The Saint in Miami

submarine. As soon as we are sufficiently far away, I shall permit myself the luxury of pressing the button ... I leave you and your friends to look forward to that moment'

4 It was dark in the room before their eyes could adapt themselves to see by the drift of moonlight that filtered through the small window. Friede had switched off the light when he went out, with a deliberation which told as plainly as words that he did it for a last finishing touch of sadism, to eke the ultimate ounce of mental torment out of their wait for death by stealing the small comfort of companionship that light might have given them. March's body had been left ignored where it had fallen. The storm troopers had been withdrawn, all of them to help hasten the readying of the submarine, except one man who had been posted outside the door. They could hear him pacing up and down like a sentry.

They had not been gagged; and Simon did not believe that that was any oversight. It belonged with the same psychology as the putting out of the light. Light could have aided courage; voices alone, speaking in darkness, might be more likely to give way, and in so doing snowball the self-made agony of nerves wrung out under intolerable stain. That was how Friede would have seen it. But Patricia Holm broke the silence first, in a voice that held only practical anxiety.

'Simon, boy, are you all right?'

'As fit as a flea, darling,' he said. 'I don't think Heinrich tried to do too much serious damage, because if he'd really knocked me out I might have missed a lot of these two hours of interesting thinking that he was so pleased about giving us.'

And even while he spoke he was working, the muscles of his arms and shoulders cording in the titanic effort to stretch a few millimetres of slack out of the ropes on his wrists, so that his fingertips might grip the hilt of his knife and ease it out of its sheath. . .

In the darkness there were sounds of other efforts, and the quick subdued catching and releasing of laboured breath.

'I just wish,' Peter Quentin said strainingly, 'you'd had the sense to mind your own fool business and let us mind ours. If we want to come to a place like this to get away from you, isn't that enough to tell you we don't want you? Anyone might think you were a detective snooping for evidence for a divorce.'

'It was the deputy sheriffs that worried me,' said the Saint. 'If I'd known that you and Pat were just looking for some jungle love I'd have gone back to the Palmleaf Fan. I was just afraid they might have picked you up because they'd found out she was under sixteen.'

'Make it under nine,' said Patricia. 'You should have left us here just for being taken in by an old chestnut like that.'

'It was just as good a chestnut as it always has been,' said the Saint. 'In fact, it was better than usual in this case. The Sheriff had already paid us a call earlier in the day, and you had every reason to believe that I might have raised some more hell at the Palmleaf Fan. Which as a matter of fact was what did happen, to some extent.'

'Tell us,' said Patricia.

The Saint told them, while he writhed and fought and rested and fought again. It was worth telling, to pass the time, and it kept all their minds away from other things. But in spite of what he was doing, his voice never lost its concise and self-contained inflection. He might have been telling a story that there was all the time in the world to discuss.

By the time he had finished they knew everything that he knew himself. The picture was complete. And there was silence again . . .

'A sweet set-up,' Peter commented at length. 'I just wish I could have had your pal Heinrich to myself for a few minutes.'

It seemed like the only thing to say. But Hoppy Uniatz had other ideas.

'Boss,' he said heavily, 'I still don't get it.'

'Get what?' Simon asked, very kindly.

'About de Pool.'

'Hoppy, I tried to tell you-'

'I know, boss. Dis here ain't de Pool, at all. But you hear what March says before dey give him de woiks? He says after we come here de Pool is all blown up. We ain't never blown up nut'n. So dey must be some udder hijackers tryin' to mus­cle in on dis shine. I don't get it,' said Mr Uniatz, reiterating his major premise.

It's just a general craze for blowing things up,' Simon ex­plained. 'It'll die out after a while, like miniature golf and the Handies.'

There was another lull. There should have been so much to say at a time like that, and yet at that time there seemed to be so tittle that was worth saying.

Outside, above the slow pacing of the sentry, the heavier tramping back and forth of laden men went on, with the sounds of creaking tackle and clunking wood, of muttering voices and the intermittent sharp spur of commands.

Karen Leith said reflectively: 'I don't know how the rest of you are getting on, but I'm supposed to have been trained in all the tricks of getting out of ropes, and I'm afraid these knots are too good for me.'

'For me too,' said Peter.

Even the Saint seemed to have stopped struggling.

Patricia said in a sudden eerie whisper: 'What's moving around in here?'

'Shut up,' said the Saint's low voice. 'Just keep on talking as you have been.'

And the sound came from a different part of the room from where he had last spoken. In the dim moonlight their straining eyes watched a shadow move-a shadow that crept here and there on the floor. But it was not Randolph March come to life again, as the first ghostly brush of horror in their flesh had suggested, for his shape could still be seen lying where it had fallen.

They were tongue-tied for a while, trying to frame sentences that would sound natural.

At last Peter said, with purpose: 'If only Hoppy and I were loose we could jump the guy at the door and get his gun and kill some more of the swine before they got us.'

'But they would get you, Peter.' Again the Saint's voice came from another place. 'There are plenty of them, and one gun-load wouldn't go very far.'

'If we were loose,' said Patricia, taking her tone from Peter, 'we could sneak off and hide in the jungle. They couldn't afford to spend much time hunting for us.'

'But they'd still get away,' said the Saint.

'Maybe dey wouldn't have room for all de liquor,' said Mr Uniatz, developing his own fairy-tale. 'Maybe dey gotta leave a whole case, so we can find it.'

'If I could get out,' Karen said, 'I'd do anything to try and stop the submarine.'

With what?' Peter demanded.

'I wish I knew.'

There was a tiny snapping sound, a very thin long-drawn squeak, then a slurred rustle.

Peter made a restive movement 'I know it's all quite stupid,' he remarked, 'but I wish you'd give us some of your ideas, Skipper. Just to pass the time. What would you do if you could do anything?'

There was no answer.

The silence dragged through long tingling seconds.

Patricia said softly, and not quite steadily: 'Simon . . .'

The Saint did not answer. Or was it an answer when two spaced finger-taps beat almost inaudibly on the floor?.

There was nothing else. They had lost track of the moving shadow, although there might have been a new angular patch of blackness in one dark comer near where the shadow had last moved. But the square of luminance from the window had spread itself on the floor in a way that built up deceptive outlines. In the straining of their eyes, all shadows seemed to run together and dissolve like ephemeral fluids. Each of them at some time tried to count other shapes that could be dimly distinguished and identified. One, two, three-and the coun­ter ... and begin again.

But it was quiet. The ears could create sound in protest, as the eyes could create form and movement. The magnified sifflation of a breath, the screak of a cot-spring, the pulse of their own blood-stream-anything could be built into what the mind wanted to make of it. It even seemed to Karen once that something moved underneath