“And you knew very well he was booked before you introduced me.”
“I did not. Any more than I knew you were going to Bimini. What on earth made you suddenly decide that?”
“It was the first island I’d heard mentioned since I got here,” said the Saint cheerfully. “So I let that be an omen. I had to pick one of ’em eventually, anyway. A dear old aunt of mine ruined a lot of bookies picking racehorses by a similar system.”
“Well, Patsy isn’t the only good skipper. Let’s see who else is here tonight.”
They met several dozens of other men, in an accelerating kaleidoscope whose successive patterns soon overtaxed even Simon Templar’s remarkable memory, in the good humoured turmoil of a typical stag party. But at the end of the meeting, after the dinner and the presentation of badges and the lecture and the artistic performance of the girl called Lorelei (who, I regret to inform those readers who were only staying with us for that bit, has nothing further to do with this story), the face which had impressed itself on him most sharply perhaps only because it was the first introduction of the evening sorted itself out of the dispersing crowd and approached him again.
“I’ve been thinkin’, Mr Templar,” Patsy O’Kevin said. “So long as ye’re headed for Bimini anyhow, an’ if it isn’t too soon for ye, maybe ye’d like to be goin’ over with me tomorrow? It won’t cost ye nothin’, an’ we could do a bit o’ fishin’ on the way, an’ if we’re lucky we’ll catch one that’ll make this loud-mouth Mucklow wish he’d used that sardine o’ his for live bait.”
“Take him up on it, Simon,” Don said. “You might even catch one of those pink sea-serpents he sees after a week on rum and coconut water.”
“That’s too nice an offer to pass up, Patsy,” said the Saint straightly. “Thank you. I’d love it. What time do we sail?”
So if it hadn’t happened like that he would never have met Mr Clinton Uckrose. Or (to supply a new focus of sex interest) Gloria...
2
Mr Uckrose, Simon learned on the way over, was an American, rich and retired, living in Europe. He had been in the jewelry manufacturing business in New York, but had sold out to his partner, and had become a legal resident of the principality of Monaco, by which device he escaped paying any income tax on his invested capital, since the profits from the Monte Carlo Casino absolve the happy inhabitants of Monaco from any such depressing obligation. He was so morbidly apprehensive about jeopardizing this delicate but agreeable situation that nothing would induce him to set foot in the United States again, for fear that by touching American soil he might provide the IRS with grounds for some claim against him. Although he had become a regular winter visitor in Nassau, and liked to get in some big-game fishing during his stay, he flew directly to the Bahamas via London and Bermuda, and refused to take the short fifty-minute additional flight to Miami for his sport: instead, he took a Bahamian Airways plane to Bimini, most westerly of the islands and only some fifty miles off the Florida coast, and sent for a charter boat to come over and join him there. A former business connection of Uckrose’s had recommended Patsy O’Kevin the first time, and this would make the third consecutive year that the stocky Irishman had been booked for the same assignment.
This had not made O’Kevin any more enthusiastic about it.
“It’s not that he’s stingy, Simon, which I’ll be so bowld as to call ye. An’ wid the competition these days, a captain should give thanks for ivry charter he gets. But there’s not a drap o’ real fisherman’s blood in him.” O’Kevin watched approvingly as the Saint used a sharpened brass tube to core the spine out of a ballyhoo, the slender little bait fish that looks so aptly like a miniature of some of the big billed fishes it is used to lure. “Niver would Mr Uckrose soil his hands by puttin’ thim closer to a fish than the other end av a rod.”
Simon slid the ballyhoo on to a hook and bound it with a few deft twists of leader wire. Now when it went in the water it would troll with its limp tail fluttering exactly as if it were swimming alive.
“I’m just a free-loader,” he said lightly. “If I were paying for this, I might expect service too.”
“Niver would Mr Uckrose use that rod an’ six-thread line,” O’Kevin persisted. “All he’ll use is the heaviest tackle I’ve got, so that whiniver he hooks anything, so long as the hook holds, he can just harse it in. If I had a derrick an’ a power winch, he’d be usin’ that. An’ any toime there’s a little braize blowin’, we’ll stay right at the dock, Mr Uckrose is afraid he’ll be seasick.”
“That isn’t his fault, Patsy.”
“Thin he shouldn’t be tryin’ to pretend he’s a fisherman,” said O’Kevin arbitrarily. “For it seems all he cares about is to come in wid some fish, he doesn’t care what kind it is or how it was caught, just so he can be havin’ his picture taken with it, an’ send it to his friends if it’s eatable or have it stuffed if it isn’t, so they’ll think what a great spartsman he is, when there’s no spart to it. An’ that’s the kind o’ client I’d like to be rich enough to turn down.” The captain spat forcefully to lee. “Now get that bait in the water, Simon, before I start thinkin’ ye’re a man after Uckrose’s heart rather than me own!”
Simon laughed, and put the bait over the side.
O’Kevin’s mate eased off the throttles as the Colleen knifed her trim forty-foot hull out of the green coastal water into the deep blue of the Gulf Stream, a boundary almost as sharply marked as the division between a river and its bank. He was a thin dark intense-looking young man who never opened his mouth unless he was directly spoken to, and not always then. “We call him Des,” O’Kevin said, “after the chap in those Philip Wylie stories.” His air of nervous compression suggested the mute strain of a hunting dog on a leash.
When the Saint threw the brake on his reel, O’Kevin reached for the line, nipped it in a clothes-pin, and hauled it out to the end of one of the outriggers that had already been lowered to stand out from the boat’s side like a long sensitive antenna. With the outrigger holding it clear of the Colleen’s wake, the ballyhoo wiggled and skipped enticingly through the tops of the waves far behind them. The Saint settled the butt of the rod securely in the socket between his thighs, leaned comfortably back in the fishing chair, and watched the trail of the bait lazily with his blue eyes narrowed against the glare. Patsy opened a cold can of beer and put it into his hand. “This was the life,” Simon thought, feeling the sun warm his bare back and letting his weight balance harmoniously with the gentle surge and roll of the boat, and he didn’t give a damn about Mr Uckrose or any of his shortcomings.
“Now, Mrs Uckrose is diff’rent altogether,” Patsy said presently, as if some obscure need for this amplification had been worrying him. “Gloria’s her name, an’ glorious she is to look at, though I’m thinkin’ she needs a stronger hand on the tiller than Uckrose is man enough to be givin’ her. If I were as young as yerself—”
“Sail!” shouted Des, in a sudden hysterical bark.
Simon had already seen it himself, the long dorsal fin that lanced the water behind and to one side of the diving and flirting ballyhoo. It disappeared, then showed again briefly on the other side of the bait, still following it.
Suddenly the line broke out of the light grip of the clothes-pin that held it at the end of the outrigger, and the slack of it drifted astern from the Saint’s rod tip.
It must perhaps be explained to those who have not yet been initiated into this form of angling that a member of the swordfish family does not attack a lure like a bass hitting a plug or a trout rising to a fly. It first strikes its intended victim with its bill, to kill or stun it: this is the blow that jerks the line from the outrigger, and with the line released the bait is for a few seconds no longer towed by the boat and drops back with convincing lifelessness, while the fish that struck it circles into position to take a comfortable gulp at the prospective snack. The precise timing of this wait is a matter of fine judgment curbing the excitement of a suspense that makes seconds seem to stretch out into minutes.