Leslie Charteris - Vendetta for the Saint

Ponti had the Bugatti in gear and moving again by that time.

“Then they are probably still hiding in the village! We only have to locate the house—”

“And get mowed down when we do it. At one time I saw at least four passengers in that car, and wherever they went to earth is bound to be a nest of more mafiosi. No, you will have to go back and meet Fusco’s scout car, and radio for reinforcements.”

“And give those fannulloni time to slip away!”

“That is why I made you take the wheel. You will go through the village in low gear, making a terrific noise, and skidding your tires around the corners, so that they will hear everything and have no doubt that you went through without stopping. But actually as you come into the main street you will only be doing about fifteen kilometers an hour, and that is when I shall leave you. If they do try to slip away, I shall either follow them or try to detain them.”

“It is an insane plan. What chance would you have?”

“What better chance do we have? Try to apply the power of positive thinking, Marco mio. Look on the bright side. This may be where the Ungodly are delivered right into our hands. And I feel lucky tonight!”

Running downhill, the dark outskirts of the village were before them surprisingly quickly, and the curve into the side street that would intersect the main road.

“Down into second gear,” snapped the Saint. “Give them the full sound effects. With enough tire-squealing, exhaust-roaring, and gear-grinding, they should be convinced that you went through here like a maniac, and it will never occur to them that we are plagiarizing their brainstorm.”

“I only hope,” Ponti said gloomily, “That you know some rich industrialist who will give a job to an ignominiously discharged police officer, if there is not a happy ending to this night’s work.”

But he obeyed his instructions, taking the bend on two protesting wheels and slipping the clutch to get an extra howl out of the engine. Simon unlatched the door on his side and braced himself, holding it ready to let it fly open at the right moment as they blatted down the narrow street. With the main street junction rushing towards them, Ponti added the extra touch of a blast on the horn which raised stentorian echoes from the sleepy walls, and which Simon could only hope would give pause to any other vehicle which might happen to be on a collision course on the main road. Then came another screech of rubber, and the Bugatti broadsided around the corner.

Ponti took the clutch out again as soon as he had steadied the car, but kept the throttle open to maintain the level of exhaust noise, and during that instant of minimum speed Simon threw the door open and jumped. He had not touched the ground when Ponti let the clutch in again and set the red monster racing away.

The Saint landed running, the slap of his feet drowned in the departing reverberations of the motor, and in five long strides he was sheltered in the darkness of a doorway. The Bugatti vanished down the road, its uproar died away, and stillness descended again like a palpable blanket.

He was alone once more, in a citadel of potential enemies.

For five minutes he stood in the doorway, un-moving and silent as the ancient walls. He saw no lights and heard no sounds, and the windows of the buildings opposite from which he might have been observed remained shuttered and dark. A scrawny cat stalked down the sidewalk, paused to gaze at him speculatively, and hurried on. Other than that there was no sign of life. It was impossible that the tumultuous passage of automobiles had not disturbed anyone, but either the inhabitants had learned that discretion was the better part of curiosity in those Mafia-dominated hills or they were more bucolically interested in getting back to sleep for the last hour or two of rest before another morning’s toil.

With the luminous dial of his watch turned to the inside of his wrist so that its glow would not betray him to any hidden watcher, if there were one, he verified that it was twenty minutes past three. So much had happened that night that it seemed as if it should already have been completely spent, yet he estimated that there must still be about an hour of darkness left. An hour which would give him the most concealment, before the early risers began to stir and the gray pre-dawn exposed him to their view.

Which was either plenty of time, or nothing like enough...

At first impression, it might have seemed an impossible task, to locate the hideout of Al Destamio and his buddies among all those barred and silent buildings. But actually it was by no means a search without clues. In the first place, by far the greater part of the village, through which Simon had had the limousine in sight, could be ruled out. Secondly, his quarry’s choice of that particular town had not been dictated by its cultural amenities or picturesque charm, nor would it have been picked on the spur of the moment: the Ungodly must have known exactly what refuge they were going to dive into when they hopped out of their car, without trusting that blind luck would let them blunder into something suitable. Nor would this merely be the home of some known sympathizer, since this would have involved an impossible delay for banging on the door to rouse him and waiting for him to open up. It had to be a place that they could get into at once; and since the telephone lines to the chateau had been cut long before their flight, they could not have called ahead to announce their arrival and prepare anyone to receive them. Therefore it would have to be a place to which they had a key, or where they knew that some door was always unlocked. Therefore it was most probably the home of one of them. And to qualify as the domicile of such an exalted member of the Mafia, it would have to be perceptibly more pretentious than the average of its neighbors. So that again a greater part of the remaining theoretical possibilities could be eliminated.

Satisfied now that he was not being observed, Simon Templar eased himself out of the doorway and made his way back up the side street as soundlessly as the cat.

The hideout was almost certainly beyond the second turning at the end of the block, since that would have given the fugitives more time to disappear before the Bugatti could come in sight of them again, and somewhere within the fifty-yard stretch that had separated him from the limousine when he saw it again. The Saint moved more slowly from the corner, staying in the deepest shadows and assessing the buildings on each side, his eyes and ears straining to pick up any glimmer of light or whisper of sound that would betray a suspiciously early wakefulness within.

The houses were ranged shoulder to shoulder, but not in an even line, some having chosen to set farther back from the road than others. Simon prowled past two, then three, a small shop with living quarters above, another tall narrow building, none of them giving any sign of life. Then there was something only about two meters high which pushed out closer to the road than any of its neighbors, and in a moment Simon realized that it was not the projection of a ground floor but simply of a wall enclosing the front garden of a building which was itself set back quite a distance from the street.

And as he drifted wraith-like towards the angle, he heard from beyond it a soft scuff of footsteps, and his pulse beat a fraction faster at the virtual certainty that this must be the place where Destamio & Co had holed up.

As he flattened himself against the side wall, with his head turned to allow only one eye to peep around the corner, a black shape took one step out from a gateway in the front and stood to glance up and down the road. The firefly glow of a cigarette-end brightened to reveal the coarse cruel face of a typical subordinate goon, and to glint on the barrel of what looked like a shotgun tucked under his arm.