The massive door slammed shut, and the guide grasped Simon’s arm at the elbow and propelled him forcefully across the ante-room, along the gallery, and down the magnificent stairway with such brutal vigor that it took all the Saint’s agility to keep his footing and save himself from being hurled down the steps on his face.
In the same bullying manner, he was marched through the kitchen, down the back stairs, and along the basement corridor to the room from which he had been brought. But at that especial moment he almost welcomed the sadistic treatment, for under cover of a natural resistance to it he was able to wrestle more vigorously and concentratedly with the rope that held his wrists.
A last brutal kick with his escort’s knee sent him flying into the little cell. The door banged behind him, and the key grated in the lock.
He was alone again, for the doctor had not waited, but he knew it would not be for long. Whatever business the dying Don Pasquale wanted to conclude with Destamio could not take more than a short while, and then Destamio would be in even more haste to complete his own project.
But alone and unobserved, the Saint could writhe and struggle without restraint, and he already had a good start…
In less than three more minutes he dragged one hand free, and the cord was slack on his other wrist.
Even while it was falling to the floor, he reached the window in a soundless rush.
Until then, he had had no clue to how long he had been unconscious after he had been knocked out in the mausoleum, and with his hands tied behind him he had been unable to see the time on his wrist watch. But now, with the electric bulb behind him, he saw that the sky was no longer black but gray with the first dim promise of dawn. And that faint glimmer of illumination was enough to show him why his captors were so unconcerned about leaving him in a room with an open unbarred window.
The palazzo was perched on the very edge of a precipice. The window from which he leaned out was pierced in a smooth wall with no other openings for fifteen feet on either side or above. Below, the wall merged without a break into the vertical cliff which served as its foundation. And below that juncture the rock sheered away into still unfathomable blackness.
CHAPTER FIVE:
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WALKED IN THE SUN, AND DRANK FROM VARIOUS BOTTLES
1
The Saint’s jacket was gone, and his trouser pockets had been emptied of everything except a handful of small change which had been almost contemptuously left. He took out a five-lire piece and dropped it out of the window from arm’s length. It vanished into the gloom below, but for as long as he strained his ears he could not hear it strike bottom. Whatever was below the window had to be a long way down.
But the door offered no alternative. It was massively constructed of thick planks bolted together and belted with iron straps, and while the lock would probably have been easy to pick if he had had any sort of tool, there was simply nothing on him or in the bare room that he could use. The window might seem like a kind of Russian roulette with five chambers loaded, but it was the only possible way out. And to remain there was certain death.
Without wasting another instant of precious time, Simon tore the blanket from the cot and began to rip it into usable strips. Knotted together, along with the cord with which he had been tied, they gave him a rope about thirty feet long and of highly speculative strength. He had often read about this standard device, like everyone else, but had had just as few occasions as anyone to try it out in practice. There was no way to test it in advance, other than by strenuous tugging, which appeared to reveal no intrinsic weakness. Less than ten minutes after he had been locked in, he had one end of the rope secured to the frame of the bed, and the bed itself propped up across the window, allowing the greatest possible length of his improvised hawser to hang down the wall.
He sat on the sill, his legs dangling over the void, and studied as much as he could of the situation. Though the details of the gorge below were still concealed by the morning mist, the sky was now rapidly lightening—enough to disclose a broadening range of topographical features.
The cliff on which the house was perched formed part of one side of a narrow valley through which straggled a small village with a fair-sized church spire reaching above the white houses. Beyond the town the hills rose again abruptly, and even higher peaks probed skyward in the distance. To the left, through the clearing haze, he could just make out a thin ribbon of road winding upwards along the opposite slope; to the right, it seemed to descend from the village. Holding on with one hand and leaning as far out as he could, he was rewarded with a glint of sunlight reflected on water, far off in the latter direction. The road to the right, then, led down towards the sea, and that would be the direction of escape. He hadn’t the vaguest idea where on the map he was, but he knew that the interior of Sicily consisted almost entirely of mountain ranges, and that the main roads followed the coast line of that triangular island to connect the larger cities, all of which are on the sea.
From beyond the door behind him he heard footsteps again, and the metallic rattle of the key in the lock. If he was going to fly the coop at all, this was the positively last chance for take-off.
With a sinuous motion he twisted off the ledge until he hung supported only by his fingers. Then he shifted one hand to the blanket-rope and gradually transferred his weight, experimentally, until all of it was on the rope. The ancient fabric stretched but held, and thereafter his most urgent concern was to make the strain on it as brief as possible. He lowered himself hand under hand with a speed that came close to that of a circus acrobat, tempered only by the requirement of avoiding any abrupt jerks or jolts that might tax his makeshift life-line beyond its dubious breaking-point.
He was halfway down when a gaping face appeared from the window above him, and two yards lower before it could express its perplexity in words.
“Che cosa fai?”
