The Saint on the Spanish Main (3 page)

Patsy O’Kevin was obviously an expert
captain, but
on that occasion his eagerness turned his skill into a
liability. He was so anxious not to let a probable record get
away, so
afraid of letting the Saint put too much strain
on his frail line,
that he followed the fish as closely as a
seasoned stock horse
herding a calf—so quickly and closely that the Saint had a job to keep any
pressure on
the fish at all. And so there were several more jumps,
and many
more runs, and time went on until it seemed
to have lost
meaning; and then at last there was a mo
ment when the fish
turned in its tracks and came to
wards the boat like a torpedo, the Saint
reeling in fran
tically, and O’Kevin for once was slow, and fumbled
over
throwing the clutches from reverse to forward. The
bellying line passed
right under the transom, right
through the churning of the propellers, and
as the Saint
mechanically went on winding a limp frayed end of
nylon
lifted clear of the wake.

No more than a boat’s length off the
starboard beam,
the freed sailfish rose monstrously from the water for
one last
derisive pirouette.

“I did it,” said O’Kevin brokenly.
“There’s no one to
blame but me. If ye’d be kinder to me than I
deserve,
Simon, would ye just be cuttin’ me throat before ye throw
me overboard to the sharks?”

“Forget it,” said the Saint,
wiping the sweat from his
face. “I was getting tired of the whole
thing anyway.”

He was amazed to see by his watch that the
battle had
lasted more than two and a half hours.

“An’ almost all the time, that son av a whale was
headin’ almost due south,” O’Kevin said.
“We’re
further from Bimini now
than we were whin we left Mi
ami.”

Only the taciturn mate had no comment. O’Kevin
turned the helm back to him, and a certain
restrained melancholy settled over the whole party as the
Colleen
swung around and ploughed northwards again with
the
stream.

After a belated lunch of sandwiches and beer
had had
their restorative effect, however, Patsy finally stopped shaking his
head and muttering to himself and stomped
aft to the bait box.

“If ye’ll allow me to bend another bait to yer line,
sorr,” he said, “we may yet meet the
great-grandfather
o’ that tadpole I
lost for ye.”

If this were really a fishing story, it
would tell how the
Saint presently hooked and fought and vanquished an
even
bigger sailfish, a leviathan that was likely to remain
a world’s record for
all time. Unfortunately the drab
requirements of veracity to which your
historian is sub
ject will not permit him this pleasure.

In fact, most of the northward troll yielded
only one
medium-sized barracuda. Then, with the islands of
Bimini
already clearly in sight, Simon hooked another
sailfish; but it was
quite a small one, only about fifty pounds, as they saw on its first jump.
O’Kevin allowed
Des to handle the boat, which he did efficiently enough,
and in
something less than an hour the exhausted fish
was wallowing tamely
alongside. O’Kevin reached down
and grasped its bill with a gloved hand and
lifted it half out of the water, his other hand sliding down the wire
leader.
He looked at Simon inquiringly.

“Let it go,” said the Saint.
“We’ll come back and
catch him some day when he’s grown up.”

So this only shows exactly how and why it
was that it
was late afternoon when the
Colleen
threaded her
way
between the tricky reefs and shoals that guard the har
bor
entrance of Bimini, half a day later than she should
normally have
arrived, and flying from one of her raised
outriggers the
pennant with which a sport fisherman
proclaims that a sailfish has been brought to the boat
and voluntarily released.

The Commissioner was waiting to come aboard as
they tied up. Acting as immigration, health, and
cus
toms officer combined, he
glanced at their papers, accepted a drink and a cigarette, wished them a
pleasant
stay, and stepped back on
the dock in less than fifteen
minutes.

Simon had stayed behind in the cabin to pick
up his
suitcase. As he brought it out to the cockpit, O’Kevin
was
already on the pier talking to three people who
stood there. Simon
handed up his two-suiter, and as he swung himself up after it O’Kevin said:
“This is the
gintleman I was talkin’ about. Mr. Templar—Mr. and
Mrs. Uckrose.”

Mr. Clinton Uckrose was a somewhat
pear-shaped
man of medium height who looked about fiftyfive,
dressed in
an immaculate white silk shirt and white shan
tung trousers with a
gaudy necktie knotted around the
waist for a belt. Under a peaked cap of
native straw, his
face also had a pear-shaped aspect, compounded of
broad
blood-hound jowls bracketing a congenitally ag
grieved mouth and a pair of oldfashioned
pince-nez
which seemed to pull his eyes
closer together with their
grip on
his nose. He ignored the Saint’s proffered hand
and did not even seem to
have heard his name.

“You’ve got a nerve!” he snarled.

Simon looked down at his hand, saw nothing
obvious
ly contaminating about it, and tried offering it to Mrs.
Uckrose.
She took it.

Politeness required him to look into her
eyes, which
were interesting enough in a languorous brown-velvet
way; but
it was not easy to keep his gaze from wandering
too pointedly over
her other attractions, which were dis
played as candidly as a pair of very
short shorts and bra to match could do it. From the roots of her chestnut hair
to the
toes of her sandaled feet she was so evenly sun
tanned that she looked like a golden
statue; but there
was nothing statuesque
about the lingering softness of
her
handshake. She could hardly have been more than
half her husband’s age.

Simon understood exactly what she made Patsy
O’Kevin
think of. He was thinking the same way him
self.

