Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “I think so,” said the Saint, and bent over the table.

  The lieutenant who had brought them from the gate, together with another lieutenant and a sergeant who were already in the hut, joined Olivetti and Ponti around the map and watched intently while Simon traced his way over the contours from the junction on the coast where he had caught the bus to Cefalù, back up the dry river bed to the village and up over the mountain ridge to the other valley and the combination of remembered landmarks which enabled him to pinpoint the site of the eyrie from which he had escaped.

  “This road is unpaved,” he said, running a fingernail along the route down from the house. “I haven’t been on this upper stretch, but their car came down it at speed with no trouble. I don’t know anything about this other road marked along the top of the cliff.”

  Olivetti studied the terrain with professional minuteness.

  “On either road, there is a risk that they may have outposts who would give warning of the approach of a force like ours. You mentioned descending this cliff in the dark. Could we send men up that way?”

  “Even Alpine troops, I think, would need to use pitons, and the hammering would make too much noise. I came down that way because I had to, and some of it was just dropping and sliding and hoping for the best.”

  “I could deploy my men from these points and let them make it on foot, but then I could not guarantee they would be ready to close in before dawn.”

  “I know there is no logical reason why this convocation should panic and pack up in the middle of the night,” Ponti said, “but I must admit that each hour that we leave the trap open will make me more afraid of finding it empty when we close it.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” asked the Saint.

  “Of course. You are the only one of us who has already seen this area in daylight.”

  “And I think it would be a commando’s nightmare. On the other hand, if you got there and found that the birds had flown, I should feel sillier than anyone. So I think we should try for speed rather than stealth. Of course, I would try to cut all the telephone lines in the area—and apologize to the telephone company afterwards, otherwise some Mafia sympathizer among the operators would certainly send out a warning. But after that, I would move in as fast as possible, and hang the uproar. I take it your company is mechanized, Maggiore?”

  “Si. That is, we have no tanks, but we have trucks and troop carriers.”

  Simon pointed to the two roads to the Mafia hideout.

  “Then if you split them into two units, and send one up by this road and one by this, timed to meet at the top—once they start, they themselves will be blocking the only roads that the mobsters could escape by, if they still are up there. However, if they find themselves cornered like that, the jokers might decide to fight rather than surrender. Are you prepared to go as far as a shooting war?”

  “I should welcome it!” Olivetti bellowed, and struck the flimsy trestle table a great blow with his fist that threatened the support of its legs. “If Ponti has the authority—”

  “That is quite a point,” Simon admitted, turning to the detective. “Can you justify launching an offensive like this?”

  Ponti showed his teeth in a vulpine grin.

  “I can if you are not deceiving me, and unless you let me down. In which case I would do worse to you than I promised Niccolo. But on your testimony I have plenty to charge them with—assault, kidnaping, attempted murder. Then there is a very legalistic charge involving criminal intentions, which an assembly of persons of bad repute can be assumed to be plotting, in certain circumstances. But best of all would be if one of them does fire a shot at us—then we need no more excuses.”

  “So, it is decided,” Olivetti said, with ebullient enthusiasm. “The tecnici will go out first, in pairs, on motorcycles. Then, look, the first and second plotoni—”

  His subalterns and the sergeant crowded up to follow his pointings on the map as he developed the plan in greater detail, and Ponti caught Simon’s eye and beckoned him away from the briefing.

  “I imagine you would like to go back to your hotel and get some sleep, but that might be dangerous. Let me give you the key to my apartment. The Mafia will never look for you there. I will see you there after all this is over. You will have to identify the ones that we capture, and make a deposition to support the charges. The address is—”

  Simon had already begun to shake his head, before he interrupted.

  “There you go again, Marco, trying to kill me with kindness,” he murmured. “It makes me feel an ungrateful bum to turn you down, but I have sat through too many acts of this opera to be eased out before the grand finale. I shall come along and be ready with more of my brilliant advice in case the military needs it.”

  “But you are a civilian. You do not have to expose yourself—”

  “Someone should have told me that a few days ago. But now I still have those personal problems of my own which you know something about, and I want a chance to straighten them out before some trigger-happy bersagliere blasts away any hope of getting the answers. If you refuse me that little bit of fun, I might be so upset as to get an attack of amnesia, and be completely unable to identify any of your prisoners. Such things can happen to hysterical types like me.”

  “Your blackmail is shameful. But I am forced to bow to it. However, I take no responsibility for your safety, or for any legal trouble you may get into.”

  “You never did, did you?” said the Saint innocently.

  The map-table conference broke up, and the lieutenants and the sergeant hurried out.

  “Well, the operation will be rolling in eight minutes,” Olivetti said. “The Company was put on full alert as soon as you telephoned, Ponti—and since then there has been no telephoning.”

  With a broad smile, he held up his huge hand and clicked a pantomime wire-cutter.

  “I, too, take no chances,” he said, and looked at the Saint. “I am glad you are going with us. It will help to have someone who knows the layout of this castello.”

  “He insists,” Ponti said wryly. “He is afraid that he may become hysterical if he is left alone. He has been through a lot, you know.”

