Vendetta for the Saint. (30 page)

Simon Templar put down his other foot with a
chilling respect for the
murderous efficiency re-
demonstrated
by the opposition, but knowing pre
cisely how the score totalled at the instant that was
tearing towards him, and what alternatives he
could try to throw at it.

He
continued to walk steadily towards her, as if they had even had a rendezvous,
with a smile that not only did not falter but broadened as he came
nearer.

“Well, well, well,” he murmured,
with the lilt in
his voice
which was always gayest when everything
around was most grim. “How long can it
be since
we met? It
seems like a million years!”

He took her firmly by both hands and gazed
fondly into the gigantic opaque sunglasses trimmed
with plastic flowers. He wondered what her eyes
would be like when and if he ever saw them. May
be she didn’t have any.
But at least the full red
mouth was
concealed only by lipstick. He kissed it
for the second time, and it still tasted like warm
paint.

“Don’t scream, or try to pretend I’m insulting
you,” he said, without a change in his
affectionate
smile, “because if
I had to I could break your nose
and
knock all your front teeth out before anyone
could possibly come to your rescue. And it’d be a
shame for a pretty face like yours to be bashed in
like the wings of an old jalopy.”

He kept hold of her hands, just in case, but
the
resistance he
felt was light and only momentary.

“Why?” she asked, in that voice
that throbbed monosyllables like organ notes, and with as little individual
expression.

“You
mean you weren’t waiting for me here?”

“Why
should I?”

“Because Al
sent you.”

“Why?”

It was a perfect defense—in terms of the
Maginot Line. He laughed.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the
last message
I asked you to
give him. You did deliver it, didn’t
you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you know how Al is about these
things.
He’s been
trying to get even ever since. Didn’t he tell you why he wanted you to put the
finger on
me?”

“No.”

“You
tripped, Lily,” said the Saint quietly. “So
you
are
here to point me out to the
mob, and not
just to see
who else you could pick up in your new
clothes.”

In deference to the conventions of an
ordinary
Italian town,
she was wearing a full wraparound
skirt that hid half the length of her sensational legs,
but her upper structure was clearly limned by
a
sleeveless sweater that
would have been barred at
the
doors of the Vatican.

“Where are the boys?” he asked,
with an in
sistence that
was outwardly emphasized only in the
invisible tightening of his grip.

Her head moved a little as if she glanced
around, but it was only an impression which could not be
verified through those ornately floriferous blin
ders.

“I
don’t know what you mean,” she said.

Without letting go of her, as if it were only
an
unconscious waltz step in
a lovers’ tryst, he had
edged
around to reverse their positions, so that his
back was to the railings; but he saw no
indication of any
mafiosi
closing in or watching for a cue to
do so. And he was becoming increasingly
fascinated by the fact that she still made no
attempt
to scream for
help, legitimate or illegitimate. His
threat might have checked her in the beginning—
long enough to let him improve his strategic
posi
tion and maneuver
her obstructively into the line of
fire—but by now she should have been thinking of
some counter to that. Unless her mind was as
comp
letely barren
as her dialog…

If there were any guns around, they must
have
been of very
low caliber. But the wild idea grew
stronger that there might not even be any. The railroad station at Cefal
ù
was a way-out shot, a vague
chance, the kind of improbable
possibility that a doll might have been sent to cover, just for luck,
but without giving her any heavy
backing. It would be figured that if by some remote fluke he did show
up there, she would be capable of
latching on to
him,
overtly or covertly, until—

“We mustn’t be seen here
together,” she said.
“Can we go
somewhere and talk?”

His hunch anchored itself solidly enough at
that
to provide a springboard for
tentative exultation.

“Why
not?” he said.

He turned her around and changed his grip
more
swiftly than
she could have taken advantage of the
instant’s
liberty. Now locking the fingers of her
right
hand in his left, with his arm inside hers hold
ing it tight against his side, he steered her briskly
towards the station exit, as firmly attached to
him
as if they had been Siamese
twins. But she went along as obediently as a puppet; and if any of
Destamio’s men were waiting for a sign from her,
they did not seem to get it.

He opened the door of the first cab on the
rank
outside, and
followed her in without letting go her
hand.

“I suppose you know this town,” he
said.
“Where
would be a safe place to go, where we
won’t be
likely to run into Al or any of his pals?”

“The Hotel Baronale,” she said at
once, and Si
mon repeated it
to the driver.

Obviously the Hotel Baronale was a prime
place to
avoid, but Simon waited till they
had whipped
around the next corner before he
leaned forward and
pushed a bill
from his stolen roll over the driver’s
shoulder.

“I think my wife is having me
followed,” he said
hoarsely.
“Try to shake off anyone behind us. And
instead of the Baronale, I think it would be
safer to
drop us at the
Cathedral, if you understand.”

