Vendetta for the Saint. (20 page)

The Saint was turning his wrists over behind
him, testing the bonds that held them. They
were
tied with a
piece of light rope which was soft and
supple with age, and there was stretch in it
which could be exploited by setting his arms in certain positions known to
escape artists, to gain the maximum leverage, and then applying all the power
of
his exceptional muscles to
it. He knew that he
could
release himself eventually, but it would take
at least several minutes. His legs, however,
were
not bound; and
as the doctor approached Simon
braced
himself and measured the distance for a vicious kick which if it found its
target would in
dubitably
cause quite an interregnum in the sched
uled proceedings. By fair means or foul, no
matter
how foul, he
had to win that essential time …

Time
was given to him, miraculously, by a man
who looked like anything but an agent of
Provi
dence, who
flung open the door at that precise moment and rattled a sentence in dialect at
Destamio.
Simon could not
understand a word of it, but it
had
an instantaneous effect on its recipient that
would have been envied by Paul Revere. Destamio
spun around with a single
grating oath, and wad
dled
to the door with grotesque celerity.

“Wait until I get back,” he spat
over his shoul
der as he went
out.

Simon watched as the doctor carefully put
down the hypodermic inside his bag and strolled over to
the window. He drew aside the dingy curtain
and
threw open the casement, giving the
Saint an unim
peded view of the night sky.
The lack of bars on the
opening was
like a symbol, and Simon felt a sud
den new surge of hope. Behind his
back his arms
writhed and strained in
desperate but disciplined
hate as he
did everything he could to profit by the
Heaven-sent reprieve, while at the same time avoid
ing any struggles violent enough to attract atten
tion.

“What is the excitement about,
dottore?”
he
asked, less in
expectation of an answer than to cov
er the small sounds of his contortions.

“It is Don Pasquale,” the doctor
said, his back
to Simon as
he continued to inhale the fresh air.
“He is very old and very sick, and there are two
other
medici
here besides myself to
prove again that science can make old age more comfortable
but never cure it.”

“You must excuse my ignorance, but who
is this
Don Pasquale?
And why does he get such a special
fuss made over him?”

The doctor turned
and looked at him curiously.

“Your ignorance is indeed surprising,
for a man who has information that the Mafia seems to want
very badly. Don Pasquale is the head of the
organi
zation, and
when he dies they will have to elect a
new Don. That is why the leaders are all
here.”

“The vultures gather …” Simon tried to keep
any sign of effort from his face, while his sinews
flexed and corded like steel wire.
“And I suppose
my fat friend
would love to become Don Alessandro
.”

“I doubt if he will be chosen. He has
been out of
the country
too long. Here in the South we tend to be rather provincial, and a little
suspicious of all
things foreign.”

“That never seems to have stopped you
exporting your
mafiosi
missionaries to less insular parts, such as the
United States. I should think the organ
ization would welcome a new top thug with in
ternational experience.”

The doctor shrugged impassively. Either he
was
too discreet
to be baited into further discussion, or
he was genuinely uninterested in anything the
Saint could possibly
contribute. He continued to
gaze
at Simon as impersonally as he would have
contemplated an anatomical chart, and the
Saint
goaded his
brain frantically to think of some other gambit that might divert attention
from the move
ments that he
had to keep on making.

Then both of them turned as the door opened
again. It was the messenger who had called
Destamio
away who reappeared.

“Tu,”
he said to the Saint, in understandable
Italian. “Come with me.”

“Il
signor
Destamio wants him here for
medical
treatment,”
the doctor interposed, without ex
pression.

“It will have to wait,” said the
man curtly. “It is
Don
Pasquale who sends for him.”

4

At
this revelation the doctor pointedly lost interest
again, and devoted himself to closing up his
satchel
as the emissary pulled Simon to his
feet. The Saint
for his part submitted to the
new orders with the
utmost docility, not only because it would have re
quired the apathy of a turnip to resist such an in
triguing summons, but also to avoid giving his es
cort any reason to re-check the rope on his
wrists.

The tie was loosening, but it would still take him several more
minutes to get free. He would have to
wait
for that time,

They went down a long musty whitewashed cor
ridor with other closed doors in it, then up
a flight
of stone stairs
which brought them into an
enormous
kitchen, from which another short pas
sage and another doorway led into a vast baroque hall heavy with
tapestries, paintings, suits of ar
mor, and ponderously ornate woodwork. He re
alized then that the cell where he had revived was
only an ignoble storage room in the basement of
what could legitimately be called a
palazzo.
There
was a floating population of dark men in tight suits
with bulging armpits, all of them with fixed ex
pressions of congenital unfriendliness. No further
proof was needed that he had
penetrated to the
very heart of the
enemy’s camp, although not quite
in
the manner he would have chosen for himself.

