Vendetta for the Saint. (27 page)

From somewhere ahead came a plaintive squeal
ing sound that slowed his headlong course as
he
tried to identify it. It
repeated itself regularly, but
grew no louder; if
anything, it seemed to grow
fainter as he
went slower. He resumed his pace with
redoubled
alertness, and the intermittent squealing
became gradually louder, showing that it must
come from something
that he was overtaking on
the road.

Prudence
should have dictated holding back for a safe distance, but curiosity was
equally cogent,
and
besides he could not afford to be slowed down
indefinitely by some nameless obstruction.
Instead,
he accelerated
again until he won a glimpse of it.

Soon the road made two consecutive horseshoe
bends, bringing him to a
clear view of the next level
down
the rutted track, where he saw that he was
being preceded by a
carretta siciliana,
the
pic
turesque Sicilian mule cart
made famous by fifty
million
picture postcards. The rhythmic creaking
which he had heard came from its inadequately
lu
bricated hubs. It carried
no load, and—except for its nodding driver—no passengers; but a bac
chanalian scene of country maidens dancing
with flower-wreathed satyrs graced its sides, while in
tricate patterns of fruit and foliage
revolved on the
fellies of
its high wheels in an explosion of primary
colors that pained the eyes.

Without hesitation Simon turned off the
road,
avalanched
through the intervening gully, and
raced into the wake of the trundling cart.

As he caught up with it, he saw that the
driver, a gray-whiskered rustic, appeared to be asleep, the
reins draped limply from one hand and his hat
tilted over his eyes, but he raised his head and
scowled down as the Saint came level with him.

“Buon giorno,”
Simon said in the standard greet
ing, falling back to a walk without a hint of
short-
windedness to betray that he had
been hurrying.

“You would not say it was a good day if
you had
listen to my
wife’s tongue cracking like a whip all
morning,” said the driver crossly.

“Cattiva giornata,”
amended the Saint, ever flex
ible in such situations.

“Hai ragione.
It is the worst kind of day. Have a
drink.”

The man produced a damp bottle from a mound
of rags between his feet and proffered it.
Unlike the
goatherd’s
wineskin, this flagon contained its prop
er beverage, and was even moderately cool
from
the evaporation
of the wet cloths in which it had
been nested.

Simon enjoyed a second long pull and handed
it
back. The driver seized the
excuse to have one
himself,
and it was obvious from the way he
weaved the bottle up and down that it was not his first drink of the
day. The Saint could not be dis
courteous,
and when the bottle was handed him
again he forced himself to accept another pleasant
swallow of the thin slightly acid wine,
walking with
one hand on
the cart to balance himself while the
patient power plant trudged phlegmatically along.

“Where are you
going?” asked the driver.

“To
Palermo,” Simon replied.

It was in his mind that if that statement were
ever relayed to Al Destamio, the hoodlum’s de
vious psychology would automatically assume that
he was heading the opposite way, towards
Messina; whereas he really did hope to get back to
Palermo. He had left too many loose
and un
finished ends there, of which
Gina was not the least
troubling.

From far behind the valley, at the very
limit of
audibility,
came something like the buzzing of a
distant hornet, which swelled rapidly to the pro
portions of an airplane’s drone and then to
a rattle
like a
pneumatic drill gone berserk. It was no feat of
memory for Simon to recognize the sound: he
had
heard it all
too recently—unless there were two in
ternal combustion engines in the area with identi
cally obnoxious exhausts.

The envoy was coming back down from the vil
lage. And on the way he had probably spoken
with
the picket on
the outskirts …

“Let us keep each other company,”
said the
Saint, and with
a nimble leap he swung himself up
to the seat beside the outraged driver.

“Who asked you?” demanded the latter
in
befuddled resentment. “What are you
doing?”

“Joining you so that we can hurry to
the nearest
vinaio
and buy some more of that excellent
beverage which you have been sharing so
gener
ously with me.
And here is the price of the next
round.”

Simon
slapped the remaining change from his
pocket on to
the wooden seat. Small as the sum
was, it
was sufficient to buy two or three liters of
wine at the depressed local prices. The peasant
looked at it with heavy-lidded eyes, and picked it
up without further protest. He even
let Simon take
another drag from the
bottle before he reclaimed it.

The Saint relinquished his grip and listened
calculatingly to the thrumming roar that was now re
verberating from the valley walls.

“Drink up,” he said encouragingly,
“and let me
do your
work for you.”

As he spoke, he gently detached the reins
from
the other’s
limp hold. The erstwhile driver turned
and opened his mouth for another outburst of
in
dignation, to be greeted
with a smile of such
seraphic
innocence and friendliness that he forgot
what he was going to complain about and
wisely
settled for
another swig at the flagon. As his head
went all the way back to drain the last gulp
from it,
the cart
lurched over a well-chosen rut and his hat
fell off. Simon caught it neatly and put it on his
own head, tilted down over his eyes. In an instant
his shoulders slumped with the
defeat of the over
worked and
underfed, and the reins drooped as list
lessly from his fingers as they had from those of the
previous holder.

