“You’ve got a nerve!” he snarled.
Simon looked down at his hand, saw nothing obviously 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 displayed 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 himself.
“What made you think you should take your friends joy-riding 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 sailfish?”
“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 peaceably.
“It was on my boat!” Uckrose blared. “It belonged to me. I could have sent it back to be mounted. What difference does it make who caught it?”
Simon studied him with a degree of scientific incredulity.
“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 — Simon 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 during 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 balance, 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 spluttering 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 Hollywood picture about the South Seas. The island was still nothing much more than a stopover for yachts cruising into the Bahamas, or a base for fishermen working the eastern side of the Gulf Stream.
The Saint frowned. Having started to walk away, in a rather effective exit, he could scarcely turn back and say to the slim man, or even to Uckrose, “By the way, chum, are you some sort of gangster?” Besides, there was still something not quite right with the picture. There were plenty of gangsters in the Miami area, which had always appealed to them for the same reasons as it appealed to any other class of wealthy vacationer, but Bimini had only attracted them during Prohibition, when cargoes of potable spirits could be assembled there under the tolerant protection of the British flag, to be loaded on to fast motorboats for a quick night run to the dry coast of the United States. Now the island offered nothing either to enrich or entertain them. Anyhow, he saw no reason to disbelieve the story that Mr Uckrose came there from Europe, not from the States. And somehow he could not exactly visualize Mr Uckrose as a gangster — not even of the modern, big-business, board of directors, crime syndicate chieftain type. Furthermore, if Uckrose had been one of those, the Saint would almost certainly have recognized him.