The messenger pushed him towards the baronial
stairway that came down to
the center of the hall.
They
went up to a gallery, from which he was
steered through a pair of half-open oak
portals into a somber ante-room. Beyond it, an almost equally imposing inner
door stood closed, and the guide tapped lightly on it. There was no reply from
the
interior, but
he did not seem to expect one, for he
turned the handle quietly and pulled the door
open. Remaining outside himself, he gave the
Saint
a last shove which sent him in.

Simon found himself in a bedroom that was in
full proportion to the other master rooms he had
seen, panelled in dark red brocade and cluttered
with huge and hideous pieces of age-darkened fur
niture. The windows were carefully sealed against
the noxious vapors of the night, and
effectively
sealed in the half-stale
half-antiseptic odors of the
sickroom.
Next to the high canopied bed stood an
enameled
metal table loaded with a pharmaceu
tical-looking
assortment of bottles and supplies,
over
which hovered two men with the same un
mistakably
professional air as the medico who had
been
brought to Simon’s cell, one of them gaunt
and gray and the other one short and black-
goateed.

The other men grouped around the bed were
older, and had a subtle aura of individual
authority
in spite of their deference to the
central figure in the tableau. There were four of them, ranging in
age from the late fifties upwards. The eldest,
per
haps, was Al Destamio. There was
a stout smooth
faced man with glasses
who could have passed for
a cosmopolitan business executive, and one
with
cruel eyes and the build of a wrestler
whose thick
mustache gave him a
pseudo-military air. The
youngest, at
least from the impression of nervous vigor which he gave, was almost as tall
and trim-
waisted as the Saint, but
overbalanced by a beak
which an
Andean condor might justifiably have en
vied.
Although modelled on classical Roman lines,
it expanded and enlarged the
theme on a heroic
scale which would have
made General De Gaulle look almost pudding-faced. And having apparently
conceded to his shaving mirror that there was noth
ing he could do to minimize it, he wore it with a
defiance that would have delighted Cyrano de
Bergerac.

This was the inner circle, the peers in
their own
right,
assembled at the death-bed of the King to
pay him homage—and vie among themselves for
the succession.

They turned and looked at the Saint with a
single concerted motion, as if they were wired together,
leaving an open path to the bed.

At the zenith of
his powers, the man who lay
there must have
been a giant, judging by the breadth
of
his frame. But some wasting disease had
clutched him, stripping away tissue, bringing him down to this bed in
which he must soon die. That
much was
obvious; the marks of approaching dis
solution
were heavy upon him. The skin once taut with muscle now hung in loose folds on
his neck. Black marks like smeared soot were painted under
the sunken
eyes, and the gray hair lay thin and lifeless across the mottled brow. Yet,
sick as he
was, the habit of command had
not left him. His
eyes burned with
the intensity of a madman or a
martyr; and his voice, though weakened,
had the
vibrant timbre of an operatic basso.

“Vieni
qui.”

It was not a request, or even an order, so
much
as the spoken
assurance of knowledge that obe
dience
would follow. This was the way that
absolute monarchs of the past must have spoken,
who had the power of life and death over
their subjects, and Don Pasquale was one of the last heirs to
that kind of authority.

Nevertheless, Simon reminded himself, it was
no
honorable kingdom of which
he was supreme ruler,
but
a ruthless secret society for which no crime was
too sordid if it showed sufficient profit.
Viewed in
that light, the
regal-cathedral atmosphere of the
gathering was too incongruous for the Saint’s basic
irreverence. He moved up to the foot of the
bed, as he was told, but with a lazy trace of swagger that
made it seem as if his hands were clasped
behind his back of his own choice instead of being tied
there, and a smile of brazen mockery curled
his
lips.

“Ciao, Pasquale,”
he said cheerfully, as one bud
dy to another.

He could feel the chieftains on either side
of him wince and stiffen incredulously at this
l
è
se-majest
é
,
but the man propped up on the pillows did not
even seem to notice it,
perhaps because he could
not
fully believe that he had heard it, or because in
his assured supremacy it meant no more to him
than an urchin thumbing its nose.

“So you are the one they call the
Saint. You have
given us trouble before.”

“I am pleased that it was enough for you
to notice,” Simon said. “But I don’t remember the occa
sion. What were you doing at the time?”

Since Don Pasquale had addressed him with
the familiar
“tu”,
which is used only to inferiors or in
timates, Simon saw no reason not to respond in the
same manner.

“You interfered with some plans of
Unciello,
who was one of
us. And we had a useful man in the police in Rome, an Inspector Buono, whom we
lost
because of
you.”

“Now it comes back to me,” said the
Saint. “I
have an
unfortunate knack of crossing up crooked
cops. What ever happened to the poor
grafter?”

“He got in trouble in jail. A knife
fight. He is
dead.”