Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 17

  Considering the aromas of garlic and honest sweat which pervaded the interior in multiple combinations with other less readily recognizable perfumes, it was somewhat disturbing to speculate on what exotic odor he might be diffusing about which even the best Sicilian wouldn’t tell him. Perhaps he was being unduly sensitive, but the events of that day and the previous night would have undermined anyone’s confidence in his popularity or social magnetism.

  He tried his most innocent and endearing smile on one of the women nearest to him, who was staring into his face with a fixed intensity which suggested either extreme myopia or partial hypnosis, and she crossed herself hurriedly and squirmed back into the engulfing crowd with a look of startled panic.

  He hadn’t been imagining things. Someone had already identified him, and the whispered word had been passed around.

  The fact could be read now in the tense lines of their bodies, their petrified immobility or nervous fidgeting, and the way their eyes fastened on him and then slid away when he looked in their direction. The Saint’s description had clearly been circulated throughout the entire district, with promises of reward for finding and/or threats of punishment for hiding him, and in every crowd there was likely to be one who had heard it.

  There didn’t seem to be any Mafia hirelings on the bus itself, or they would already have gone into action, but he could expect no allies either. None of these people might actively try to attack him, nor would they give him any aid or comfort. Even if they were not sympathizers with the Mafia, they had been terrorized for so long that they would do exactly what the organization had ordered.

  The bus ground protestingly up the grades and clattered recklessly down the alternating slopes that made up for them, obedient to the latent death-wish of the normal Italian driver, and with each kilometer the suspense drew tauter, but not from the inherent uncertainties of Sicilian public transportation.

  Sometimes the conveyance stopped to pick up new travellers or to let others off, and Simon did not need extrasensory perception to know that as soon as telephones could be reached the wires would be humming with reports of his sighting.

  And at each stop there was a rearrangement of seating and standing room, until there were only men around him, uneasy but grim. He wondered how much longer it would be before one of them might be tempted to try for a medal, and he moved his hand to rest it near the butt of the gun under his shirt.

  If the pressure seemed to be creeping too close to an explosion point he would have to get off before Palermo. It might be a wise precaution in any case. He had no idea how long the full trip would take, but it would certainly be long enough for a welcoming delegation to muster at the terminus. The equation of survival that had to be solved required a blind guess at the unknown length of time he could stay with the bus to gain the maximum escape mileage, before warnings telephoned ahead would have a reception committee assembled and waiting for him at the next stop.

  He had been keeping most of his attention on the other riders, who had packed themselves closer to suffocation in their desire to keep beyond contamination range of him, but he had been careful to reserve some portion of his awareness for the outside world through which they travelled. He was not concerned with noting all the spots of scenic interest, but with observing any other vehicles whose occupants might evince unusual interest in the one he rode in. And now his circumspection suddenly paid off. A large American sedan pulled around from behind the bus with a screaming horn, as if to pass it, and then simply stayed level with it, while swarthy faces carefully scanned the interior.

  Trying not to make any sharp conspicuous movement, Simon edged farther towards the opposite side, bending his knees and slumping his spine to diminish his height, and trying to keep the heads of other passengers between the parallel car and the smallest segment of his face which would let him keep an eye on it and its occupants.

  It was a good try, but there was a typically neutralist consensus against it. As his fellow travellers also became aware of the car keeping alongside, they separated and shrank away, either as a pharisaic way of pointing him out without pointing, or to remove themselves from the line of fire if there was to be any shooting. Either way, the result was disastrously the same. A lane opened up across the bus, with passengers trampling each other’s corns on both sides but leaving a clear space between Simon and the windows. Even the seated riders found themselves suddenly irked by the burden on their buttocks, and got up to join the sardine pack of standees.

  Simon Templar, willy-nilly, was given as unobstructed a view of the men in the car as they were given of him.

  But after the first glance there was only one face that held his attention: the face of the man in front, beside the driver. A fat, reddened, unshaven face that cracked in a lipless grin like a triumphant lizard as the recognition became mutual.

  The face of Al Destamio.

  Simon wished he had been wearing a hat, so that he could have raised it in a mocking salute that seemed to be the only possible gesture at the moment. Instead, he had to be content with giving his pursuer a radiant smile and a friendly wave which was not returned.

  Destamio’s exultant travesty of a grin was replaced by a vindictive snarl. The barrel of an automatic appeared over the sill of his open window, and he steadied it with both hands to aim.

  The Saint’s smile also faded as he snatched the pistol from his belt and ducked to shelter as much of himself as possible below the dubious steel of the bus’s coachwork. He had no misgivings as to who would be the victor in a straight shoot-out under those conditions, but when Destamio’s henchmen chimed in, as they would without caring how many bystanders were killed or injured in the exchange, a lot of non-combatants were likely to become monuments to another of the perils of neutralism. And pusillanimous as they might have shown themselves, and perhaps undeserving of too much consideration, Simon had to think of the consequences to himself of a lucky score on the bus driver at that speed.

