“Buon giorno,” said the Saint, with his maximum affability. “Is this the way to the bathroom?”
The reaction was fully as obvious and exaggerated as a cinematic double-take. The newcomer’s sagging jaw dragged his mouth open in a befuddled O, exposing an interesting assortment of gold teeth interspersed with the blackened stumps of their less privileged fellows which had yet to benefit from auric reconstitution.
“Che cosa fai?”
The question seemed no less inanely rhetorical to the Saint than it had on the previous occasion, but this time he made an attempt to keep the conversation going.
“Ebbene, it is like this,” he replied, while he sank carefully to one knee and his other leg dropped over the cliff edge, his toe groping for a support. “There have been complaints about the foundations of this castle. We do not want Don Pasquale’s end to be accelerated by having his sick-room fall out from under him. So I have been called in to examine the underpinnings. I am inclined to suspect Death Watch beetles — does that sound likely to you?”
The opinion of his audience, which had been half-hypnotized into watching in blank stupefaction while Simon meantime levered himself over the ledge until only his chin was above its level, was not revealed because he was suddenly yanked back and replaced by the gunman who had taken his last pot shot from the upper window.
“Come back!” shouted the man, with somewhat idiotic optimism, as he tried to get into an aiming position.
“I’m sorry,” said the Saint, “but my union only allows me to climb down. To bring me up you must send an elevator.”
The gunman’s homicidal zeal was, not diminished by this reasonable answer, but he was severely handicapped by the mechanics of the situation. The precipice began at his feet, and the base of the building came almost to its edge on his right. If it had been the opposite way around, or if he had been left-handed, it would have been simplicity itself to poke his head and gun-hand around the corner and bang away. But being one of the right-handed majority, there was no way he could comfortably bring his gun to bear, short of stepping out and resting at least one foot on a cloud. He tried a couple of snap shots without that levitational assistance, but with his hand bent awkwardly back from his wrist the bullets went wide and the recoils almost dislodged him from his insecure stance on the rim of the chasm.
While he struggled with this peculiar problem, his quarry was working steadily down the sheer wall with an unexpected virtuosity that would have won respect from challengers of the Eiger. And by the time he had figured out the possible solution of lying flat on his stomach and wriggling out over the void for half the length of his chest, prepared even from that extension to try a southpaw shot if necessary, he was stung to a scream of frustration by the discovery that his target had meanwhile managed to claw his way around a sufficient bulge in the illusory plane of the cliff to be completely shielded from his line of sight.
While his would-be assassin may have been mentally elaborating excuses for the one that got away, Simon was still a long drop from feeling home and safe. He had done some rock climbing, as he had tried every other hazardous sport in his time, and he had muscles and agility that many professionals might have envied, but he would never have claimed to be an expert mountaineer. High-octane adrenalin was the primitive fuel that drove him, clinging like a limpet to an almost vertical gradient, his toes scrabbling for irregularities that might lend a bare ridge of support, his fingers hooking into grooves and crannies that only centuries of weather had eaten into the unsympathetic stone.
Having no time to be precise or technical, he took risks that no seasoned alpinist would have considered. He surrendered his weight to handholds that had not been fully tested, and one of them pulled away, a jagged chunk of rock that crashed down among the trees below, leaving him for one desperate moment without support of any kind, except the friction of his body pressed against the natural wall. Yet even as he slid, his hands were racing over the fissured incline and found another minuscule ridge, and he resumed his ingloriously frantic descent.
At infinitely long last something brushed his shoulder which he realized was a fruit-laden branch. With a quick twist he grasped it, swung down to the ground, and took off running through the grove.
Far above him, through the clear air, he heard the grind of a starter and the roar of a car’s engine breaking into life. Someone up there had finally realized that there might be better ways of cutting him off towards his destination than from his starting point.
He ran.
A patch of open meadow separated the orchards, and as he crossed it there was a flurry of echoes from high behind him, and something whistled past his ear and thudded into the turf. He accepted this with an equanimity which owed no little to the cold-blooded estimate that at such a distance a hand gun was approximately as dangerous as a well-hurled pebble. He had a more serious threat to worry about: the howl of an over-stressed motor came faintly down to his ears, and a large black limousine, strangely reminiscent of movies about Prohibition days in America, hurtled into view on a road that came over the cliff top near the house and zigzagged down towards the village. Its intentions were obvious from the maniac speed with which it attacked the descent, broadsiding on the turns and throwing up clouds of gravel and dust. Even though his predicament was no longer cliff-hanging, he could still be cut off...
The Saint doubled his pace and fairly flew down the more gentle slope, hurdling the tumbled-stone fences, pitting his own speed and freedom of choice against the more devious routes which the faster car was obliged to follow. As soon as he reached the shelter of the next grove, he angled off to the right, a change of course that would be hidden from watchers at the cliff top. The limousine was also invisible now behind the trees, but he could trace its progress by the whine of gears and the chatter of skidding tires. The element of desperate uncertainty was where his path and the road would intersect.
The pain in the back of his skull where he had been bludgeoned had long since been cured or driven out of consciousness by the pressure of more imperative demands on his attention. Another fence rose up ahead, made of the same broken slabs of stone fitted together without mortar, and again he took it like a steeplechaser, without breaking stride to make sure what was beyond. This was reckless, but he had little choice: the sounds of the car were coming much too close to permit leisured reconnaissance. As he cleared the wall, he discovered that the ground beyond had been cut away, making a drop of six feet on the other side — where the road itself was responsible for the cutting. He took the fall easily, touching his hands to the gravel with the force of the impact but instantly springing up again. But in one swift glance around he saw the top of the black sedan over the tops of some young olive trees a scant hundred yards farther up the incline. Only the configuration of the ground and an intervening hairpin bend prevented its occupants from seeing him as well.
In terms of the speed of the approaching vehicle, that advantage represented mere seconds of grace. Rebounding like a rubber ball, Simon took two more immense strides across the road and dived head first over the lower wall on the other side, landing with a paratrooper’s shoulder roll and staying flat on the ground at the end of it.
A shaved moment later, the car slashed around the bend and screeched to a rubber-rending stop just beyond the place where the Saint had crossed. It was so close that spurted gravel rattled against the wall and the dust floated over his head. If he had been a fraction slower he would have been caught on the road; ten seconds slower in his breakneck run and he would have been trapped in the groves above, which the mafiosi were now invading.