Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  The thought was briefly invigorating as he increased his pace. Staying out of the hot clutches of the Mafia might be the most difficult accomplishment of his checkered career, but if he could survive that cliche he might be able to outlast anything.

  One stairwayed vineyard led down to another as his giant strides carried him through them towards the valley town. The contadini of the outskirts were already awake and scratching at their tiny allotments with medieval mattocks. They seemed to notice Simon only disinterestedly as he passed, as if their tenure under the very shadow of the Mafia allowed them only to observe when specifically called upon to do so. The sight of a hurrying man in a torn shirt coming from the direction of the Mafia mansion evoked no response but hastily averted eyes: they would remember his passage if the correct parties inquired later, but right now they would neither hinder nor help.

  Simon dismissed them as ciphers in this desperate game, and made no stop or detour on their account until he reached the first outlying buildings of the town, where he paused briefly to do what little he could to make himself slightly more presentable.

  One shirt-sleeve was unrepairable, split up almost to the shoulder. Ripping off the cuff, he used it as a band on which to roll up the remains of the sleeve. When he rolled up the other sleeve to match, the torn one was hardly noticeable. He brushed the dirt from his hands, dusted his slacks as best he could, and combed his hair with his fingers—wincing slightly when they touched the knot above his occiput, and making another mental entry in the ledger that would have to be balanced with Al Destamio’s account when they came to a final settlement. With that, he was as ready to go on as he would ever be.

  The nameless town which he had to enter was already coming to life, since like any microcosm of the south it moved more quickly in the cool of the morning in order to doze better during the incinerating afternoon. Before finally entering a narrow alley that would surely lead to the main street, Simon checked backwards to see that his trail was still free of pursuers, and was rewarded with an unexpected and arresting sight. His downward path had widened his visual scope, and now he could see not only his recently deserted prison on the overhanging cliff but also a more distant mountain rising beyond and dwarfing it, a summit from which a thin plume of smoke coiled lazily upwards.

  Even the most superficial student of geological grandeurs could have recognized the symptoms of a dormant volcano, and since there is only one such on the island of Sicily, at the same time the highest in Europe and one of the largest in the world, Simon knew that he must be looking at Mount Etna. And aside from any casual vulcanological interest, it performed the important function of telling him exactly where he was.

  To visualize a map of Sicily, as the Saint did, you might think of a piece of pie about to be kicked by the toe of a boot, which is the shape of the Italian peninsula. The resemblance is only in outline, and should not lead to any symbolic inferences. The top side of this pie-wedge is fairly straight and runs almost due east and west. The volcano of Etna is situated in the upper eastern corner of the triangle. Since the Saint was looking towards it, and the sun was rising behind it, the most rudimentary geographical acumen or even the basic training of a boy scout would have been enough to tell him that the road downhill from the unknown town he was entering must run north to join the coastal highway somewhere between Messina and Palermo. To some exigent critics this deduction might still have seemed to fall far short of pinpointing a position, but to Simon Templar it provided a fix from which he would have cheerfully set a course to Mars.

  As he reached the central square of the town, he had a clear view of the valley road that bisected it and wandered on down to the now occulted sea. That trail of patched macadam, he knew, was a siren’s lure that beckoned only to his death. Though it looked open, it would be the first avenue to be watched, closed, or booby-trapped. The Mafia might not be overly concerned with Destamio’s personal problems, but they would be ruthlessly jealous of their own prerogatives, which the Saint had affronted with insulting levity. Therefore all their resources, spread like a spider cancer through the entire community, would be devoted to the simple objective of cutting him down. And the main thoroughfares would be the first and most obvious avenues for them to cover.

  Across the square, in front of the town’s principal and possibly only hotel, an assortment of early-rising tourists were loading their luggage and their young into various cars. Two families of beaming Bavarians, complete with lederhosen and beer bellies, obviously travelling together in identical beetle-nosed Volkswagens; a middle-aged Frenchman with his dependable Peugeot and a chic chick who somehow looked a most unconvincing wife, and an oversized station wagon whose superfluous fins and garbage-can-lid rear lights would have revealed its transatlantic origin long before the red-and-black identification of the American forces in Europe could have been deciphered on its dusty license plate. The gaudy pseudo-Hawaiian shirt worn like a pregnancy smock outside the tired slacks of its proprietor was no disguise for a certain pugnacity of jaw and steeliness of eye which stamp a professional sergeant in peace or war.

  Simon’s spirits rose another notch. With such a type, opportunity might not be exactly pounding at his door, but at least he could hear it tap.

  He waited till the last suitcase had been jammed into the truck-sized rear deck, and the last squalling brat trapped and stowed amidships, and then he approached the near-side window just as the driver was settling in and turning on the engine.

  “I hate to make like a hitch-hiker,” he said, with just the right blend of fellow-American camaraderie combined with undertones of a wartime commission, “but could you drop me off a couple of miles down the valley? I had to bring my car in to be fixed at the garage here, and it won’t be done till this evening.”

  While the sergeant hesitated momentarily, from the ingrained suspicion of all professional sergeants, his wife moved over to make room on the front seat.

