Vendetta for the Saint. (32 page)

“You’re
crazy,” she gasped.

“That has been suggested before,”
he admitted.
“And some
people have thought I’d fall for the goofiest stories. But your yarn about how
you got
to Cefal
ù
and just happened to be loafing
around
the station was
stretching the long arm of coin
cidence right out of its socket, even for me. I only
went along with the gag because I
didn’t have any
choice.
But I still say thanks, because it helped me
out of a tough spot.”

If he needed any confirmation of his
analysis, he
had it in the
name she called him, which cannot be
quoted here, in deference to the more elderly
readers of these chronicles.

“You’re a naughty girl, Lily,” he
said reproach
fully.
“You didn’t see anything wrong with trying
to finger me for the Mafia, and you’d have been
just as ready to do it in Catania, and turn your
back while they mowed me down. If you want to
play Mata Hari, you should be a good sport about
losing
your bait.”

Sometime about sunset he had taken off her
glasses, and verified that she actually had eyes—
smoky gray ones, which by then were deliriously
sleepy. Now he could no longer distinguish them in
the gloom; which made liars of a whole school of
authors, who he was certain would have described
them
as spattering sparks and flame.

She kept coming forward, regardless now of
splashing into the sea over her ankles and
then to
the depth of her
streamlined calves; and he prudently back-pedalled enough to keep the
moscone
always retreating beyond her reach.

“It’s an awful long swim back,” he
cautioned
her,
“unless you’re in the Channel-crossing class.
And nasty things come out in these waters at
night,
like slimy
eels with sharp teeth. It’s not worth it,
honestly. I’m sure Al will understand.”

She stopped with the water up to her knees,
screaming abuse with an imaginative fluency that
was in startling contrast to her usual
inarticulate
ness, while he
backed up with increasing accelera
tion until he had put enough distance between
them to be able to come forward again in a
long
turn past the
cove and outwards.

“Don’t spoil the memory, Lily,” he
pleaded as
he went by.
“I said thank you, didn’t I?”

It was a wasted effort. Her invective
followed
him as far as
her voice would carry, and made him wonder how a nice girl could have picked up
that
vocabulary.

He kept pointing towards the Pole Star until
the shrieks faded astern, and then made a slow turn to
the left.

Westwards. Towards
Palermo. Not Catania.

It was an especially snide trick to add to the
wrongs he had done Lily, after she had given so
much to the Mafia cause, but he couldn’t afford
to
be sentimental. Whenever she was
rescued or made
her own way to a
telephone, she would swear that
the
Saint was making for Catania. And that could
make all the difference to his first hours in
Palermo.

His legs pumped steadily, at a rate which he
could keep up for hours and yet which pushed
the
moscone
along at its maximum hull speed, beyond
which any extra effort would have achieved
noth
ing but
churning water. Nevertheless this terminal
velocity was not inconsiderable, so far as he
could
judge from his
impression of the inky water slip
ping past, for a vessel that wasn’t designed for rac
ing and relied only on muscular propulsion.

The slight evening breeze had dropped and the
sea was practically dead
calm. It was easy to
navigate
basically by keeping Polaris over his right
shoulder. The twinkling illumination of
small set
tlements on
the coast, and occasional flashes of
headlights on the highway, located the shore line;
and he kept far enough from it to feel secure
from
accidental
discovery by any headlights that might
be turned capriciously out to sea.

Eventually, of course, when he figured that
he
had put enough miles behind
him, he had to edge
shorewards
again. He had heard one train rum
bling
along the coastal track, and thought he had
identified its cyclopean headlamp flashing
between
cuttings and
embankments; he had to hope that the
next one would not pass too soon, or be too far
behind. He would be afraid to risk another
bus,
because the
driver by that time might have heard of
the adventure of another bus driver and be
abnormally observant of all passengers; but a long
wait at a train stop also had its hazards.

He made his final approach along a fair
stretch
of dark coast
preceding the lights of another town,
nursing the little waterbug in until the dim starlight
found him a sheltered beach to run up on. He
hauled the boat well up above the tide line,
where
it would be
safe until the indignant owner could lo
cate it, and stumbled over some rocks and
through
a stony patch
of some unrecognizable cultivation
to a road which led into the hardly less murky out
skirts of the community.

The sign on the railroad station, which he located simply by
turning inland until the tracks
stopped him,
and then following them, read CAMPOFELICE
DI ROCCELLA; and the waiting
room
was deserted. Simon strolled in, studied the timetable on the wall, and
purchased a ticket to
Palermo. The
next train was due in only ten
minutes;
and precisely on schedule it pulled in,
hissed its brakes, discharged a handful of passengers, and clankingly
pulled out again—a perform
ance for
which a certain Benito Mussolini once
claimed
all the credit.

There were only a few drowsy
contadini
and
a
couple of chattering
families of sun-drenched
sightseers
aboard, and none of them paid any at
tention to the Saint during the hour’s ride into
Palermo.

