The Saint in Miami

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Simon Templar lay stretched out on the sands in front of Lawrence Gilbeck's modest twenty-five-room bungalow, and allowed the cottony breakers pushing their way in from the Atlantic to lull him with the gentle roar of their disintegration on the slope at his feet.

Although it was an hour after a late dinner, the sand was still warm from the day's sun. Overhead, the celebrated Miami moon, by kind permission of the Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Public Relations, floated among the stars like a piece of luminous cheese, looking more like the product of one of Earl Carroll's electricians than a manifestation of nature. The moon dripped down a silvery opalescence which left black shadows in the areas it missed. The shadows deepened the tiny indentations beside Simon's nose, and for a moment gave an entirely false suggestion of care and worry to his face he looked at Patricia Holm.

That the appearance of care was false, Patricia knew. Commonplace care was a disease of modern existence which was incapable of infecting the exuberant life of that amazing modern buccaneer who was better known to most of the world by his queer nickname of "The Saint" than by the names which were recorded on his birth certificate. Worry he might cause to the plodding members of many police forces throughout the world; worry he certainly had caused, in lavish and sometimes even fatal doses, to very many members of that loosely knit fraternity which is popularly referred to as the Underworld, even when it lives in much greater luxury than most respectable people; but the worry stopped there. It was something quite external to the Saint.

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