Vendetta for the Saint. (22 page)

“Che
cosa fai?”

Believing that anyone who asked what he was
doing, in those circumstances, could not be
serious
ly expecting an answer, Simon
ignored the intrusion and concentrated even more intensely on
his
gymnastic performance. Therefore he was look
ing
downwards when the man produced a gun, and
the first indication he had of its presence was the
crack of the shot and the dying scream of a bullet
ricocheting from the wall near his head. It took
an
ice-nerved self-discipline to make no change in the
smoothness of his descent—or perhaps he was
more worried about the capacity of his rope than
about the marksmanship of the man upstairs.

From above, next, he heard the voice of Al
Destamio engaged in noisy altercation with
the
gunman. It
seemed that Al didn’t want him to
shoot any more, for reasons which the Saint could
appreciate, but which were meeting a good
deal of consumer resistance from the minor
mafioso,
who had discovered a
delightfully novel form of target
practice and resented being deprived of it. While
they wrangled, Simon descended a few more
feet,
and literally
came to the end of his rope.

Holding on with one vise-clamped fist, he
saw
that his feet
were still almost a metre above the bot
tom of the wall, which was based less than
half that
distance from
the cliff edge. Below that lip, the
rock face dropped away at a slant of about eighty
degrees to an orchard that looked almost far
enough to open a parachute, which he wished
he
had. Especially as the
argument at the window overhead seemed to be compromised with a violent
shaking or hauling on the flimsy filament from
which he was suspended.

He
had no choice but to take one more gamble.

He
opened his hand and dropped …

He landed lightly on his toes, knees bending
to
cushion the steadiest
possible landing. Dirt
crumbled
and gravel trickled down the escarpment,
but the rock foundation was solid. He rested
there
a moment,
plastered against the gripless wall of the building and envying octopods with
suction cups in
their
tentacles.

The nearest corner of the house was at least
twenty feet to his right, and he began to edge
cautiously in that direction. There was a sudden
silence from the window above, and it did not take
much imagination to visualize
Destamio and oth
ers trundling
around to meet him. But there was a
good
chance that he could reach the side of the
building before they could make their way to the
same area by a more normal route through the
house. Once he was off the vertiginous ledge, he
would have to extemporize his next step according to what openings presented
themselves. His plan
ning had gone no
farther than this, where he con
sidered
himself comparatively fortunate to be.

Which was all to the good, since he was
destined
never to reach
the corner of the building. Another
of the Mafia security corps had apparently been
already outside, and upon hearing the shots
had
moved to
investigate this unwonted matutinal ac
tivity. His head appeared like a
jack-in-the-box around the angle towards which Simon was inching his
precarious way.

“Buon giorno,”
said the Saint, with his maximum
affability. “Is this the way to the
bathroom?”

The reaction was fully as obvious and exag
gerated as a cinematic double-take. The new
comer’s sagging jaw dragged his mouth open in
a
befuddled O, exposing an
interesting assortment
of
gold teeth interspersed with the blackened
stumps of their less privileged fellows which
had
yet to benefit from auric
reconstitution.

“Che
cosa fai?”

The
question seemed no less inanely rhetorical to
the Saint than it had on the previous
occasion, but this time he made an attempt to keep the conversa
tion going.

“Ebbene,
it is like this,” he replied, while he
sank
carefully to
one knee and his other leg dropped
over the cliff edge, his toe groping for a support.
“There have been complaints about the founda
tions of this castle. We do not want Don
Pasquale’s end to be accelerated by having his sick-room fall out from under
him. So I have been called in to
examine
the underpinnings. I am inclined to suspect Death Watch beetles—does that sound
likely
to you?”

The opinion of his audience, which had been
half-hypnotized into watching in blank stupe
faction while Simon meantime levered himself
over the ledge until only his chin was above its level, was not revealed
because he was suddenly yanked back
and replaced by the gunman who had taken his last
pot shot from the upper window.

“Come back!” shouted the man, with
somewhat idiotic optimism, as he tried to get into an aiming position.

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint,
“but my union only
allows
me to climb down. To bring me up you must
send an elevator.”

The gunman’s homicidal zeal was, not di
minished by this reasonable answer, but he
was
severely
handicapped by the mechanics of the situ
ation. The precipice began at his feet, and
the base of the building came almost to its edge on his right. If it had been
the opposite way around, or if he had
been left-handed, it would have been simplicity
itself to poke his head and gun-hand around
the
corner and
bang away. But being one of the right-handed majority, there was no way he
could com
fortably bring
his gun to bear, short of stepping out
and resting at least one foot on a cloud. He
tried a
couple of snap
shots without that levitational assistance, but with his hand bent awkwardly
back
from his wrist
the bullets went wide and the recoils
almost dislodged him from his insecure stance on
the rim of the chasm.

