The Saint in Europe (21 page)

But nothing was likely to happen in the Excelsior cockнtail lounge, which was obviously not adapted to tidy abducнtions, and the Saint was too impatient to wait there for long. The laughing face of Sue Inverest kept materializing in front of him, turning into a mask of pitiful terror, disнsolving into imagined scenes of unspeakable vileness. He knew the mentality of men like Tony Unciello too well to be complacent about the inevitable passing of tune. He wanted something to happen fast. He wanted to leave nothing undone that would help it to happen.

He finished his sherry, paid for it, and went out into the street again.

A glance at his watch only reasserted the fact that it was still early to go to dinner. He strolled up towards the Borghese Park, making a conscious effort to slow down a stride that wanted to hurry but had no place to hurry to.

The crowded tables of a sidewalk cafe were suddenly on both sides of him. Perhaps there, Unciello’s men might see an opportunity.

He saw a vacant table at the edge of the sidewalk, next to the street, where it would be as easy as possible for them, and sat down.

A waiter took his order. A boy came by with an armful of newspapers, and Simon bought one. The kidnaping of Sue Inverest qualified for the biggest headline on the front page, and early in the story he found himself referred to as a friend of the girl, who had been “beaten and left for dead” on the scene; with a fine disregard for obvious probabilities, which was no more inconsistent than the facts, he was later reported being held by the police for investigation of his possible complicity in the crime.

His drink came, and he paid for it but did not touch it. He extracted a grim kind of satisfaction out of realizing that the chances of any food or drink offered to him being poisoned must be increasing with every minute. He could cope with that danger easily enough, at least for a while. It was less easy to become accustomed to the crawly feeling that at any instant a knife from nowhere might strike him between the shoulder-blades, or a fusillade of shots from a passing car smash him down into bloody oblivion. But that was what he had asked for; and he was beginning to symнpathize with the emotions of a goat that had not merely been staked out to attract a tiger, but was cooperating with every resource of capric coquetry to coax the tiger to the bait. And all he could do was hope he was not mistaken in his estimate of Tony Unciello’s vein of curiosity …

He read on, looking for a reference to the mysterious secret clue he was supposed to have.

And then he had company.

There were two of them, and because he had studiously avoided watching for them they might have sprung up out of the ground. They stood one on each side of him, crowding him, and at the same time practically blocking him from the sight of the other patrons of the cafe. They were men of perfectly average size and build, dressed in perfectly comнmonplace dark suits, with perfectly unmemorable faces disнtinguished only by the perfect expressionlessness of their prototypes in any gangster movie. It was just like home.

The street was behind Simon; but that opening was closed, with admirable timing, by a car which simultaneнously slid in to the curb and stopped at his back.

One of the men leaned on Simon’s shoulder with a hand that was buried in his coat pocket, but what the Saint felt was harder than a hand, and he knew that the muzzle of a gun was no more than an inch from his ear.

“Let’s-a go, sport,” the man said.

Simon tried to look up with the right combination of fear, surprise, and bluster.

“What are you talking about?”

“You, sport,” said the spokesman laconically. “Get in-a da car.”

Simon flicked his cigarette into the gutter, where it was immediately the center of a scramble of vulture-eyed urнchins, and stood up. It was the only stir caused by his departure.

In the car, the two men sat one on each side of him, in the back seat. Each of them kept a hand in the pocket of his coat on the side nearest the Saint, one in the right, one in the left. Their two guns pressed with equal firmness against the neighborhood of the Saint’s kidneys. Neither of them offered any conversation. The driver of the car said nothing. He drove in competent silence, like a man who already had his instructions.

There were no shades inside the car, no suggestion of blindfolding the Saint, no attempt to stop him observing the route they took. The implication that nothing he saw . would ever be any use to him was too obvious to be missed, but that gave him nothing unforeseen to worry about. He could still hope that the project was to take him to Tony Unciello before the only possible intended end of the ride.

