Vendetta for the Saint

1

The Saint’s jacket was gone, and his trouser pockets had been emptied of everything except a handful of small change which had been almost contemptuously left. He took out a five-lire piece and dropped it out of the window from arm’s length. It vanished into the gloom below, but for as long as he strained his ears he could not hear it strike bottom. Whatever was below the window had to be a long way down.

But the door offered no alternative. It was massively constructed of thick planks bolted together and belted with iron straps; and while the lock would probably have been easy to pick if he had had any sort of tool, there was simply nothing on him or in the bare room that he could use. The window might seem like a kind of Russian roulette with five chambers loaded, but it was the only possible way out. And to remain there was certain death.

Without wasting another instant of precious time, Simon tore the blanket from the cot and began to rip it into usable strips. Knotted together, along with the cord with which he had been tied, they gave him a rope about thirty feet long and of highly speculative strength. He had often read about this standard device, like everyone else, but had had just as few occasions as anyone to try it out in practice. There was no way to test it in advance, other than by strenuous tugging, which appeared to reveal no intrinsic weakness. Less than ten minutes after he had been locked in, he had one end of the rope secured to the frame of the bed, and the bed itself propped up across the window, allowing the greatest possible length of his improvised hawser to hang down the wall.

He sat on the sill, his legs dangling over the void, and studied as much as he could of the situation. Though the details of the gorge below were still concealed by the morning mist, the sky was now rapidly lightening — enough to disclose a broadening range of topographical features.

The cliff on which the house was perched formed part of one side of a narrow valley through which straggled a small village with a fair-sized church spire reaching above the white houses. Beyond the town the hills rose again abruptly, and even higher peaks probed skyward in the distance. To the left, through the clearing haze, he could just make out a thin ribbon of road winding upwards along the opposite slope; to the right, it seemed to descend from the village. Holding on with one hand and leaning as far out as he could, he was rewarded with a glint of sunlight reflected on water, far off in the latter direction. The road to the right, then, led down towards the sea, and that would be the direction of escape. He hadn’t the vaguest idea where on the map he was, but he knew that the interior of Sicily consisted almost entirely of mountain ranges, and that the main roads followed the coast line of that triangular island to connect the larger cities, all of which are on the sea.

From beyond the door behind him he heard footsteps again, and the metallic rattle of the key in the lock. If he was going to fly the coop at all, this was the positively last chance for take-off.

With a sinuous motion he twisted off the ledge until he hung supported only by his fingers. Then he shifted one hand to the blanket-rope and gradually transferred his weight, experimentally, until all of it was on the rope. The ancient fabric stretched but held; and thereafter his most urgent concern was to make the strain on it as brief as possible. He lowered himself hand under hand with a speed that came close to that of a circus acrobat, tempered only by the requirement of avoiding any abrupt jerks or jolts that might tax his makeshift life-line beyond its dubious breaking-point.

He was halfway down when a gaping face appeared from the window above him, and two yards lower before it could express its perplexity in words.

“Che cosa fai?”

Believing that anyone who asked what he was doing, in those circumstances, could not be seriously expecting an answer, Simon ignored the intrusion and concentrated even more intensely on his gymnastic performance. Therefore he was looking downwards when the man produced a gun, and the first indication he had of its presence was the crack of the shot and the dying scream of a bullet ricocheting from the wall near his head. It took an ice-nerved self-discipline to make no change in the smoothness of his descent — or perhaps he was more worried about the capacity of his rope than about the marksmanship of the man upstairs.

From above, next, he heard the voice of Al Destamio engaged in noisy altercation with the gunman. It seemed that Al didn’t want him to shoot any more, for reasons which the Saint could appreciate, but which were meeting a good deal of consumer resistance from the minor mafioso, who had discovered a delightfully novel form of target practice and resented being deprived of it. While they wrangled, Simon descended a few more feet, and literally came to the end of his rope.

Holding on with one vise-clamped fist, he saw that his feet were still almost a metre above the bottom of the wall, which was based less than half that distance from the cliff edge. Below that lip, the rock face dropped away at a slant of about eighty degrees to an orchard that looked almost far enough to open a parachute, which he wished he had. Especially as the argument at the window overhead seemed to be compromised with a violent shaking or hauling on the flimsy filament from which he was suspended.

He had no choice but to take one more gamble.

He opened his hand and dropped...

He landed lightly on his toes, knees bending to cushion the steadiest possible landing. Dirt crumbled and gravel trickled down the escarpment, but the rock foundation was solid. He rested there a moment, plastered against the gripless wall of the building and envying octopods with suction cups in their tentacles.

The nearest corner of the house was at least twenty feet to his right, and he began to edge cautiously in that direction. There was a sudden silence from the window above, and it did not take much imagination to visualize Destamio and others trundling around to meet him. But there was a good chance that he could reach the side of the building before they could make their way to the same area by a more normal route through the house. Once he was off the vertiginous ledge, he would have to extemporize his next step according to what openings presented themselves. His planning had gone no farther than this, where he considered himself comparatively fortunate to be.

Which was all to the good, since he was destined never to reach the corner of the building. Another of the Mafia security corps had apparently been already outside, and upon hearing the shots had moved to investigate this unwonted matutinal activity. His head appeared like a jack-in-the-box around the angle towards which Simon was inching his precarious way.

“Buon giorno,” said the Saint, with his maximum affability. “Is this the way to the bathroom?”

The reaction was fully as obvious and exaggerated as a cinematic double-take. The newcomer’s sagging jaw dragged his mouth open in a befuddled O, exposing an interesting assortment of gold teeth interspersed with the blackened stumps of their less privileged fellows which had yet to benefit from auric reconstitution.

“Che cosa fai?”

The question seemed no less inanely rhetorical to the Saint than it had on the previous occasion, but this time he made an attempt to keep the conversation going.

“Ebbene, it is like this,” he replied, while he sank carefully to one knee and his other leg dropped over the cliff edge, his toe groping for a support. “There have been complaints about the foundations of this castle. We do not want Don Pasquale’s end to be accelerated by having his sick-room fall out from under him. So I have been called in to examine the underpinnings. I am inclined to suspect Death Watch beetles — does that sound likely to you?”

The opinion of his audience, which had been half-hypnotized into watching in blank stupefaction while Simon meantime levered himself over the ledge until only his chin was above its level, was not revealed because he was suddenly yanked back and replaced by the gunman who had taken his last pot shot from the upper window.

“Come back!” shouted the man, with somewhat idiotic optimism, as he tried to get into an aiming position.

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint, “but my union only allows me to climb down. To bring me up you must send an elevator.”

The gunman’s homicidal zeal was, not diminished by this reasonable answer, but he was severely handicapped by the mechanics of the situation. The precipice began at his feet, and the base of the building came almost to its edge on his right. If it had been the opposite way around, or if he had been left-handed, it would have been simplicity itself to poke his head and gun-hand around the corner and bang away. But being one of the right-handed majority, there was no way he could comfortably bring his gun to bear, short of stepping out and resting at least one foot on a cloud. He tried a couple of snap shots without that levitational assistance, but with his hand bent awkwardly back from his wrist the bullets went wide and the recoils almost dislodged him from his insecure stance on the rim of the chasm.