  “Now you try to explain that, Marco,” Simon grinned, and went out.

  He was checking the gas and oil in the Bugatti when the advance scouts set out, the wasp-whine of their Guzzi motorcycles splitting the still night. They were followed by the snore of truck engines grumbling into life.

  Satisfied that his borrowed behemoth was still fuelled for any kilometrage that it was likely to be called on to cover, he was buckling down the hood when a Fiat scout car skidded to a stop beside him with all four wheels locked. Major Olivetti was at the wheel. In the rear seat, a lieutenant and the radio-man braced themselves stoically, being no doubt inured to their commander’s mercurial pilotage, but in the other front bucket Ponti had his hands clamped to the dashboard with a pained expression which hinted that he might have preferred the vehicle which brought him to the camp.

  “Follow my column,” Olivetti bawled, “and join me when we stop. Do you want a gun?”

  He proffered his own automatic.

  “Thank you, but it must be illegal for foreign civilians in this country to possess military firearms. And in any case I already have an illegal weapon obtained from the Mafia. But don’t tell your poliziotti friends.”

  Ponti opened his mouth, but whatever contribution he may have had in mind was not forthcoming, at least in Simon’s hearing. For at that moment the grinning major snapped in the clutch, and the scout car vanished into the night with a jolt that could have whiplashed the necks of its occupants.

  A column of trucks growled after it while Simon was winding up the Bugatti and turning it around. He fell in after the scout car that brought up the rear.

  Strangely or naturally, according to which school of psychology you favor, he was not wondering how Lily was making out, but what had happened to Gina. Gina with the dark virginal eyes and
the wickedly nymphic body and the young eagerness and unsureness, who was another part of the intricate house of Destamio, and who could be destroyed with it—if it had not already destroyed her first.

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  HOW THE FIREWORKS WENT OFF AND CIRANO TURNED UP HIS NOSE

  1

  It was a slow drive. Olivetti was obviously holding their speed down in order to give the engineers the half-hour’s lead he had allowed for them. If his timing was right, they should meet the motorcycle advance guard at the exact moment scheduled for the assault.

  They saw nothing of the coast or the sea, since the Major had wisely chosen to use only the interior roads that wound their way through the mountains. For the most part these roads were bad, and frequently they were terrible. Sometimes when they branched off on to an unpaved track to avoid a town, clouds of dust billowed up and swept suffocatingly over the Bugatti. Simon stopped more than once to let the worst of the dust settle, and then caught up with the column again, having no fear of losing it while there was still a trail of powdery fog to trace it by.

  This dilatory progress continued until after midnight, when Simon felt they could not be much farther from the Mafia headquarters. They ground through a darkened village, then up a precipitous track that appeared to have been scratched out of the face of a cliff.

  Lights flashed in the Saint’s eyes from his rear-view mirror as a car came up behind and blinked its headlights to pass. He pulled courteously over to the side, and at the same instant was possessed by a prickling presentiment of danger.

  What possible reason could an ordinary car have for being on such a road at this time of night—and in enough of a desperate hurry to risk trying to pass a convoy of trucks on such a dangerous cornice? Only an errand of more than ordinarily reckless urgency. This did not ineluctably mean that the car was driven by Mafia sympathizers. But with the telephone wires cut, anyone who wanted to warn the Mafia headquarters of the approaching column would have to go by road. This road.

  This reasoning went through the Saint’s head in the brief moment during which the car was overtaking him, and as soon as it was past he swung out behind it and kicked on his high beams. They blazed out like twin searchlights and impaled a long open Alfa-Romeo, not new but obviously still capable of a good turn of speed. The driver kept his eyes on the road, but the man beside him turned, shading his eyes from the glare with the turned-down brim of a black hat.

  Simon sounded a warning series of blasts on his horn to attract attention, and the officer in the scout car ahead was not stupid. He waved the Alfa-Romeo back as it started to pass him, and held up a gun to show that he meant business.

  The reply from the Alfa-Romeo was instantaneous. The driver accelerated, and his companion produced a pistol and began firing at the scout car. The officer ducked down, and the Alfa-Romeo went safely by, staying in the scanty lane between the trucks and the sheer drop into the valley.

  It was a long chance, but it looked as if they might get away with it. The trucks trundled stolidly along on the right-hand side of the trail, while the Mafia car tore up on their left, its wheels within inches of the unfenced verge. The scout car swung out of line behind it and raced in pursuit, the occupants of both cars exchanging shots, though neither seemed to be having any effect.

  The end came with shocking suddenness as one of the truck drivers farther up the column became aware of what was occurring. He must have seen the flash of gunfire or heard the shots above the grinding of engines, and reacted with commendable intelligence and initiative. As the Alfa-Romeo came up to pass his truck, he edged out of line and narrowed the space between the flank of his vehicle and the edge of nothingness. The Mafia driver, crowded by the scout car immediately behind him, held down blaringly on his klaxon and made a frantic bid to squeeze through. The truck remorselessly held its course and hogged a little more. Finally the sides of the two vehicles touched, with much the same effect as a ping-pong ball grazing a locomotive. The Alfa-Romeo was simply flipped sideways off the road, and was gone. There was a delayed crash and a flash of fire from the ravine below, but the convoy had rolled on well beyond that point before the final reverberations could rumble up to its level.