  “Sure,” she said, making up his mind for him like any good American wife. “No trouble at all.”

  The Saint got in, and they pulled away. By this time, he figured that Destamio and the first pursuit squad might be debating the possibility that they had not after all headed him where they stopped on the road.

  “What you doin’ around here?” asked the sergeant sociably, after a time.

  “Spending a vacation with some cousins,” Simon answered casually, knowing that his black hair and tanned complexion would superficially support a fictional Italian ancestry. “They’ve got a farm down the road a piece. First time I’ve ever been here—my folks emigrated before I was born.”

  “Where you from, then?”

  “New York.”

  A trite choice, but one where he knew he could not be caught out on any topographical details, and big enough not to lead into any acquaintance pitfalls of the “Do you know Joe Blow?” pattern.

  “We’re from Dallas, Texas. We don’t get out much into the suburbs.”

  It was astonishingly easy, and might have tempted anyone to parlay his luck as far as the ride could be stretched. But the Saint had attained his present age mainly because he was not just anyone. Very shortly, his pursuers would extend their search into the town, where they would soon find some loafer in the square who had seen a man answering to Simon’s description getting into an unmistakable American car. With the speed of a couple of telephone calls, the word would be flashed ahead to confreres along the littoral, and before the station wagon even reached the coast the highway in both directions would be alive with eyes that would never let it out of their sight. From that moment there would be nowhere he could leave the car without the probability of being observed and followed, while to stay in it would risk an unthinkable involvement of its innocent occupants in any splashy attempts at his own destruction.

  Watching the road ahead for any side tracks that could plausibly lead to a farm, he finally spotted a suitable turning and said, “Right here—don’t try to take me to the door, you’d have a jo
b turning around to get out again. And thanks a million.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Simon got out, and the car shot off as he waved good-bye.

  Now until they stopped the station wagon and questioned the driver, Destamio’s cohorts would be partially baffled—unless someone realized that a man on foot could travel in any direction, if he was fool enough to climb over a sun-blasted mountain instead of skirting it. Which was precisely the Saint’s intention.

  But the plan was not as hare-brained to him as it might have seemed to a less original fugitive. On a previous visit to Sicily he had driven from Messina to Palermo, and had remarked on the numbers of people waiting at bus stops along the highway, who had apparently landed from boats or lived under rocks by the wayside, since they were nowhere near any visible human habitation. His companion, who knew the island, had pointed out the dusty dirt tracks that wound back between the buttresses of the hills, and explained that higher up in most of the valleys, closer to sources of precious water, there was a hidden village. Though they might be only a few miles apart on the map, the normal route from one to another was down to the sea, along the coast, and back up again—a long way around, but much more attractive in a climate that discouraged strenuous exertion. To the Saint, however, to do whatever would be most unexpected was far more important than an economy of sweat.

  And sweat, in plain common language, was what his eccentricity exacted, in copious quantities. As he climbed higher, so did the sun, making it clear why Sicily had never become the Mecca of midsummer mountain-hikers. To add to its natural disadvantages for such sport, Simon Templar also had to contend not only with the after-effects of a mild concussion but also with the fact that he had had no breakfast, or any other food or drink since last night’s dinner.

  It was good evidence of his mental as well as his physical toughness that he set and maintained a pace which would not have disgraced a week-end hiker over some gentle undulations in an English autumn. His shirt was already sodden when the terraced groves and vineyards gave up their encroachment on a baked and crumbling mountain-side where only straggling shrubs and cacti grew, but the sun only worked harder to imitate the orifice of a blast furnace. More insidious was the temptation to let his mind dwell on thoughts of cool refreshing drinks, which only intensified the craving. The human body can go without food for a month, but dies in a few days without water. Simon was not about to die, but he had never been so thirsty as he was when he reached the summit of the range he had aimed for.

  By then it was almost noon, and his brains felt as if they were being cooked inside his skull. The rocks shimmered in the blaze, heat-induced mirages plagued his vision, and the blood pounded in his temples. But if he had chosen the right ridge, he should be able to come down in a valley that would bring him to the sea from a totally different quarter and in a totally different area from where the hunters would be watching for him.

  A rustling sound like wind-blown leaves came to him as he rounded a jutting promontory some way below the crest, and he found himself suddenly face to face with three startled goats. They were moth-eaten, dusty, and lean to a point of emaciation which was understandable if their only grazing was the withered herbage of that scorched hillside. Two of them were females with large but not distended udders, and the explanation of that detail dawned on him an instant too late for him to draw back behind the sheltering shoulder of magma. By that time he had seen the goatherd, and seen that the goatherd also saw him.

  They stared at each other for a silent moment, the goatherd looking as surprised as his charges. He was a thin youth as dusty and tattered as the goats, in a faded shirt with the sleeves torn off at the shoulders and pants that had been mended so many times that it was difficult to tell which was the original material and which the patches. A knotted rope served him for a belt, and completed the sum of his wardrobe; the soles of his bare feet must have been calloused like hoofs to be able to ignore the abrasive and cauterizing surfaces which were all that his pastures offered them to walk on. He brushed back his uncut mop of hair to get a better view of the extraordinary apparition which had shattered all the precedents of his lonely domain.