While he struggled with this peculiar problem, his quarry was working steadily down the sheer wall with an unexpected virtuosity that would have won respect from challengers of the Eiger. And by the time he had figured out the possible solution of lying flat on his stomach and wriggling out over the void for half the length of his chest, prepared even from that extension to try a southpaw shot if necessary, he was stung to a scream of frustration by the discovery that his target had meanwhile managed to claw his way around a sufficient bulge in the illusory plane of the cliff to be completely shielded from his line of sight.

While his would-be assassin may have been mentally elaborating excuses for the one that got away, Simon was still a long drop from feeling home and safe. He had done some rock climbing, as he had tried every other hazardous sport in his time, and he had muscles and agility that many professionals might have envied, but he would never have claimed to be an expert mountaineer. High-octane adrenalin was the primitive fuel that drove him, clinging like a limpet to an almost vertical gradient, his toes scrabbling for irregularities that might lend a bare ridge of support, his fingers hooking into grooves and crannies that only centuries of weather had eaten into the unsympathetic stone.

Having no time to be precise or technical, he took risks that no seasoned alpinist would have considered. He surrendered his weight to handholds that had not been fully tested, and one of them pulled away, a jagged chunk of rock that crashed down among the trees below, leaving him for one desperate moment without support of any kind, except the friction of his body pressed against the natural wall. Yet even as he slid, his hands were racing over the fissured incline and found another minuscule ridge, and he resumed his ingloriously frantic descent.

At infinitely long last something brushed his shoulder which he realized was a fruit-laden branch. With a quick twist he grasped it, swung down to the ground, and took off running through the grove.

Far above him, through the clear air, he heard the grind of a starter and the roar of a car’s engine breaking into life. Someone up there had finally realized that there might be better ways of cutting him off towards his destination than from his starting point.

He ran.

A patch of open meadow separated the orchards, and as he crossed it there was a flurry of echoes from high behind him, and something whistled past his ear and thudded into the turf. He accepted this with an equanimity which owed no little to the cold-blooded estimate that at such a distance a hand gun was approximately as dangerous as a well-hurled pebble. He had a more serious threat to worry about: the howl of an over-stressed motor came faintly down to his ears, and a large black limousine, strangely reminiscent of movies about Prohibition days in America, hurtled into view on a road that came over the cliff top near the house and zigzagged down towards the village. Its intentions were obvious from the maniac speed with which it attacked the descent, broadsiding on the turns and throwing up clouds of gravel and dust. Even though his predicament was no longer cliff-hanging, he could still be cut off...

The Saint doubled his pace and fairly flew down the more gentle slope, hurdling the tumbled-stone fences, pitting his own speed and freedom of choice against the more devious routes which the faster car was obliged to follow. As soon as he reached the shelter of the next grove, he angled off to the right, a change of course that would be hidden from watchers at the cliff top. The limousine was also invisible now behind the trees, but he could trace its progress by the whine of gears and the chatter of skidding tires. The element of desperate uncertainty was where his path and the road would intersect.

The pain in the back of his skull where he had been bludgeoned had long since been cured or driven out of consciousness by the pressure of more imperative demands on his attention. Another fence rose up ahead, made of the same broken slabs of stone fitted together without mortar, and again he took it like a steeplechaser, without breaking stride to make sure what was beyond. This was reckless, but he had little choice: the sounds of the car were coming much too close to permit leisured reconnaissance. As he cleared the wall, he discovered that the ground beyond had been cut away, making a drop of six feet on the other side — where the road itself was responsible for the cutting. He took the fall easily, touching his hands to the gravel with the force of the impact but instantly springing up again. But in one swift glance around he saw the top of the black sedan over the tops of some young olive trees a scant hundred yards farther up the incline. Only the configuration of the ground and an intervening hairpin bend prevented its occupants from seeing him as well.

In terms of the speed of the approaching vehicle, that advantage represented mere seconds of grace. Rebounding like a rubber ball, Simon took two more immense strides across the road and dived head first over the lower wall on the other side, landing with a paratrooper’s shoulder roll and staying flat on the ground at the end of it.

A shaved moment later, the car slashed around the bend and screeched to a rubber-rending stop just beyond the place where the Saint had crossed. It was so close that spurted gravel rattled against the wall and the dust floated over his head. If he had been a fraction slower he would have been caught on the road; ten seconds slower in his breakneck run and he would have been trapped in the groves above, which the mafiosi were now invading.

Rising up with infinite wariness until he could look over the wall near him, he saw four of them clambering over the higher wall to spread out through the trees. The chauffeur who had navigated the projectile descent of the cliff road still sat at the wheel of the big car, and not much farther was the broad sweat-stained back of Al Destamio himself, shouting orders to his advance pack of hoodlums. Everyone was actively oriented to the upward angles, apparently fully convinced that at that point they must have well outdistanced the Saint and need not bother to look for him below them.

The temptation to counter-attack from the rear was almost overwhelming, and if it had been only a matter of Destamio or his driver the Saint would have probably failed nobly to resist it. But the two together, spaced as far apart as they were, constituted just too much risk that any hitch in the taking out of the first might give the second a chance to raise an alarm that would reverse all the convenient preconceptions of the squad that expected the Saint to fall into their arms from above. Reluctantly, he decided that this was a case where commonsensical considerations should outweigh the superficial allures of grandstand glory.

He turned away, rather sadly remembering more juvenile days when he would have chosen otherwise, and melted silently down through the vineyard where he had landed.

2

He could count on a brief respite while the searchers above vainly combed the upper slopes where they seemed to think they had cornered him. With that preconceived idea, it would take them between half an hour and an hour to convince themselves that he had gone past them and not crawled into some undiscovered hole. Then the word would have to be passed to headquarters, and a more widespread search would have to be organized. This would be a blanket operation that would enlist the entire Mafia and all their sympathisers, who possibly comprised most of the island’s population. Every man’s hand would be against him; but he would know where he stood with any man.

The thought was briefly invigorating as he increased his pace. Staying out of the hot clutches of the Mafia might be the most difficult accomplishment of his checkered career; but if he could survive that cliche he might be able to outlast anything.

One stairwayed vineyard led down to another as his giant strides carried him through them towards the valley town. The contadini of the outskirts were already awake and scratching at their tiny allotments with medieval mattocks. They seemed to notice Simon only disinterestedly as he passed, as if their tenure under the very shadow of the Mafia allowed them only to observe when specifically called upon to do so. The sight of a hurrying man in a torn shirt coming from the direction of the Mafia mansion evoked no response but hastily averted eyes: they would remember his passage if the correct parties inquired later, but right now they would neither hinder nor help.

Simon dismissed them as ciphers in this desperate game, and made no stop or detour on their account until he reached the first outlying buildings of the town, where he paused briefly to do what little he could to make himself slightly more presentable.

