Vendetta for the Saint. (8 page)

Simon Templar would not often have gone
berserk over a little damage to a garment, but it
must be remembered what had so recently happened
to the rest of his wardrobe. Now he was
wearing his only remaining suit, and this too had
been wrecked, leaving him with literally nothing
but rags to his name. Combined with a natural
resentment towards strangers who took advantage of
his kindly instincts to try to stick daggers into
his
digestive apparatus, it was the last straw.

But instead of blinding him, anger only made
his
actions more
precise. He grasped the wrist of the knife hand as it went by, and pivoted,
locking the
thin man’s arm
under his own. He held that posi
tion
with cold calculation, just long enough to
make sure that an adequate quorum of
witnesses
had stopped and
stared and thoroughly registered the fact of which one was holding the knife;
and
then he made
another swift sharp movement that
resulted in a crack of breaking bone and a short
scream from his victim. The stiletto fell to
the pave
ment.

Without releasing his grip on the thin man’s
wrist, Simon freed his other hand, carefully
ad
justed the position of his
target, and put all his
weight
into a piston stroke that planted his left fist
squarely in the center of the other’s face.
Under the impact, nose and face gave way with a most satis
fying crunch, but the man went down without
another vocal sound, and lay still. All things considered, Simon decided, as
his fury subsided as
quickly
as it had flared, it had been only a humane
anesthetic for a fractured ulna.

The whole incident had taken only a few sec
onds. Looking around warily for any possible
sec
ond assault
wave, he saw a small Fiat standing at
the other end of the alley where it connected with
the next parallel street. The door on the
near side
was open, and a
blue-chinned bandit sat at the
wheel,
staring towards the Saint with his jaw still
sagging. Then he suddenly came to life,
slammed
the door, and
stepped frantically on the gas.

Simon picked up the fallen stiletto, ignoring
the gathering crowd which gesticulated and jabbered
around him but kept a safe distance. It was
per
fectly balanced, the blade
honed to a shaving edge,
a
deadly tool in the hands of an expert. The Saint
was not sorry to think that at least one
such vir
tuoso would not be working for some
time.

A policeman finally came pushing through the
mob, one hand on his holstered pistol, and Simon
coolly tendered him the hilt of the souvenir.

3

“This is what I was attacked with,”
he said, tak
ing none of the
risks of undue diffidence. “All these people saw me disarm him. I shall be
happy to help
you take him to the police station
and sign the charges against him.”

The
policeman swivelled a coldly professional eye
over the crowd, whose members immediately
began a circulatory movement as the
spectators in
front were
stirred by a sudden desire to be in the
rear. Simon saw his witnesses rapidly
evaporating; but before the last law-shy personality could melt
away the
polizie,
inured to coping
with the evasive
ness
inspired by his vocation, had stepped forward and collared two of them—a pimply
youth with an
acute case of
strabismus, and a portly matron
bedizened
with bangles like an animated junk stall.
The only things they had in common were their
observation of the knifing
attempt and a profound
reluctance
to admit this to the constabulary. Nev
ertheless, the policeman quarried from them a
grudging admission that they had seen some
of the
events which
had occurred; though the ocular ab
normality of the younger one might have cast
doubts on the value of his testimony. He
then appropriated their identity cards, which they could
redeem only by appearing at the police
station to make depositions. Dismissed, they retired grateful
ly into the background; and the policeman
brought
his
functionally jaundiced scrutiny back to the
Saint.

“Why did you kill him?” he asked, looking
gloomily from the knife in his hand to the recum
bent figure on the sidewalk.

“I didn’t kill him,” Simon insisted
patiently.
“He tried
to murder me, but I didn’t feel like let
ting him. So I disarmed him and knocked him
out.
The knife
you’re holding is his, not mine.”

The policeman examined the weapon once more,
flicking open the mechanism of the blade
with his
thumb nail. He
closed it again with one hand and
pushed the safety button into place with an auto
matic motion which revealed long familiarity
with
such devices.

Behind him, two more police officers
appeared,
causing the
crowd to lose all further interest and
disperse. The one who had been first on the
scene saluted the more lavishly gold-braided of the new
comers and mumbled an explanation in dialect.
His superior stared at the
Saint darkly, but showed
no
inclination to discuss the crime further in the
public street. Simon accepted their glum
detach
ment with
seraphic indifference, and even allowed
himself to be jammed into the rear of an
undersized
police car
without further protest. Whatever consequences were to develop next would have
to reveal themselves at the
questura.

Once inside that ancient building, the
recording and annotating of the fracas proceeded with pon
derous solemnity. There was an incredible
amount
of laborious
writing on multiple forms, and the
continual thumping of rubber stamps accompanied
it like a symbolic drum-roll of bureaucracy.
The
only ripple in
the remorseless impersonality of the
routine occurred
when the Saint presented his
passport for
examination, and raised eyebrows and
knowing
glances informed him that his reputation
was not entirely unknown even
there.

