Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 15

  As he worked his way closer to it, suffering all the added disadvantages of pathfinding as the price of refusing the young goatherd’s offer of guidance, the echoing clangor of the inevitable church bell reached him, striking the half-hour which his wrist watch confirmed to be one-thirty. Ten minutes later he slithered by accident across a well-worn path which would probably have brought him as far with half the effort if he could have been shown it, but which at least eased the last quarter-hour’s slog to the most outlying cottages.

  But the delay had not necessarily penalized him. In fact, it might have improved the conditions for his arrival. The reassembly of the inhabitants under their own roofs, and the serious business of the colazione, the midday and most important meal of the southern peasant, would have run their ritual courses, and a contentedly inflated populace should still be pampering the work of their digestive juices in the no less hallowed formality of the siesta. Even if any of them had already been alerted, which in itself seemed moderately unlikely, for a while there would be the fewest eyes open to notice him.

  The pitifully stony terraces through which he made the last lap of his approach, the desiccated crops and scattering of stunted trees, prepared him in advance for the poverty-stricken aspect of the town. Indeed, it was hard to imagine how even such a modest community could wrest a subsistence from such starved surroundings—unless one had had previous immunization to such miracles of meridional ecology. But the Saint knew that within that abject microcosm could be found all the essentials that the fundaments of civilization would demand.

  Like all the Sicilian villages of which it was prototypical, it had no streets more than a few feet wide. The problems of motorized traffic were still in its fortunate future. Its twisted alleys writhed between those houses which were not prohibitively Siamesed to their neighbors, only to converge unanimously on what had to be deferentially called the town square. Having accepted the inevitability of ploughing that obvious route, Simon strode boldly and as if he knew exactly where he was heading through a debris-cluttered alley which squeezed him between two high walls overhung with wilted flowers into the central piazza. The overlooking windows were tightly shuttered, lending an atmosphere of timeless somnolence to the scene.

  The Saint’s pace slowed into a pace compatible with his surroundings, trying to tone down obtrusive brashness, for the benefit of any wakeful observer, without inversely suggesting nefarious stealth. But there was no sign of any interest in his deportment, or even that his entrance or his mere existence had been discerned at all. The pervading heat dwelt there like a living presence in the absence of any other life. Nothing whatever moved except the flies circling a mangy dog that lay in a dead sleep in one shaded doorway.

  There was no central fountain in the square, but somewhere near, he was sure, there had to be a town tap, or pump, or at least a horse-trough. He walked around the western and southern sides of the perimeter, keeping close to the buildings in order to benefit by their shade, and wondering how long it would be before the first food shop would re-open.

  “Hi, Mac! You like a nice clean shave an’ freshen up?”

  The voice almost made him jump, coming in heavily accented but fluent English from the open doorway he was passing. Overhead there was a crudely painted sign that said “PARRUCCHERIA.” A curtain of strings of beads, southern Europe’s primitive but effective form of fly barrier, screened the interior from sight, and he had assumed that a more solid portal had been left open merely to aid the circulation of air while the barber snored somewhere in the back of the shop, but apparently that artist was already awake and watching from his lair for any potential customer to pass within hooking range.

  Simon, having been halted in his tracks, grated a hand across his thirty-six-hour beard and pretended to weigh the merits of the invitation. In reality he was weighing the few coins in his pocket and considering whether he could afford it. A delay of a quarter-hour or so should make little difference, and might be more than made up by the new vigor he could generate in such an interlude of complete repose. A clean-up would not only make him look less like a desperate fugitive, but would give him a psychological boost to match its outward effect. There would certainly be water—that thought alone almost jet-propelled him into the shop—and during the ministrations he might elicit much information…or even something more mundane to chew on.

  The arguments whirled through his head in a microfraction of the time it takes to set them down, and his choice was made well within the limits of any ordinary decision.

  “You sold me, bub,” he said, and went in.

