The Saint in Miami

came in, showing him brown eyes made dull with fear and hopelessness, set in the face of a wayward Madonna. A frail grey-haired man sitting in a cheap wooden chair beside the cot raised a haggard unshaven face and made a protective movement towards her with one thin arm.

'What is it now?' he asked tiredly, and tried ineffectually to stiffen the gaze of his weak eyes.

Simon looked at him with triumph and bitterness and pity blending in his long comprehensive glance.

'Lawrence Gilbeck, I presume,' he said unoriginally. 'I'm Simon Templar. I believe Justine sent for me.'

4 The flare of half-incredulous relief that leaped into the girl's eyes died again slowly into a more hopeless despair.

'So you came,' she said in a low voice. 'And I got you into this-you and Pat. Now you'll die here with us.'

'It's no use,' echoed Gilbeck stupidly. 'Justine told me; but you shouldn't have come. You don't know what you're up against. There isn't anything you can do.'

'That remains to be seen,' said the Saint grimly.

He switched out the light, and presently found his way to the dim glow of the window. Pulling the curtains aside, he aimed his flashlight through the screen in the direction of where he had left the rest of his party, and blinked it three times. The flashes could hardly have been seen from the March Hare. He dropped the curtains back and spoke quietly into the dark.

'Follow me out, and try not to make a sound.'

He crossed to the door and opened it. It was full night out­side now, and the moon had not yet risen. Simon let them pass him out of the steaming prison, and closed the door again and locked it and dropped the key. That would take care of any other surprise visitors for long enough to let him know that an alarm had been raised; and he knew that the guard would never tell his story to any mortal ears.

He led them across to the shadow of the storehouses at the end of the pier and from there into the edge of the jungle di­rectly opposite, where he knew Charlie Halwuk would lead the others in answer to his summons. He stopped when he thought it would be safe enough to talk. From where he squatted on a dead log, he still had a fan-shaped field of vision that held the lodge at one edge and the storehouses at the other, with most of the clearing and the March Hare in the distance in between. With an old soldier's trick, he lighted himself a cigarette without letting any more light es­cape than a glow-worm would have made.

'Justine,' he said, 'have you seen Pat?'

'No.' Her voice was ragged, perplexed. 'Isn't she with you?'

'They caught her,' said the Saint passionlessly. 'Along with a friend of mine named Peter Quentin, who means quite a lot to me too . . . They're probably still on the yacht. I rather expected it. Friede would keep them as close to him as he could for safety.'

There was a subdued crackling in the underbrush, but it was not made by Charlie Halwuk, who had already reached the Saint's side like a shadow. The noise was made by Karen and Hoppy and the Greek as they followed him.

The moon was just starting to tip the horizon then, spreading a faint glimmer ahead of it by which they could all see each other after a fashion. The Saint moved his cigarette like an indicative firefly.

'Miss Leith, Mr Uniatz, Mr Gallipolis, and Mr Halwuk,' he introduced. 'Our travelling League of Nations . . . These are some Gilbeck people I came here to rescue, among other things.'

The two girls studied each other in silence, and then Justine said uncertainly: 'I'm frightened.'

Karen put an arm round her, but she still looked at the Saint.

Lawrence Gilbeck shook his head like a punch-drunk prizefighter, and said: 'I don't want any of you to take any risks for me, but I would like to save her.'

'You're getting soft-hearted in your old age, aren't you?' Simon remarked with carefully measured vitriol. 'You threw in your wealth on the side of the most high-powered mob of gangsters who have ever pillaged the world. You weren't worried about an odd hundred American seamen who were to be blown to pieces by Friede's submarine. But you are worried about your darling daughter. You got her into this-you played with fire and got yourself burned. What made you get so sentimental?'

'It was the submarine-so help me God!' Gilbeck said with a groan. 'I didn't know anything about it, at first I went into March's Foreign Investment Fool as an ordinary business proposition. I knew they were buying Nazi bonds, but there's no harm in that. Or there wasn't. America was a neutral country, and there's nothing wrong with buying anything in the market if you think it'll show a profit. I was in it as deep as I could be before I found out the truth about March's scheme.'

'And what is the truth?' Simon asked mercilessly.

Gilbeck ran trembling fingers through his sparse dishevelled hair. At that moment he looked less like the popular conception of a Wolf of Wall Street than anything that could be imagined.

'The truth is that they were ready to stop at nothing- nothing at all-to try and alienate American sympathy from the Allies.'

'We'd figured that out too,' said the Saint 'And I'm still waiting for the truth about yourself.'

'I'm guilty,' said the millionaire feverishly. 'Guilty as hell. But I didn't know. I swear I didn't. It just crept up on me. Look.' The words came faster, the desperate outpouring of vain remorse. 'We were going to make money because March convinced me that these Nazi bonds were going to rise. Then the war started. The bonds fell lower. We had our money in 'em. We had to want them to go up. Then the only thing was to hope the Germans would win. We had to hope that, if we wanted to save our money. So we couldn't be unsympathetic, could we? In fact, if we could do a little to help them-You see? We'd be helping ourselves. So we couldn't be hostile to the Bund, could we? And other things. Little things. Helping to spread propaganda-the stuff about 'Well, after all, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other' and 'We helped the Allies once and they never paid their war debt' and 'Look what the British did in India and South Africa'. You know. And the cleverest of all propagandas-to discount any facts that the Allies could advance on their side by saying that they were just propaganda too. And from there it went to some discreet lobbying in Washington. Supporting Isolation­ist Congressmen. Criticising Roosevelt's foreign policy. Trying to block the repeal of the Arms Embargo and the Johnson Act-anything that would obstruct American help to the Allies. You know.'

Go on.'

Gilbeck swallowed so that his mouth twitched.

'That's all. That's how it was. Just like that. Step by step. One thing led to another-so gradually and so harmlessly- so logically that I didn't see where I was getting to. Until they thought I was completely sewn up, and didn't care what they told me. God knows how many other men they made slaves of in the same way. But they'd got me. I'd always known that March had been to Germany a lot, and said that the Nazis were very much maligned; but I only thought of that as a private eccentricity. He'd had dinner with Goebbels and gone hunting with Goering and even visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and he thought they were all charming peo­ple. Anything that was said against them was 'all propaganda'. Only as this went on it got worse. He said once that he wouldn't mind seeing Hitler running this country-men like us would be much better off, with no more labour troubles and that sort of thing. He even hinted that he wouldn't mind helping to get him here . . . That was when I was going mad -when Justine wrote to you. But I couldn't do anything. I'd let myself slip too far. They could have ruined me-I think I could even have been sent to jail ... Then March told me about the submarine.'

'We're waiting,' said the Saint inexorably.

'That was too much. Even for me. It wasn't like killing people indirectly, with political manoeuvres. You could forget about that, if you tried hard. Talk yourself out of it. But this was direct murder.' Gilbeck twisted bis hands together. 'That was when I found a little belated courage. I knew there was only one thing I could do. I had to expose the plot, whatever it cost me-even if I lost everything I had and went to jail for it. It might even have been a relief in the end, if I could take my medicine and not be haunted any more. Only -I still didn't have quite enough courage. I still wanted to make a last attempt to save myself. I thought if I told March and Friede that I'd decided to expose them and take the consequences, I might make them give up their idea.'

'Yes,' said the Saint.

'That was the day you were expected.' Gilbeck's voice fell lower, but it seemed to gain steadiness with the security of confession. 'Justine hadn't told me then who you were-she just said you were friends of hers. I thought that March was fishing down the Keys. I thought I could go down in the Mirage and talk to him and still be back to meet you. I-didn't know what a fool I was.'