“Wait until I get back,” he spat over his shoulder 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 unimpeded view of the night sky. The lack of bars on the opening was like a symbol, and Simon felt a sudden 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 avoiding any struggles violent enough to attract attention.
“What is the excitement about, dottore?” he asked, less in expectation of an answer than to cover 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 organization, 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 organization would welcome a new top thug with international 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 movements 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 expression.
“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 required the apathy of a turnip to resist such an intriguing summons, but also to avoid giving his escort 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 corridor with other closed doors in it, then up a flight of stone stairs which brought them into an enormous kitchen, from which another short passage and another doorway led into a vast baroque hall heavy with tapestries, paintings, suits of armor, and ponderously ornate woodwork. He realized 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 expressions 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 furniture. 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 pharmaceutical-looking assortment of bottles and supplies, over which hovered two men with the same unmistakably 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, perhaps, was Al Destamio. There was a stout smoothfaced 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 envied. 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 nothing 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 dissolution 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 obedience 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.