  Dim coolness wrapped him around, the perpetually surprising phenomenon of thick-walled architecture that had evolved its own system of air-conditioning before Carrier tried to duplicate it mechanically. In the temporary partial blindness of the interior, he allowed himself to be guided into a barber chair that felt positively voluptuous, and to be swathed to the neck in a clean sheet. Then, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the half-light, he perceived something which he thought at first must be a hallucination conjured up by his thirst-tortured senses. A white foam-plastic box stood against the wall, filled with chunks of ice from which projected the serrated caps of four bottles.

  “What’s that you’ve got in the ice?” he asked in an awed voice.

  “Some beer, Mac. I keep a few bottles around in case anyone wants it.”

  “For sale?”

  “You bet.”

  “I’ll buy.”

  It took the barber four steps to the cooler, where the ice rattled crisply and stimulatingly as a bottle was withdrawn, and four steps back; each step seemed to take an eternity as the Saint counted the footfalls. It took another age before the top popped off and he was allowed to grasp the cold wet shape which seemed more exquisitely conceived than the most priceless Ming vase.

  “Salute,” he said, and emptied half of it in one long delicious swallow.

  “Good ’ealth,” said the barber.

  Simon delayed the second installment while he luxuriated in the first impact of cool and tasty liquid on his system.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t have anything around that I could nibble?” he said. “I always think beer tastes better with a bite of something in between.”

  “I got-a some good salami, if you like that.”

  “I’m crazy about good salami.”

  The barber disappeared through another bead curtain at the back of the room, and returned after a few minutes with several generous slices on a chipped plate. By that time Simon had finished his bottle and could indicate with an expressive gesture that another would be needed to wash down the sausage.

  “What made you speak to me in English?” he asked curiously, while it was being opened.

  “The way you was lookin’ aroun’, I can see you never been in dis town before,” said the barber complacently. “So I start-a thinkin’, how you got your last hair-cut an’ how you dress an’ carry yourself. People from different countries all got their own face expressions an’ way of walkin’. You put a German in an Italian suit an’ he still don’t look Italian. I work-a sixteen years in Chicago an’ I seen all kinds.”

  He was trending into his sixties, and with his smoothly shaven and powdered blue jowls and balding head with a few carefully nurtured strands of hair stretched across it he was himself a sort of out-dated but cosmopolitan barber-image. How and why he had gone to America and returned to this Sicilian dead-end was a story that Simon had no particular desire to know, but which he was sure he would be hearing soon, if there was any truth in the traditional loquacity of tonsorial craftsmen.

  While he could still do some talking himself, however, before being partly gagged by lather and the need to maintain facial immobility, the Saint thought it worth trying to implant some protective fiction about himself.

  “And only an English-speaking tourist would be nutty enough to hike all the way up here from the coast in the middle of a day like this,” he said.

  If that v
ersion took hold, it might briefly dissociate him from someone else who was believed to have come over the crest from the other direction. Perhaps very briefly indeed, but nothing could be despised that might help to confuse the trail.

  The barber deftly washed the dust of the hills from the Saint’s face and replaced it with a soothing balm of suds. His inscrutably lugubrious air might have seemed to mask the thought that anyone who was not condemned to permanent residence in that backwater of civilization should not complain about the purely transitory discomfort of a mere day’s visit, no matter how arduous.

  “You like-a ver’ much walking, I guess?”

  “Somebody sold me on getting off into the back country and finding the real Sicily that the ordinary tourists miss,” Simon answered between swigs at his second bottle. “Unfortunately I didn’t ask all the details I should have about the gradients and the climate. I’m glad I saw this town, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to walking back down that road I came up. Does there happen to be a taxi in town, or anyone who drives a car for hire?”

  “No, nothing like-a that, Mac.” The barber was stropping his formidable straight-edge razor. “There’s a bus twice a day, mornin’ an’ evenin’.”

  “What time?”

  “Six o’clock, both times. Whichever you choose, you can’t-a go wrong.”

