Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“You have seen nothing, Amadeo?”

“Nothing but flies,” said Urselli sourly.

He was pinkly sun-broiled and very bad-tempered, and the sight of his misery almost made up for the fact that they had not seen so much as a toe print of the mountain lion which they had set out to look for.

They arrived back at the hotel a few minutes after four. Urselli was the first to dismount, moving stiffly from the exertion of the day. He stopped to read a message that was nailed to the door; Simon, coming up behind him, saw the conventional black hand at the head of the letter before he could distinguish the words, and then Intuccio’s arm drove between them and ripped it down.

Urselli spoke from the side of a thin hard mouth.

“I thought there were no more bad men.”

Intuccio did not answer. The paper crumpled in his grasp, and without a word he thrust them both aside and crashed through the door. He stumbled over an upturned chair in the gloom as he went in, and then they stood on either side of him surveying the wreck of the kitchen. The center table was tilted drunkenly against the range of the far end, and two other chairs were flung into different corners, one of them broken. A saucepan lay at their feet, and little splashes of shattered china and glass winked up at them from the floor.

Intuccio dragged himself across the room and detached a fragment of gaily printed cotton stuff from the back of the broken chair. He stared at it dumbly. Then, without speaking, he held out the message from the door.

Simon took it and smoothed it out.

If you wish to see your daughter again, bring $20,000 in cash to the top of Skeleton Hill by midnight tonight. Come alone and unarmed. We shall not send a second warning. Death pays for treachery.

“You gotta pay, Salvatore,” Urselli was saying. “I’m tellin’ ya. You can’t fool with kidnappers. A gang that snatches a girl won’t stop for nothin’. Say, I remember when Red McLaughlin put the arm on Sappho Lirra—”

Intuccio straightened up lifelessly, like a stunned giant.

“I must find the sheriff,” he said.

The Saint’s hand crossed his path, barring it, in a gesture as lithe and vivid as the flick of a sword.

“Let me go.”

He went down the short road to the town with a light step. This was adventure as he understood it, objective and decisive, like a blast of music, and the Saint smiled as he went. Far might it be from him to deny the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli any of its quintessential poetry. He walked into the sheriff’s office and found Saddlebag’s solitary representative of the law at home.

“Lucia Intuccio has been kidnapped,” he said. “Will you come up?”

The man’s eyes bulged.

“Kidnapped?” he repeated incredulously.

“There was a note calling for twenty thousand dollars ransom nailed to the door,” said the Saint, and the sheriff took down his gun belt.

“I’ll be right along.”

Simon went with him. The news spread like an epidemic, and a dozen men had gathered in the back room when they arrived.

Intuccio told the story. He seemed to have shaken off some of his first numbness, and at intervals his eyes veered towards Urselli with an ugly soberness. When he had finished, the sheriff’s gaze leveled in the same direction.

“So,” he said slowly, “while Urselli knew that you’d be gone at least three hours, there wasn’t anybody to see what he was up to.”

“What of it?” protested Urselli grittily. “You got no—”

Simon interposed himself.

“We’re wasting time,” he said coolly. “I guess we ought to make a search.”

“Mebbe we will.” The sheriff’s gaze did not shift. “You’ll come as well, Urselli — and stay with me.”

The group of men filed out quickly, splitting up outside into two and threes, for there were less than five hours of daylight left — an almost hopeless time in which to find and follow a cold trail in that wild country. Simon joined them.

The sun went down in a riot of gold and crimson, and the search parties began to filter back through the gray-blue dusk. By ten o’clock, when the night was a vaulted bowl of dark glass studded with silver pin points, they were all gathered together at the inn, and the sheriff, with Intuccio and Urselli, came in last while they were all waiting.

There was no need for questions. A silence that was its own answer hung in the room, mirroring itself in the glazed tension of the yellow highlights smeared by the single oil lamp on the circle of leathery faces. The angles of black shadow in the far corners held the strained heaviness of a mounting thunderstorm.

The sheriff read through the ransom notice again, and raised his eyes to Intuccio’s face. The nervous scrape of a man’s feet on the bare floor rasped a nerve-stabbing discord into the stillness before he spoke.

“You wasn’t aimin’ to pay this money, was you, Salvatore?”

The old man stared back at him haggardly. Before he came in, the alternatives had been discussed by the reassembled search parties in measured low-pitched voices that scarcely ruffled the texture of the air. Organized help could not come from the nearest big town before midnight — it might not come before morning. What would the sophisticated city police think of Black Hand threats?

“ Buon Dio! ” said Intuccio, in a terrible voice, “I have not so much money in the world.”

Urselli started.

“But you said yesterday—”

“I lied.”

The innkeeper’s great fists were clenched at his sides, his powerful shoulders quivering under his soiled shirt.

“I have always failed. Everything I touched has been under a curse. You all know how the farm ate up my money until it was nearly all lost, and the land was sold for the mortgages. You all know how I bought this inn to try and make a living, but none of you came here. Perhaps you were afraid of me because I never laughed with you. Dio mio , as if a man who has suffered as much as I have could laugh! You thought I had the evil eye, some black secret that made me unfit to be one of you. Yes, I had. But the only secret was one which you all knew — that I had failed... But when that cousin of mine came back from Chicago, with his fine clothes and his jewels, and boasted of the money he made — I lied. I did not want to see him despise me. I told him I had thirty thousand dollars. I have not got five hundred.”

Urselli lighted a cigarette mechanically.

“That looks bad,” he said. “I tell you, those guys mean business.”

“You know a great deal about them, Amadeo? You speak from experience?”

The innkeeper’s burning eyes were bent rigidly on the smaller man’s face. There were red notes glinting in them, hot swirling sparks from a fire that was breaking loose deep within them. In the core of the soft voice was a deep vibrant note like the premonitory rumble of a volcano. “Perhaps you know more than any of us?”

Urselli looked right and left, with a sudden widening of his rat-like eyes. Not one of the ring of faces painted in the lamplight moved an eyelash. They waited.

He sucked at his cigarette, the tip flickering abruptly to the uncertain inhalation.

“In the cities, you hear things,” he gabbled shakily. “You read newspapers. I’m only tellin’ you—”

“Now I will tell you!”

Intuccio’s restraint broke at last; the fire that was in him seethed through in a jagged roar. His iron hands crushed into the other’s shoulders, half lifting, half hurling him round.

“I said last night that you would find more robbers in the big cities of America than you would find here. I was right. Here is one of them! A dog who has come back to the home where he does not belong any longer!”