Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “No.”

  “You tripped, Lily,” said the Saint quietly. “So you are here to point me out to the mob, and not just to see who else you could pick up in your new clothes.”

  In deference to the conventions of an ordinary Italian town, she was wearing a full wraparound skirt that hid half the length of her sensational legs, but her upper structure was clearly limned by a sleeveless sweater that would have been barred at the doors of the Vatican.

  “Where are the boys?” he asked, with an insistence that was outwardly emphasized only in the invisible tightening of his grip.

  Her head moved a little as if she glanced around, but it was only an impression which could not be verified through those ornately floriferous blinders.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  Without letting go of her, as if it were only an unconscious waltz step in a lovers’ tryst, he had edged around to reverse their positions, so that his back was to the railings, but he saw no indication of any mafiosi closing in or watching for a cue to do so. And he was becoming increasingly fascinated by the fact that she still made no attempt to scream for help, legitimate or illegitimate. His threat might have checked her in the beginning—long enough to let him improve his strategic position and maneuver her obstructively into the line of fire—but by now she should have been thinking of some counter to that. Unless her mind was as completely barren as her dialog…

  If there were any guns around, they must have been of very low caliber. But the wild idea grew stronger that there might not even be any. The railroad station at Cefalù was a way-out shot, a vague chance, the kind of improbable possibility that a doll might have been sent to cover, just for luck, but without giving her any heavy backing. It would be figured that if by some remote fluke he did show up there, she would be capable of latching on to him, overtly or covertly, until—

  “We mustn’t be seen here together,” she said. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  His hunch anchored itself solidly enough at that to provide a springboard for tentative exultation.

  “Why not?” he said.

  He turned her around and changed his grip more swiftly than she could have taken advantage of the instant’s liberty. Now locking the fingers of her right hand in his left, with his arm inside hers holding it tight against his side, he steered her briskly towards the station exit, as firmly attached to him as if they had been Siamese twins. But she went along as obediently as a puppet, and if any of Destamio’s men were waiting for a sign from her, they did not seem to get it.

  He opened the door of the first cab on the rank outside, and followed her in without letting go her hand.

  “I suppose you know this town,” he said. “Where would be a safe place to go, where we won’t be likely to run into Al or any of his pals?”

  “The Hotel Baronale,” she said at once, and Simon repeated it to the driver.

  Obviously the Hotel Baronale was a prime place to avoid, but Simon waited till they had whipped around the next corner before he leaned forward and pushed a bill from his stolen roll over the driver’s shoulder.

  “I think my wife is having me followed,” he said hoarsely. “Try to shake off anyone behind us. And instead of the Baronale, I think it would be safer to drop us at the Cathedral, if you understand.”

  “Do I understand?” said the chauffeur enthusiastically. “I have so much sympathy for you that it shames me to take your money.”

  Nevertheless, he succeeded in stifling his shame sufficiently to make the currency vanish as if it had been sucked up by a starving vacuum cleaner. But he also made a conscientious effort to earn it, with an inspired disregard for the recriminations of a few deluded souls who thought that even in Sicily there were some traffic courtesies to be observed.

  Looking back through the rear window, Simon became fairly satisfied that even if any second-team goons had been backing up Lily at the station, which seemed more unlikely every minute, they were now floundering in a subsiding wake.

  “What are you so afraid of?” Lily asked, ingenuously.

  “Mainly of being killed before I’m ready,” said the Saint. “I suppose I’m a bit fussy, but since it’s something you can only do once, I feel it should be done well. I’ve been working up to it for years, but I still think I need a few more rehearsals.”

  His flippancy bounced off her like a sandbag off a pillow.

  “It can only be Fate, meeting you again like this,” she said solemnly. “I never thought it would happen. I thought of you, but I didn’t know where to find you.”

  It was a long speech for her, and he regarded her admiringly for having worked it out.

  “Why were you thinking of me?” he inquired, resigning himself to playing it straight.

  “I’ve left Al. When I found out how much he was mixed up in, I got scared.”

  “You didn’t know this when you took up with him?”

  “I haven’t been with him as long as that. I’m a dancer. I was with a troupe doing a tour. I met him at a club in Naples, and he talked me into quitting. I liked him at first, and I wasn’t getting on with the producer who booked the tour. Al took care of everything. But I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

  In uttering so many sentences she was forced to give away clues to her mysterious accent, and with mild surprise he finally placed it as London-suburban cramped with some elocution-school affectations, and overlaid with a faint indefinable “foreign” intonation which she must have adopted for additional glamor.

  “But if you’ve left Al, how did you get here to Cefalù?”

  “I was afraid he’d catch me if I tried to get out of Italy by any of the ways he’d expect. You see, I took some money—I had to. I took the plane to Palermo and I thought I could take the next plane to London, but it was full up. There’s only one a day. I was afraid to wait in Palermo, because Al has friends there, so I came here to wait till tomorrow.”

  The Saint had no way to know whether she was adlibbing or if her lines had been carefully taught her, but he nodded with the respectful gravity to which a good try was entitled.

  “It’s lucky that I ran into you,” he said. “Luckier than you know, maybe. These men are dangerous!”