  Far from feeling that he had made a joke, the barber seemed to sink into deeper gloom before this illustration of the abysmal rusticity of the campagna where ill fortune had stranded him. He placed his thumb on the Saint’s jawbone and pulled to tighten the skin, and scraped down despondently with his ancient blade.

  “You’re a big-a fool to get in trouble wit’ da Mafia,” he said without a change of intonation.

  It was an immortal tribute to the Saint’s power of self-control that he didn’t move a fraction of a millimeter in response to that sneak punch-line. The razor continued its downward track, skimming off a broad band of soap and stubble, but the epidermis behind it was left smooth and bloodless where the slightest twitch on his part would have registered a nick as surely as a seismograph. The cutting edge rested like a feather on the base of his throat for a moment that seemed endless, while the barber looked down glumly into his eyes and Simon stared back in unflinching immobility.

  Then the barber shrugged and turned away to wipe the lather from his lethal weapon on the edge of the scarred rubber dish kept for that purpose.

  “I don’t understand you,” said the Saint, to keep the conversation going.

  “You bet you do, Mac. I been sitting ’ere lookin’ out, you can see down da road to da first turn, an’ that ain’t where you come from. No, sir. You come over da mountain from Mistretta, an’ you sure got ’em stirred up over there.”

  He took aim with the razor again, at the Saint’s other cheek, but this time it was easier for Simon to wait passively for the contact. If the man had any serious butchering intentions, he would scarcely have passed up his first and best opportunity.

  “What happened in Mistretta?” Simon asked, studiously speaking like a ventriloquist without using any external muscles.

  “I don’ know an’ I don’ wanna. I don’ want-a no beef wit’ da Mafia. But dey been onna phone, I got one-a da t’ree phones in dis crummy dump, an’ I gotta pass on da word. I hear how you look, how you speak English, how everyone should watch for you.”

  There was no point in any more pretense.

  “Do they know I came over here?”

  “Naw. It’s-a kinda general warning. They don’ know where you are, an’ everybody calls up everybody else to keep-a da eye open.”

  “So you weren’t being such a Sherlock Holmes after all when you spotted me.”

  “Don’ ride me, mister. I wanted to ’ear you talk, find out what kinda feller you are.”

  “Why didn’t you cut my throat just now when you had the chance, and maybe earn yourself a reward?”

  “Listen, I don’t ’ave to kill you myself. I coulda just let you walk by, then talked on da phone. Let da Mafia do the job. I woulda been sittin’ pretty, an’ mos’ likely pick up a piece o’ change too. So don’ ride me.”

  “Sorry,” said the Saint. “But you must admit it’s a bit surprising for anyone to find such a pal in these parts.”

  The barber wiped his razor and stropped it again with slow slapping strokes, and examined the gleaming edge against the light from the doorway.

  “I ain’t your pal, but I ain’t-a no pal o’ da Mafia neither. They done nothin’ for me I couldn’t ’a done better for myself. Kick in, protection, just like-a da rackets in Chicago. Only in Chicago I make-a more money, I can afford it better. I know da score. I shoulda stayed where I was well off, but I thought I could take it easy here on my Social Security an’ what I’d-a saved up, an’ just work enough to pay da rent. I shoulda ’ad my ’ead examined.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t turn me in.”

  “Listen, when I get dis call, dey gimme your name. Simon Templar. Probably don’ mean nothin’ to dese peasants, but I been around. I know who you are. I know you made trouble for lotsa racketeers. Dat’s okay with me. I’d-a turn you in in a second, if it was my neck or yours. But I don’ mind if I can get you outa dis town—”

  Suddenly there was the snarl of a motor-scooter’s exhaust coming up from the valley and roaring into the square like a magnified hornet with hiccups. The barber stopped all movement to listen, and Simon could see the blood drain out of his face. The scooter’s tempestuous arrival at this torpid hour of the day obviously meant trouble, and trouble could only mean the Mafia. While the barber stood paralyzed, the mobile ear-splitter added a screech of brakes to its gamut of sound effects, and crescendoed to a stop outside the shop with a climactic clatter that presaged imminent disintegration.

