Vendetta for the Saint. (25 page)

But the delay had not necessarily penalized
him.
In fact, it
might have improved the conditions for his arrival. The reassembly of the
inhabitants un
der 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 dessicated
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
sub
sistence from
such starved surroundings—unless
one
had had previous immunization to such mira
cles 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 pro
totypical, 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 be
tween 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
ov
erlooking 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 ob
trusive 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 or
der
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 some
where 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 pre
tended 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 dif
ference, 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 out
ward 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 per
petually 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-tor
tured 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 liq
uid
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 your
self. 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 version took hold, it might briefly
dis
sociate 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 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 or
dinary 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 de
spondently
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, skim
ming 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 Si
mon
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.”