Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

The crowded tables of a sidewalk cafe were suddenly on both sides of him. Perhaps there, Unciello’s men might see an opportunity.

He saw a vacant table at the edge of the sidewalk, next to the street, where it would be as easy as possible for them, and sat down.

A waiter took his order. A boy came by with an armful of newspapers, and Simon bought one. The kidnapping of Sue Inverest qualified for the biggest headline on the front page, and early in the story he found himself referred to as a friend of the girl, who had been “beaten and left for dead” on the scene; with a fine disregard for obvious probabilities, which was no more inconsistent than the facts, he was later reported being held by the police for investigation of his possible complicity in the crime.

His drink came, and he paid for it but did not touch it. He extracted a grim kind of satisfaction out of realizing that the chances of any food or drink offered to him being poisoned must be increasing with every minute. He could cope with that danger easily enough, at least for a while. It was less easy to become accustomed to the crawly feeling that at any instant a knife from nowhere might strike him between the shoulder-blades, or a fusillade of shots from a passing car smash him down into bloody oblivion. But that was what he had asked for, and he was beginning to sympathize with the emotions of a goat that had not merely been staked out to attract a tiger, but was cooperating with every resource of capric coquetry to coax the tiger to the bait. And all he could do was hope he was not mistaken in his estimate of Tony Unciello’s vein of curiosity...

He read on, looking for a reference to the mysterious secret clue he was supposed to have.

And then he had company.

There were two of them, and because he had studiously avoided watching for them they might have sprung up out of the ground. They stood one on each side of him, crowding him, and at the same time practically blocking him from the sight of the other patrons of the cafe. They were men of perfectly average size and build, dressed in perfectly commonplace dark suits, with perfectly unmemorable faces distinguished only by the perfect expressionlessness of their prototypes in any gangster movie. It was just like home.

The street was behind Simon, but that opening was closed, with admirable timing, by a car which simultaneously slid in to the curb and stopped at his back.

One of the men leaned on Simon’s shoulder with a hand that was buried in his coat pocket, but what the Saint felt was harder than a hand, and he knew that the muzzle of a gun was no more than an inch from his ear.

“Let’s-a go, sport,” the man said.

Simon tried to look up with the right combination of fear, surprise, and bluster.

“What are you talking about?”

“You, sport,” said the spokesman laconically. “Get in-a da car.”

Simon flicked his cigarette into the gutter, where it was immediately the center of a scramble of vulture-eyed urchins, and stood up. It was the only stir caused by his departure.

In the car, the two men sat one on each side of him, in the back seat. Each of them kept a hand in the pocket of his coat on the side nearest the Saint, one in the right, one in the left. Their two guns pressed with equal firmness against the neighborhood of the Saint’s kidneys. Neither of them offered any conversation. The driver of the car said nothing. He drove in competent silence, like a man who already had his instructions.

There were no shades inside the car, no suggestion of blindfolding the Saint, no attempt to stop him observing the route they took. The implication that nothing he saw would ever be any use to him was too obvious to be missed, but that gave him nothing unforeseen to worry about. He could still hope that the project was to take him to Tony Unciello before the only possible intended end of the ride.

They drove down to the Tiber, crossed over the Ponte Cavour, turned by the Palace of Justice. The great white dome of St Peter’s loomed ahead against the darkening sky, and lights played on the fountains in the vast circular piazza in front of the cathedral, but they left it on their right and skimmed around the walls of the Vatican City to plunge into the maze of mean streets which lies incongruously between it and the pleasant park slopes of Monte Gianicolo. A few zigzags through narrow ill-lit alleys, and the car stopped outside a small pizzeria and bar with strings of salami tastefully displayed in the dingy window.

“Get out, sport,” said the talking man.

His partner got out first, and waited for the Saint. The two of them closed in behind Simon and prodded him towards the door of the pizzeria. They kept him moving briskly through the odorous interior, but it was only to get their job done, not because they cared about anyone in the place. The drinkers at the bar just inside the entrance, the shirtsleeve bartender wiping glasses on a filthy rag, the few diners at the stained tables in the back, the slatternly woman who looked out of the open door of the kitchen in the rear, all stared at the Saint silently as he passed, but the stares were as emotionless and impersonal as the stares of zombies.

Next to the kitchen door there was a curtained archway; beyond it, a steep flight of stairs. They climbed to a narrow landing with two doors. The man who never spoke opened one of them and pushed the Saint through.

He found himself in a small untidy bedroom, but he hardly had time to glance over it before the same man was doing something to the big old-fashioned wardrobe which caused it to roll noiselessly aside like a huge sliding door.

“Keep-a moving, sport,” said the talkative one, and the Saint was shoved on through the opening.

As he stepped into the brightness beyond, as if on to a stage set, he knew that he had at least won the first leg of the double, even before he saw the man who waited for him.

“Hullo, Tony,” he said.

It was the contrast of the room in which he found himself after the squalor that he had been hustled through which was theatrical. It was spacious and high-ceilinged, exquisitely decorated and furnished, like a room in a set designer’s conception of a ducal palace. The Saint’s gaze traveled leisurely around it in frank fascination. From his impression of the street outside, he realized that the interiors of several ramshackle old buildings must have been torn out to provide a shell for that luxurious hideaway — a project that only a vast secret society could have undertaken and kept secret. Even the absence of windows was almost unnoticeable, for the indirect lighting was beautifully engineered and the air was fresh and cool.

“Quite a layout you have, for such a modest address,” Simon remarked approvingly. “And with air-conditioning, yet.”

“Sure, it’s plenty comfortable,” said Tony Unciello.

He sat in an immense brocaded chair, looking like a great gross frog. The resemblance held true for his sloping hairless head, his swarthy skin and heavy-lidded reptilian eyes, his broad stomach and thin splayed legs. In fact, almost the only un-froglike things about him were his clothes, the diamond rings on his fingers, and the cigar clamped in his wide thick-lipped mouth.

“So you’re the Saint,” Unciello said. “Sit down.”

Instantly Simon was pushed forward, the seat of an upright chair hit him behind the knees, and two hands on his shoulders pushed him forcefully down on it. His two escorts stood behind him like sentries.

The Saint straightened his coat.

“Really, Tony,” he murmured, “when you get hospitable, it’s just like being caught in a reaper.”

The gangster took the cigar out of one side of his mouth and put it back in the other. “I heard a lot about you, Saint.”