One shirt-sleeve was unrepairable, split up almost to the shoulder. Ripping off the cuff, he used it as a band on which to roll up the remains of the sleeve. When he rolled up the other sleeve to match, the torn one was hardly noticeable. He brushed the dirt from his hands, dusted his slacks as best he could, and combed his hair with his fingers — wincing slightly when they touched the knot above his occiput, and making another mental entry in the ledger that would have to be balanced with Al Destamio’s account when they came to a final settlement. With that, he was as ready to go on as he would ever be.

The nameless town which he had to enter was already coming to life, since like any microcosm of the south it moved more quickly in the cool of the morning in order to doze better during the incinerating afternoon. Before finally entering a narrow alley that would surely lead to the main street, Simon checked backwards to see that his trail was still free of pursuers, and was rewarded with an unexpected and arresting sight. His downward path had widened his visual scope, and now he could see not only his recently deserted prison on the overhanging cliff but also a more distant mountain rising beyond and dwarfing it, a summit from which a think plume of smoke coiled lazily upwards.

Even the most superficial student of geological grandeurs could have recognized the symptoms of a dormant volcano; and since there is only one such on the island of Sicily, at the same time the highest in Europe and one of the largest in the world, Simon knew that he must be looking at Mount Etna. And aside from any casual vulcanological interest, it performed the important function of telling him exactly where he was.

To visualize a map of Sicily, as the Saint did, you might think of a piece of pie about to be kicked by the toe of a boot, which is the shape of the Italian peninsula. The resemblance is only in outline, and should not lead to any symbolic inferences. The top side of this pie-wedge is fairly straight and runs almost due east and west. The volcano of Etna is situated in the upper eastern corner of the triangle. Since the Saint was looking towards it, and the sun was rising behind it, the most rudimentary geographical acumen or even the basic training of a boy scout would have been enough to tell him that the road downhill from the unknown town he was entering must run north to join the coastal highway somewhere between Messina and Palermo. To some exigent critics this deduction might still have seemed to fall far short of pinpointing a position, but to Simon Templar it provided a fix from which he would have cheerfully set a course to Mars.

As he reached the central square of the town, he had a clear view of the valley road that bisected it and wandered on down to the now occulted sea. That trail of patched macadam, he knew, was a siren’s lure that beckoned only to his death. Though it looked open, it would be the first avenue to be watched, closed, or booby-trapped. The Mafia might not be overly concerned with Destamio’s personal problems, but they would be ruthlessly jealous of their own prerogatives, which the Saint had affronted with insulting levity. Therefore all their resources, spread like a spider cancer through the entire community, would be devoted to the simple objective of cutting him down. And the main thoroughfares would be the first and most obvious avenues for them to cover.

Across the square, in front of the town’s principal and possibly only hotel, an assortment of early-rising tourists were loading their luggage and their young into various cars. Two families of beaming Bavarians, complete with lederhosen and beer bellies, obviously travelling together in identical beetle-nosed Volkswagens; a middle-aged Frenchman with his dependable Peugeot and a chic chick who somehow looked a most unconvincing wife; and an oversized station wagon whose superfluous fins and garbage-can-lid rear lights would have revealed its transatlantic origin long before the red and black identification of the American forces in Europe could have been deciphered on its dusty license plate. The gaudy pseudo-Hawaiian shirt worn like a pregnancy smock outside the tired slacks of its proprietor was no disguise for a certain pugnacity of jaw and steeliness of eye which stamp a professional sergeant in peace or war.

Simon’s spirits rose another notch. With such a type, opportunity might not be exactly pounding at his door, but at least he could hear it tap.

He waited till the last suitcase had been jammed into the truck-sized rear deck, and the last squalling brat trapped and stowed amidships, and then he approached the near-side window just as the driver was settling in and turning on the engine.

“I hate to make like a hitch-hiker,” he said, with just the right blend of fellow-American camaraderie combined with undertones of a wartime commission, “but could you drop me off a couple of miles down the valley? I had to bring my car in to be fixed at the garage here, and it won’t be done till this evening.”

While the sergeant hesitated momentarily, from the ingrained suspicion of all professional sergeants, his wife moved over to make room on the front seat.

“Sure,” she said, making up his mind for him like any good American wife. “No trouble at all.”

The Saint got in, and they pulled away. By this time, he figured that Destamio and the first pursuit squad might be debating the possibility that they had not after all headed him where they stopped on the road.

“What you doin’ around here?” asked the sergeant sociably, after a time.

“Spending a vacation with some cousins,” Simon answered casually, knowing that his black hair and tanned complexion would superficially support a fictional Italian ancestry. “They’ve got a farm down the road a piece. First time I’ve ever been here — my folks emigrated before I was born.”

“Where you from, then?”

“New York.”

A trite choice, but one where he knew he could not be caught out on any topographical details, and big enough not to lead into any aquaintance pitfalls of the “Do you know Joe Blow?” pattern.

“We’re from Dallas, Texas. We don’t get out much into the suburbs.”

It was astonishingly easy, and might have tempted anyone to parlay his luck as far as the ride could be stretched. But the Saint had attained his present age mainly because he was not just anyone. Very shortly, his pursuers would extend their search into the town, where they would soon find some loafer in the square who had seen a man answering to Simon’s description getting into an unmistakable American car. With the speed of a couple of telephone calls, the word would be flashed ahead to confreres along the littoral, and before the station wagon even reached the coast the highway in both directions would be alive with eyes that would never let it out of their sight. From that moment there would be nowhere he could leave the car without the probability of being observed and followed, while to stay in it would risk an unthinkable involvement of its innocent occupants in any splashy attempts at his own destruction.

Watching the road ahead for any side tracks that could plausibly lead to a farm, he finally spotted a suitable turning and said: “Right here — don’t try to take me to the door, you’d have a job turning around to get out again. And thanks a million.”

“You’re welcome.”

Simon got out, and the car shot off as he waved good-bye.

Now until they stopped the station wagon and questioned the driver, Destamio’s cohorts would be partially baffled — unless someone realized that a man on foot could travel in any direction, if he was fool enough to climb over a sun-blasted mountain instead of skirting it. Which was precisely the Saint’s intention.

But the plan was not as hare-brained to him as it might have seemed to a less original fugitive. On a previous visit to Sicily he had driven from Messina to Palermo, and had remarked on the numbers of people waiting at bus stops along the highway, who had apparently landed from boats or lived under rocks by the wayside, since they were nowhere near any visible human habitation. His companion, who knew the island, had pointed out the dusty dirt tracks that wound back between the buttresses of the hills, and explained that higher up in most of the valleys, closer to sources of precious water, there was a hidden village. Though they might be only a few miles apart on the map, the normal route from one to another was down to the sea, along the coast, and back up again — a long way around, but much more attractive in a climate that discouraged strenuous exertion. To the Saint, however, to do whatever would be most unexpected was far more important than an economy of sweat.