“Do I understand?” said the
chauffeur en
thusiastically.
“I have so much sympathy for you
that it shames me to take your money.”

Nevertheless, he succeeded in stifling his
shame
sufficiently
to make the currency vanish as if it had
been sucked up by a starving vacuum cleaner.
But he also made a conscientious effort to earn it, with
an inspired disregard for the recriminations
of a
few deluded
souls who thought that even in Sicily
there were some traffic courtesies to be observed.

Looking back through the rear window, Simon
became fairly satisfied that even if any
second-team
goons had been
backing up Lily at the station,
which
seemed more unlikely every minute, they
were now floundering in a subsiding wake.

“What are you so afraid of?” Lily
asked, in
genuously.

“Mainly of being killed before I’m
ready,” said
the
Saint. “I suppose I’m a bit fussy; but since it’s
something you can only do once, I feel it
should be
done well. I’ve
been working up to it for years, but
I still think I need a few more rehearsals.”

His flippancy bounced off her like a sandbag
off
a pillow.

“It can only be Fate, meeting you again
like
this,” she
said solemnly. “I never thought it would
happen. I thought of you, but I didn’t know
where
to find
you.”

It was a long speech for her, and he
regarded her
admiringly for having worked it out.

“Why were you thinking of me?” he
inquired,
resigning
himself to playing it straight.

“I’ve left Al. When I found out how much
he
was mixed up in, I got
scared.”

“You didn’t know this when you took up
with
him?”

“I haven’t been with him as long as that.
I’m a
dancer. I was
with a troupe doing a tour. I met him
at a club in Naples, and he talked me into quitting.
I liked him at first, and I wasn’t getting on
with the
producer who
booked the tour. Al took care of
everything.
But I didn’t know what I was getting
into.”

In uttering so many sentences she was forced
to
give away clues to her
mysterious accent; and with
mild
surprise he finally placed it as London-suburban cramped with some
elocution-school affec
tations,
and overlaid with a faint indefinable “foreign” intonation which she
must have adopted for
additional glamor.

“But if you’ve left Al, how did you get
here to
Cefal
ù
?”

“I was afraid he’d catch me if I tried
to get out of
Italy by any of the ways he’d
expect. You see, I
took some money—I had
to. I took the plane to
Palermo and
I thought I could take the next plane to London, but it was full up. There’s
only one a
day. I was afraid to wait in Palermo, because Al
has friends there, so I came here to wait till
tomor
row.”

The Saint had no way to know whether she was
adlibbing or if her lines had been carefully taught her, but he nodded with the
respectful gravity to
which a good try
was entitled.

“It’s lucky that I ran into you,” he said. “Luck
ier than you know, maybe. These men are danger
ous!”

The cab shook as the driver spun it around
an
other corner and braked it to a squealing halt
in
front of the Cathedral. Simon tossed
another
bonus into his lap, with the
generosity which is best
indulged
from some other rogue’s misappropriated
roll, and dragged Lily quickly out and across the
fronting pavement.

“Why do you come here?” she
protested, totter
ing to
keep up with him on her high stiletto heels.

“Because all cathedrals have side
doors. If cab
driver got
inquisitive, he couldn’t cover all of them;
and if anyone asks him questions, he won’t
know
which way we went after he dropped
us.”

Inside, he slowed to a more moderate pace,
and
he noticed that
he no longer seemed to have any
resistance
to overcome. He surmised that now she was temporarily parted from any
protective hoodlums who may have been posted in the vicinity of
the station—or the Hotel Baronale—she must
feel that her most vital interest was to stay close to him rather than escape
from him, for if she lost track of him now she might be in the kind of trouble
that it
was painful
even to imagine. He felt free enough to
take out his guide book and turn the pages,
making
like any
swivel-eyed tourist.

“The columns,” he said, cribbing
brazenly from the book; “take particular note of the columns, be
cause they’re the handsomest you are going
to see
in a long
while. And those capitals! Byzantine, by
golly, intermixed with Roman, and all of
them
standing
foursquare holding up those stilted
Gothic arches. Don’t they
do
something to you? Or anything?”

“We can’t stay here,” Lily said,
with a sup
pressed seethe.
“If you’re in trouble with Al, you
must get out of town too.”

“What do you
suggest?”

“If you’re afraid of the railway, there
is a bus station—”

“I
came here on a bus,” he said, “and something
happened that makes me feel that I’m probably
passeggero non grata
with the bus company.”

“What,
then?”

“I must think of you, Lily. I suppose you made
a reservation on the plane to London
tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Then you daren’t go back to Palermo.
By this
time, Al could
have checked with the airlines and
found out about it. So we can fool him by going the
opposite way, to Catania. We can get a plane
from
there to
Malta—and that’s British territory.”