Vendetta for the Saint. (29 page)

Destamio’s exultant travesty of a grin was re
placed by a vindictive snarl. The barrel of
an auto
matic appeared
over the sill of his open window,
and he steadied it with both hands to aim.

The Saint’s smile also faded as he snatched
the
pistol from his
belt and ducked to shelter as much
of himself as possible below the dubious steel of the
bus’s coachwork. He had no misgivings as to
who
would be the
victor in a straight shoot-out under
those conditions; but when Destamio’s henchmen
chimed in, as they would without caring how
many bystanders were killed or injured in the exchange, a
lot of non-combatants were likely to become
monuments to another of the perils of neutralism. And
pusillanimous as they might have shown them
selves, and perhaps undeserving of too much
con
sideration,
Simon had to think of the consequences
to himself of a lucky score on the bus driver
at that
speed.

The
problem was providentially resolved when
Destamio suddenly disappeared. His startled
face
slid backwards
with comical abruptness, taking the
car with it, as if it had been snagged by some giant
hook in the pavement; it took Simon an
instant to
realize that it
was because the driver had been
forced
to jam on his brakes and drop back to avoid
a head-on collision with oncoming traffic. No
sooner had the sedan swung
in behind the bus than an immense double-trailered truck roared by in the
opposite direction, followed by a long straggle of
weaving honking cars that had accumulated be
hind it.

The Saint didn’t wait to see any more. His
guard
ian angel was
apparently trying to outdo himself,
but there was no guarantee of how long that in
ordinate effort would continue. He had to
make
the most of it
while it lasted—and before a break in
the
eastbound lane gave the Mafia chauffeur a
chance
to draw level again.

Through the broad windshield could be seen
the
outskirts of a
city, and a cog-wheeled sign whipped
by with its international invitation to visiting Rotarians, followed by
the name CEFAL
Ù
.
Now he knew where he was, and it would do for another
stage.

As he pushed towards the front again, and the
door, one of the men in a
seat behind the driver was leaning forward to mutter something in his
ear, and the bus was slowing.

“There is no need to stop,” Simon
said clearly.
“No one
wants to get off yet.”

He was in the right-hand front corner by
then,
one shoulder
towards the windshield and the other
towards the door, and the gun in his hand was
for everyone to see but especially favored the
driver.

“I am supposed to stop here,” the
man
mumbled, his
foot wavering between the ac
celerator
and the brake.

“That stop has just been
discontinued,” said the
Saint,
and his forefinger moved ever so slightly on
the trigger. “Keep going.”

The bus rumbled on, and its other passengers
glowered at the Saint sullenly, no longer trying to
avoid his gaze, plainly resenting the danger
that he
had brought to
them more violently and immediately than if he had been the carrier of a
plague, but not knowing what to do about it.
Simon
remained
impersonally alert and let his gun do all
the threatening. Everyone received the
message
and declined
to argue with it; the driver stared fix
edly ahead and gripped the wheel as if it had
been
a wriggling
snake.

From behind came repeated blares from the
horn of the following sedan, and fresh sweat
beaded the driver’s already moist forehead.
Through the length of the bus and over the
heads
of the other
riders, Simon could catch glimpses of the sedan hanging on their tail and
fretting for a chance to draw alongside again, but the increasing traffic of
the town gave it no opening. And in the
longitudinal direction, the passengers who were
now crowded into the rear two-thirds of the bus
could not open up a channel through which the
Saint could be fired at from astern. Yet with all
its advantages, it was a situation which could only be
temporary: very soon, a traffic light or a traffic
cop
or some other hazard must
intervene to change it,
or the
pursuing
mafiosi
would become more des
perate and start shooting at the tires.

Simon decided that it was better to keep the
in
itiative while he had it.
He threw a long glance at
the
road ahead, then turned to wave the passengers
back into submission before any of them
could
capitalize on his momentary
inattention.

“Put your foot over the brake,” he
told the
driver,
“but do not touch it until I tell you to. Then
give it all your weight—which can be alive
or dead,
as you
prefer.”

He had photographed the next quarter-mile of
road on his memory, and now
he waited for the
first
landmark he had picked to go by.

“Hold on tight,
amici,”
he warned the passen
gers. “We are going to make a sudden stop,
and I
do not want you to fall on
your noses—or on this
very hard piece of metal.”

Again, through a momentary opening in the
crowd, he glimpsed the trailing sedan edging
out
behind the
left rear corner. And the wine-shop sign
he had chosen for a marker was just ahead of
the driver. The timing was perfect.

“Ora!”
he yelled, and
braced himself.

The brakes bit, and the bus slowed
shudderingly. The standing passengers stumbled and collided and
cursed, but miraculously held on to various
props
and managed to
avoid being hurled down upon
him
in a human avalanche. And from the rear
came a muted crash and crumpling sound, accom
panied by a slight secondary jolt, which was
the
best of all he
had hoped for.