And sweat, in plain common language, was what his eccentricity exacted, in copious quantities. As he climbed higher, so did the sun, making it clear why Sicily had never become the Mecca of midsummer mountain-hikers. To add to its natural disadvantages for such sport, Simon Templar also had to contend not only with the after-effects of a mild concussion but also with the fact that he had had no breakfast, or any other food or drink since last night’s dinner.

It was good evidence of his mental as well as his physical toughness that he set and maintained a pace which would not have disgraced a week-end hiker over some gentle undulations in an English autumn. His shirt was already sodden when the terraced groves and vineyards gave up their encroachment on a baked and crumbling mountain-side where only straggling shrubs and cacti grew; but the sun only worked harder to imitate the orifice of a blast furnace. More insidious was the temptation to let his mind dwell on thoughts of cool refreshing drinks, which only intensified the craving. The human body can go without food for a month, but dies in a few days without water. Simon was not about to die, but he had never been so thirsty as he was when he reached the summit of the range he had aimed for.

By then it was almost noon, and his brains felt as if they were being cooked inside his skull. The rocks shimmered in the blaze, heat-induced mirages plagued his vision, and the blood pounded in his temples. But if he had chosen the right ridge, he should be able to come down in a valley that would bring him to the sea from a totally different quarter and in a totally different area from where the hunters would be watching for him.

A rustling sound like wind-blown leaves came to him as he rounded a jutting promontory some way below the crest, and he found himself suddenly face to face with three startled goats. They were moth-eaten, dusty, and lean to a point of emaciation which was understandable if their only grazing was the withered herbage of that scorched hillside. Two of them were females with large but not distended udders, and the explanation of that detail dawned on him an instant too late for him to draw back behind the sheltering shoulder of magma. By that time he had seen the goatherd, and seen that the goatherd also saw him.

They stared at each other for a silent moment, the goatherd looking as surprised as his charges. He was a thin youth as dusty and tattered as the goats, in a faded shirt with the sleeves torn off at the shoulders and pants that had been mended so many times that it was difficult to tell which was the original material and which the patches. A knotted rope served him for a belt, and completed the sum of his wardrobe; the soles of his bare feet must have been calloused like hoofs to be able to ignore the abrasive and cauterizing surfaces which were all that his pastures offered them to walk on. He brushed back his uncut mop of hair to get a better view of the extraordinary apparition which had shattered all the precedents of his lonely domain.

“Buon giorno,” said the Saint reassuringly. “A beautiful day for a walk in the hills.”

“Sissignore,” responded the young man politely, to avoid offending an obvious lunatic. He speculated: “You are English?”

Simon nodded, deciding that it was better to accept that assumption than be taken for a mad dog. He sighted a tiny patch of shade under a projecting rock and sat down to rest in it for a minute.

“It was not as hot as this when I started out,” he said, in an attempt to partly explain his irrational behavior.

“You must be thirsty,” the herdboy said.

Something in Simon’s manner had erased his first fear and he came and squatted close by.

“My mouth is so dry that I doubt if I could lick a stamp.”

“You would like a drink?”

“I would love one. I would like about six drinks,” said the Saint wistfully. “Tall ones, ice-cold. I would not be fussy about what they were. Orange juice, beer, cider, wine, tomato juice, even water. Do you have a refrigerator in a cave anywhere near by?”

“You can have some of my water if you like.”

The lad reached behind him and swung into sight a skin bottle that had been hanging down his back, suspended from a loop of gray string. He pulled the cork from the neck and extended the flask to the Saint, who took it in a state of numbed shock.

“And I thought you were kidding...” Simon raised the bottle to his lips and let a trickle of hot, sour, but life-giving wetness moisten his tongue and flow down his throat. At any other time it would have been almost nauseating, but in his condition it was like nectar. He sipped slowly, to extract the maximum humidity from it and to give himself the impression of a prolonged draught without actually draining the container. He returned the skin still more than half full, and sighed gratefully.

“Mille grazie. You may have saved my life.” On the other hand, the youth might equally prove to be a contributor to the Saint’s death. There was no way to make him forget the encounter, short of knocking him on the head and pitching his body into the nearest ravine, which would have been a somewhat churlish return for his good Samaritanism. But eventually the goatherd would hear about the foreigner who was being sought, and would tell about their meeting, and would be able to indicate which way the Saint had gone. With one quirk of fate, Simon had lost much of the advantage that he had toiled so painfully to gain — how much, depended on how soon the boy’s story reached one of the search parties. But that was only another hazard that had to be accepted.

3

There was nothing more to be gained by perching on that ledge like a becalmed buzzard and brooding about it. Simon climbed to his feet again, counting the compensation of the brief rest and refreshment, and pointed down the steep slope.

“There is a village down that way?”

“Sissignore. It is where I live. Would you like me to guide you?”

“No, if I keep going downhill I must come to it.”

“After you pass around that hill there with the two dead trees on the side you will see it. But I have to go back there before long in any case.”

“I am in a hurry, and I have already interfered with you too much,” said the Saint hastily. “Thank you again, and may your goats multiply like rabbits.”

He turned and plunged on down the slope with a dynamic purposefulness designed to leave the lad too far behind for further argument before any such argument could suggest itself.

He only slackened his pace when he felt sure, without turning to look back, that the goatherd had been left shrugging helplessly at the incontestable arbitrariness of Anglo-Saxons, and when the precipitousness of the path reminded him that a twisted ankle could eventually prove just as fatal as a broken neck. He had to work his way across a perilous field of broken scree on the direct course he had set for the two dead trees which had been pointed out as his next landmark, but soon after he passed them he scrambled over another barren hump to be greeted by a vista that justified all the toil and sweat of its attainment.

In the brown hollow of the hills far below clustered the white-washed buildings of another village, with a road leading away from them down the widening canyon that could ultimately meander nowhere but to the coast. His venture seemed to have paid off.

His descent from the heights seemed like a sleigh ride only by comparison with the preceding climb. A steep downhill trail, pedestrians whose walking is confined to city pavements might be surprised to learn, is almost as tiring as an uphill: the body’s weight does not have to be lifted, but its gravitational pull has to be cushioned instead, and the shocks come on the unsprung heels which make the muscles of the thighs work harder to soften the jolts. It was true that he had had a cupful of water to drink, but to boil it off there was an afternoon heat more intense if possible than the morning. Having breakfasted on nothing but thin air, he was now sampling more of the same menu for lunch. If he had been inclined to self-pity, he could have summarized that he was parched with thirst, faint with hunger, stumbling with fatigue, and baked to the verge of heat prostration; but he never permitted himself such an indulgence. On the contrary, renewed hope winged his steps and helped him to forget exhaustion.

Nevertheless, a more coldly impersonal faculty warned him that he couldn’t continue drawing indefinitely on nothing but will-power and his stored-up reserves of strength. He would have to find liquid and solid sustenance in the village. If he by-passed it, he might be able to reach the coast on foot, but he would be in no shape to cope with any minions of the Mafia that he might meet there or run into on the road. The risk of attracting attention in town had to be balanced against the physical and mental improvement that its resources of food and drink could give him.