  The problem was providentially resolved when Destamio suddenly disappeared. His startled face slid backwards with comical abruptness, taking the car with it, as if it had been snagged by some giant hook in the pavement; it took Simon an instant to realize that it was because the driver had been forced to jam on his brakes and drop back to avoid a head-on collision with oncoming traffic. No sooner had the sedan swung in behind the bus than an immense double-trailered truck roared by in the opposite direction, followed by a long straggle of weaving honking cars that had accumulated behind it.

  The Saint didn’t wait to see any more. His guardian angel was apparently trying to outdo himself, but there was no guarantee of how long that inordinate effort would continue. He had to make the most of it while it lasted—and before a break in the eastbound lane gave the Mafia chauffeur a chance to draw level again.

  Through the broad windshield could be seen the outskirts of a city, and a cog-wheeled sign whipped by with its international invitation to visiting Rotarians, followed by the name “CEFALÙ.” Now he knew where he was, and it would do for another stage.

  As he pushed towards the front again, and the door, one of the men in a seat behind the driver was leaning forward to mutter something in his ear, and the bus was slowing.

  “There is no need to stop,” Simon said clearly. “No one wants to get off yet.”

  He was in the right-hand front corner by then, one shoulder towards the windshield and the other towards the door, and the gun in his hand was for everyone to see but especially favored the driver.

  “I am supposed to stop here,” the man mumbled, his foot wavering between the accelerator and the brake.

  “That stop has just been discontinued,” said the Saint, and his forefinger moved ever so slightly on the trigger. “Keep going.”

  The bus rumbled on, and its other passengers glowered at the Saint sullenly, no longer trying to avoid his gaze, plainly resenting the danger that he had brought to them more violently and immediately than if he had been the carrier of a plague, b
ut not knowing what to do about it. Simon remained impersonally alert and let his gun do all the threatening. Everyone received the message and declined to argue with it; the driver stared fixedly ahead and gripped the wheel as if it had been a wriggling snake.

  From behind came repeated blares from the horn of the following sedan, and fresh sweat beaded the driver’s already moist forehead. Through the length of the bus and over the heads of the other riders, Simon could catch glimpses of the sedan hanging on their tail and fretting for a chance to draw alongside again, but the increasing traffic of the town gave it no opening. And in the longitudinal direction, the passengers who were now crowded into the rear two-thirds of the bus could not open up a channel through which the Saint could be fired at from astern. Yet with all its advantages, it was a situation which could only be temporary: very soon, a traffic light or a traffic cop or some other hazard must intervene to change it, or the pursuing mafiosi would become more desperate and start shooting at the tires.

  Simon decided that it was better to keep the initiative while he had it. He threw a long glance at the road ahead, then turned to wave the passengers back into submission before any of them could capitalize on his momentary inattention.

  “Put your foot over the brake,” he told the driver, “but do not touch it until I tell you to. Then give it all your weight—which can be alive or dead, as you prefer.”

  He had photographed the next quarter-mile of road on his memory, and now he waited for the first landmark he had picked to go by.

  “Hold on tight, amici,” he warned the passengers. “We are going to make a sudden stop, and I do not want you to fall on your noses—or on this very hard piece of metal.”

  Again, through a momentary opening in the crowd, he glimpsed the trailing sedan edging out behind the left rear corner. And the wine-shop sign he had chosen for a marker was just ahead of the driver. The timing was perfect.

  “Ora!” he yelled, and braced himself.

  The brakes bit, and the bus slowed shudderingly. The standing passengers stumbled and collided and cursed, but miraculously held on to various props and managed to avoid being hurled down upon him in a human avalanche. And from the rear came a muted crash and crumpling sound, accompanied by a slight secondary jolt, which was the best of all he had hoped for.

  The bus had scarcely even come to a complete standstill when he reached across the driver and in a swift motion turned off the ignition and removed the key.

  “Anyone who gets out in less than two minutes will probably be shot,” he announced, and pulled the lever that controlled the door next to him.

  Then he was out, and one glance towards the rear confirmed that the Mafia sedan was now most satisfactorily welded to the back of the bus which it had been over-ambitiously trying to pass. Its doors were still shut, and the men in it, even if not seriously injured, were apparently still trying to pick themselves off the floor or otherwise pull themselves together. The car itself might or might not be out of the chase for a considerable time, but the bus solidly blocked any vehicular access to the alley across the entrance of which it had parked itself with a symmetry which the Saint could not have improved on if he had been driving it himself.

  He had put the pistol back in his waistband under his shirt during the last second before he stepped out of the bus, so that there was nothing to make him noticeable except the fact that he was walking briskly away from the scene of an interesting accident instead of hurrying towards it like any normal native. But even so, those who passed him were probably too busy hustling to secure a front-row position in the gathering throng to pay any attention to his eccentric behavior.