Disembarking there was a fairly tense
moment.
He was not
seriously expecting a
mafiosa
delegation of welcome, but the penalties
of excessive op
timism
could be too drastic to be taken lightly. He stayed close to the tourist
families, using the same
technique
that he had tried with the students at
Cefal
ù
, and hoping that anyone who had only
a description to go by would dismiss him as one of their party. But his
far-ranging gaze picked out no greeters or loiterers with the malevolent aspect
of
Destamio’s goondoliers.
The hue and cry was still
far
behind, apparently—and hopefully pointing in
other
directions.

Outside the station, he let himself be
guided by
the brighter
lights and the busier flow of people, in
order to melt as far as possible into the
anonymous multitude, until the current drifted him by the kind
of nook that he wanted to be washed into.

This was a small but cheerfully sparkling
trat
toria which
provided him with a half-litre of wine and the small change for a phone call.
He rang the
number that
Marco Ponti had given him, and knew
that the cards were still running for him when the
detective’s own crisp voice answered the
buzz, even
though it sounded tense and edgy.

“Pronto!
Con chi parlo?”

“An old friend,” said the Saint, in
Italian, “who
has some
interesting news about some older friends
of yours.”

The phone booth is a refinement which has
made
little progress
in Sicily, and he was well aware of
the automatic neighborly interest of the
padrone
and any unoccupied customer within earshot.
Even
to have spoken a word of English
would have
aroused a curiosity which could
ultimately have been fatal.

“Saint!” the earpiece rasped
loudly. “What hap
pened
to you? Where are you! I was afraid you
were dead. An impossibly large Bugatti was re
ported abandoned in the country, and was
towed
in here to the
police garage. By a lucky accident I
took the job
of tracing the owner—who told me
that
you
had
hired it, and … Wait, what did you
say
about friends of ours? Do you mean—”

“I do. The ones we are both so fond of.
But tell
me first, where is the car
now?”

“The owner came to the
questura
with
an extra
set of keys
and wanted to take it away with him,
but I did not want to release it until I found out
what had happened to you, in case it should
be ex
amined again
for clues, so I had it impounded.”

“Good! I was going to tell you to grab
a taxi and
join me, but
the Bugatti might be more useful. I
have a lot of news about our friends which would
take too long to give you over the phone. So
why not un-impound the Bug and drive it here? I am in
a restaurant named
Da Gemma,
somewhere
near
the station—you
probably know it. The food
smells
are making my mouth water, so I shall order
something while I wait. But hurry, because I
think
we have a busy night coming
up.”

The only answer was an energized click at
the
other end of
the line; and the Saint grinned and
returned to his table and an assay of the menu for some sustaining
snack. Enough time and exercise
had
intervened since his picnic with Lily to create a
fresh appetite; and fortunately, late as it
was getting by northern standards, it was not at all an ex
ceptional hour for supper in the meridional
tradi
tion.

He was chasing the last juicy morsels of a
tasty
lepre in salmi
around his plate with a crust of bread when he
heard the reverberant gurgle of an un
mistakable exhaust outside, and Ponti burst
through the pendant strips of plastic that
curtained
the door. Simon
waved him to the place on the oth
er side of the table, where a clean glass and a fresh
carafe of wine had already been set up.

“I did not come here to get drunk with
you,” the
detective
said, pouring himself a glass and draining
half of it. “Be quick and tell me what
has hap
pened.”

“Among other things, I have been conked
on the
head, kidnaped,
shot at, and chased all over by an
assortment of bandits who must have a real grudge
against your Chamber of Commerce. But I sup
pose it would bore you to hear all my
private mis
adventures.
The part that I know will interest you
involves the location of a
castello
where
you can
find, if you move quickly enough, a
beautiful
sampling of the directors of that
Company in full
session, along with
the chairman of the board
himself,
whose name seems to be Pasquale.”

Although they were talking in low voices that
could hardly have carried
to the nearest occupied
table,
it still seemed circumspect to make certain
references only obliquely.

“I know all about that meeting,”
Ponti said. “Everything, that is, except the location. Where is
it?”

“I wouldn’t know how to give you the
address,
but I could
take you there.” Simon refilled their
glasses. “But you surprise me—you seem
to know
a lot more
about this organization than you did the
last time we talked.”

“I
should claim to have done some ex
traordinary
secret research, but I am too modest. I
owe it all to the sample of one of their
products
that was left
in your car, the one that was designed
to make the loud noise. You remember, there
was
a certain kind
of signature on the plastic. I photo
graphed it myself, and checked it against the identi
fication files while the clerk was at lunch.
The
Fates smiled,
for a change, and I discovered that
the marks were made by a local dealer named Nic
colo who has been accused of handling similar
goods before, but of course was absolved for lack
of evidence. I brought him in to the office myself
and managed to question him privately.”