  The cab shook as the driver spun it around another corner and braked it to a squealing halt in front of the Cathedral. Simon tossed another bonus into his lap, with the generosity which is best indulged from some other rogue’s misappropriated roll, and dragged Lily quickly out and across the fronting pavement.

  “Why do you come here?” she protested, tottering to keep up with him on her high stiletto heels.

  “Because all cathedrals have side doors. If cabdriver got inquisitive, he couldn’t cover all of them, and if anyone asks him questions, he won’t know which way we went after he dropped us.”

  Inside, he slowed to a more moderate pace, and he noticed that he no longer seemed to have any resistance to overcome. He surmised that now she was temporarily parted from any protective hoodlums who may have been posted in the vicinity of the station—or the Hotel Baronale—she must feel that her most vital interest was to stay close to him rather than escape from him, for if she lost track of him now she might be in the kind of trouble that it was painful even to imagine. He felt free enough to take out his guide book and turn the pages, making like any swivel-eyed tourist.

  “The columns,” he said, cribbing brazenly from the book; “take particular note of the columns, because they’re the handsomest you are going to see in a long while. And those capitals! Byzantine, by golly, intermixed with Roman, and all of them standing foursquare holding up those stilted Gothic arches. Don’t they do something to you? Or anything?”

  “We can’t stay here,” Lily said, with a suppressed seethe. “If you’re in trouble with Al, you must get out of town too.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “If you’re afraid of the railway, there is a bus station—”

  “I came here on a bus,” he said, “
and something happened that makes me feel that I’m probably passeggero non grata with the bus company.”

  “What, then?”

  “I must think of you, Lily. I suppose you made a reservation on the plane to London tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you daren’t go back to Palermo. By this time, Al could have checked with the airlines and found out about it. So we can fool him by going the opposite way, to Catania. We can get a plane from there to Malta—and that’s British territory.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “You don’t feel like walking?”

  She gazed at him in silent disgust.

  “Maybe it is a bit far,” he admitted. “But if we try to rent a car, that’s the next thing the Ungodly will have thought of, too. There must be something left that they won’t think of—if I can only think of it…”

  He riffled the pages of the guide book, fumbling for an inspiration somewhere in its recital of the antique grandeurs and modern comforts of the city. To lose themselves in a population of less than 12,000 was a very different problem from doing the same thing in New York or even Naples. But there had to be a solution, there always was.

  And suddenly it was staring him in the face.

  “I know,” he said. “We’ll go to the beach and cool off.”

  Lily’s mouth opened in an expression not unlike that of a beached fish—an expression which the Saint had a fatal gift of provoking, and which always gave him a malicious satisfaction. With no intention of prematurely alleviating her bewilderment, he captured her hand again and led her down an aisle and out into a tree-shaded cloister. From there, a small gate let them out into what his map showed to be the Via Mandralisca, where he turned back in the direction of the sea.

  Towing the baffled but obedient Lily beside him, he stopped at the first clothing store they came to and bought a knitted T-shirt in horizontal blue and white stripes and a pair of cheap sandals. He changed into them quickly in the next convenient alley, discarding his former soiled shirt and scuffed shoes in the nearest trash barrel. A little farther on, at a cubicle of tourist superfluities overflowing on to the sidewalk, he acquired a pair of sunglasses and a huge garish straw bag which he gave Lily to carry.

  Only a block from the approaching vista of blue Mediterranean, he made a last stop at a well-stocked salumeria, where an apparently unsuspicious proprietor was delighted to wrap bountiful packages of cheese, ham, sausage, artichoke hearts, and ripe olives, together with a loaf of crusty bread and a flagon of the sturdy purple Corvo that would agreeably moisten their passage. These were all stowed in the capacious sack with which he had thoughtfully provided Lily.

  “What is all this for?” she queried plaintively.

  “For either of us who gets hungry. It might be late before we get a proper dinner.”

  None of the shopkeepers he had patronized seemed to have been alerted; or perhaps Destamio’s grapevine had been too busy trying to block the more obvious exits, so far, to diffuse itself over the general prospect. At any rate, they reached the beach without any alarming signals registering on Simon Templar’s ultrasensitive antennae, looking like any other tourist couple among the clutter of humanity that was reclining or romping according to age and temperament.

  Once among them, he made himself even more typical and less memorable by peeling off his T-shirt, putting it with the sandals in the catchall bag, and rolling his trousers up to the knee. His bronzed torso matched the most common tint of the other vacationers, and even if his musculature was considerably more striking than the average, it was not outstandingly different from that of any weight-lifting beach boy. There was nothing much else about him for anyone to notice or describe.

  Lily was a little more difficult to camouflage, but he made her roll her sweater up above her midriff until it was almost a brassiere, and unbutton her skirt to bare the maximum length of thigh as she walked barefoot like himself, with her shoes joining the other discards in the big bag. She had already tied up her dazzlingly bleached hair in a scarf, at his suggestion, while he was changing his shirt.