Believing that anyone who asked what he was doing, in those circumstances, could not be seriously expecting an answer, Simon ignored the intrusion and concentrated even more intensely on his gymnastic performance. Therefore he was looking downwards when the man produced a gun, and the first indication he had of its presence was the crack of the shot and the dying scream of a bullet ricocheting from the wall near his head. It took an ice-nerved self-discipline to make no change in the smoothness of his descent—or perhaps he was more worried about the capacity of his rope than about the marksmanship of the man upstairs.
From above, next, he heard the voice of Al Destamio engaged in noisy altercation with the gunman. It seemed that Al didn’t want him to shoot any more, for reasons which the Saint could appreciate, but which were meeting a good deal of consumer resistance from the minor mafioso, who had discovered a delightfully novel form of target practice and resented being deprived of it. While they wrangled, Simon descended a few more feet, and literally came to the end of his rope.
Holding on with one vise-clamped fist, he saw that his feet were still almost a metre above the bottom of the wall, which was based less than half that distance from the cliff edge. Below that lip, the rock face dropped away at a slant of about eighty degrees to an orchard that looked almost far enough to open a parachute, which he wished he had. Especially as the argument at the window overhead seemed to be compromised with a violent shaking or hauling on the flimsy filament from which he was suspended.
He had no choice but to take one more gamble.
He opened his hand and dropped…
He landed lightly on his toes, knees bending to cushion the steadiest possible landing. Dirt crumbled and gravel trickled down the escarpment, but the rock foundation was solid. He rested there a moment, plastered against the gripless wall of the building and envying octopods with suction cups in their tentacles.
The nearest corner of the house was at least twenty feet to his right, and he began to edge cautiously in that direction. There was a sudden silence from the window above, and it did not take much imagination to visu
alize Destamio and others trundling around to meet him. But there was a good chance that he could reach the side of the building before they could make their way to the same area by a more normal route through the house. Once he was off the vertiginous ledge, he would have to extemporize his next step according to what openings presented themselves. His planning had gone no farther than this, where he considered himself comparatively fortunate to be.
Which was all to the good, since he was destined never to reach the corner of the building. Another of the Mafia security corps had apparently been already outside, and upon hearing the shots had moved to investigate this unwonted matutinal activity. His head appeared like a jack-in-the-box around the angle towards which Simon was inching his precarious way.
“Buon giorno,” said the Saint, with his maximum affability. “Is this the way to the bathroom?”
The reaction was fully as obvious and exaggerated as a cinematic double-take. The newcomer’s sagging jaw dragged his mouth open in a befuddled “O,” exposing an interesting assortment of gold teeth interspersed with the blackened stumps of their less privileged fellows which had yet to benefit from auric reconstitution.
“Che cosa fai?”
The question seemed no less inanely rhetorical to the Saint than it had on the previous occasion, but this time he made an attempt to keep the conversation going.
“Ebbene, it is like this,” he replied, while he sank carefully to one knee and his other leg dropped over the cliff edge, his toe groping for a support. “There have been complaints about the foundations of this castle. We do not want Don Pasquale’s end to be accelerated by having his sickroom fall out from under him. So I have been called in to examine the underpinnings. I am inclined to suspect Death Watch beetles—does that sound likely to you?”
The opinion of his audience, which had been half-hypnotized into watching in blank stupefaction while Simon meantime levered himself over the ledge until only his chin was above its level, was not revealed because he was suddenly yanked back and replaced by the gunman who had taken his last pot shot from the upper window.
“Come back!” shouted the man, with somewhat idiotic optimism, as he tried to get into an aiming position.
“I’m sorry,” said the Saint, “but my union only allows me to climb down. To bring me up you must send an elevator.”
The gunman’s homicidal zeal was not diminished by this reasonable answer, but he was severely handicapped by the mechanics of the situation. The precipice began at his feet, and the base of the building came almost to its edge on his right. If it had been the opposite way around, or if he had been left-handed, it would have been simplicity itself to poke his head and gun-hand around the corner and bang away. But being one of the right-handed majority, there was no way he could comfortably bring his gun to bear, short of stepping out and resting at least one foot on a cloud. He tried a couple of snap shots without that levitational assistance, but with his hand bent awkwardly back from his wrist the bullets went wide and the recoils almost dislodged him from his insecure stance on the rim of the chasm.
While he struggled with this peculiar problem, his quarry was working steadily down the sheer wall with an unexpected virtuosity that would have won respect from challengers of the Eiger. And by the time he had figured out the possible solution of lying flat on his stomach and wriggling out over the void for half the length of his chest, prepared even from that extension to try a southpaw shot if necessary, he was stung to a scream of frustration by the discovery that his target had meanwhile managed to claw his way around a sufficient bulge in the illusory plane of the cliff to be completely shielded from his line of sight.
While his would-be assassin may have been mentally elaborating excuses for the one that got away, Simon was still a long drop from feeling home and safe. He had done some rock climbing, as he had tried every other hazardous sport in his time, and he had muscles and agility that many professionals might have envied, but he would never have claimed to be an expert mountaineer. High-octane adrenalin was the primitive fuel that drove him, clinging like a limpet to an almost vertical gradient, his toes scrabbling for irregularities that might lend a bare ridge of support, his fingers hooking into grooves and crannies that only centuries of weather had eaten into the unsympathetic stone.
