“On the subject of lies,” said the Saint genially, “you’d so obviously been taking a nap when I came aboard that I couldn’t believe you had any pot cooking. Not that I blame you for the try.”
The reply which O’Kevin started to make was so manifestly irrelevant, and so offensive to the Saint’s refined ears, that Simon was obliged to use the rest of the tape to seal up O’Kevin’s mouth without further delay.
“I’m afraid it was you who made the first mistake, Patsy,” he said. “When Don Mucklow introduced us and said I was looking for you, your guilty conscience couldn’t swallow that as a figure of speech. After that, all the talk about fishing only sounded like a cover-up. And when I said I was headed for Bimini, all you could think of was that I must be on the trail of this racket you’re in.”
He lighted a cigarette and enjoyed a leisurely inhalation.
“You pounded your brains during the evening, and decided that the really smart move, if I was as close on the trail as that, was to keep me even closer. At least that might make it easier to keep track of me, and the more you could make me think I was fooling you, the better you might be able to fool me. Besides, you still had the selfish personal angle that if I didn’t know too much already, you might go on selling the idea that you weren’t really connected with Uckrose except in the most innocent and professional way, which is how the operation is set up anyhow. So if it came to a blow-up, you might yet save your own skin.”
He leaned against the galley bulkhead and flipped ashes fastidiously into the sink.
“Of course you didn’t give yourself away by inviting me to come over with you. I didn’t begin to smell the rat until you started on the tirade against Uckrose. You had a good idea there, but you overdid it. It just didn’t ring quite true that you should be so bitter about a rich slob who only gave you a nice bit of business every year, even if he was a bum sportsman. It started me wondering what else there could be behind your attitude. And then, when we got here, you were alone with him just long enough to have tipped him off to the build-up you’d given me, and he had to carry on with the gag. Only he overdid it too. I just couldn’t see a successful retired business man being quite such an uninhibited boor... I didn’t see all this in a flash, but it filtered through gradually. And I even began to see what was developing ahead when you started the special advance work for Gloria — almost pimping for her, if I may be so rude.”
O’Kevin glared up at him with his head twisted sideways, mutely, having little choice about doing it in any other way, but the Saint was quite content to conduct a monologue.
“Now the only question is, what is the racket?” he said. “Of course I could probably get you to tell me by sticking toothpicks under your toenails, or something old-fashioned like that, but it’s more fun to make it an intellectual exercise. So I shall try first to do it in my head. Listen carefully, Patsy, because you may have to explain to the others how I did it without any help from you.”
He paused a moment for a final review of his thoughts, because he would always be proud of this feat of virtuosity if he brought it off.
“It has to involve some form of merchandise, because nothing else could pay off through Bimini. It must be very valuable to account for the guard and for all the concern about it. It should be something that a man could bring here from Europe, which he could land with in Nassau without any trouble, because the Customs there never bother with the baggage of American tourists. And then it only has to be put on board a charter boat working out of Miami, which would only get a perfunctory going-over by the Customs there if it was just coming back from Bimini. The two most compact and likely possibilities are narcotics and jewelry. Unless Uckrose has invented himself a completely phony background, which is less probable, the odds point to jewels.”
He took a last drag at his cigarette and flicked it through the porthole.
“Then where are these jewels? Not at the hotel, because Clinton and Gloria and Vincent all went out with you this morning, and they’d never have risked me burgling their rooms or even the hotel safe while they were away if there’d been anything there to find. But all kinds of work has been done to take suspicion off the Colleen — and you. Des is so obviously innocent that he’s an extra asset to the camouflage. So this boat should be the safest place in sight. And exactly where on the boat, if I’m to find them without taking her apart?”
O’Kevin seemed to lie even more motionless than his bonds required, as if frozen by an almost superstitious fascination. And the Saint smiled at him like a benevolent swami.
“Well, I remember something you mentioned more than once when you were knocking Uckrose, about how you’d have to take his fish back with you — any kind of fish. It seems like too fanciful a touch for you to have invented. Therefore you knew it was really going to happen, and you were trying to prepare me for it so that I wouldn’t be too struck by it when it did. So I am now going to bet my roll on that very fishy story.”
He went back out to the cockpit and opened the fish box. The dolphin that O’Kevin had shown him earlier still lay there on the ice. Simon squeezed its belly hard with one hand, and knew in a moment of exquisite and unforgettable elation that he had been right, all the way to this climax. It was like having forecast a chess game up to the checkmate after the first half-dozen moves.
Straight ahead of him over the transom the sun was setting, and the silhouette of a seaplane coming head-on was etched against a crimson-tinted cloud. Already he could hear the faint hum of its engine like a distant bumblebee.
With the bait-knife, Simon Templar performed a deft Caesarean section that delivered the fish of a transparent plastic bag in which many hard angular objects thinly wrapped in tissue paper could be easily felt. He returned to the saloon and showed it to O’Kevin.
“I must check on Clinton’s ex-partner in New York in a couple of years,” he remarked. “I assume he’s the receiving end of the line, and by that time they may have organized some other channel that I can hijack. But I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to legitimate fishing, Patsy me b’y.”
He rinsed the plastic bag under the pump and dried it on a dish-towel before he put it away in his pocket. The examination of its contents could afford to wait, but his plane was already coming down for its landing on the lagoon with a roar and a rush of wind overhead.
“I wish you’d give Gloria a message,” said the Saint. “Tell her she didn’t really leave me cold, but I couldn’t take everything else she offered and these jewels too. On the other hand, I mightn’t have been doing this at all if she hadn’t tried to take me like a yokel and stand me up. There has to be some self-respect among thieves.”
He went out and jumped up on to the dock and walked briskly away, wondering what he was going to write to Don Mucklow.
Nassau: The arrow of God
Introduction
It can hardly escape notice that I have a personal antipathy to the words “detective” and “mystery” as descriptives of a certain type of story. Aside from the pejorative implications which has been given them by literary snobs (and, admittedly, with the assistance of the worst and most venal writers) I find them both inadequate and unnecessarily restrictive. They relate to an old cut-and-dried formula: body is found — whodunit? — detective pins guilt on least likely suspect. Even the genius of John Dickson Carr, who added the superlative factor of what I have named the “howdiddee” (the murder was committed in a sealed and locked room, and would be theoretically impossible except that you can’t explain away the body, so some rational method of killing and leaving it there must be found) could not wipe out this limitation. Considered in three or even four dimensions, there are still many more aspects to a crime than that. At the moment, I tend to favor the description “crime story,” meaning that in its core there is essentially some factor of extra-legality, so that in addition to the ordinary problems of human friction and attraction between A and B there is a third impersonal force called The Law. It is along these excursion lines that I have tried to enlarge the range of The Saint Magazine.