Vendetta for the Saint. (21 page)

Don
Pasquale still had the memory of a com
puter. All the threads of a world-wide network of
crime led back to him, and he controlled it because he knew the
exact length and strength of every sin
gle
one. More than ten years had passed since that
incident in Rome, but he had not forgotten any of the details.

“What
has the Saint done now, Alessandro?”

“He is trying to make trouble for
me,” Destamio
said.
“He has followed me, spied on me, gone to
my family and questioned them, threatened to
blackmail me. I have to find out what he
knows,
and who else
knows it, and then get rid of him.”

“That
may be; but why bring him here?”

“I thought it was the safest place, and
besides I
did not want to
be away myself at this time—”

“What information could the Saint have
that he
could possibly
blackmail Alessandro with?”

It was a new voice that broke in, and
Destamio started visibly at the sound of it. It came from the man with the
majestic proboscis whom Simon had
already intuitively assessed as the most dynamic of
the council.

“Nothing, Cirano, nothing at all,”
Destamio re
plied, his
voice sounding a trifle hoarser than usual. “But I want to know why he
thinks he can give me trouble, who he is working with, so that I can
take care of everything.”

The man called Cirano—probably a nickname
rather than a fortunate choice by his
parents—
turned his
fascinating beak towards Destamio and
actually sniffed, as if all his powers of perception
were brought to focus in that incredible
olfactory
organ.

“If he cannot be dangerous, what are
you afraid
of,
Alessandro?” he persisted mercilessly. “What is
there to take care of?”

“Basta!”
Don Pasquale interrupted Destamio’s
retort before it even came to voice.
“You can wait
to fight
with each other after I am dead. Until then,
I make the decisions.”

His lips barely moved when he talked, and
there
was no sign of
animation or emotion on the pallid
face. Only
the eyes were indomitably alive, and
they
fastened on the Saint again with a concentra
tion which could almost be physically felt.

“I have long wanted to see you, Simon
Templar,” he said, still in the clear
correct Italian
which
seemed to be used as a neutral language to bridge the differences of dialect
that must have ex
isted
between some of those present, and which can
make a Sicilian just as unintelligible to a
Calabrian
as to any
foreigner. “Nobody who defies the Mafia
lives so long afterwards as you have. You
should
have been eliminated before you left
Rome, after
you crossed Unciello. Yet here
you are crossing us
again. I should
be telling Alessandro to waste no
more
time in putting you out of the way. But in the
meantime I have heard and
learned much more
about you. I am not sure
that you must inevitably be our enemy. With our power behind you, you
could have become many times richer than you are.
With your cleverness and your daring,
we might
have become even
greater.”

The room was deathly silent. Even at the end
of
his reign, Don Pasquale
remained the unchallenged autocrat by sheer force of will-power and tradition.
The satraps around him were still only his
lieuten
ants, and would
remain subservient until his ex
tinction unleashed
the new battle for supremacy.

“Do you mean,” Simon asked slowly,
“that after
all that,
you would offer me a chance to join you?”

“It is not impossible,” Don
Pasquale said. “Such
things
happen in the world. Even great nations
which have been bitter enemies become
allies.”

The Saint hesitated for an instant, while a
score of possibilities flashed back and forth across his
mind like bolts of lightning, speculating on
what
use he could
make of such a fantastic offer and
how far he
might play it along.

But for once the bronze mask of his face was
no more defense than a shell of clear glass against the
searching stare that dwelt on it.

“But no,” Don Pasquale said, before he could
even formulate a response. “You are thinking
only
of how you might turn it to
your advantage, to escape from the position you are now in. That is why
I had to see you, to have your answer myself.
L’
udienza e flnita.”

Without
affectation, he used the same words to
declare
the audience finished that would have come
from a king or a pope.

Al Destamio grabbed the Saint and hustled him
to the door with what might
have seemed like
almost
inordinate zeal, and Don Pasquale spoke
again.

“Wait
here one moment, Alessandro.”

Destamio gave the Saint a push which sent him
stumbling up against the messenger who waited
outside, and snapped: “Take him back
downstairs
and lock him
in.”

The massive door slammed shut; and the guide
grasped Simon’s arm at the elbow and propelled
him forcefully
 
across the ante-room, along the gal
lery, and down the magnificent stairway with such
brutal vigor that it took all the Saint’s agility
to
keep his footing and save himself
from being
hurled down the steps on his face.

In the same bullying manner, he was marched
through the kitchen, down the back stairs, and
along the basement corridor
to the room from
which he
had been brought. But at that especial
moment he almost welcomed the sadistic
treatment,
for under
cover of a natural resistance to it he was
able to wrestle more vigorously and
concentratedly
with the rope that held his
wrists.

