Leslie Charteris - Vendetta for the Saint

That was the obliging clincher. A large house, behind a walled garden — and an armed guard at the gate. Any skeptic who insisted on more proof would probably have refused to believe that an H-bomb had hit him until his dust had been tested with a Geiger counter.

So now all that Simon had to do was to withdraw as softly as he had come, meet Ponti and the soldiers outside the town, and lead them to the spot.

Except that such relatively passive participation had never been the Saint’s favorite role. And it would certainly have been an anticlimactic denouement to the enterprise which had brought him that far. Besides which, he had already been pushed around too much by the Mafia to complacently leave others to administer their comeuppance. Major Olivetti and his bersaglieri had been fine for a frontal attack on the castle fortress, the boom of mortar shells and the flicker of tracer bullets had made it a stirring production number worthy of wide-screen photography; but Simon felt that something more intimate was called for in his personal settlement with Al Destamio.

He waited motionless, with infinite patience, until finally the bored sentinel turned and went back into the garden.

With the fluid silence of a stalking tiger the Saint followed behind him, and sprang.

The first intimation of disaster that the sentry had was when an arm snaked over his shoulder and the braced thumb-joint of its circling fist thumped into his larynx. Paralyzed, he could neither breathe nor yell, and he never noticed the second blow on the side of his neck that rendered him mercifully unconscious.

The Saint caught the shotgun as it dropped, and with his other hand clutched the man’s clothing and eased his fall to the ground into a mere rustling collapse. Then he picked the limp form off the driveway and carried it to the shadow of a clump of bushes and rolled it under.

The driveway led straight to the doors of a garage, a status symbol which had obviously been cut into one corner of the ground floor of an edifice much older than the horseless carriage, and a flagged path branched from it to three steps which mounted to the front door. Simon tiptoed up the steps, and the door yielded to his touch — which was no more than he expected, for the Ungodly would hardly have been old-maidishly apprehensive enough to have locked the guard outside. The hallway inside was dark; but light came from a crack under a door at the back, and a deep murmur of male voices. With the shotgun in one hand, Simon inched towards the light with hyper-sensory alertness for any invisible obstacle that might catastrophically trip him.

The voices came through the door distinctively enough for him to recognize the hoarse rasp of Destamio’s; but the conversation was mostly in Sicilian dialect, mangled and machine-gun fast, which made it almost impossible for him to follow. Occasionally someone would slip into ordinary Italian, which was more tantalizing than helpful, since the responses instantly became as unintelligible as the context. There seemed to be a debate as to whether they should lie low there, or leave together in a car which appeared to be available, or disperse; the argument seemed to hinge on whether their assembly should be considered to have completed its business for the present, or to have only been adjourned. The controversy flowed back and forth, with Destamio’s voice becoming increasingly louder and more forceful: he seemed to be well on the way to dominating the opposition. But the next most persistent if quieter voice cut in with some proposal which seemed to find unanimous acceptance: the general mutter of approval merged into a scraping of chairs and a scuffle of feet, the inchoate clatter of men rising from a council table and preparing to fly the coop.

Which was precisely the move that Simon Templar had undertaken to deter.

He had no time to make any plan, he would have to play it entirely by ear, but at least he could give himself the priceless advantage of the initiative, of throwing them off balance and forcing them to react, while giving them the impression that he knew exactly where he was going.

Before anyone else could do it, he flung open the door and stood squarely in the opening, the shotgun levelled from his hip.

“Were you looking for me?” he inquired mildly.

Pure shock froze them in odd attitudes like a frame from a movie film stopped in mid-action, a ludicrous tableau of gaping mouths and bulging eyes. The apparition on the very threshold of their secret conclave of the man they had been trying to dispose of in one way or another for a day and two nights, who must have been responsible for their recent rout before the armed forces of justice, and who they had every right to believe had at least temporarily been shaken off, would have been enough to immobilize them for a while even without the menace of his weapon.

There were four of them: nearest the Saint, a stocky man with a porcine face and a scar, and a taller cadaverous one with thick lips which made him look like a rather negroid death’s-head, both of whom Simon had seen at the bedside of Don Pasquale, and behind them Al Destamio and the man called Cirano with the nose to match it. They had been sitting around a circular dining table on which were glasses and a bottle of grappa, under a single light bulb with a wide conical brass shade over it. Cigarette and cigar ashes and butts soiled a gilt-edged plate that had been used as an ashtray.

Destamio was the first to recover his wits.

“It’s a bluff,” he croaked. “He only has two shots with that thing. He dare not use it because he knows that even if he gets two of us the other two will get him.”

He said this in plain Italian, for the Saint’s benefit.

Simon smiled.

“So which two of you would like to be the heroes, and sacrifice yourselves for the other two?”

There was no immediate rush of volunteers.

“Then move back a bit,” ordered the Saint, swinging the shotgun. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Scarface and Skullface gave ground, not unwillingly; but Destamio kept behind Skullface, whose bulk was not quite sufficient to mask the protrusion of Destamio’s elbow as his right hand crept up his side. Simon’s restless eyes caught the movement, and his voice sliced through the smoky air like a sword.

“Stop him, Cirano! Or you may never find out why he is a bad security risk.”

“I would like to know about that,” Cirano said, and widened his mouth in a tight grin that made double pothooks on each side of his majestic nose.

He did more than talk; he caught hold of Destamio’s right wrist, arresting its stealthy crawl towards the hip. Their muscles conflicted for a second before Destamio must have realized that even the slightest struggle would nullify any advantage he might have sneaked, and hatred replaced movement as an almost equally palpable link between them.

“You would listen to anyone if he was against me, non è vero?” Destamio snarled. “Even to this—”

“A good leader listens to everything before he makes up his mind, Alessandro,” Cirano said equably. “You can be the first to sacrifice yourself when he has spoken, if you like, but there can be no harm in hearing what he has to say. You have nothing to cover up, have you?”

Destamio growled deep in his throat, but made no articulate answer. He abandoned his effort reluctantly, with a disgusted shrug that tried to convey that anyone stupid enough to accept such reasoning deserved all the nonsense that it would get him. But his beady eyes were tense and vicious.

“That’s better,” drawled the Saint. “Now we can have a civilized chat.”

He advanced to within reach of the bottle on the table, picked it up, and took a sampling swig from it, without shifting his gaze from his captive audience. He lowered the bottle again promptly, with a grimace and a shudder, but did not put it down.