They drove down to the Tiber, crossed over the Ponte Cavour, turned by the Palace of Justice. The great white dome of St Peter’s loomed ahead against the darkening sky, and lights played on the fountains in the vast circular piazza. in front of the cathedral, but they left it on their right and skimmed around the walls of the Vatican City to plunge into the maze of mean streets which lies incongruously between it and the pleasant park slopes of Monte Gianiнcolo. A few zigzags through narrow ill-lit alleys, and the car stopped outside a small pizzeria and bar with strings of salami tastefully displayed in the dingy window.

“Get out, sport,” said the talking man.

His partner got out first, and waited for the Saint. The two of them closed in behind Simon and prodded him. towards the door of the pizzeria. They kept him moving briskly through the odorous interior, but it was only to get their job done, not because they cared about anyone in the place. The drinkers at the bar just inside the entrance, the shirtsleeved bartender wiping glasses on a filthy rag, the few diners at the stained tables in the back, the slatternly woman who looked out of the open door of the kitchen in the rear, all stared at the Saint silently as he passed; but the stares were as emotionless and impersonal as the stares of zombies.

Next to the kitchen door there was a curtained archway; beyond it, a steep flight of stairs. They climbed to a narrow landing with two doors. The man who never spoke opened one of them and pushed the Saint through.

He found himself in a small untidy bedroom, but he hardly had time to glance over it before the same man was doing something to the big oldfashioned wardrobe which caused it to roll noiselessly aside like a huge sliding door.

“Keep-a moving, sport,” said the talkative one, and the Saint was shoved on through the opening.

As he stepped into the brightness beyond, as if on to a stage set, he knew that he had at least won the first leg of the double, even before he saw the man who waited for him.

“Hullo, Tony,” he said.

5

It was the contrast of the room in which he found himself after the squalor that he had been hustled through which was theatrical. It was spacious and high-ceilinged, exнquisitely decorated and furnished, like a room in a set designer’s conception of a ducal palace. The Saint’s gaze traveled leisurely around it in frank fascination. From his impression of the street outside, he realized that the interнiors of several ramshackle old buildings must have been torn out to provide a shell for that luxurious hideaway-a project that only a vast secret society could have undertaken and kept secret. Even the absence of windows was almost unnoticeable, for the indirect lighting was beautifully engiнneered and the air was fresh and cool.

“Quite a layout you have, for such a modest address,” Simon remarked approvingly. “And with air-conditioning, yet.”

“Sure, it’s plenty comfortable,” said Tony Unciello.

He sat in an immense brocaded chair, looking like a great gross frog. The resemblance held true for his sloping hairless head, his swarthy skin and heavy-lidded reptilian eyes, his broad stomach and thin splayed legs. In fact, almost the only un-froglike things about him were his clothes, the diamond rings on his fingers, and the cigar clamped in his wide thick-lipped mouth.

“So you’re the Saint,” Unciello said. “Sit down.”

Instantly Simon was pushed forward, the seat of an upнright chair hit him behind the knees, and two hands on his shoulders pushed him forcefully down on it. His two escorts stood behind him like sentries.

The Saint straightened his coat.

“Really, Tony,” he murmured, “when you get hospitable, it’s just like being caught in a reaper.”

The gangster took the cigar out of one side of his mouth and put it back in the other.

“I heard a lot about you, Saint.”

“I know. And you just couldn’t wait to meet me.”

“I could of waited for ever to meet you. But now it’s different. All on account of this place.” Unciello took the cigar out again to wave it comprehensively at the surroundнings. “It’s quite a layout, like you said. And comfortable, like I said. You ain’t seen a half of it. I could hole up here for years, and live just like the Ritz. Only there’s nobody supposed to know about it who don’t belong to me, body and soul. And then you come along, and you don’t belong to me, but it gives out that you know how to find me.”

“Why, what gave you that idea?”

“That’s what you said.”

“I’d bought a newspaper just before your reception comнmittee picked me up,” Simon remarked thoughtfully, “but it didn’t have that story. How did you hear it so quickly? Direct from the police, maybe?”

“You catch on fast,” Unciello said. “Sure, Inspector Buono’s one of my boys. He should of kept you locked up when he had you, and saved me this trouble.”

Simon nodded. He was not greatly surprised.

“I figured him for a bad egg,” he said. “But it’s nice to have you confirm it.”