When the knife-wielding citizen was brought
in,
Simon saw that
his injuries had been partly
patched
up by a police sugeon: one splinted arm
hung in a sling, and a large wad of gauze was
taped
over his nose.
From behind the edges of it, a pair of
bloodshot eyes glared hatred at the Saint,
who responded with a beatific smile.

With the preliminary recordings completed,
an
other door opened and the
maresciallo
del
carabinieri
made his impressive entrance.

His elaborately decorated and braided jacket
and cap, worn even in the heat of the office,
left no
doubt of the
eminence of his rank. His head was
nobly Roman and graying at the temples, not un
like the average man’s mental picture of a
Caesar;
though the
softness of the lower lip suggested Nero
rather than Julius.

He stared coldly down the straight length of
his
nose at Simon; then swivelled his
eyes, like the
black orifices of cannons
coming to bear, towards
the bandaged
knife-wielder.

“Well, Tonio,” he said stolidly, “you were not
out of trouble very long this time.”

“I did nothing,
maresciallo,
nothing!
I swear on
my mother’s tomb. It was this
fannullone”
—the
man called Tonio jerked the thumb of his
good hand towards Simon—“who caused the trouble.
He is a madman, perhaps. He comes up to me on
the street, insults me, pulls out a knife. I had
done
nothing!”

The
maresciallo
glanced through the
papers
which had been
written up, and turned his imperial
gaze on Simon.

“What
have you to say about this?”

“Nothing—except that Tonio must have
very lit
tle respect for
his mother,” said the Saint calmly.
“There were a dozen people around when
he at
tacked me with
the knife. They all saw me disarm him. Some of them may also have noticed his
accomplice waiting near by in a car, who left rather
hurriedly when Tonio was detained. If that
is not
enough, ask him
how my coat was cut if I was
trying
to stab him, or why I did not use the knife on him instead of my hands. After
that, you might ask
him who
hired him to kill me.”

The
maresciallo
heard the words with
pursed lips
and mask-like
impassibility. He poked at Simon’s
passport on the desk before him.

“We do not like international criminals
who
pose as simple
tourists,” he said. “Who come here
and attack people.”

Simon Templar’s eyes widened for an instant
as
he took the shock. Then
they narrowed into chips of blue ice as cold as the edge that crept into his
voice.

“Are you suggesting that there is one
grain of
truth in that creature’s story, or
that there is one shred of evidence to support it?”

Under the pressure of the challenge the
maresciallo’s
imperial manner slipped a bit. He
squirmed inside his gorgeous jacket and
seemed to
find it a
relief to switch his gaze to Tonio at frequent intervals.

“That is not the point. I mean to say,
this is an
investigation,
and we must consider all possi
bilities.
There is some doubt among the witnesses
as to exactly what happened. And you must
admit,
Signor
Templar, that your reputation is not spot
less.”

Simon glanced around at the
carabinieri,
who
stared stolidly back,
registering neither approval nor
disapproval
of their officer’s attitude. The Saint
had never cherished any childlike faith in
the impartiality of the police, but he did not have to be
excessively cynical to realize that there
was some
thing more here
than a normal suspiciousness of
his
honesty and respectable intentions. And an in
substantial but chilling draught seemed to
touch
his spine as it
dawned on him that something more
dangerous to him than any knifeman’s blade might lie beneath the
surface of that impersonal hostility.

Then yet another man came in, in ordinary
clothes but with a subtle air of authority
that in
visibly
outranked the
maresciallo’s
gold-encrusted
magnificence, and the tension that had begun
to build up dissolved as if it had all been an illusion.

He was a man of medium build, flat-bellied,
with
the gray eyes
and curly blond hair that are native
only to northern Italy. His browned features
seemed almost boyish at first, until one
discovered
the
intermingled lines etched among them by twenty years more than was suggested
by their youthful
contours.
But he walked with an athletic spring in
his step which again belied those skin-deep
foreshadowings
of middle age.

He stopped in front of Tonio, studying him
carefully, and said: “I am glad to see
someone has
worked on your ugly face, piece of
filth.”

He added some more vivid epithets which
would
have invited a
duel to the death in any tavern in
Sicily, but the wounded Tonio only glowered and
kept his lips buttoned.

No one else spoke either as the newcomer
turned
to the
maresciallo’s
desk and flicked through the
papers
on it.

“Simon Templar!” he said, looking
up and
laughing.
“We seem to have landed a big one this
time.”

He came towards
Simon and offered his hand.

“Let me introduce myself, Signor Saint:
my
name is Marco Ponti. I am
the
agente investigativo
here,
what you would call a police detective. Now
you know all about me, because I am sure you
know all about detectives. But I also know
some
thing about
you. And since you are here, it is my
business to ask what brings you to Sicily?”