Saint Errant (12 page)

It was not until dinner was half finished that Intuccio’s rock-like taciturnity unbent at all. They ate in the smoky oil-lighted kitchen, the four of them together round a stained pine table, in the incense of garlic and charring wood.

Urselli prattled on in a kind of strained desperation, as if the mighty silence that welled in on them whenever he stopped was more than his nerves could stand. The older man answered only with grunts and monosyllables; the girl Lucia spoke very little, whether from shyness or habit Simon could not decide; and the Saint himself felt that he was a spectator rather than a player-at least for those early scenes. It was as a spectator that Simon watched Intuccio wind the last reel of spaghetti dexterously round his fork, and heard him interrupt Urselli’s recital of the delights of Broadway to ask: “You have done well in your business, Amadeo?”

They were speaking in Italian, the language on which Intuccio stubbornly insisted, and which Simon spoke as easily as he.

“Well enough,” Urselli answered. “It was easy for me. I must have been born for it. Buy and sell, the same as any other business-there is only the one secret-and know what you can sell before you buy.” He slapped his waist. “Here in my belt I have twenty thousand good American dollars. And you, Salvatore?”

The other drank from his wineglass and wiped his matted black beard.

“I also have no complaints. Five years ago I have much land and everyone is paying the highest prices, but I have the intelligence to see that it will not always be like that. Ebbene, I sell the farm; and presently when the prices have gone down I buy this place. It is something for me to do, and I like to stay here. I have perhaps thirty thousand dollars, perhaps a little more. We are thrifty people, and we do not have to spend money on fine clothes.”

The meal was completed with some grudging attempts at graciousness on the part of Intuccio, at which Urselli gave Simon a covert grimace of relief and turned his attentions more openly to Lucia. When it was over the girl picked up a pail and went out to draw water from the well to wash the dishes, and Urselli followed her out with an offer of help. The old man’s shadowed eyes gazed after them fixedly.

“You have an attractive daughter,” Simon observed, with a touch of humorous significance.

Intuccio’s face turned slowly back to him, and the Saint was surprised by its darkness. There was a hunted flicker of fear and suspicion at the back of the innkeeper’s eyes, the same look that Simon might have expected if he had burst into the solitude of a hermit.

“Perhaps I should not have told that Amadeo that I had so much money,” he said, with an equal significance in the harsh ness of his reply.

“Why worry,” asked the Saint gently, “when it was not true?”

For the first time the semblance of a smile touched the inn-keeper’s grim mouth.

“Amadeo does not know that. But I had to say it. I have not three hundred dollars, signor, but I have pride. Why should I let Amadeo boast against me?”

He raised himself from the table and stumped out of the kitchen. Simon went out and smoked a cigarette in the fresh air on the veranda. Later he found the old man serving the scanty orders of his evening customers in the big gloomy outer room, moving about his work in the same heavy unsmiling manner.

Simon drifted into a place at the long communal table which occupied the center of the room. The four customers were at the other end of it, grouped over a game of poker. Simon ordered himself a drink and listened abstractedly to the scuff of cards and the expressionless voices of the players. Intuccio called for the girl to come out and take over the serving; she came, composed and silent, and the old man joined Simon at the table. He sat there with his brawny arms spread for ward and his glass held clumsily between his huge hands, with out speaking; and the Saint wondered what thoughts were passing through the dark caverns of that heavy impenetrable mind. There was a sense of menace about that somber immobility, a dreadful inhumanity of aloofness, that sent an eerie ripple of half-understanding up Simon Templar’s spine. Suddenly he knew why so few men came to the inn.

Amadeo Urselli entered jauntily, and pulled out a chair be side them.

“This is a dandy spot,” he said fluently. “You know, when I first dropped in here I nearly got straight back on the bus and went out again. Seemed like a guy would go nuts sittin’ around here with nothing to look at but a lot of mesquite. Well, now I guess movies and cabarets don’t mean so much compared with real home life. I could settle down in a town like this. Say, Salvatore, what’s the hunting around here?”

Intuccio lifted his eyes under their dense black brows.

“Hunting?”

“Yeah. You got a swell rifle hangin’ on the wall outside. I took it down to have a look at it, and it was all cleaned and erled. Or is it in case the bandits come this way?”

The innkeeper sat motionless, as if he had not heard, staring at the glass cupped between his hands. The voices of the poker players muttered a pizzicato background to his stillness: “Two to come in.” “And four.” “Make it four more.” “I’ll raise that ten.” The chips slithered and spilled across the board and hands were turned face downwards and sent spinning over the table to join the discard.

Intuccio, detached as a statue, turned his head as the game fell into the lull of a fresh deal.

“Mr Jupp, have you seen any bandits here?”

One of the players looked up.

“Since Roosevelt became President there have been no more bad men,” he said solemnly.

Another of the men leaned round in his chair.

“Yo’re new to these parts, I guess,” he drawled. “You oughta know that them stories belong back in the days of your grand father. This is a peaceful country now.”

“By hookey,” erupted the third man, who wore a sheriff’s badge, “it had better be! You won’t see any bad men here while I’m responsible.”

Intuccio nodded. He turned to Urselli again, his eyes dispassionately intent, gleaming motionlessly in their hollow sockets like deep pools of stagnant water in a cave.

“You see, Amadeo?” he said. “At one time there were bad men and bandits here. Even now, sometimes, little things have happened. There are some who believe that the bad men are not altogether stamped out. But the times have changed.” The craglike head, inscrutable as a mask of rugged wax, held itself squarely in the field of Urselli’s shifting eyes. “Today you will find more robbers in the big cities of America than you will find here.”

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 no body 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 hailed 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 hoofbeats. 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 be mistaken about Amadeo.