“Buono’s a good boy,” Unciello said. “He knows where I am. That’s okay. But with you it’s different.” He leaned forward a little. His manner was very patient and earnest. “I like this place. Spent a lot of dough fixing it up. I’d hate that to be all wasted. But when a fellow like you says he could find it, it bothers me. I gotta know how you got it figured. So if maybe somebody slipped up somewhere, it can be taken care of. See what I mean?”

“You couldn’t be more lucid, Tony,” Simon reassured him. “And what do you think this information would be worth?”

Unciello chuckled, a soundless quaking of his wide belly.

“Why, to you it’s worth plenty. You tell me all about it, and everything’s nice and friendly. But you don’t tell me, and the boys have to go to work on you. They do a mean job. You hold out for an hour, a day, two days-depending how tough you are. But in the end you talk, just the same, only you been hurt plenty first. To a fellow with your brains, that don’t make sense. So you tell me now, and we don’t have no nastiness.”

Simon appeared to consider this briefly, but the concluнsion was obvious.

“You make everything delightfully simple,” he said. “So I’ll try to do the same. I said I could find you, and this proves it. I’m here now.”

“Only because my boys brought you here.”

“Which I figured you’d have them do as soon as you heard I was claiming to know how to find you.”

Unciello’s eyes did not blink so much as deliberately close and open again, like the eyes of a lizard.

“You’re a smart fellow. Now you’re here. What’s your angle?”

“Will one of these goons behind me start shooting if I go for a cigarette?”

“Not if it’s just a cigarette.”

Simon took one from the pack in his breast pocket, movнing slowly and carefully to avoid causing any alarm. In the same way he took out his lighter and kindled it.

“I’m acting as Mr Inverest’s strictly unofficial representaнtive,” he said. “As you very well know, he can’t officially make any deal with you. In fact, for public consumption he’s got to say loudly that nobody can blackmail him, even with his daughter’s life-or else he’d probably be out of a job and have no influence at all. But as a man, of course, you’ve got him over a barrel. He’s ready to trade.”

“He’s a smart fellow, too.”

“It’ll have to be very discreetly handled, so that it looks kosher. They’ll have to arrange to dig up some startling new evidence, to give grounds for a re-trial and an acquittal.”

“That’s his worry. I don’t care how he does it, just so Mick gets out.”

“But before he starts to work, he’s got to be sure that you’ve really got his daughter and that she hasn’t been harmed.”

“The gal’s okay.”

Simon looked at him steadily.

“I have to see her myself. Then I’ll write him a note, which you can have delivered. I’ll tell you right now that it’ll have a code word in it, which is to prove that I really wrote it and that nobody was twisting my arm to make me say the right things.”

Unciello contemplated him with the immobility of a Buddha. Then his eyes switched to a point over the Saint’s head.

“Mena la giovane,” he said.

The hoodlum who never spoke came around from beнhind the Saint’s chair and crossed the big room to disappear through one of the doors at the other end. Unciello smoked his cigar impassively. There was no idle conversation. Presнently the man who had left came back, and with him he brought Sue Inverest.

She was so exactly like Simon had seen her last, and as he remembered her, that for a moment it felt as if they were back in the Colosseum. Only in a strange dislocation of time they now seemed to belong rather with the expendнables who had once stood on the floor of the arena, while a modern but no less vicious Nero squatted like a toad on his brocaded throne and held their lives in his hands. But the girl still carried her curly fair head high, and Simon smiled into her shocked gray eyes.

“Your father sent me to see if you were all right, Sue,” he said gently. “Have they hurt you?”

She shook her head.

“No, not yet. Are they going to let me go?”

“Quite soon, I hope.”

“Write that letter,” Unciello said.

The taciturn thug brought a pad and pencil from a side table and thrust them at the Saint.

Simon balanced the pad on his knee and wrote, taking his time:

Dear Mr Inverest:
I’ve seen Sue, and she’s still as good as new. So you’d better hurry up and meet Tony’s terms, even if it isn’t exactly “for the public good.” Perhaps that would sound better to you in Latin, but it all comes to the homo sequendum. Will report again as arranged.