The hideout was almost certainly beyond the second turning at the end of the block, since that would have given the fugitives more time to disappear before the Bugatti could come in sight of them again, and somewhere within the fifty-yard stretch that had separated him from the limousine when he saw it again. The Saint moved more slowly from the corner, staying in the deepest shadows and assessing the buildings on each side, his eyes and ears straining to pick up any glimmer of light or whisper of sound that would betray a suspiciously early wakefulness within.
The houses were ranged shoulder to shoulder, but not in an even line, some having chosen to set farther back from the road than others. Simon prowled past two, then three, a small shop with living quarters above, another tall narrow building, none of them giving any sign of life. Then there was something only about two meters high which pushed out closer to the road than any of its neighbors, and in a moment Simon realized that it was not the projection of a ground floor but simply of a wall enclosing the front garden of a building which was itself set back quite a distance from the street.
And as he drifted wraith-like towards the angle, he heard from beyond it a soft scuff of footsteps, and his pulse beat a fraction faster at the virtual certainty that this must be the place where Destamio & Co had holed up.
As he flattened himself against the side wall, with his head turned to allow only one eye to peep around the corner, a black shape took one step out from a gateway in the front and stood to glance up and down the road. The firefly glow of a cigarette-end brightened to reveal the coarse cruel face of a typical subordinate goon, and to glint on the barrel of what looked like a shotgun tucked under his arm.
That was the obliging clincher. A large house, behind a walled garden—and an armed guard at the gate. Any skeptic who insisted on more proof would probably have refused to believe that an H-bomb had hit him until his dust had been tested with a Geiger counter.
So now all that Simon had to do was to withdraw as softly as he had come, meet Ponti and the soldiers outside the town, and lead them to the spot.
Except that such relatively passive participation had never been the Saint’s favorite role. And it would certainly have been an anticlimactic denouement to the enterprise which had brought him that far. Besides which, he had already been pushed around too much by the Mafia to complacently leave others to administer their comeuppance. Major Olivetti and his bersaglieri had been fine for a frontal attack on the castle fortress, the boom of mortar shells and the flicker of tracer bullets had made it a stirring production number worthy of wide-screen photography, but Simon felt that something more intimate was called for in his personal settlement with Al Destamio.
He waited motionless, with infinite patience, until finally the bored sentinel turned and went back into the garden.
With the fluid silence of a stalking tiger the Saint followed behind him, and sprang.
The first intimation of disaster that the sentry had was when an arm snaked over his shoulder and the braced thumb-joint of its circling fist thumped into his larynx. Paralyzed, he could neither breathe nor yell, and he never noticed the second blow on the side of his neck that rendered him mercifully unconscious.
The Saint caught the shotgun as it dropped, and with his other hand clutched the man’s clothing and eased his fall to the ground into a mere rustling collapse. Then he picked the limp form off the driveway and carried it to the shadow of a clump of bushes and rolled it under.
The driveway led straight to the doors of a garage, a status symbol which had obviously been cut into one corner of the ground floor of an edifice much older than the horseless carriage, and a flagged path branched from it to three steps which mounted to the front door. Simon tiptoed up the steps, and the door yielded to his touch—which was no more than he expected, for the Ungodly would hardly have been old-maidishly apprehensive enough to have locked the guard outside. The hallway inside was dark, but light came from a crack under a door at the back, and a deep murmur of male voices. With the shotgun in one hand, Simon inched towards the light with hyper-sensory alertness for any invisible obstacle that might catastrophically trip him.
The voices came through the door distinctively enough for him to recognize the hoarse rasp of Destamio’s, but the conversation was mostly in Sicilian dialect, mangled and machine-gun fast, which made it almost impossible for him to follow. Occasionally someone would slip into ordinary Italian, which was more tantalizing than helpful, since the responses instantly became as unintelligible as the context. There seemed to be a debate as to whether they should lie low there, or leave together in a car which appeared to be available, or disperse; the argument seemed to hinge on whether their assembly should be considered to have completed its business for the present, or to have only been adjourned. The controversy flowed back and forth, with Destamio’s voice becoming increasingly louder and more forceful: he seemed to be well on the way to dominating the opposition. But the next most persistent if quieter voice cut in with some proposal which seemed to find unanimous acceptance: the general mutter of approval merged into a scraping of chairs and a scuffle of feet, the inchoate clatter of men rising from a council table and preparing to fly the coop.
Which was precisely the move that Simon Templar had undertaken to deter.
He had no time to make any plan, he would have to play it entirely by ear, but at least he could give himself the priceless advantage of the initiative, of throwing them off balance and forcing them to react, while giving them the impression that he knew exactly where he was going.
Before anyone else could do it, he flung open the door and stood squarely in the opening, the shotgun levelled from his hip.
“Were you looking for me?” he inquired mildly.
Pure shock froze them in odd attitudes like a frame from a movie film stopped in mid-action, a ludicrous tableau of gaping mouths and bulging eyes. The apparition on the very threshold of their secret conclave of the man they had been trying to dispose of in one way or another for a day and two nights, who must have been responsible for their recent rout before the armed forces of justice, and who they had every right to believe had at least temporarily been shaken off, would have been enough to immobilize them for a while even without the menace of his weapon.
