Even while it was falling to the floor, he reached the window in a soundless rush.
Until then, he had had no clue to how long he had been unconscious after he had been knocked out in the mausoleum, and with his hands tied behind him he had been unable to see the time on his wrist watch. But now, with the electric bulb behind him, he saw that the sky was no longer black but gray with the first dim promise of dawn. And that faint glimmer of illumination was enough to show him why his captors were so unconcerned about leaving him in a room with an open unbarred window.
The palazzo was perched on the very edge of a precipice. The window from which he leaned out was pierced in a smooth wall with no other openings for fifteen feet on either side or above. Below, the wall merged without a break into the vertical cliff which served as its foundation. And below that juncture the rock sheered away into still unfathomable blackness.
V
How Simon Templar walked in the sun,
and Drank from various bottles
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.