Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

There was something bizarre about the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli. During the afternoon, with no more effort than was called for by attentive listening, Simon learned that both men were the scions of local families, immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the century. Not long afterwards their paths had separated. The Ursellis had taken to the big cities, merging themselves flexibly into the pace and turmoil of a rising civilization; the Intuccios, unyielding peasants for as many generations as the oldest of them could remember, had naturally sent down their roots into the soil, preferring to find their livelihood in the surroundings to which they had been born. The divergence was summed up almost grotesquely in the two men; if the Saint’s hypersensitive intuition had not been startled into alertness by the other oddities that had struck him about Urselli, he might have found himself staying on for nothing but the amusement of the human comedy which they were acting.

It was not until dinner was half finished that Intuccio’s rock-like taciturnity unbent at all. They ate in the smoky oil-lighted kitchen, the four of them together round a stained pine table, in the incense of garlic and charring wood.

Urselli prattled on in a kind of strained desperation, as if the mighty silence that welled in on them whenever he stopped was more than his nerves could stand. The older man answered only with grunts and monosyllables; the girl Lucia spoke very little, whether from shyness or habit Simon could not decide, and the Saint himself felt that he was a spectator rather than a player — at least for those early scenes. It was as a spectator that Simon watched Intuccio wind the last reel of spaghetti dexterously round his fork, and heard him interrupt Urselli’s recital of the delights of Broadway to ask, “You have done well in your business, Amadeo?”

They were speaking in Italian, the language on which Intuccio stubbornly insisted, and which Simon spoke as easily as he.

“Well enough,” Urselli answered. “It was easy for me. I must have been born for it. Buy and sell, the same as any other business — there is only the one secret — and know what you can sell before you buy.” He slapped his waist. “Here in my belt I have twenty thousand good American dollars. And you, Salvatore?”

The other drank from his wineglass and wiped his matted black beard.

“I also have no complaints. Five years ago I have much land and everyone is paying the highest prices, but I have the intelligence to see that it will not always be like that. Ebbene , I sell the farm, and presently when the prices have gone down I buy this place. It is something for me to do, and I like to stay here. I have perhaps thirty thousand dollars, perhaps a little more. We are thrifty people, and we do not have to spend money on fine clothes.”

The meal was completed with some grudging attempts at graciousness on the part of Intuccio at which Urselli gave Simon a covert grimace of relief and turned his attentions more openly to Lucia. When it was over the girl picked up a pail and went out to draw water from the well to wash the dishes, and Urselli followed her out with an offer of help. The old man’s shadowed eyes gazed after them fixedly.

“You have an attractive daughter,” Simon observed, with a touch of humorous significance.

Intuccio’s face turned slowly back to him, and the Saint was surprised by its darkness. There was a hunted flicker of fear and suspicion at the back of the innkeeper’s eyes, the same look that Simon might have expected if he had burst into the solitude of a hermit.

“Perhaps I should not have told that Amadeo that I had so much money,” he said, with an equal significance in the harshness of his reply.

“Why worry,” asked the Saint gently, “when it was not true?”

For the first time the semblance of a smile touched the innkeeper’s grim mouth.

“Amadeo does not know that. But I had to say it. I have not three hundred dollars, signor, but I have pride. Why should I let Amadeo boast against me?”

He raised himself from the table and stumped out of the kitchen. Simon went out and smoked a cigarette in the fresh air on the veranda. Later he found the old man serving the scanty orders of his evening customers in the big gloomy outer room, moving about his work in the same heavy unsmiling manner.

Simon drifted into a place at the long communal table which occupied the center of the room. The four customers were at the other end of it, grouped over a game of poker. Simon ordered himself a drink and listened abstractedly to the scuff of cards and the expressionless voices of the players. Intuccio called for the girl to come out and take over the serving; she came, composed and silent, and the old man joined Simon at the table. He sat there with his brawny arms spread forward and his glass held clumsily between his huge hands, without speaking, and the Saint wondered what thoughts were passing through the dark caverns of that heavy impenetrable mind. There was a sense of menace about that somber immobility, a dreadful inhumanity of aloofness, that sent an eerie ripple of half-understanding up Simon Templar’s spine. Suddenly he knew why so few men came to the inn.

Amadeo Urselli entered jauntily, and pulled out a chair beside them.

“This is a dandy spot,” he said fluently. “You know, when I first dropped in here I nearly got straight back on the bus and went out again. Seemed like a guy would go nuts sittin’ around here with nothing to look at but a lot of mesquite. Well, now I guess movies and cabarets don’t mean so much compared with real home life. I could settle down in a town like this. Say, Salvatore, what’s the hunting around here?”

Intuccio lifted his eyes under their dense black brows. “Hunting?”

“Yeah. You got a swell rifle hangin’ on the wall outside. I took it down to have a look at it, and it was all cleaned and erled. Or is it in case the bandits come this way?”

The innkeeper sat motionless, as if he had not heard, staring at the glass cupped between his hands. The voices of the poker players muttered a pizzicato background to his stillness: “Two to come in.”

“And four.”

“Make it four more.”

“I’ll raise that ten.” The chips slithered and spilled across the board and hands were turned face downwards and sent spinning over the table to join the discard.

Intuccio, detached as a statue, turned his head as the game fell into the lull of a fresh deal.

“Mr Jupp, have you seen any bandits here?”

One of the players looked up.

“Since Roosevelt became President there have been no more bad men,” he said solemnly.

Another of the men leaned round in his chair.

“Yo’re new to these parts, I guess,” he drawled. “You oughta know that them stories belong back in the days of your grandfather. This is a peaceful country now.”

“By hookey,” erupted the third man, who wore a sheriff’s badge, “it had better be! You won’t see any bad men here while I’m responsible.”

Intuccio nodded. He turned to Urselli again, his eyes dispassionately intent, gleaming motionlessly in their hollow sockets like deep pools of stagnant water in a cave.

“You see, Amadeo?” he said. “At one time there were bad men and bandits here. Even now, sometimes, little things have happened. There are some who believe that the bad men are not altogether stamped out. But the times have changed.” The craglike head, inscrutable as a mask of rugged wax, held itself squarely in the field of Urselli’s shifting eyes. “Today you will find more robbers in the big cities of America than you will find here.”

Simon could still hear every intonation of the slow rough-hewn voice when he went up to bed, and he ran over it again and again in his mind while he smoked the last cigarette of the day. In spite of the recollection he lost no sleep. A glimpse of a pretty girl leads to an inn, and to the same inn comes an Americanized Italian who is not quite everything that an Americanized Italian should be, and all at once there is a mystery; that is how these things happen, but the Saint was still waiting for his own cue. Then he woke up late the next morning, and suddenly it dawned upon him, with dazzling simplicity, that the most elementary and obvious solution would be to lure Amadeo personally into a secluded spot, scratch him tactfully, and see what his subcutaneous ego looked like to the naked eye.