As he worked his way closer to it, suffering all the added disadvantages of pathfinding as the price of refusing the young goatherd’s offer of guidance, the echoing clangor of the inevitable church bell reached him, striking the half-hour which his wrist watch confirmed to be one-thirty. Ten minutes later he slithered by accident across a well-worn path which would probably have brought him as far with half the effort if he could have been shown it, but which at least eased the last quarter-hour’s slog to the most outlying cottages.

But the delay had not necessarily penalized him. In fact, it might have improved the conditions for his arrival. The reassembly of the inhabitants under their own roofs, and the serious business of the colazione, the midday and most important meal of the southern peasant, would have run their ritual courses, and a contentedly inflated populace should still be pampering the work of their digestive juices in the no less hallowed formality of the siesta. Even if any of them had already been alerted, which in itself seemed moderately unlikely, for a while there would be the fewest eyes open to notice him.

The pitifully stony terraces through which he made the last lap of his approach, the dessicated crops and scattering of stunted trees, prepared him in advance for the poverty-stricken aspect of the town. Indeed, it was hard to imagine how even such a modest community could wrest a subsistence from such starved surroundings — unless one had had previous immunization to such miracles of meridional ecology. But the Saint knew that within that abject microcosm could be found all the essentials that the fundaments of civilization would demand.

Like all the Sicilian villages of which it was prototypical, it had no streets more than a few feet wide. The problems of motorized traffic were still in its fortunate future. Its twisted alleys writhed between those houses which were not prohibitively Siamesed to their neighbors, only to converge unanimously on what had to be deferentially called the town square. Having accepted the inevitability of ploughing that obvious route, Simon strode boldly and as if he knew exactly where he was heading through a debris-cluttered alley which squeezed him between two high walls overhung with wilted flowers into the central piazza. The overlooking windows were tightly shuttered, lending an atmosphere of timeless somnolence to the scene.

The Saint’s pace slowed into a pace compatible with his surroundings, trying to tone down obtrusive brashness, for the benefit of any wakeful observer, without inversely suggesting nefarious stealth. But there was no sign of any interest in his deportment, or even that his entrance or his mere existence had been discerned at all. The pervading heat dwelt there like a living presence in the absence of any other life. Nothing whatever moved except the flies circling a mangy dog that lay in a dead sleep in one shaded doorway.

There was no central fountain in the square; but somewhere near, he was sure, there had to be a town tap, or pump, or at least a horse-trough. He walked around the western and southern sides of the perimeter, keeping close to the buildings in order to benefit by their shade, and wondering how long it would be before the first food shop would re-open.

“Hi, Mac! You like a nice clean shave an’ freshen up?”

The voice almost made him jump, coming in heavily accented but fluent English from the open doorway he was passing. Overhead there was a crudely painted sign that said PARRUCCHERIA. A curtain of strings of beads, southern Europe’s primitive but effective form of fly barrier, screened the interior from sight, and he had assumed that a more solid portal had been left open merely to aid the circulation of air while the barber snored somewhere in the back of the shop; but apparently that artist was already awake and watching from his lair for any potential customer to pass within hooking range.

Simon, having been halted in his tracks, grated a hand across his thirty-six-hour beard and pretended to weigh the merits of the invitation. In reality he was weighing the few coins in his pocket and considering whether he could afford it. A delay of a quarter-hour or so should make little difference, and might be more than made up by the new vigor he could generate in such an interlude of complete repose. A clean-up would not only make him look less like a desperate fugitive, but would give him a psychological boost to match its outward effect. There would certainly be water — that thought alone almost jet-propelled him into the shop — and during, the ministrations he might elicit much information... or even something more mundane to chew on.

The arguments whirled through his head in a microfraction of the time it takes to set them down, and his choice was made well within the limits of any ordinary decision.

“You sold me, bub,” he said, and went in.

Dim coolness wrapped him around, the perpetually surprising phenomenon of thick-walled architecture that had evolved its own system of air-conditioning before Carrier tried to duplicate it mechanically. In the temporary partial blindness of the interior, he allowed himself to be guided into a barber chair that felt positively voluptuous, and to be swathed to the neck in a clean sheet. Then, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the half-light, he perceived something which he thought at first must be a hallucination conjured up by his thirst-tortured senses. A white foam-plastic box stood against the wall, filled with chunks of ice from which projected the serrated caps of four bottles.

“What’s that you’ve got in the ice?” he asked in an awed voice.

“Some beer, Mac. I keep a few bottles around in case anyone wants it.”

“For sale?”

“You bet.”

“I’ll buy.”

It took the barber four steps to the cooler, where the ice rattled crisply and stimulatingly as a bottle was withdrawn, and four steps back; each step seemed to take an eternity as the Saint counted the footfalls. It took another age before the top popped off and he was allowed to grasp the cold wet shape which seemed more exquisitely conceived than the most priceless Ming vase.

“Salute,” he said, and emptied half of it in one long delicious swallow.

“Good ’ealth,” said the barber.

Simon delayed the second installment while he luxuriated in the first impact of cool and tasty liquid on his system.

“I suppose you wouldn’t have anything around that I could nibble?” he said. “I always think beer tastes better with a bite of something in between.”

“I got-a some good salami, if you like that.”

“I’m crazy about good salami.”

The barber disappeared through another bead curtain at the back of the room, and returned after a few minutes with several generous slices on a chipped plate. By that time Simon had finished his bottle and could indicate with an expressive gesture that another would be needed to wash down the sausage.

“What made you speak to me in English?” he asked curiously, while it was being opened.

“The way you was lookin’ aroun’, I can see you never been in dis town before,” said the barber complacently. “So I start-a thinkin’, how you got your last hair-cut an’ how you dress an’ carry yourself. People from different countries all got their own face expressions an’ way of walkin’. You put a German in an Italian suit an’ he still don’t look Italian. I work-a sixteen years in Chicago an’ I seen all kinds.”

He was trending into his sixties, and with his smoothly shaven and powdered blue jowls and balding head with a few carefully nurtured strands of hair stretched across it he was himself a sort of out-dated but cosmopolitan barber-image. How and why he had gone to America and returned to this Sicilian dead-end was a story that Simon had no particular desire to know, but which he was sure he would be hearing soon, if there was any truth in the traditional loquacity of tonsorial craftsmen.

While he could still do some talking himself, however, before being partly gagged by lather and the need to maintain facial immobility, the Saint thought it worth trying to implant some protective fiction about himself.

“And only an English-speaking tourist would be nutty enough to hike all the way up here from the coast in the middle of a day like this,” he said.

If that version took hold, it might briefly dissociate him from someone else who was believed to have come over the crest from the other direction. Perhaps very briefly indeed, but nothing could be despised that might help to confuse the trail.

The barber deftly washed the dust of the hills from the Saint’s face and replaced it with a soothing balm of suds. His inscrutably lugubrious air might have seemed to mask the thought anyone who was not condemned to permanent residence in that backwater of civilization should not complain about the purely transitory discomfort of a mere day’s visit, no matter how arduous.

