The Saint in Miami

'Den how,' demanded Mr Uniatz logically, 'can she be sittin' up in dat tree?'

Gallipolis mopped his steaming forehead with a wet ban­danna and said: 'This whole damn business is getting too much for me.'

'Have any of you got a cigarette?' asked the girl calmly.

Simon took out his case. The contents were on the damp side, but the metal had saved them from total dissolution. He offered it to her, and helped himself. He noticed that her slim hands were soiled and scarred, and yet their unsteadiness was so rigidly controlled that he had to look closely for it.

'Well,' he said, after he had given her a light, 'I know that this life of sin is full of mysteries, but for once I think Hoppy has got something.'

Her deep violet eyes studied the Martian contours of the marsh buggy, and then deliberately went over the four men -Hoppy, Gallipolis, Charlie Halwuk, lastly the Saint. Simon realised that none of them could have looked much more civilised than she did, and wondered if she saw the same stony purposefulness in all of them that he saw in her. He had to hand that to her also. In spite of the ordeal that she had just been through she was keyed with the same delicate inner core of steel that he had sensed in her once before.

'Apparently,' she said, 'we're all literally in the same boat.'

'Marsh buggy,' Simon corrected disinterestedly. 'It runs on land too, believe it or not. It isn't exactly a Rolls Royce, but it's a lot more use in the Everglades.'

'On land?' Her voice had a quick lift 'You mean this thing can take us out of the swamps?'

'It brought us in.'

'Simon,' she said, 'thank God you brought it. Don't let's waste any more time. I've got to get to the road-'

The Saint sat on the side of the buggy, his forearms on his knees. He eased his lungs of a long plume of smoke. The mantle of his detachment wrapped him in a cold armour of aloofness and gave his blue eyes an impersonal hardness that she had never seen before.

'I think you're taking a lot for granted, darling,' he said in a voice of tempered tungsten. 'The only question at the mo­ment is whether we should take you with us where we're going, or whether we should turn you loose again to keep walking.'

The shadow that passed through her eyes might have been dark and dull with pain; but the eyes themselves never flinched.

'I know,' she said. 'I should have begun at the beginning.'

'Try it now,' he suggested dispassionately.

She drew the end of her cigarette hot and bright.

'All right,' she said, in a tone that attempted to match his. 'I suppose you know that Captain Heinrich Friede is one of the chief Nazi secret agents in the United States.'

'I figured that out.' Simon flicked ashes into the oozing creek. 'And your dear Randolph March is his principal stooge, or a sort of playboy financier of the Fifth Column. Go on from there.'

'You know that Randolph March has a hidden harbour that he calls a hunting lodge somewhere over there.'

'Hoppy found that out. All by himself. I can still top you. He keeps a German U-boat parked in it, and they go out and torpedo tankers.'

'That's right.'

'You're quite sure it is? You've seen this submarine?'

'I saw it today for the first time. It's there now.'

'And what else?'

'The March Hare.'

'Once again we don't fall over backwards. You know that because you were on board. As a matter of fact, I happened to see you.'

'There are two other people on board.'

'I know. Friends of mine. Arrested by phoney deputy sheriffs.' The Saint's voice had the silky edge of a razor. 'How were they when you left them?'

'They were still all right They'll still be all right-according to what you do. They're hostages for you.'

Then we're still waiting for you to contribute. When do you start paying your way with something we don't know already or hadn't guessed for ourselves?'

She seemed to be holding herself in with terrible patience. 'What else is there that matters?'

'There's still the minor detail of what your stake is in this carnival.' Simon's voice was without emotion, his face a smooth carving in brown marble. 'We seem to keep running into you in a whole lot of funny places-most of them some­where near Randolph March. You were with him and Friede when I met you. You came to visit me just at the time when one of their stooges twice removed took a shot at me that started a most ingenious trail towards my tombstone. You keep quiet about Rogers until I'd planted the very evidence against myself that I was meant to plant. You came with me to the Palmleaf Fan to be in at the death; and when the death failed to take place, you joined up with Randy and Friede again and beetled off, I skipped a lot of that while it was going on because it was fun, as I told you. But the fun is all over now, Ginger. It's nothing but straight answers-or else.'

Her lips gave a funny little quirk.

'Dear man,' she said, 'who do you think tipped off Rogers?'

He lifted his eyes to hers.

'According to the Sheriff,' he replied unyieldingly, 'it was a mysterious kibitzer called A Friend. If that was you, say so.'

'It was.'

'Then why didn't you say anything to me?'

'I told you before dinner, last night-you had to go through it all, in case you got anything else out of it. And then, if I'd told you at the Palmleaf Fan, you know you'd have still gone in to Rogers anyhow, and the plot would have worked. But I knew he belonged to the FBI, and I knew he'd be more cautious. I hoped that if I told him it might save you from being killed.'

'That was nice of you,' said the Saint politely. 'So after you'd done that, you went back to March and Friede and helped them to kidnap my friends.'

'I didn't. I wanted to cover myself. I went over and said that I didn't know what went on, but you'd said something just as you left that sounded as if you already knew what the trap was and you'd organised things to take care of it. A couple of minutes later the waiter came and whispered to Friede, and he said I was right. He was raging. He gave a lot of orders in German that I couldn't catch, and we all left. While they were getting the March Hare ready to sail, some men brought your friends on board.'

'I saw you enjoying the joke with Randy as you went past the Causeway.'

'I had to stay with them then. The one thing that mattered was to find out where they were going.'

Without shifting his eyes, the Saint blew smoke at the mos­quitoes that were starting to rise in thickening clouds into the twilight.

'You still have a last chance to come clean,' he said ruthlessly. 'Who are you working for?'

She seemed to make up her mind after a hopeless struggle.

'The British Secret Service,' she said.

Simon looked at her for a moment longer.

Then he put his face in his hands.

It was a few seconds before he raised it again. And then the expression in his face and eyes had changed as if he had taken off an ugly mask.

It was all clear now-all of it. And he felt as if he had taken the last step out of suffocating darkness into fresh air and the light of the day. He didn't even have to ask himself whether she was telling the truth. If the unshadowed straightness of her wonderful eyes had not been enough, the circumstantial evidence would have been. No lie could have fitted every niche and filigree of the pattern so completely, He could only be astounded that that was the one answer he had never guessed.

Impulsively he reached out for her hand, 'Karen,' he said, 'why didn't you tell me?'

'How could I?' But her face and voice were without rancour. 'I wouldn't have been any more use if I'd been suspected. I'd put too much into getting where I was. Even for you, I couldn't endanger any of it. I knew you were