The timing and the performance were perfect.
As
the motor-scooter blatted deafeningly up behind
and hurtled past, the rider should have seen only
a
pair of local peasants, the
younger one dozing over
the reins,
the older one groping foggily for some
thing
he seemed to have lost in the back of the cart.

Nevertheless the courier jammed on his
brakes and skidded to a halt in a billowing cloud of dust,
squarely across the road in front of them.
From the
fact that he
did not threaten them with a weapon,
Simon could still hope that it was only a routine
check, a matter of asking the cartmen if they
had
seen anything of the quarry. His
crude disguise
might still be effective,
enhanced as it was by his
authentically
local companion and the wagon they
were
riding in.

“Alt!”
shouted the messenger. “I want to talk
to
you!”

In spite of the torrid temperature, he wore
the
short black
leather blouse required by the protocol
of his fraternity, inside which he must have
enjoyed
all the
amenities of a portable Turkish bath; but as
he pushed back his goggles Simon realized
that he
had seen him
before, even though they had been hidden from each other in the barber’s shop.
It was
one of the
stone-faced security guards who had
lurked sleeplessly around the marble columns of
Don Pasquale’s
palazzo
above Mistretta.

With every faculty pitilessly aware of its
thin
margin for
survival, the Saint lazily flicked the
reins to urge the jenny as close as possible
to the
gunman—just in
case …

“What kind of way is that to talk to
anyone?” grumbled the chariot’s owner, blinking perplexedly
at the interception.

Then, as he turned to his passenger for
confirma
tion, he saw
for the first time something that drove
the more complex affront completely out of
his
fumbling mind.

“You
stole my hat,
ladrone!”
he squawked.

He reached to retrieve the disputed headgear,
but his alcoholic aim
combined with Simon’s in
stinctive
divergence only succeeded in knocking it
off the Saint’s head. It fell almost at the
feet of the
startled
scooterist, who had moved around to the
side of the cart for less stentorian
conversation,
and whose
reciprocal recognition was a coruscat
ing gem of over-statement.

Then the
mafioso’s
right hand darted
inside his
jacket for the
hardware that he should have dis
played
from the beginning.

Simon Templar moved even faster. He shifted
sideways and swung his outside leg faster than the
gunman could disengage his gun, and there
was a
distinct and
satisfying crunch as the toe of his shoe
caught the thug accurately in the side of
the temple.

The man folded quietly to the ground and lay face down in the
dirt.

Simon was leaping down for the clincher even
while his opponent was falling, but no
further ef
fort was
necessary. The scooter jockey had lost all
interest in his mission, and would not be likely to
regain it for a long time.

The Saint swiftly took possession of the
half-
drawn
automatic, and tucked it inside his shirt un
der the waistband of his trousers where his
belt
would hold it in place. Then he ran
through the
man’s other pockets, and came
up with a switch
blade knife and a
well-stuffed wallet. He looked up
from
it to find that his travelling companion had
clambered down from the cart and was staring with
mounting bewilderment at the sundry components of
the scene.

“What is this all about?” pleaded
the cart-driver distractedly.

Simon faced his next problem. The old man
would inevitably be grilled by the Mafia before
long, and he was likely to have an uncomfortably
hard time absolving himself of complicity in the
Saint’s escape. Unless he was provided with
evidence that would convince even the hard-boiled
mafiosi
that he was only another hapless fellow-vic
tim
of the Saint’s lengthening list of atrocities.

There was an inordinate number of five-
thousand-
lire
notes in the wallet,
besides other de
nominations,
and Simon extracted four of them
and
tucked them away under a sack of melons in
the cart, while the driver gaped at him.

“If
I gave those to you now, they might search you and find them,” he said.
“Say nothing about
them, and leave
them there until you get home.
Also, when
you are questioned, remember how I jumped on your cart and forced you to let me
stay
there. Now, I am sorry to repay
you so unkindly,
but it will hurt you
less than if the Mafia thought
you
had helped me.”

“What
is this talk of the
Mafia?”
muttered the
other blearily, swaying a little.

“Look at those birds in the sky,”
said the Saint,
steadying
him; and as the man raised his chin he hit
him under it as crisply and scientifically as
he knew
how.

The driver crumpled without a sound into an
other peaceful siesta.

For a second time Simon was tempted by the
scooter, purely for its ground-covering
potential;
and now he
might be able to afford a little time to
unravel its mechanical secrets. But nothing less
than a major operation would silence it, and he
was
still in a situation where stealth seemed to offer
more advantages than speed.