There were four of them: nearest the Saint, a stocky man with a porcine face and a scar, and a taller cadaverous one with thick lips which made him look like a rather negroid death’s-head, both of whom Simon had seen at the bedside of Don Pasquale, and behind them Al Destamio and the man called Cirano with the nose to match it. They had been sitting around a circular dining table on which were glasses and a bottle of grappa, under a single light bulb with a wide conical brass shade over it. Cigarette and cigar ashes and butts soiled a gilt-edged plate that had been used as an ashtray.
Destamio was the first to recover his wits.
“It’s a bluff,” he croaked. “He only has two shots with that thing. He dare not use it because he knows that even if he gets two of us the other two will get him.”
He said this in plain Italian, for the Saint’s benefit.
Simon smiled.
“So which two of you would like to be the heroes, and sacrifice yourselves for the other two?”
There was no immediate rush of volunteers.
“Then move back a bit,” ordered the Saint, swinging the shotgun. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Scarface and Skullface gave ground, not unwillingly, but Destamio kept behind Skullface, whose bulk was not quite sufficient to mask the protrusion of Destamio’s elbow as his right hand crept up his side. Simon’s restless eyes caught the movement, and his voice sliced through the smoky air like a sword.
“Stop him, Cirano! Or you may never find out why he is a bad security risk.”
“I would like to know about that,” Cirano said, and widened his mouth in a tight grin that made double pothooks on each side of his majestic nose.
He did more than talk; he caught hold of Destamio’s right wr
ist, arresting its stealthy crawl towards the hip. Their muscles conflicted for a second before Destamio must have realized that even the slightest struggle would nullify any advantage he might have sneaked, and hatred replaced movement as an almost equally palpable link between them.
“You would listen to anyone if he was against me, non è vero?” Destamio snarled. “Even to this—”
“A good leader listens to everything before he makes up his mind, Alessandro,” Cirano said equably. “You can be the first to sacrifice yourself when he has spoken, if you like, but there can be no harm in hearing what he has to say. You have nothing to cover up, have you?”
Destamio growled deep in his throat, but made no articulate answer. He abandoned his effort reluctantly, with a disgusted shrug that tried to convey that anyone stupid enough to accept such reasoning deserved all the nonsense that it would get him. But his beady eyes were tense and vicious.
“That’s better,” drawled the Saint. “Now we can have a civilized chat.”
He advanced to within reach of the bottle on the table, picked it up, and took a sampling swig from it, without shifting his gaze from his captive audience. He lowered the bottle again promptly, with a grimace and a shudder, but did not put it down.
“Ugh,” he said politely. “I don’t wonder that people who drink this stuff start vendettas. I should start my first one with the distiller.”
“How did you get here?” Cirano asked abruptly.
“A stork brought me,” said the Saint. “However, if you were wondering whether I had some connivance from your guard at the gate outside, forget it. He never drew a disloyal breath, poor fellow. But he had an acute attack of laryngitis. If he is still breathing when you find him, which is somewhat doubtful, I hope you will not add insult to his injuries.”
“At the least, he will have to answer for negligence,” Cirano said. “But since you are here, what do you want?”
“Some information about Alessandro here—for which I may be able to give you some in return.”
“He is playing for time,” Destamio rasped shrewdly. “What could he possibly tell any of you about me?”
“That is what I should like to know,” Cirano said, with his great nose questing like a bird-dog.
He was nobody’s fool. He knew that the Saint would not be standing there to talk without a reason, but he was not ready to jump to Destamio’s conclusion as to what the reason was. Even the remote possibility that there might be more to it than a play for time forced him to satisfy his curiosity, because he could not afford to brush off anything that might weight the scales between them. And being already aware of this bitter rivalry, Simon gambled his life on playing them and their partisans against each other, keeping them too preoccupied to revert to the inexorable arithmetic which added and subtracted to the cold fact that they could overwhelm him whenever they screwed up their resolve to pay the price.
“Of course you know all about his riper or even rottener years,” said the Saint agreeably. “But I was talking about the early days, when the Al we know was just a punk, if you will excuse the expression. Don Pasquale may have known—but doubtless he knew secrets about all of you which he took with him. But Al is older than the rest of you, and there may not be anyone left in the mob who could say they grew up with him. Not many of you can look forward to reaching his venerable old age: there are too many occupational hazards. So there can’t be many people around unlucky enough to be able to recognize him under the name he had before he went to America.”
“He is crazy!” Destamio choked. “You all know my family—”
“You all know the Destamios,” Simon corrected. “And a good sturdy Mafia name it is, no doubt. And a safe background for your new chief. On the other hand, in these troubled times, could you afford to elect a chief with an air-tight charge of bank robbery and murder against him on which he could not fail to be convicted tomorrow—or with which he might be blackmailed into betraying you instead?”
4
Simon Templar knew that at least he had made some impression. He could tell it from the way Skullface and Scarface looked at Destamio, inscrutably waiting for his response. In such a hierarchy, no such accusation, however preposterous it might seem, could be dismissed without an answer.