The bus had scarcely even come to a complete
standstill when he reached
across the driver and in
a
swift motion turned off the ignition and removed
the key.

“Anyone who gets out in less than two
minutes
will probably
be shot,” he announced, and pulled
the lever that controlled the door next to
him.

Then he was out, and one glance towards the
rear confirmed that the Mafia sedan was now
most satisfactorily welded to the back of the bus which it had been
over-ambitiously trying to pass. Its doors were still shut, and the men in it,
even if not seri
ously
injured, were apparently still trying to pick
themselves off the floor or otherwise pull
them
selves
together. The car itself might or might not be
out of the chase for a considerable time, but
the
bus solidly
blocked any vehicular access to the al
ley across the entrance of which it had parked itself
with a symmetry which the Saint could not
have
improved on if he had been driving
it himself.

He had put the pistol back in his waistband
un
der his shirt during the
last second before he
stepped
out of the bus, so that there was nothing to make him noticeable except the
fact that he was
walking
briskly away from the scene of an interest
ing accident instead of hurrying towards it
like any normal native. But even so, those who passed him
were probably too busy hustling to secure a
front-row position in the gathering throng to pay any
attention to his eccentric behavior.

He strode down the alley to where it crossed
an
other even narrower
passage, flipped a mental
coin,
and turned left. Half a block down on the
right, a youth in a filthy apron was emptying a
heaped pail of garbage into one of a group of over
flowing cans, and went back through the battered
door beside them, which emitted an almost
palpable cloud of food and seasoning effluvia
before it closed again. The Saint’s nostrils
twitched as he reached it: scent confirmed sight to justify the
deduction that it was the back door of a
restaurant,
which had to have another
more prepossessing en
trance on the other side. Without hesitation he
opened the door and found himself in a bustling
steaming kitchen, and still without a pause he
walked on through it, as if he owned the place or
owned the proprietor, with a jaunty wave and an
affable
“Ciao!”
to a slightly perplexed cook who
was hooking yards of spaghetti from an enormous
pot,
heading for the next door through which he
had
seen a waiter pass. It took him straight into the
restaurant, where other waiters and customers
disinterestedly assumed that he must have had business in the kitchen or perhaps
the men’s room and
hardly spared him
a second look as he ambled pur
posefully but without unseemly haste
through to
the front entrance and the street
beyond.

Three or four zigzagging blocks later he knew
that Al Destamio and his
personal goon squad
would only
pick up his trail again by accident. But
that didn’t mean he was home safe by any
means.
Unless they had
all been knocked cold in the col
lision,
which was unlikely, the Mafia knew now
that he was in Cefal
ù
, and the size of the town
would not make it any less of a death
trap than the
last
mountain village.

The only remedy was to leave it again as soon
as
possible.

He noted the names of the cross streets at
the next intersection, then bought a guide book with
a map of the town at a convenient newsstand.
He
quickly oriented himself
and headed for the rail
road station,
hoping that he might catch a train
there
before the Ungodly reorganized and
bethought them of the same move.

The station was swarming with a colorful and
international jumble of tourists, besides the normal
complement of more stolid population
statistics
going about
their mundane business, and Simon
merged himself with a boisterous group of French
students who were heading for the platform en
trance gates and a train that was just
loading. He
did not know
its destination, but that was of secon
dary importance. It could only be Messina or
Palermo, and either would do as long as he
boarded unobserved. Fortune still seemed to
be
smoothing his way: the students
were dressed very
much like
he was, and if necessary he could pass
for French himself. Anyone who was not too
suspi
cious could
pass him over as their tutor or guide. Only a handful of
mafiosi
actually
knew him by sight, and a mere verbal description would hardly
be enough to single him out of the group he
had joined. And the odds were encouragingly reasonable against the station
being staked out by one of Destamio’s hoods who had personally seen him
before.

He had figured all that out to his own
satisfac
tion just
before he saw Lily standing by the barrier,
at the same moment as she saw him.

2

In
the fragment of a second between one step and
the next, he marshalled and evaluated every
possi
bility that
could tie into her presence there, and
went on to adumbrate what could follow or be
filched from it. Coincidence he ruled out.
Everything in her stance and positioning marked her as
watching for somebody, and it was too great a
stretch to imagine that
that could be someone else.
Although
the Saint had been thinking auto
matically
in terms of masculine malevolence, she
was one of the very few in Destamio’s
immediate
entourage who
had been qualified to pick him out
of any mob. But the sketchiest calculation showed
that she could not possibly have been sent
there
since he
abandoned the bus. She could only be part
of the general net that had been spread
around the
area; but
because she could positively identify him,
she had been given one of the most strategic
spots.