“You like-a ver’ much walking, I guess?”

“Somebody sold me on getting off into the back country and finding the real Sicily that the ordinary tourists miss,” Simon answered between swigs at his second bottle. “Unfortunately I didn’t ask all the details I should have about the gradients and the climate. I’m glad I saw this town, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to walking back down that road I came up. Does there happen to be a taxi in town, or anyone who drives a car for hire?”

“No, nothing like-a that, Mac.” The barber was stropping his formidable straight-edge razor. “There’s a bus twice a day, mornin’ an’ evenin’.”

“What time?”

“Six o’clock, both times. Whichever you choose, you can’t-a go wrong.”

Far from feeling that he had made a joke, the barber seemed to sink into deeper gloom before this illustration of the abysmal rusticity of the campagna where ill fortune had stranded him. He placed his thumb on the Saint’s jawbone and pulled to tighten the skin, and scraped down despondently with his ancient blade.

“You’re a big-a fool to get in trouble wit’ da Mafia,” he said without a change of intonation.

It was an immortal tribute to the Saint’s power of self-control that he didn’t move a fraction of a millimeter in response to that sneak punch-line. The razor continued its downward track, skimming off a broad band of soap and stubble, but the epidermis behind it was left smooth and bloodless where the slightest twitch on his part would have registered a nick as surely as a seismograph. The cutting edge rested like a feather on the base of his throat for a moment that seemed endless, while the barber looked down glumly into his eyes and Simon stared back in unflinching immobility.

Then the barber shrugged and turned away to wipe the lather from his lethal weapon on the edge of the scarred rubber dish kept for that purpose.

“I don’t understand you,” said the Saint, to keep the conversation going.

“You bet you do, Mac. I been sitting ’ere lookin’ out, you can see down da road to da first turn, an’ that ain’t where you come from. No, sir. You come over da mountain from Mistretta, an’ you sure got ’em stirred up over there.”

He took aim with the razor again, at the Saint’s other cheek, but this time it was easier for Simon to wait passively for the contact. If the man had any serious butchering intentions, he would scarcely have passed up his first and best opportunity.

“What happened in Mistretta?” Simon asked, studiously speaking like a ventriloquist without using any external muscles.

“I don’ know an’ I don’ wanna. I don’ want-a no beef wit’ da Mafia. But dey been onna phone, I got one-a da t’ree phones in dis crummy dump, an’ I gotta pass on da word. I hear how you look, how you speak English, how everyone should watch for you.”

There was no point in any more pretense.

“Do they know I came over here?”

“Naw. It’s-a kinda general warning. They don’ know where you are, an’ everybody calls up everybody else to keep-a da eye open.”

“So you weren’t being such a Sherlock Holmes after all when you spotted me.”

“Don’ ride me, mister. I wanted to ’ear you talk, find out what kinda feller you are.”

“Why didn’t you cut my throat just now when you had the chance, and maybe earn yourself a reward?”

“Listen, I don’t ’ave to kill you myself. I coulda just let you walk by, then talked on da phone. Let da Mafia do the job. I woulda been sittin’ pretty, an’ mos’ likely pick up a piece o’ change too. So don’ ride me.”

“Sorry,” said the Saint. “But you must admit it’s a bit surprising for anyone to find such a pal in these parts.”

The barber wiped his razor and stropped it again with slow slapping strokes, and examined the gleaming edge against the light from the doorway.

“I ain’t your pal, but I ain’t-a no pal o’ da Mafia neither. They done nothin’ for me I couldn’t ’a done better for myself. Kick in, protection, just like-a da rackets in Chicago. Only in Chicago I make-a more money, I can afford it better. I know da score. I shoulda stayed where I was well off; but I thought I could take it easy here on my Social Security an’ what I’d-a saved up, an’ just work enough to pay da rent. I should-a ’ad my ’ead examined.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t turn me in.”

“Listen, when I get dis call, dey gimme your name. Simon Templar. Probably don’ mean nothin’ to dese peasants; but I been around. I know who you are. I know you made trouble for lotsa racketeers. Dat’s okay with me. I’d-a turn you in in a second, if it was my neck or yours. But I don’ mind if I can get you outa dis town—”

Suddenly there was the snarl of a motor-scooter’s exhaust coming up from the valley and roaring into the square like a magnified hornet with hiccups. The barber stopped all movement to listen, and Simon could see the blood drain out of his face. The scooter’s tempestuous arrival at this torpid hour of the day obviously meant trouble, and trouble could only mean the Mafia. While the barber stood paralyzed, the mobile ear-splitter added a screech of brakes to its gamut of sound effects, and crescendoed to a stop outside the shop with a climactic clatter that presaged imminent disintegration.

“Quick!” Simon whispered. “A wet towel!”

Galvanized at last into action by a command that connected helpfully with established reflexes of professional habit, the barber stumbled over to the dual-purpose cooler and dredged up a sodden serviette from under the ice and remaining bottles. He scuttled back and draped it skilfully around and over the Saint’s face as ominous footsteps clomped on the cobbles, and the beaded door-curtain rattled as someone parted it and pushed through.

It was an interesting situation, perhaps more appealing to an audience than to a participant. The barber was in a blue funk and might say anything; in fact, to betray the Saint, he didn’t even need to say anything, he only had to point to the customer in the chair. He owed Simon nothing, and had frankly admitted that he would not hesitate over a choice between sympathy and his own skin. The Saint could only wait, blind and defenseless, but knowing that any motion might precipitate a fatal crisis. Which was not merely nerve-racking, but diluted his capacity to enjoy the exhilarating chill of the refrigerated wetness on his face.

Out of necessity, he lay there in a supine immobility that called for reserves of self-dominance that should have been drained by the razor-edge ordeal of a few minutes ago, while the rider rattled questions and commands in incomprehensible answers, but at last the curtain rattled again and the footsteps stomped away outside and faded along the sidewalk.

The towel was snatched from Simon’s face and the chair tilted up with precipitate abruptness.

“Get out,” rasped the barber, from a throat tight with panic.

“What was he saying?” Simon asked, stepping quietly down.

“Get-a goin’!” The man pointed at the door with a shaking forefinger. “He’s a messenger from the Mafia, come-a to call out all da mafiosi in dis village. They found out you didn’t go down to da coast from Mistretta, so now they gonna search all-a da hills. They don’ know you been here yet, but in a coupla minutes they’ll be out lookin’ everywhere an’ you ain’t-a got a chance. They kill you, an’ if they find out you been ’ere dey kill-a me too! So get out!”

The Saint was already at the door, peering cautiously through the curtain.

“What was that way you were going to tell me to get out of town?”

“Fuori!”

Only the fear of being heard outside muted what would have been a scream into a squeak, but Simon knew that he had used up the last iota of hospitality that was going to be extended to him. If he strained it another fraction, the trembling barber was almost certain to try to whitewash himself by raising the alarm.

The one consolation was that in his frantic eagerness to be rid of his visitor the barber had no time to discuss payment for the beer and salami or even for the shave, and the Saint was grateful to be able to save the few coins in his pocket for another emergency.