  This was the only crisis that disturbed the purely figurative smoothness of the trip. Within minutes the road levelled out, and brake-lights glowed as the column ground to a halt. Major Olivetti’s car roared back down the line and stopped beside Simon.

  “The engineers are there, and report all the wires cut as ordered,” he said. “We’re ready to go in. According to the map, the house is only about a kilometer ahead. The scouts will go first and I will follow, and it would be best if you kept close to me. I must have positive identification of the house before there is any shooting.”

  He was away again before the Saint could do more than half-salute in answer. Simon gunned the Bugatti after the Fiat scout car and followed it down the road, until a motorcyclist waved them to a stop. They pulled off into an open orchard, and with instinctive prospicience Simon backed his car into a position from which it would be free to take off again in any direction. After this they continued on foot through the orchard, until the trees thinned out to disclose a house looming ahead across a clearing, blacked out and silent.

  “Is that the place?” Major Olivetti asked.

  “It could be,” Simon answered. “I can’t be absolutely certain, because I never saw it from this side. It looks something like the right shape. Does the location fit the description I gave you, on the edge of a cliff?”

  “Perfectly. And the scouts report no other house near here that fits it. You can see the beginning of the road there that leads down to the village, gravel surfaced as you described it. Another column is down there, blocking any escape that way. We can go into action as soon as you are absolutely certain that this is the right place.”

  “Are all your men in position?”

  “On all sides. The mortars should be down and sighted by now, the machine guns set up as well.”

  “Shall I go and ring their front door bell?” Simon asked, straightening up and taking a few steps into the moonlit clearing.

  “Don’t be a fool—get down! They can see you from the house!”

  “That is precisely the idea,” Simon said. “The people inside must have heard your trucks, and if they have guilty consciences they should now be keeping a rather jittery lookout.”

  He stood gazing intently at the building for several seconds, and then stepped back with exaggerated furtiveness behind a thick-trunked tree.

  He had gauged the impression he would give, and its timing, with impudent accuracy. There was a rattle of gunfire from the house, and a covey of bullets passed near, some of them thunking into the tree.

  “That seems to settle it,” Simon remarked coolly. “And now that they’ve started the shooting, you have all the justification you need for shooting back.”

  With or without the reassurance of such legalistic argument, some of the deployed soldiers were already returning the fire. The house promptly sparkled with more flashes as its occupants accepted the challenge. Bullets whipped leaves from the trees and keened away in plaintive ricochets. Someone turned a spotlight on the building, and before it was shot out they could see that most of the heavy shutters on the windows were open for an inch or two to provide gun slits, and most of them seemed to be in use.

  “Very nice,” Olivetti said, crouching beside Simon and Ponti, “You ask me to help you make a raid on some criminals, but you did not tell me we should be fighting a minor battle.”

  “Mi despiace, Commandante,” Ponti said. “I did not plan it this way.”

  “You are sorry? This is the best thing that could have happened! In the summer no skiing, and all they do is chase girls and drink. We shall sweat some of the wine out of them tonight! All I want to know is in what condition you want those men inside the house. If it is dead, it will be easy. Only there will be a certain amount of mortar fire necessary, and b
efore entering rooms we would roll in a grenade or two. That way, there may be very few prisoners.”

  “There are some that I want alive,” Ponti said. “The leaders only. The rest, your soldiers can practice their training upon, and save the courts much useless expense. But I want the men at the top, to identify them and bring them to a public trial which will focus the attention of the whole country. If they are only killed here they will become martyrs: the lesser leaders will take over, and the whole organization will soon be flourishing again.”

  Simon thought of reminding them that Gina Destamio might also be in the house, for all he knew. But if she were, the mafiosi themselves would protect her as much as they could, if only until they could use her as a hostage. And as a mere possibility it was too speculative to justify holding up the assault.

  “That is more difficult, but we can try,” Olivetti was saying. “I will blow open the front door and the ground floor windows, and we will rush them from three directions. We shall have some casualties, but—”

  Suddenly headlights blazed on the far side of the house, and a car roared around the driveway and careened into the road. It was closely followed by another. Both were large sedans and apparently well manned, for their windows blazed with a crackle of small arms.

  “Aim for the drivers!” bellowed the Major, in a voice that could be heard easily above the rising crescendo of gunfire. “Then we can take the others alive!”

  The leading car drove straight at the front of the army truck which had been strategically parked across the road, without slackening speed, smashed into it, and burst into flame. Frantic men tumbled out and stumbled away from the flickering light. The second car braked violently, but not enough to lose all momentum as it crashed into the rear of the first. It then became clear that the whole sequence was deliberate: the first impact had slewed the truck around enough to leave a car’s width between its bumper and the bordering stone wall, and the second car was now ramming the burning wreck of its companion through the gap.