“What made you think you should take
your friends
joyriding while I’m waiting for you here?” Uckrose
was
demanding of
the captain.

“He was comin’ here anyhow,” Patsy
said, “so I
thought it’d do no harm if he came wid me. O’ course,
when we
got to fishin’—”

“When you got to fishing, you took the
whole day
instead of getting here as you were told to.”
Uckrose
pointed up at the nearest outrigger. “And what does
that flag
mean?”

“It’s a release flag, sorr.”

“It’s a release flag.” Uckrose had
a trick of repeating
the last thing that had been said to him in
a tone that
made it sound as if the speaker could only have uttered
it as a
gratuitous affront. “What does that mean?”

“Mr. Templar had a sailfish on, an’ we
turned it
loose.”

“You turned it loose.” Uckrose’s
jowls quivered.
“How many days, how many weeks, have I fished with
you, year
after year, and I’ve never yet caught a sail
fish?”

“That’s the luck o’ the game,
sorr.”

“The luck of the game. But the very
least you could
have
done was bring in the fish.”

“It was Mr. Templar’s fish,” Patsy
said, with a little more emphasis on the name. “He said to break it off,
so
I did.”

“It was only a little one,” Simon
put in peaceable.

“It was on my boat!” Uckrose
blared. “It belonged to me. I could have sent it back to be mounted. What
dif
ference does it make who caught it?”

Simon studied him with a degree of scientific
in
credulity.

“Do you seriously mean,” he inquired, “that you’d
have had my fish stuffed, and hung over your mantelpiece,
and told everyone you caught it?”

“You mind your own business!”

The Saint nodded agreeably, and turned to
O’Kevin.

“I’m sorry I got you into this, Patsy,” he said.
“But
let’s just get you out again.”
He put a hand in his
pocket, brought
out some money and peeled off two
fifty-dollar
bills. “That should take care of today’s
charter. Don’t charge Fat Stuff for it, and he can’t
squawk. His time starts tomorrow. And thanks for
the fishing—it was fun.”

As O’Kevin hesitated, Simon tucked the two
fifties
into his
shirt pocket and picked up his suitcase.

Gloria Uckrose said: “Did I get the
name right—Si
mon Templar?”

Simon nodded, looking at her again, and this
time
taking no
pains to control where his eyes wandered.
With
all his audacity he was not often crudely brash:
there is a difference which the cut-rate Casanovas of the Mickey
Spillane school would never understand. But
Clinton Uckrose’s egregious rudeness had sparked an
answering insolence in him that burned up into
more
outrageous devilment than
solemn outrage.

“I’ll be staying at the Compleat
Angler,” he said.
“Any time you can shake off this dull
slob, let’s have a
drink.”

He started to walk away.

The third member of the party who had been
waiting
on the pier intercepted him. He had been with the
Uckroses
when Simon first saw them, but standing a
little behind them.
He had not been introduced, and dur
ing all the talk that followed he had
remained a little
apart. He was a slim man of about thirty in a rumpled
seersucker suit, with a light panama hat shading a long blue-chinned face and
heavy-lidded black eyes. Simon had observed those details at a glance but had
taken no
other
notice of him.

Now the man had moved so that the Saint
either had
to back
up and make a wide detour or pass along the
very
edge of the dock through a space that was barely
wide enough to admit him. Simon coolly kept going.
The man was looking right at him and said:
“Mr.
Uckrose don’t like fresh guys.”

Then he hit the Saint low in the belly with his left
hand and pushed with his right.

The Saint’s sinewy leanness made it
deceptively easy to
misjudge his weight, and his reflexes worked on hair
triggers.
Fantastic as it seemed in that setting, the slim man’s approach had a certain standardized
professional
quality which had given Simon a split second’s warning.
The man’s
fist only grazed a set of abdominal muscles
that were already
braced to the consistency of a truck tire, and the push with his right hand
rocked the Saint
but
did not send him flying off the dock as it should
have. For an instant Simon was precariously off bal
ance; and then as the other instinctively pushed
again
Simon ducked and twisted like a
cat, and it was the slim man who incredulously found himself floating off into
space to pancake on the water with a fine liquid
smack.

Simon Templar looked down at him as he came
splut
tering to the surface, shook his head reproachfully, and
sauntered
on.

It was only after that that he realized
intelligently
what he had reacted to intuitively: that for a retired
manufacturing
jeweler, Mr. Uckrose had a champion whose technique was extraordinarily
reminiscent of a
gangster’s bodyguard.

3

Simon surrendered his bag to one of an
insistent troop
of black boys, as the simplest way of getting rid of the
rest, and
walked thoughtfully along the one street of
Bimini, which follows the shore of the
lagoon. Any day
now, perhaps, some ambitious
commercial enterprise
will descend on
that little ridge of palm-topped coral
and
transform it into a tropical Coney Island; but at this
time the street still led only from the
neighborhood of
the small trim Yacht
Club, near which Simon had
landed, to the vicinity of the homelike
Compleat Angler
hotel, with a scattering of
shacks in between, some of
them
selling liquor or groceries or souvenirs, which had
a paradoxical look
of having been left over from a Hol
lywood
picture about the South Seas. The island was
still nothing much more than a stopover for yachts cruis
ing into the Bahamas, or a base for fishermen
working
the eastern side of the Gulf
Stream.