“Thanks for everything, anyway, pal,” he said, and stepped out into the square.

4

Propped upright in the gutter outside, the unguarded scooter was a temptation; but Simon Templar had graduated to automobiles long before vehicles of that type were introduced, and it would have taken him a perilous interval of fumbling to find out how to start it. Even then, it would have provided anything but unobtrusive transportation; indeed, the noise he had heard it make under full steam would be more help to any posse in pursuit of him than a pack of winged bloodhounds. Regretfully he decided that its locomotive advantages were not for him.

He strolled across the square to the corner from which the main road ran downhill, schooling himself to avoid any undue semblance of haste, but feeling as ridiculous as an elephant trying to pass unnoticed through an Eskimo settlement. The first few shutters were opening, the first few citizens emerging torpidly from their doors, and he was acutely aware that in any such isolated community any stranger was a phenomenon to be observed and analyzed and speculated upon. The best that he could hope for was to be taken for an adventurous tourist who had strayed off the beaten track, or somebody’s visiting cousin from another province who had not yet been introduced around. When there was no outcry after the first few precarious seconds, it suggested that the barber had ultimately decided to keep quiet: if he shouted as late as this, the messenger might remember the towel-draped anonymity in the chair and wonder... Therefore the Saint could still hope to slip through the trap before the jaws closed.

And as each stride took him farther from the town center and the risk of total encirclement, his spirits rose to overtake the physical resurgence that the interlude of refreshment and recuperation in the barber shop had quickened — so much that when he saw a hulking and beady-eyed ruffian staring fixedly at him through every step that led through one of the last blocks of the village buildings, it was only a challenge to the oldest recourse of Saintly impudence, and he walked deliberately and unswervingly into the focus of the stare until it wavered uncertainly before the arrogant confidence of his approach.

“Ciao,” said the Saint condescendingly, with a superior Neapolitan accent. “He will be coming in a few minutes. But do not glare at him like that, or he will turn back and run.”

“What am I to do, then?” mumbled the bully.

“Pretend to be busy with something else. After he passes, whistle Arrivederci, Roma, very loudly. We shall hear it, and be waiting for him.”

He strode on, disdaining even to pause for acknowledgement of the order, though the back of his neck prickled.

But it worked. He had broken another cordon, and the way he had done it proved how much he had recuperated. He felt his morale beginning to soar again. More nets would be cast, but his inexhaustible flair for the unexpected would take him through them.

In a few more moments he had left the last cottages behind, and then a curve in the road took him altogether out of sight of the village and the watcher on the outskirts who should now be watching the opposite way anyhow.

He quickened his step to a gait which from any distance would still have looked like a walk, attracting less attention than a run, but whose deceptively lengthened stride covered the ground at a speed which most men would have had to run to keep up with. At the same time his eyes ceaselessly scanned the barren ridges on either side, alert for any other sentinels who might be watching the road from the heights. The road wound steadily downhill, making his breakneck pace possible in spite of the stifling heat, and he kept it up without sparing himself, knowing that the canyon he followed could be either his salvation or a death trap.

If he had not met the goatherd on the summit, and then had to stop in the last village, he might have had more latitude of choice, perhaps spending a night in the trackless hills and continuing across country until he could drop down into Cefalù, which he should have been able to locate from some peak if he was in the approximate area which he had deduced from his glimpse of Etna. But that was impossible now after where he had been seen. So far he was ahead of the chase, and had succeeded in out-thinking it as well, but that advantage would be lost as soon as the reports filtered in and were coordinated. His only hope now was to reach the coast before he was completely cut off, and lose himself in the crowds which could still be treacherous but could give better cover than any scrawny growth on the stark uplands.

From somewhere ahead came a plaintive squealing sound that slowed his headlong course as he tried to identify it. It repeated itself regularly, but grew no louder; if anything, it seemed to grow fainter as he went slower. He resumed his pace with redoubled alertness, and the intermittent squealing became gradually louder, showing that it must come from something that he was overtaking on the road.

Prudence should have dictated holding back for a safe distance, but curiosity was equally cogent, and besides he could not afford to be slowed down indefinitely by some nameless obstruction. Instead, he accelerated again until he won a glimpse of it.

Soon the road made two consecutive horseshoe bends, bringing him to a clear view of the next level down the rutted track, where he saw that he was being preceded by a carretta siciliana, the picturesque Sicilian mule cart made famous by fifty million picture postcards. The rhythmic creaking which he had heard came from its inadequately lubricated hubs. It carried no load, and — except for its nodding driver — no passengers; but a bacchanalian scene of country maidens dancing with flower-wreathed satyrs graced its sides, while intricate patterns of fruit and foliage revolved on the fellies of its high wheels in an explosion of primary colors that pained the eyes.

Without hesitation Simon turned off the road, avalanched through the intervening gully, and raced into the wake of the trundling cart.

As he caught up with it, he saw that the driver, a gray-whiskered rustic, appeared to be asleep, the reins draped limply from one hand and his hat tilted over his eyes, but he raised his head and scowled down as the Saint came level with him.

“Buon giorno,” Simon said in the standard greeting, falling back to a walk without a hint of short-windedness to betray that he had been hurrying.

“You would not say it was a good day if you had listen to my wife’s tongue cracking like a whip all morning,” said the driver crossly.

“Cattiva giornata,” amended the Saint, ever flexible in such situations.

“Hai ragione. It is the worst kind of day. Have a drink.”

The man produced a damp bottle from a mound of rags between his feet and proffered it. Unlike the goatherd’s wineskin, this flagon contained its proper beverage, and was even moderately cool from the evaporation of the wet cloths in which it had been nested.

Simon enjoyed a second long pull and handed it back. The driver seized the excuse to have one himself, and it was obvious from the way he weaved the bottle up and down that it was not his first drink of the day. The Saint could not be discourteous, and when the bottle was handed him again he forced himself to accept another pleasant swallow of the thin slightly acid wine, walking with one hand on the cart to balance himself while the patient power plant trudged phlegmatically along.

“Where are you going?” asked the driver.

“To Palermo,” Simon replied.

It was in his mind that if that statement were ever relayed to Al Destamio, the hoodlum’s devious psychology would automatically assume that he was heading the opposite way, towards Messina; whereas he really did hope to get back to Palermo. He had left too many loose and unfinished ends there, of which Gina was not the least troubling.

From far behind the valley, at the very limit of audibility, came something like the buzzing of a distant hornet, which swelled rapidly to the proportions of an airplane’s drone and then to a rattle like a pneumatic drill gone berserk. It was no feat of memory for Simon to recognize the sound: he had heard it all too recently — unless there were two internal combustion engines in the area with identically obnoxious exhausts.

The envoy was coming back down from the village. And on the way he had probably spoken with the picket on the outskirts...

“Let us keep each other company,” said the Saint, and with a nimble leap he swung himself up to the seat beside the outraged driver.

“Who asked you?” demanded the latter in befuddled resentment. “What are you doing?”