While he struggled with this peculiar
problem,
his quarry was working steadily down
the sheer
wall with an unexpected
virtuosity that would have won respect from challengers of the Eiger. And by
the time he had figured out the possible solution
of
lying flat on his stomach and
wriggling out over the
void for half
the length of his chest, prepared even from that extension to try a southpaw
shot if neces
sary, he was stung to a
scream of frustration by
the
discovery that his target had meanwhile man
aged to claw his way around a sufficient bulge in
the illusory
plane of the cliff to be completely
shielded
from his line of sight.

While his would-be assassin may have been
mentally elaborating excuses for the one that got
away, Simon was still a long drop from feeling
home and safe. He had done some rock climbing,
as he had tried every other hazardous sport in
his
time, and he had muscles and
agility that many
professionals
might have envied, but he would never have claimed to be an expert
mountaineer. High-
octane adrenalin
was the primitive fuel that drove
him,
clinging like a limpet to an almost vertical
gradient, his toes scrabbling for irregularities that
might lend a bare ridge of support, his fingers
hooking into grooves and crannies that only cen
turies of weather had eaten into the unsympathetic
stone.

Having no time to be precise or technical, he
took risks that no seasoned
alpinist would have
considered.
He surrendered his weight to hand
holds
that had not been fully tested, and one of
them pulled away, a jagged chunk of rock that
crashed down among the
trees below, leaving him
for
one desperate moment without support of any
kind, except the friction of his body
pressed against the natural wall. Yet even as he slid, his hands were
racing over the fissured incline and found
another
minuscule ridge, and he resumed his
ingloriously
frantic descent.

At infinitely long last something brushed his
shoulder which he realized
was a fruit-laden
branch.
With a quick twist he grasped it, swung
down to the ground, and took off running
through
the grove.

Far above him, through the clear air, he heard
the grind of a starter and
the roar of a car’s engine
breaking into life.
Someone up there had finally re
alized that
there might be better ways of cutting
him
off towards his destination than from his start
ing point.

He
ran.

A
patch of open meadow separated the or
chards, and as he crossed it there was a flurry of
echoes from high behind him, and something
whistled past his ear and thudded into the
turf. He
accepted this
with an equanimity which owed no
little
to the cold-blooded estimate that at such a
distance a hand gun was approximately as
danger
ous as a well-hurled pebble. He had
a more serious
threat to worry about: the
howl of an over-stressed
motor came
faintly down to his ears, and a large
black
limousine, strangely reminiscent of movies
about Prohibition days in
America, hurtled into
view on a road that
came over the cliff top near the
house
and zigzagged down towards the village. Its
intentions were obvious from the maniac speed
with which it attacked the descent, broadsiding on
the turns and throwing up clouds of
gravel and
dust. Even though his
predicament was no longer
cliff-hanging, he could still be cut off
…

The Saint doubled his pace and fairly flew
down
the more gentle
slope, hurdling the tumbled-stone
fences, pitting his own speed and freedom of
choice against the more devious routes which
the
faster car was
obliged to follow. As soon as he
reached
the shelter of the next grove, he angled off
to the right, a change of course that would
be hidden from watchers at the cliff top. The limousine
was also invisible now behind the trees, but
he
could trace its progress
by the whine of gears and
the
chatter of skidding tires. The element of desper
ate uncertainty was where his path and the road
would intersect.

The pain in the back of his skull where he
had
been bludgeoned
had long since been cured or
driven
out of consciousness by the pressure of
more imperative demands on his attention.
Another
fence rose up
ahead, made of the same broken
slabs
of stone fitted together without mortar, and
again he took it like a steeplechaser,
without break
ing stride to
make sure what was beyond. This was
reckless, but he had little choice: the sounds of the
car were coming much too close to permit
leisured
reconnaissance.
As he cleared the wall, he discovered that the ground beyond had been cut away,
making a drop of six feet
on the other side—where
the
road itself was responsible for the cutting. He
took the fall easily, touching his hands to
the gravel
with the force
of the impact but instantly springing
up again. But in one swift glance around he saw the
top of the black sedan over the tops of some
young
olive trees a
scant hundred yards farther up the incline. Only the configuration of the
ground and an intervening hairpin bend prevented its occupants from seeing him
as well.

In terms of the speed of the approaching
vehicle, that advantage represented mere seconds of grace.
Rebounding like a rubber ball, Simon took two
more immense strides across the road and dived
head first over the lower wall on the other side,
landing with a paratrooper’s shoulder roll and
staying flat on the ground at the end of it.