The Saint in Miami

simple that he should have seen it at once-if he had only known enough . . . But no one who was not looking for what he was looking for would have thought anything of it. A man like March could have a hunting lodge in the Everglades without causing any comment; and if he wanted to dredge out a channel and an anchorage big enough to accommodate a vessel the size of the March Hare-well, that was the sort of eccentric luxury a millionaire could afford to indulge. Haskins might have known about it all the time and never seen any reason to mention it. And now the Saint couldn't go back to Haskins . . .

Again the Saint brightened the tip of his cigarette.

'In that case,' he said, 'you could do your little job of guide work.'

'Uh-huh.' Gallipolis drained his glass. 'You could hire bloodhounds cheaper. How many people do I have to kill?'

'That all depends,' said the Saint benignly.

'I thought there was a gimmick in it,' said the Greek. 'Let's quit beating around the bush. You've got something on Randolph March, and I don't mean that boloney about him making shine. He'd be pretty big game, Mr Saint. I wonder if he mightn't be too big for the likes of you and me.'

Simon's eyes wandered estimatively over the room.

'You aren't doing much business, are you?' he said.

'I can thank you for some of that. When the Sheriff starts calling at a place like this, you ease up and like it. The goodwill doesn't last when they start loading your customers into a wagon and carting them off to the bastille.'

'If you had a grand,' said the Saint abstractedly, 'you could open up somewhere else and have quite a nice joint.'

'Yes,' said Gallipolis. 'If I left that much money, every sponge diver in Tarpon Springs would be pickled in red wine for three days after I die.' He rubbed slender fingers through his hair and looked at his palm. 'If there really is that much dough in the world, mister, I can take you out to the middle of the Everglades and find you snowballs in a peat fire.'

Simon took a roll out of his pocket and peeled off a bill.

'What does this look like?'

'Read it to me,' said the Greek. 'My eyes are bad, and I can't get by that first O.'

'It's a century. Just for an advance. To earn the other nine, you take me to this place of March's. And I want to get there the quickest way there is.'

'The quickest way is overland through the swamps,' said Gallipolis tersely. 'But the only guy who could walk on that stuff died nineteen hundred and forty years ago.'

He got up from the table and moved towards the back of the bar.

The Saint said, deprecatingly: 'It's true I'm carrying a lot of money, but Hoppy and I are carrying other things too. They go bang when they see machine guns.'

'You're damn near as suspicious as I am,' Gallipolis said petulantly. 'I'm looking for a map. I thought we might study it a while.'

He pulled out a folded sheet from behind the counter, while Hoppy's gun hand tentatively relaxed from its hair-trigger hovering.

Gallipolis spread out the map on the counter and said: 'Turn up the lamp and come here.'

Simon complied, and bent over the sheet beside him. The Greek pointed to a spot on the lower west coast of the state.

'March's lodge is somewhere in here on Lostman's River, near Cannon Bay. The nearest town is Ochopee, and that's about seventy miles from here on the Tamiami Trail.'

The Saint gazed down at the vast green wilderness on the map marked 'Everglades National Park'. Only the thin red line of the Tamiami Trail broke its featureless expanse of two thousand square miles or more. In all the rest of that area from the coastal creeks inland there was nothing else shown -nothing but the close-packed little spidery bird-tracks that cartographers use to indicate a swamp. It was as if exploration had glanced at the outlines and then decided to go and look somewhere else. Only a finger's length from Miami on the large-scale map, they offered less informative detail than a map of the moon.

And that was where he had to go-quickly.

It had to be him; he knew that He couldn't run back crying for Haskins or Rogers. It was outside Haskins' county, anyhow, and he could put decimal points in front of the probability of getting a strange sheriff interested. Rogers would not be much easier. Rogers would probably have to get authorisation from Washington, or an Act of Congress, or something. And what was the jurisdiction, anyway? What charges could he bring and substantiate? Any authorities would want at least some good evidence before going into violent action against a man like March. And there was not one shred of proof to give them-nothing but the Saint's own suspicions and deductions and a little personal knowledge for which there was no other backing than his word. It would take hours to convince any hard-headed official that he wasn't raving, even if he could ever do it at all; it might take days to get the machinery moving. The State Department would brood cautiously over the international issues . . . And he had to be quick.

Quick, because of Patricia and Peter. Who were also the last and most important reason why he had to hesitate to call for official help. They were hostages for the Saint's good behaviour-he didn't need to receive any message from the ungodly to tell him that. The counter-attack had been made with the breath-taking speed of blitzkrieg generalship. The pincers movement against himself had been balked, and without a pause one of the flanking columns had swung off and trapped Peter and Patricia. Yet even if Simon could en­list the forces of the Law and send them into the fight, Cap­tain Friede would only have to drop the hostages overboard somewhere with a few lengths of anchor chain tied round them, and blandly protest his complete puzzlement about all the fuss. And the Saint had no doubt that that was exactly what he would do ...

'Ochopee.' The Saint's voice was quiet and steely cool 'What is there there?'

'Tomato farms,' said Gallipolis, 'and nothing much more except a lot of water in the rainy season. But I know an Indian there. If there's any guy living who can take you through the Glades to where you want to go, he's it.'

Simon laid a paper of matches along the scale of miles and began to measure distances.

Gallipolis stopped him.

'You're on the wrong track. We pick up the Indian at Ochopee, but you couldn't get down from there. You'll have to come back thirty miles to where you see this elbow marked 27 in the Tamiami Trail. March's place can only be about ten miles from there. Of course, it might be nearer twentyfive or thirty the way you'd have to go. If we started early tomorrow morning, we might be able to get in there by the fol­lowing day.'

The Saint figured quickly. It was a hundred miles to Ochopee and back to the bend of the elbow where they would enter the swamp. If that left March's harbour only about ten miles away- 'We aren't going on bicycles,' he said. 'We can drive to Ochopee in an hour and a half. We should be able to pick up your Indian and get back to the elbow in another hour easily. That ought to get us to Lostman's River early in the morning.

The Greek cupped one hand and supported his chin with one arm on the bar.

'Mister,' he said dreamily, 'you're talking about something you just don't know. You're talking about covering ten miles of Everglades. That's oak and willow hammocks, and cypress and thorns and mud and quicksand and creek and diamond-back rattlesnakes and moccasins-and at night I'll throw in a panther or two. This ain't walking around Miami. That web-footed Indian might get you there alive if I can talk him into it, but even he'd have to do it by day.'

Simon made rapid calculations on the course of the March Hare. The yacht could probably tick off twenty knots, and might do more with pushing. It was two hundred and fifty miles if she went around Key West to Cannon Bay on the Gulf, which would take her twelve hours or more. But if the submarine operated out of Lostman's River too, the chances were that the astute Captain Friede knew other channels through the Keys which might save as much as a hundred miles.

The Saint folded the hundred-dollar bill and flicked it to­wards Gallipolis, and said: 'Let's just pretend that Randolph March and I are having a private war. I want to pull a sur­prise attack, and I haven't got time to mess around. Do we start right now, or do we play charades while the price goes down a hundred dollars an hour?'

'What do you think?' asked Gallipolis.

'I think,' said the Saint, 'that we start now.'