Having no time to be precise or technical, he took risks that no seasoned alpinist would have considered. He surrendered his weight to handholds that had not been fully tested, and one of them pulled away, a jagged chunk of rock that crashed down among the trees below, leaving him for one desperate moment without support of any kind, except the friction of his body pressed against the natural wall. Yet even as he slid, his hands were racing over the fissured incline and found another minuscule ridge, and he resumed his ingloriously frantic descent.
At infinitely long last something brushed his shoulder which he realized was a fruit-laden branch. With a quick twist he grasped it, swung down to the ground, and took off running through the grove.
Far above him, through the clear air, he heard the grind of a starter and the roar of a car’s engine breaking into life. Someone up there had finally realized that there might be better ways of cutting him off towards his destination than from his starting point.
He ran.
A patch of open meadow separated the orchards, and as he crossed it there was a flurry of echoes from high behind him, and something whistled past his ear and thudded into the turf. He accepted this with an equanimity which owed no little to the cold-blooded estimate that at such a distance a hand gun was approximately as dangerous as a well-hurled pebble. He had a more serious threat to worry about: the howl of an over-stressed motor came faintly down to his ears, and a large black limousine, strangely reminiscent of movies about Prohibition days in America, hurtled into view on a road that came over the cliff top near the house and zigzagged down towards the village. Its intentions were obvious from the maniac speed with which it attacked the descent, broadsiding on the turns and throwing up clouds of gravel and dust. Even though his predicament was no longer cliff-hanging, he could still be cut off…
The Saint doubled his pace and fairly flew down the more gentle slope, hurdling the tumbled-stone fences, pitting his own speed and freedom of choice against the more devious routes which the faster car was obliged to follow. As soon as he reached the shelter of the next grove, he angled off to the right, a change of course that would be hidden from watchers at the cliff top. The limousine was also invisible now behind the trees, but he could trace its progress by the whine of gears and the chatter of skidding tires. The element of desperate uncertainty was where his path and the road would intersect.
The pain in the back of his skull where he had been bludgeoned had long since been cured or driven out of consciousness by the pressure of more imperative demands on his attention. Another fence rose up ahead, made of the same broken slabs of stone fitted together without mortar, and again he took it like a steeplechaser, without breaking stride to make sure what was beyond. This was reckless, but he had little choice: the sounds of the car were coming much too close to permit leisured reconnaissance. As he cleared the wall, he discovered that the ground beyond had been cut away, making a drop of six feet on the other side—where the road itself was responsible for the cutting. He took the fall easily, touching his hands to the gravel with the force of the impact but instantly springing up again. But in one swift glance around he saw the top of the black sedan over the tops of some young olive trees a scant hundred yards farther up the incline. Only the configuration of the ground and an intervening hairpin bend prevented its occupants from seeing him as well.
In terms of the speed of the approaching vehicle, that advantage represented mere seconds of grace. Rebounding like a rubber ball, Simon took two more immense strides across the road and dived head first over the lower wall on the other side, landing with a paratrooper’s shoulder roll and staying flat on the ground at the end of it.
A shaved moment later, the car slashed a
round the bend and screeched to a rubber-rending stop just beyond the place where the Saint had crossed. It was so close that spurted gravel rattled against the wall and the dust floated over his head. If he had been a fraction slower he would have been caught on the road; ten seconds slower in his breakneck run and he would have been trapped in the groves above, which the mafiosi were now invading.
Rising up with infinite wariness until he could look over the wall near him, he saw four of them clambering over the higher wall to spread out through the trees. The chauffeur who had navigated the projectile descent of the cliff road still sat at the wheel of the big car, and not much farther was the broad sweat-stained back of Al Destamio himself, shouting orders to his advance pack of hoodlums. Everyone was actively oriented to the upward angles, apparently fully convinced that at that point they must have well outdistanced the Saint and need not bother to look for him below them.
The temptation to counter-attack from the rear was almost overwhelming, and if it had been only a matter of Destamio or his driver the Saint would have probably failed nobly to resist it. But the two together, spaced as far apart as they were, constituted just too much risk that any hitch in the taking out of the first might give the second a chance to raise an alarm that would reverse all the convenient preconceptions of the squad that expected the Saint to fall into their arms from above. Reluctantly, he decided that this was a case where commonsensical considerations should outweigh the superficial allures of grandstand glory.
He turned away, rather sadly remembering more juvenile days when he would have chosen otherwise, and melted silently down through the vineyard where he had landed.
2
He could count on a brief respite while the searchers above vainly combed the upper slopes where they seemed to think they had cornered him. With that preconceived idea, it would take them between half an hour and an hour to convince themselves that he had gone past them and not crawled into some undiscovered hole. Then the word would have to be passed to headquarters, and a more widespread search would have to be organized. This would be a blanket operation that would enlist the entire Mafia and all their sympathisers, who possibly comprised most of the island’s population. Every man’s hand would be against him, but he would know where he stood with any man.
Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 13