  “Buon giorno,” said the Saint reassuringly. “A beautiful day for a walk in the hills.”

  “Sissignore,” responded the young man politely, to avoid offending an obvious lunatic. He speculated: “You are English?”

  Simon nodded, deciding that it was better to accept that assumption than be taken for a mad dog. He sighted a tiny patch of shade under a projecting rock and sat down to rest in it for a minute.

  “It was not as hot as this when I started out,” he said, in an attempt to partly explain his irrational behavior.

  “You must be thirsty,” the herdboy said.

  Something in Simon’s manner had erased his first fear and he came and squatted close by.

  “My mouth is so dry that I doubt if I could lick a stamp.”

  “You would like a drink?”

  “I would love one. I would like about six drinks,” said the Saint wistfully. “Tall ones, ice-cold. I would not be fussy about what they were. Orange juice, beer, cider, wine, tomato juice, even water. Do you have a refrigerator in a cave anywhere near by?”

  “You can have some of my water if you like.”

  The lad reached behind him and swung into sight a skin bottle that had been hanging down his back, suspended from a loop of gray string. He pulled the cork from the neck and extended the flask to the Saint, who took it in a state of numbed shock.

  “And I thought you were kidding…” Simon raised the bottle to his lips and let a trickle of hot, sour, but life-giving wetness moisten his tongue and flow down his throat. At any other time it would have been almost nauseating, but in his condition it was like nectar. He sipped slowly, to extract the maximum humidity from it and to give himself the impression of a prolonged draught without actually draining the container. He returned the skin still more than half full, and sighed gratefully.

  “Mille grazie. You may have saved my life.” On the other hand, the youth might equally prove to be a contributor to the Saint’s death. There was no way to make him forget the encounter, short of knocking him on the head and pitching his body into the nearest ravine, which would have been a somewhat churlish return for his good Samaritanism. But eventually the goatherd would hear about the foreigner who was being sought, and would tell about their meeting, and would be able to indicate which way the Saint had gone. With one quirk of fate, Simon had lost much of the advantage that he had toiled so painfully to gain—how much, depended on how soon the boy’s story reached one of the search parties. But that was only another hazard that had to be accepted.

  3

  There was nothing more to be gained by perching on that ledge like a becalmed buzzard and brooding about it. Simon climbed to his feet again, counting the compensation of the brief rest and refreshment, and pointed down the steep slope.

  “There is a village down that way?”

  “Sissignore. It is where I live. Would you like me to guide you?”

  “No, if I keep going downhill I must come to it.”

  “After you pass around that hill there with the two dead trees on the side you will see it. But I have to go back there before long in any case.”

  “I am in a hurry, and I have already interfered with you too much,” said the Saint hastily. “Thank you again, and may your goats multiply like rabbits.”

  He turned and plunged on down the slope with a dynamic purposefulness designed to leave the lad too far behind for further argument before any such argument could suggest itself.

  He only slackened his pace when he felt sure, without turning to look back, that the goatherd had been left shrugging helplessly at the incontestable arbitrariness of Anglo-Saxons, and when the precipitousness of the path reminded him that a twisted ankle could eventually prove just as fatal as a broken neck. He had to work his way across a perilous field of broken scree on the direct course h
e had set for the two dead trees which had been pointed out as his next landmark, but soon after he passed them he scrambled over another barren hump to be greeted by a vista that justified all the toil and sweat of its attainment.

  In the brown hollow of the hills far below clustered the whitewashed buildings of another village, with a road leading away from them down the widening canyon that could ultimately meander nowhere but to the coast. His venture seemed to have paid off.

  His descent from the heights seemed like a sleigh ride only by comparison with the preceding climb. A steep downhill trail, pedestrians whose walking is confined to city pavements might be surprised to learn, is almost as tiring as an uphill: the body’s weight does not have to be lifted, but its gravitational pull has to be cushioned instead, and the shocks come on the unsprung heels which make the muscles of the thighs work harder to soften the jolts. It was true that he had had a cupful of water to drink, but to boil it off there was an afternoon heat more intense if possible than the morning. Having breakfasted on nothing but thin air, he was now sampling more of the same menu for lunch. If he had been inclined to self-pity, he could have summarized that he was parched with thirst, faint with hunger, stumbling with fatigue, and baked to the verge of heat prostration, but he never permitted himself such an indulgence. On the contrary, renewed hope winged his steps and helped him to forget exhaustion.

  Nevertheless, a more coldly impersonal faculty warned him that he couldn’t continue drawing indefinitely on nothing but will-power and his stored-up reserves of strength. He would have to find liquid and solid sustenance in the village. If he by-passed it, he might be able to reach the coast on foot, but he would be in no shape to cope with any minions of the Mafia that he might meet there or run into on the road. The risk of attracting attention in town had to be balanced against the physical and mental improvement that its resources of food and drink could give him.