Saint Errant (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Simon could still hear every intonation of the slow rough-hewn voice when he went up to bed, and he ran over it again and again in his mind while he smoked the last cigarette of the day. In spite of the recollection he lost no sleep. A glimpse of a pretty girl leads to an inn, and to the same inn comes an Americanized Italian who is not quite everything that an Americanized Italian should be, and all at once there is a mystery; that is how these things happen, but the Saint was still waiting for his own cue. Then he woke up late the next morning, and suddenly it dawned upon him, with dazzling simplicity, that the most elementary and obvious solution would be to lure Amadeo personally into a secluded spot, scratch him tactfully, and see what his subcutaneous ego looked like to the naked eye.

  He went down to breakfast in the same exuberant spirits to which any promise of direct action always raised him. Simon Templar’s conception of a tactful approach was one which nobody else had ever been able to comprehend.

  The girl asked him what he proposed to do that day.

  “You will remember that I am an outlaw,” said the Saint. “I am going to make a raid.”

  Through the kitchen window he caught sight of Mr Urselli, an earlier riser, sitting on the edge of the well at the back and filing his nails meditatively. He went out as soon as he had finished his coffee and nailed his fellow guest with every circumstance of affability.

  “What cheer, Amadeo,” he said.

  Mr Urselli jerked round sharply, identified him, and relaxed. “Morn’n’,” he said.

  His manner was preoccupied, but it took more than that to deter Simon once he had reached a decision. The Saint traveled round and sank cheerfully onto a reach of parapet at his victim’s side. In a similar fashion one of Nero’s lions might have circumnavigated a plump martyr.

  “Amadeo,” said the Saint, “will you tell me a secret? Why do you carry a gun?”

  Urselli stopped filing abruptly. For a couple of seconds he did not move, and then his eyes slewed round, and they were narrowed to brown slits.

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “I know you carry a gun,” said the Saint quietly.

  Urselli’s gaze shifted first. He looked down at his hands.

  “You gotta be able to take care of yourself in my business,” he explained, and if his voice was a shade louder than was necessary, many ears less delicately tuned than the Saint’s might not have noticed it. “Why, it was nothing to travel about the country with fifty grand worth of ice on me. Suppose I hadn’t packed a roscoe—hell, I’d of been heisted once a week!”

  Simon nodded.

  “But can you shoot with it?”

  “I’m telling you I can shoot with it.”

  “That tin can up on the slope, for instance,” Simon persisted innocently. “Do you think you could hit that?”

  Urselli squinted upward.

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to see you do it,” said the Saint airily.

  The barb in his words was subtly smooth, but the other shot a quick glance sideways, his underlip jutting.

  “Who says I’m a liar?” he questioned aggressively.

  “Nobody I heard.” The Saint was as suave as velvet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Intuccio standing in the door of the kitchen, watching them in silence, but he had no aversion to an audience. He put a hand in his pocket. “All the same, I’ve got a double saw that wonders whether you can.”

  “And I’ve got a century that says I’m telling you I can.”

  “Call it a bet.”

  Urselli drew out his automatic fumblingly, as though he had started to regret his rashness, and then he caught the Saint’s blue gaze resting on him in gentle mockery, and snapped back the jacket with vicious resolution. He aimed carefully, and his first shot kicked up a spurt of dust six inches to the left of the target. His second was three inches to the right. Urselli cursed under his breath, and the third shot fell short. Intuccio drew nearer, and stood behind them with folded arms.

  At that range it was reasonably good shooting, but the Saint smiled, and covered the weapon with a cool hand before Urselli could fire again.

  “I mean like this,” he said.

  He took the gun and fired without appearing to aim, but the tin leaped like a grasshopper; the third shot caught it in the air and spun it against the side of the hill. Urselli stared at him while the echoes rattled and died, and the can rolled tinkling down toward them till an outcrop of stone checked it.

  “By the way,” Simon said, recalling the other’s peculiarly localized pronunciation of jernt and erled, “I thought you came from Chicago.”

