glass.
It was so beautiful, so perfect, so complete . . . And yet, twentyfour hours ago, it had seemed impossible that among the million coves of the Florida coastline he could ever find the base of the mysterious submarine which had first given him a hint of the magnitude of what he might be up against. Twentyfour minutes ago, it had seemed even more impossible that he could discover the destination of the March Hare in time for the knowledge to offer any hope . . . And now, with a word, both questions were answered at once. And once again the answer was so