A last brutal kick with his escort’s knee
sent him
flying into
the little cell. The door banged behind
him, and the key grated in the lock.

He was alone again, for the doctor had not
waited; but he knew it would not be for
long.
Whatever
business the dying Don Pasquale wanted
to conclude with Destamio could not take more
than a short while, and then Destamio would be in
even
more haste to complete his own project.

But alone and unobserved, the Saint could
writhe and struggle without restraint; and
he al
ready had a good
start…

In less than three more minutes he dragged
one
hand free, and
the cord was slack on his other
wrist.

Even while it was falling to the floor, he
reached
the window in a soundless rush.

Until then, he had had no clue to how long he
had been unconscious after he had been knocked
out in the mausoleum, and with his hands tied be
hind him he had been unable to see the time on
his wrist watch. But now, with the electric bulb behind
him, he saw that the sky was no longer black but
gray with the first dim promise of dawn. And that
faint glimmer of illumination was
enough to show him why his captors were so unconcerned about
leaving him in a room with an open unbarred win
dow.

The
palazzo
was perched on the very
edge of a
precipice. The
window from which he leaned out was pierced in a smooth wall with no other open
ings for fifteen feet on either side or
above. Below,
the wall merged
without a break into the vertical
cliff which
served as its foundation. And below
that
juncture the rock sheered away into still un
fathomable blackness.

V

How Simon Templar walked in
the Sun,

and Drank from various
Bottles

The
Saint’s jacket was gone, and his trouser
pockets had been emptied of everything except a
handful of small change which had been almost
contemptuously left. He took out a five
-lire
piece
and dropped it out of the window from
arm’s
length. It vanished into the gloom below, but for as
long as he strained his ears he could not hear it
strike bottom. Whatever was below the window
had to be a long way down.

But the door offered no alternative. It was
massively constructed of thick planks bolted
to
gether and belted with iron
straps; and while the
lock
would probably have been easy to pick if he had had any sort of tool, there was
simply nothing on him or in the bare room that he could use. The
window might seem like a kind of Russian
roulette
with five chambers loaded, but it
was the only pos
sible way out. And to remain
there was certain
death.

Without wasting another instant of precious
time, Simon tore the blanket from the cot and
began to rip it into usable strips. Knotted
together,
along with the
cord with which he had been tied, they gave him a rope about thirty feet long
and of
highly
speculative strength. He had often read
about this standard device, like everyone
else, but
had had just as few occasions as
anyone to try it
out in practice. There was
no way to test it in advance, other than by strenuous tugging, which app
eared to reveal no intrinsic weakness. Less than
ten minutes after he had been locked in, he had
one end of the rope secured to the frame of the bed, and the bed itself propped
up across the window, allow
ing the
greatest possible length of his improvised
hawser to hang down the wall.

He sat on the sill, his legs dangling over
the void,
and studied as
much as he could of the situation.
Though the details of the gorge below were still
concealed by the morning mist, the sky was
now
rapidly
lightening—enough to disclose a broad
ening range of topographical features.

The cliff on which the house was perched
formed
part of one
side of a narrow valley through which
straggled a small village with a fair-sized church
spire reaching above the white houses. Beyond
the town the hills rose again abruptly, and even higher
peaks probed skyward in the distance. To the
left,
through the
clearing haze, he could just make out a thin ribbon of road winding upwards
along the op
posite slope;
to the right, it seemed to descend from
the village. Holding on with one hand and
leaning
as far out as
he could, he was rewarded with a glint
of sunlight reflected on water, far off in
the latter direction. The road to the right, then, led down towards the sea,
and that would be the direction of
escape. He
hadn’t the vaguest idea where on the
map he
was, but he knew that the interior of Sicily
consisted almost entirely of mountain ranges, and that the main roads
followed the coast line of that triangular island to connect the larger cities,
all of
which are on the sea.

From beyond the door behind him he heard
footsteps again, and the metallic rattle of the key in
the lock. If he was going to fly the coop at all,
this
was the positively last chance
for take-off.

With a sinuous motion he twisted off the
ledge
until he hung
supported only by his fingers. Then he shifted one hand to the blanket-rope and
gradu
ally
transferred his weight, experimentally, until all
of it was on the rope. The ancient fabric
stretched
but held; and
thereafter his most urgent concern
was to make
the strain on it as brief as possible. He lowered himself hand under hand with
a speed that
came close to that of a circus
acrobat, tempered only by the requirement of avoiding any abrupt
jerks or jolts that might tax his makeshift
life-line
beyond its dubious
breaking-point.

He was halfway down when a gaping face ap
peared from the window above him, and two
yards
lower before it
could express its perplexity in
words.