  “Well?”

  “You wouldn’t have noticed it,” Simon said kindly, “but your accent betrays you. You spent some time in the East, didn’t you—on your jewelry business?” He was casually slipping the empty magazine out of the automatic while he talked, and then he suddenly let out an exclamation of dismay and peered anxiously down into the well. A faint splash came up from far below. “It slipped right through my fingers,” he said, looking at Urselli blankly.

  The other sprang up, swiftly tearing the now useless weapon out of Simon’s hands.

  “You did that on poipose!” he grated.

  The Saint seemed to ponder the accusation.

  “I might have,” he conceded. “You handle that rod just a little too well, and you wouldn’t want to be tempted to commit murder, would you? Now suppose you happened to run into the guy who told you that that white sapphire in your ring was a real diamond, and charged you five grand for it?”

  Urselli’s eyes dilated incredulously towards the scintillation on his left hand.

  “Why, the son of a—” He pulled himself together. “What’s the idea?” he snarled. “Are you tryin’ to put me on the spot?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “No,” he answered. “But maybe you left Chicago because you were already on it.”

  Intuccio came up between them.

  “You like shooting?” he said in his deep harsh voice.

  “I’m always ready for a bit of fun,” said the Saint lightly. “Maybe Amadeo would like some hunting, too. D’you think we could find anything worth shooting around here?”

  The innkeeper nodded hesitantly.

  “Yesterday morning I saw the tracks of a mountain lion. If you like, we will go out and see what we can find.”

  An hour later Intuccio halted his horse in an arroyo two miles away. He laid a rifle across Urselli’s saddlebow. “You will wait here,” he said. “We go round the other side of the mountain and drive him down.”

  Urselli’s glance flickered at him.

  “How long do I wait?”

  The innkeeper shrugged.

  “Perhaps three hours, perhaps four. It is a long way. But if we find him, he will come down here.” He turned calmly to the Saint. “Andiamo, signor!”

  Simon was contented enough to follow him. Intuccio set a tiring trot, but it was easy for the Saint, who was as iron-hard as he had ever been. A coppery sun baked the air out of a sky of brilliant unbroken blue, one of those subtropical skies that are as flat and glazed as a painted cyclorama. Little whirls of dust floated up behind them as they rode, dancing a phantom veil dance to the irregular tom-tom of swinging hoof beats. Intuccio made no conversation, and Simon was left to ruminate over his own puzzle. To be out under the blazing daylight in that ridged and castled wilderness of mighty boulders piled against steep scarps of rock, with such an enigma on his mind, gave him the exact opposite of the feeling which he had had the night before. Then he had been a spectator; now he was an actor, and he was ready, as he always was, to enjoy his share in the play.

  Three hours later, as they rode down the barren slopes again toward the place where they had left Urselli, he felt very much at peace. He had settled quite a number of things in his own mind during the ride, and about Amadeo Urselli’s own exact position in the cosmic scale he had removed all doubts even before they set out. He knew the rats of the big cities too well to b
e mistaken about Amadeo.

  But the setting for the encounter was what made it so ineffably superb. To have met him in the city would have been ordinary enough, but to meet the city gunman out here in the great open spaces was a poem which only the Saint’s impish sense of humor could realize to the full.

  Glancing down at the rifle carried ready across his pommel, the Saint even asked himself the wild question whether Amadeo Urselli might conceivably be mistaken in a moment of well-staged excitement for a mountain lion. Almost regretfully he dismissed the idea, but when a turn of the trail brought him a sight of Urselli sitting disconsolately on a rock slapping at the indefatigable flies, he felt genuinely distressed to think that such an ideal opportunity had to be passed by. They rode down into the gulch, and Intuccio leaned over in the saddle with his forearm on his thigh.

  “You have seen nothing, Amadeo?”

  “Nothing but flies,” said Urselli sourly.

  He was pinkly sun-broiled and very bad-tempered, and the sight of his misery almost made up for the fact that they had not seen so much as a toe print of the mountain lion which they had set out to look for.