  He strode down the alley to where it crossed another even narrower passage, flipped a mental coin, and turned left. Half a block down on the right, a youth in a filthy apron was emptying a heaped pail of garbage into one of a group of overflowing cans, and went back through the battered door beside them, which emitted an almost palpable cloud of food and seasoning effluvia before it closed again. The Saint’s nostrils twitched as he reached it: scent confirmed sight to justify the deduction that it was the back door of a restaurant, which had to have another more prepossessing entrance on the other side. Without hesitation he opened the door and found himself in a bustling steaming kitchen, and still without a pause he walked on through it, as if he owned the place or owned the proprietor, with a jaunty wave and an affable “Ciao!” to a slightly perplexed cook who was hooking yards of spaghetti from an enormous pot, heading for the next door through which he had seen a waiter pass. It took him straight into the restaurant, where other waiters and customers disinterestedly assumed that he must have had business in the kitchen or perhaps the men’s room and hardly spared him a second look as he ambled purposefully but without unseemly haste through to the front entrance and the street beyond.

  Three or four zigzagging blocks later he knew that Al Destamio and his personal goon squad would only pick up his trail again by accident. But that didn’t mean he was home safe by any means. Unless they had all been knocked cold in the collision, which was unlikely, the Mafia knew now that he was in Cefalù, and the size of the town would not make it any less of a death trap than the last mountain village.

  The only remedy was to leave it again as soon as possible.

  He noted the names of the cross streets at the next intersection, then bought a guide book with a map of the town at a convenient newsstand. He quickly oriented himself and headed for the railroad station, hoping that he might catch a train there before the Ungodly reorganized and bethought them of the same move.

  The station was swarming with a colorful and international jumble of tourists, besides the normal complement of more stolid population statistics going about their mundane business, and Simon merged himself with a boisterous group of French students who were heading for the platform entrance gates and a train that was just loading. He did not know its destination, but that was of secondary importance. It could only be Messina or Palermo, and either would do as long as he boarded unobserved. Fortune still seemed to be smoothing his way: the students were dressed very much like he was, and if necessary he could pass for French himself. Anyone who was not too suspicious could pass him over as their tutor or guide. Only a handful of mafiosi actually knew him by sight, and a mere verbal description would hardly be enough to single him out of the group he had joined. And the odds were encouragingly reasonable against the station being staked out by one of Destamio’s hoods who had personally seen him before.

  He had figured all that out to his own satisfaction just before he saw Lily standing by the barrier, at the same moment as she saw him.

  2

  In the fragment of a second between one step and the next, he marshalled and evaluated every possibility that could tie into her presence there, and went on to adumbrate what could follow or be filched from it. Coincidence he ruled out. Everything in her stance and positioning marked her as watching for somebody, and it was too great a stretch to imagine that that could be someone else. Although the Saint had been thinking automatically in terms of masculine malevolence, she was one of the very few in Destamio’s immediate entourage who had been qualified to pick him out of any mob. But the sketchiest calculation showed that she could not possibly have been sent there since he abandoned the bus. She could only be part of the general net that had been spread around the area, but because she could positively identify him, she had been given one of the most strategic spots.

  Simon Templar put down his other foot with a chilling respect for the murderous efficiency re-demonstrated by the opposition, but knowing precisely how the score totalled at the instant that was tearing towards him, and what alternatives he could try to throw at it.

  He continued to walk steadily towards her, as if they had even had a rendezvous, with a smile that not only did not falter but broadened as he came nearer.

  “Well, well, well,” he murmured, with the lilt in his voice which was always gayest when everything around was mos
t grim. “How long can it be since we met? It seems like a million years!”

  He took her firmly by both hands and gazed fondly into the gigantic opaque sunglasses trimmed with plastic flowers. He wondered what her eyes would be like when and if he ever saw them. Maybe she didn’t have any. But at least the full red mouth was concealed only by lipstick. He kissed it for the second time, and it still tasted like warm paint.

  “Don’t scream, or try to pretend I’m insulting you,” he said, without a change in his affectionate smile, “because if I had to I could break your nose and knock all your front teeth out before anyone could possibly come to your rescue. And it’d be a shame for a pretty face like yours to be bashed in like the wings of an old jalopy.”

  He kept hold of her hands, just in case, but the resistance he felt was light and only momentary.

  “Why?” she asked, in that voice that throbbed monosyllables like organ notes, and with as little individual expression.

  “You mean you weren’t waiting for me here?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because Al sent you.”

  “Why?”

  It was a perfect defense—in terms of the Maginot Line. He laughed.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the last message I asked you to give him. You did deliver it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you know how Al is about these things. He’s been trying to get even ever since. Didn’t he tell you why he wanted you to put the finger on me?”