“Joining you so that we can hurry to the nearest vinaio and buy some more of that excellent beverage which you have been sharing so generously with me. And here is the price of the next round.”

Simon slapped the remaining change from his pocket on to the wooden seat. Small as the sum was, it was sufficient to buy two or three liters of wine at the depressed local prices. The peasant looked at it with heavy-lidded eyes, and picked it up without further protest. He even let Simon take another drag from the bottle before he reclaimed it.

The Saint relinquished his grip and listened calculatingly to the thrumming roar that was now reverberating from the valley walls.

“Drink up,” he said encouragingly, “and let me do your work for you.”

As he spoke, he gently detached the reins from the other’s limp hold. The erstwhile driver turned and opened his mouth for another outburst of indignation, to be greeted with a smile of such seraphic innocence and friendliness that he forgot what he was going to complain about and wisely settled for another swig at the flagon. As his head went all the way back to drain the last gulp from it, the cart lurched over a well-chosen rut and his hat fell off. Simon caught it neatly and put it on his own head, tilted down over his eyes. In an instant his shoulders slumped with the defeat of the overworked and underfed, and the reins drooped as listlessly from his fingers as they had from those of the previous holder.

The timing and the performance were perfect. As the motor-scooter blatted deafeningly up behind and hurtled past, the rider should have seen only a pair of local peasants, the younger one dozing over the reins, the older one groping foggily for something he seemed to have lost in the back of the cart.

Nevertheless the courier jammed on his brakes and skidded to a halt in a billowing cloud of dust, squarely across the road in front of them. From the fact that he did not threaten them with a weapon, Simon could still hope that it was only a routine check, a matter of asking the cartmen if they had seen anything of the quarry. His crude disguise might still be effective, enhanced as it was by his authentically local companion and the wagon they were riding in.

“Alt!” shouted the messenger. “I want to talk to you!”

In spite of the torrid temperature, he wore the short black leather blouse required by the protocol of his fraternity, inside which he must have enjoyed all the amenities of a portable Turkish bath; but as he pushed back his goggles Simon realized that he had seen him before, even though they had been hidden from each other in the barber’s shop. It was one of the stone-faced security guards who had lurked sleeplessly around the marble columns of Don Pasquale’s palazzo above Mistretta.

With every faculty pitilessly aware of its thin margin for survival, the Saint lazily flicked the reins to urge the jenny as close as possible to the gunman — just in case...

“What kind of way is that to talk to anyone?” grumbled the chariot’s owner, blinking perplexedly at the interception.

Then, as he turned to his passenger for confirmation, he saw for the first time something that drove the more complex affront completely out of his fumbling mind.

“You stole my hat, ladrone!” he squawked.

He reached to retrieve the disputed headgear, but his alcoholic aim combined with Simon’s instinctive divergence only succeeded in knocking it off the Saint’s head. It fell almost at the feet of the startled scooterist, who had moved around to the side of the cart for less stentorian conversation, and whose reciprocal recognition was a coruscating gem of over-statement.

Then the mafioso’s right hand darted inside his jacket for the hardware that he should have displayed from the beginning.

Simon Templar moved even faster. He shifted sideways and swung his outside leg faster than the gunman could disengage his gun, and there was a distinct and satisfying crunch as the toe of his shoe caught the thug accurately in the side of the temple.

The man folded quietly to the ground and lay face down in the dirt.

Simon was leaping down for the clincher even while his opponent was falling, but no further effort was necessary. The scooter jockey had lost all interest in his mission, and would not be likely to regain it for a long time.

The Saint swiftly took possession of the half-drawn automatic, and tucked it inside his shirt under the waistband of his trousers where his belt would hold it in place. Then he ran through the man’s other pockets, and came up with a switchblade knife and a well-stuffed wallet. He looked up from it to find that his travelling companion had clambered down from the cart and was staring with mounting bewilderment at the sundry components of the scene.

“What is this all about?” pleaded the cart-driver distractedly.

Simon faced his next problem. The old man would inevitably be grilled by the Mafia before long, and he was likely to have an uncomfortably hard time absolving himself of complicity in the Saint’s escape. Unless he was provided with evidence that would convince even the hard-boiled mafiosi that he was only another hapless fellow-victim of the Saint’s lengthening list of atrocities.

There was an inordinate number of five-thousand-lire notes in the wallet, besides other denominations, and Simon extracted four of them and tucked them away under a sack of melons in the cart, while the driver gaped at him.

“If I gave those to you now, they might search you and find them,” he said. “Say nothing about them, and leave them there until you get home. Also, when you are questioned, remember how I jumped on your cart and forced you to let me stay there. Now, I am sorry to repay you so unkindly, but it will hurt you less than if the Mafia thought you had helped me.”

“What is this talk of the Mafia?” muttered the other blearily, swaying a little.

“Look at those birds in the sky,” said the Saint, steadying him; and as the man raised his chin he hit him under it as crisply and scientifically as he knew how.

The driver crumpled without a sound into another peaceful siesta.

For a second time Simon was tempted by the scooter, purely for its ground-covering potential; and now he might be able to afford a little time to unravel its mechanical secrets. But nothing less than a major operation would silence it, and he was still in a situation where stealth seemed to offer more advantages than speed.

He fired a single shot into its gas tank to eliminate it from further participation in the pursuit, and set off again at a mile-eating trot that tried to ignore the heat.

The mountain road twisted and doubled back upon itself like a tortured serpent. At some of the turns, when no unscaleable cliff or other geological barrier intervened, a rough footpath short-circuited the loop for the benefit of pedestrians. The Saint took advantage of all of them without slackening speed, although some of them dropped at forty-five degree angles and any slip might have meant violent injury.

The slopes were broken and rough, with little but cactus and thorny bushes holding their superficial shale together, and twice he picked his own route across the pebble-strewn beds of gullies gouged by torrents of some mythical rainy season rather than following even the slightly more cautious trail worn by previous short-cutters.

He was in the middle of one of these when he heard the anguished whine of an automobile’s straining gear-box coming up the valley from below, and he did not need to call on his clairvoyant gifts to divine that no innocent tourist conveyance would be in such a screaming rush to get to the drab cittadina at the head of that forsaken gorge.

There was no cover in the flat stream bed, and he would be instantly noticeable from anything crossing the stone bridge forty yards away. The bridge itself offered the only possible concealment, but that meant running towards the approaching car with the certainty of being still more conspicuous if he failed to win the race. Simon sprinted with grim determination, the loose rocks spurting from under his feet and the shrill grind of the car coming closer with terrifying rapidity. He dived under the shadow of the bridge’s single arch only a heart-beat before the car rumbled over it and yowled on up the grade.

The Saint allowed himself half a minute to be sure it was out of sight, and to let the heaving of his lungs subside. Then he climbed the bank to the road above.

His decision not to try to help himself to the scooter had vindicated itself even more promptly than he had anticipated.

But now, through a gap in the hills ahead, he could see the benign blue Mediterranean less than a mile away.

It was only a question of whether he could reach it before the hunters turned around and overtook him again.