  They arrived back at the hotel a few minutes after four. Urselli was the first to dismount, moving stiffly from the exertion of the day. He stopped to read a message that was nailed to the door; Simon, coming up behind him, saw the conventional black hand at the head of the letter before he could distinguish the words, and then Intuccio’s arm drove between them and ripped it down.

  Urselli spoke from the side of a thin hard mouth.

  “I thought there were no more bad men.”

  Intuccio did not answer. The paper crumpled in his grasp, and without a word he thrust them both aside and crashed through the door. He stumbled over an upturned chair in the gloom as he went in, and then they stood on either side of him surveying the wreck of the kitchen. The center table was tilted drunkenly against the range of the far end, and two other chairs were flung into different corners, one of them broken. A saucepan lay at their feet, and little splashes of shattered china and glass winked up at them from the floor.

  Intuccio dragged himself across the room and detached a fragment of gaily printed cotton stuff from the back of the broken chair. He stared at it dumbly. Then, without speaking, he held out the message from the door.

  Simon took it and smoothed it out.

  If you wish to see your daughter again, bring $20,000 in cash to the top of Skeleton Hill by midnight tonight. Come alone and unarmed. We shall not send a second warning. Death pays for treachery.

  “You gotta pay, Salvatore,” Urselli was saying. “I’m tellin’ ya. You can’t fool with kidnappers. A gang that snatches a girl won’t stop for nothin’. Say, I remember when Red McLaughlin put the arm on Sappho Lirra—”

  Intuccio straightened up lifelessly, like a stunned giant.

  “I must find the sheriff,” he said.

  The Saint’s hand crossed his path, barring it, in a gesture as lithe and vivid as the flick of a sword.

  “Let me go.”

  He went down the short road to the town with a light step. This was adventure as he understood it, objective and decisive, like a blast of music, and the Saint smiled as he went. Far might it be from him to deny the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli any of its quintessential poetry. He walked into the sheriff’s office and found Saddlebag’s solitary representative of the law at home.

  “Lucia Intuccio has been kidnapped,” he said. “Will you come up?”

  The man’s eyes bulged.

  “Kidnapped?” he repeated incredulously.

  “There was a note calling for twenty thousand dollars ransom nailed to the door,” said the Saint, and the sheriff took down his gun belt.

  “I’ll be right along.”

  Simon went with him. The news spread like an epidemic, and a dozen men had gathered in the back room when they arrived.

  Intuccio told the story. He seemed to have shaken off some of his first numbness, and at intervals his eyes veered towards Urselli with an ugly soberness. When he had finished, the sheriff’s gaze leveled in the same direction.

  “So,” he said slowly, “while Urselli knew that you’d be gone at least three hours, there wasn’t anybody to see what he was up to.”

  “What of it?” protested Urselli grittily. “You got no—”

  Simon interposed himself.

  “We’re wasting time,” he said coolly. “I guess we ought to make a search.”

  “Mebbe we will.” The sheriff’s gaze did not shift. “You’ll come as well, Urselli—and stay with me.”

  The group of men filed out quickly, splitting up outside into two and threes, for there were less than five hours of daylight left—an almost hopeless time in which to find and follow a cold trail in that wild country. Simon joined them.

  The sun went down in a riot of gold and crimson, and the search parties began to filter back through the gray-blue dusk. By ten o’clock, when the night was a vaulted bowl of dark glass studded with silver pin points, they were all gathered together at the inn, and the sheriff, with Intuccio and Urselli, came in last while they were all waiting.

  There was no need for questions. A silence that was its own answer hung in the room, mirroring itself in the glazed tension of the yellow highlights smeared by the single oil lamp on the circle of leathery faces. The angles of black shadow in the far corners held the strained heaviness of a mounting thunderstorm.

  The sheriff read through the ransom notice again, and raised his eyes to Intuccio’s face. The nervous scrape of a man’s feet on the bare floor rasped a nerve-stabbing discord into the stillness before he spoke.