  “Quick!” Simon whispered. “A wet towel!”

  Galvanized at last into action by a command that connected helpfully with established reflexes of professional habit, the barber stumbled over to the dual-purpose cooler and dredged up a sodden serviette from under the ice and remaining bottles. He scuttled back and draped it skillfully around and over the Saint’s face as ominous footsteps clomped on the cobbles, and the beaded door-curtain rattled as someone parted it and pushed through.

  It was an interesting situation, perhaps more appealing to an audience than to a participant. The barber was in a blue funk and might say anything; in fact, to betray the Saint, he didn’t even need to say anything, he only had to point to the customer in the chair. He owed Simon nothing, and had frankly admitted that he would not hesitate over a choice between sympathy and his own skin. The Saint could only wait, blind and defenseless, but knowing that any motion might precipitate a fatal crisis. Which was not merely nerve-racking, but diluted his capacity to enjoy the exhilarating chill of the refrigerated wetness on his face.

  Out of necessity, he lay there in a supine immobility that called for reserves of self-dominance that should have been drained by the razor-edge ordeal of a few minutes ago, while the rider rattled questions and commands in incomprehensible answers, but at last the curtain rattled again and the footsteps stomped away outside and faded along the sidewalk.

  The towel was snatched from Simon’s face and the chair tilted up with precipitate abruptness.

  “Get out,” rasped the barber, from a throat tight with panic.

  “What was he saying?” Simon asked, stepping quietly down.

  “Get-a goin’!” The man pointed at the door with a shaking forefinger. “He’s a messenger from the Mafia, come-a to call out all da mafiosi in dis village. They found out you didn’t go down to da coast from Mistretta, so now they gonna search all-a da hills. They don’ know you been here yet, but in a coupla minutes they’ll be out lookin’ everywhere an’ you ain’t-a got a chance. They kill you, an’ if they find out you been ’ere dey kill-a me too! So get out!”

  The Saint was already at the door, peering cautiously through the curtain.

  �
��What was that way you were going to tell me to get out of town?”

  “Fuori!”

  Only the fear of being heard outside muted what would have been a scream into a squeak, but Simon knew that he had used up the last iota of hospitality that was going to be extended to him. If he strained it another fraction, the trembling barber was almost certain to try to whitewash himself by raising the alarm.

  The one consolation was that in his frantic eagerness to be rid of his visitor the barber had no time to discuss payment for the beer and salami or even for the shave, and the Saint was grateful to be able to save the few coins in his pocket for another emergency.

  “Thanks for everything, anyway, pal,” he said, and stepped out into the square.

  4

  Propped upright in the gutter outside, the unguarded scooter was a temptation, but Simon Templar had graduated to automobiles long before vehicles of that type were introduced, and it would have taken him a perilous interval of fumbling to find out how to start it. Even then, it would have provided anything but unobtrusive transportation; indeed, the noise he had heard it make under full steam would be more help to any posse in pursuit of him than a pack of winged bloodhounds. Regretfully he decided that its locomotive advantages were not for him.

  He strolled across the square to the corner from which the main road ran downhill, schooling himself to avoid any undue semblance of haste, but feeling as ridiculous as an elephant trying to pass unnoticed through an Eskimo settlement. The first few shutters were opening, the first few citizens emerging torpidly from their doors, and he was acutely aware that in any such isolated community any stranger was a phenomenon to be observed and analyzed and speculated upon. The best that he could hope for was to be taken for an adventurous tourist who had strayed off the beaten track, or somebody’s visiting cousin from another province who had not yet been introduced around. When there was no outcry after the first few precarious seconds, it suggested that the barber had ultimately decided to keep quiet: if he shouted as late as this, the messenger might remember the towel-draped anonymity in the chair and wonder…Therefore the Saint could still hope to slip through the trap before the jaws closed.