“Lies! Nothing but lies!” blustered Destamio, as if he would blast them away by sheer vocal volume. “He will say anything that comes into his head—”
“Then why are you raising your voice?” Simon taunted him. “Is it a guilty conscience?”
“What is this other name?” Cirano asked.
“It might be Dino Cartelli,” said the Saint.
Destamio looked at the faces of his cronies, and seemed to draw strength from the fact that the name obviously had no impact on them.
“Who is this Cartelli?” he jeered. “I told you, this Saint is only trying to make trouble for me. I think he is working for the American government.”
“It should be easy enough to prove,” Simon said calmly, speaking to Cirano as if this were a private matter between them. “All you have to do is take Al’s fingerprints and ask the Palermo police to check them against the record of Dino Cartelli. No doubt you have a contact who could do that—perhaps the maresciallo himself? Cartelli, of course, is supposed to be dead, and they would be fascinated to hear of someone walking around alive with his identical prints. It would call for an urgent investigation, with the whole world looking on, or it might pop the entire fingerprint system like a pin in a balloon. But I’d suggest keeping Al locked up somewhere while you do it, or a man at his time of life might be tempted to squeal in exchange for a chance to spend his declining years in freedom.”
Destamio’s face turned a deeper shade of purple, but he had more control of himself now. He had to, if he was going to overcome suspicion and maintain his contested margin of leadership. And he had not climbed as high as he stood now through nothing but loudness and bluster.
“I will gladly arrange the fingerprint test myself,” he said. “And anyone who has doubted me will apologize on his knees.”
It was the technique of the monumental bluff, so audacious that it might never be called—or if it was, he could hope by then to have devised a way to juggle the result. It was enough to tighten the lips of Cirano, as he felt the mantle of Don Pasquale about to be twitched again from hovering over his shoulders.
“But that will not be done in these two minutes,” Destamio went on, pressing his counter-attack. “And I tell you, he is only trying to distract you for some minutes, perhaps until more soldiers or police arrive—”
His black button-eyes switched to a point over the Saint’s shoulder and above his head, widening by a microscopic fraction. If he had said anything like “Look behind you!” Simon would have simply hooted at the time-worn wheeze, but the involuntary reaction was a giveaway which scarcely needed the stealthy creak of a board from the same focal direction to authenticate it.
The Saint half turned to glance up and backwards, knowing exactly the risk he had to take, like a lion-tamer forced to take his eyes off one set of beasts to locate another creeping behind him, and glimpsed on the dimness of a staircase disclosed by the light that spilled from the room a fat gargoyle of a woman in a high-necked black dressing-gown trying to take two-handed aim at him with a shaky blunderbuss of a revolver—the wife or housekeeper of Cirano or Skullface or Scarface, whoever was the host, who must have been listening to everything since the dining-room door opened, and who had gallantly responded to the call of domestic duty.
In a flash Simon turned back to the room, as the hands of the men in it clawed frantically for the guns at their hips and armpits, and flung the grappa bottle which he still held up at the naked light bulb. It clanged on the brass shade like a gong, and he leapt sideways as the light went out.
The antique revolver on the stairs boomed like a cannon, and sharper retorts spat from the pitch blackness which had descended on the dining room, but the Saint was out in the hall then a
nd untouched. He fired one barrel of the shotgun in the direction of the dining-room door, aimed low, and was rewarded by howls of rage and pain. The pellets would not be likely to do mortal damage at that elevation, but they could reduce by one or two the number of those in condition to take up the chase. He deliberately held back on the second trigger, figuring that the knowledge that he still had another barrel to fire would slightly dampen the eagerness of the pursuit.
Another couple of shots, perhaps loosed from around the shelter of the dining-room door frame, zipped past him as he sprinted to the front door and cleared the front steps in one bound, but respect for his reserve fire-power permitted him to make a diagonal run across the garden to the gate without any additional fusillade.
Outside the gate he stopped again, listening for following footsteps, but he did not hear any. He could have profited by his lead to run on down the road in either direction, leaving the Ungodly to guess which way he had chosen, but that would also have left them one avenue of escape where he could not hinder them or see them go. Now if two of them came on foot, he worked it out, he would have to slug the nearest one with his gun barrel and hope he would still have time to fire it at the second; if there were three or more, the subsequent developments would be very dicey indeed. On the other hand, if they came by car, he would have to shoot at the driver and hope that the glass was not tough enough to resist buckshot.
He waited tensely, but it seemed as if the pursuers had paused to lick their wounds, or were maneuvering for something more stealthy.
Then he heard something quite different: a distant sound of machinery rumbling rapidly closer. It was keyed by the throaty voice of the Bugatti, but filled out by an accompaniment of something more high-pitched and fussy. Lights silhouetted the bend from the village and then swept around it. The Bugatti, with Ponti at the wheel and Lieutenant Fusco beside him, was plainly illuminated for a moment by the lights of the following scout car, before its own headlights swung around and blinded him. Simon ran towards them, holding both hands high with the shotgun in one of them, hoping that it would stop any trigger-happy warrior mistaking him for an attacking enemy.
Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 22