  So they completed their crossing of the beach as reasonable facsimiles of any two commonplace holiday-makers, hand in hand, to the water’s edge where there were drawn up some of the Mediterranean’s most popular pleasure craft, those companionable catamarans made just for a couple to sit in side by side and pedal themselves lazily around with the aid of the paddle-wheel housed between the pontoons. Practically, however, they can be propelled faster and much more effortlessly than the ordinary rowboat, and are far more seaworthy and comfortable in moderately messy weather, and in fact it was the guide book’s mention of this littoral attraction which had led him there.

  The concessionaire came to meet them as they arrived, beaming with mercenary optimism.

  “Che bellissimo giorno, signore! And a beautiful afternoon for a ride in a moscone. This is the best time of day!”

  “It is late,” Simon said dubiously. Any appearance of urgency or eagerness might kindle suspicion if there were already a spark for it to fan, and in any case would be sharply remembered later. “There will not be much more sun.”

  “It is only the middle of the afternoon!” protested the operator, waving his arms to the heavens for witness. “And when the sun is going down, it is nice and cool. Besides, I will make you a special price.”

  “How much?”

  There followed the inevitable formality of bargaining, and a price was finally agreed on to cover the remaining duration of daylight. Simon paid it in advance.

  “In case we are a little late,” he said with an elaborate wink, “you will not have to wait for us.”

  The man grinned in broad fraternity.

  “Capita! Grazie! E buona sorte!”

  Simon handed Lily into her seat, and helped the proprietor push the paddle-cat into the water before he hopped nimbly aboard and took the tiller, turning their twin prows westward as he began to pedal in unison with her.

  It was all he could do to refrain from laughing out loud. Behind him, the town would be swarming with Destamio’s minions: he formed a whimsical picture of them pouring in from all directions until they outnumbered both natives and tourists. The railroad station was probably infested with them by now, and likewise the bus depot; unless Destamio’s car had hit the bus harder than it sounded, he could have organized coverage of every outlying road and even footpath, and even the little port might not have been overlooked, but Simon was joyfully prepared to bet his life that he had hit on the one possible exit that a serious-minded creep like the former Dino Cartelli would never think of until it was too late. It had become a truly Saintly escape, outrageous in its originality—and now spiked with a bonus that he would not have tried to incorporate in his dizziest dream.

  “Isn’t Catania the other way?” she said after a while.

  “You’re brilliant,” he assured her reverently. “This is the way to Palermo. The moscone merchant has to see us going this way. All the clues should keep pointing to Palermo. Only you and I know where we’re really going.”

  When they were far enough out for their features not to be recognizable to the naked eye, but not so far that it would look as if they were setting out on a major voyage, he held a course parallel with the coast, searching the shore line for a special kind of topography that would lend itself to what he had in mind. It was not too long before he found it: a tiny cove floored with a half-moon of sand, not much wider than the length of a moscone, walled around with sheer cliffs rising twenty feet or more, and flanked by massive falls of rock so as to be almost inaccessible except from the sea. It was at least a mile from the nearest public beach.

  Simon steered towards it, appreciating its advantages more and more as it came closer, and kept on pedalling until the pontoons grounded gently on the sand. He jumped off and held Lily’s hand to balance her as she walked along a pontoon to step off daintily without wetting her feet; then he hauled the boat higher to secure it from being disl
odged by the gently lapping wavelets, off-loaded the bulging bag, and sat down with it above the high-water mark.

  Lily stared down at him in blank befuddlement.

  “You’re not going to stay here?”

  “Only until after sunset. Then we can double back past Cefalù again and keep heading towards Catania. We’ll pedal far enough to get well outside any cordon that Al may have thrown around here, and slip ashore somewhere in the dark.” He patted the sand beside him invitingly. “Meanwhile, it’s nice and shady here, and we’ve got everything we need to ward off death by thirst or starvation. Why not enjoy it?”

  She sat down, slowly, while the Saint uncorked the wine, which he had kept well wrapped in the bottom of the bag for insulation from the sun and warmth, and poured some into the small plastic tumblers which the negoziante had efficiently added to his bill.

  “I guess we’re in this together now, Lily,” said the Saint. “I’ll get us out of it, though. Just stick with me. I can’t help feeling responsible, in a way, for the trouble between you and Al, but I’ll try to make up for it.”

  She gave him a long impenetrable scrutiny in which he could feel wheels revolving as in a primitive adding machine. There was only one arithmetical conclusion that they could reach, but the fringe benefits could transcend the limitations of mechanical bookkeeping.

  He waited patiently.

  “To hell with Al,” she said finally. “I like you much better, anyway.”

  After the warm paint was washed off with enough food and wine, there was nothing wrong with her lips at all.

  3

  When the brief twilight had turned to dark, the Saint stood up and dusted off his pants.

  “All good things come to an end,” he said sadly. “It’s been wonderful, but I’ve got to be moving on.”

  It had become cool enough, when he was away from her, for him to be glad to put on his T-shirt again, while she rearranged the scarf over her hair. He also took his sandals out of the bag and carried them to the moscone, where he put them on the bench between the seats. Then he lifted the forward end of the nearest pontoon and pushed until the craft was well afloat again.