  “You wasn’t aimin’ to pay this money, was you, Salvatore?”

  The old man stared back at him haggardly. Before he came in, the alternatives had been discussed by the reassembled search parties in measured low-pitched voices that scarcely ruffled the texture of the air. Organized help could not come from the nearest big town before midnight—it might not come before morning. What would the sophisticated city police think of Black Hand threats?

  “Buon Dio!” said Intuccio, in a terrible voice, “I have not so much money in the world.”

  Urselli started.

  “But you said yesterday—”

  “I lied.”

  The innkeeper’s great fists were clenched at his sides, his powerful shoulders quivering under his soiled shirt.

  “I have always failed. Everything I touched has been under a curse. You all know how the farm ate up my money until it was nearly all lost, and the land was sold for the mortgages. You all know how I bought this inn to try and make a living, but none of you came here. Perhaps you were afraid of me because I never laughed with you. Dio mio, as if a man who has suffered as much as I have could laugh! You thought I had the evil eye, some black secret that made me unfit to be one of you. Yes, I had. But the only secret was one which you all knew—that I had failed…But when that cousin of mine came back from Chicago, with his fine clothes and his jewels, and boasted of the money he made—I lied. I did not want to see him despise me. I told him I had thirty thousand dollars. I have not got five hundred.”

  Urselli lighted a cigarette mechanically.

  “That looks bad,” he said. “I tell you, those guys mean business.”

  “You know a great deal about them, Amadeo? You speak from experience?”

  The innkeeper’s burning eyes were bent rigidly on the smaller man’s face. There were red notes glinting in them, hot swirling sparks from a fire that was breaking loose deep within them. In the core of the soft voice was a deep vibrant note like the premonitory rumble of a volcano. “Perhaps you know more than any of us?”

  Urselli looked right and left, with a sudden widening of his rat-like eyes. Not one of the ring of faces painted in the lamplight moved an eyelash. They waited.

  He sucked at his cigarette, the tip flickering abruptly to the uncertain inhalation.

  “In the cities, you hear things,” he gabbled shaki
ly. “You read newspapers. I’m only tellin’ you—”

  “Now I will tell you!”

  Intuccio’s restraint broke at last; the fire that was in him seethed through in a jagged roar. His iron hands crushed into the other’s shoulders, half lifting, half hurling him round.

  “I said last night that you would find more robbers in the big cities of America than you would find here. I was right. Here is one of them! A dog who has come back to the home where he does not belong any longer!”

  The voice sank again, only momentarily. “This very morning you were exposed. The stranger here did it. He challenged you. I was listening. He made you show your gun. Does an honest man need a gun? And you could shoot. I watched. He told you that you were a liar when you said you traded in jewelry—because you did not know that the diamond on your finger was not real. And he said that perhaps the true reason why you left Chicago was because you were—on the spot. Perhaps you thought I did not understand. But we are not so ignorant. We also read newspapers. I know you, Amadeo! You are a gunman!”

  He turned to the Saint.

  “Is that not so?”

  Simon nodded.

  “That would be my guess.”

  “So you thought you could swindle me,” Intuccio went on mercilessly. “But then you were exposed. You knew that after what I had seen and heard I should never trust you. You had to be quick, before I denounced you to the sheriff. This afternoon you were alone. You came back here. You! You took Lucia away! You wrote that letter! You are the man we want!”

  Urselli’s gasp of fright as he was shaken as if he were a doll in the convulsive grasp of the huge hands that held him sobbed out against the fearful low-pitched growl of wrathful men. As the innkeeper’s voice rose uncontrollably, the murmur beat upwards like an angry sea. Other voices clanged against it, echoing clearer and louder in the vengeful cry of a wolf pack, soaring to drown every other sound, shouting against each other. The circle narrowed in, creeping out of the shadows into the full yellow of the smoking lamp, hands reaching out, throats snarling gutturally. “Lynch him! Lynch the swine!”