There was no central fountain in the square; but somewhere near, he was sure, there had to be a town tap, or pump, or at least a horse-trough. He walked around the western and southern sides of the perimeter, keeping close to the buildings in order to benefit by their shade, and wondering how long it would be before the first food shop would re-open.
“Hi, Mac! You like a nice clean shave an’ freshen up?”
The voice almost made him jump, coming in heavily accented but fluent English from the open doorway he was passing. Overhead there was a crudely painted sign that said PARRUCCHERIA. A curtain of strings of beads, southern Europe’s primitive but effective form of fly barrier, screened the interior from sight, and he had assumed that a more solid portal had been left open merely to aid the circulation of air while the barber snored somewhere in the back of the shop; but apparently that artist was already awake and watching from his lair for any potential customer to pass within hooking range.
Simon, having been halted in his tracks, grated a hand across his thirty-six-hour beard and pretended to weigh the merits of the invitation. In reality he was weighing the few coins in his pocket and considering whether he could afford it. A delay of a quarter-hour or so should make little difference, and might be more than made up by the new vigor he could generate in such an interlude of complete repose. A clean-up would not only make him look less like a desperate fugitive, but would give him a psychological boost to match its outward effect. There would certainly be water — that thought alone almost jet-propelled him into the shop — and during, the ministrations he might elicit much information... or even something more mundane to chew on.
The arguments whirled through his head in a microfraction of the time it takes to set them down, and his choice was made well within the limits of any ordinary decision.
“You sold me, bub,” he said, and went in.
Dim coolness wrapped him around, the perpetually surprising phenomenon of thick-walled architecture that had evolved its own system of air-conditioning before Carrier tried to duplicate it mechanically. In the temporary partial blindness of the interior, he allowed himself to be guided into a barber chair that felt positively voluptuous, and to be swathed to the neck in a clean sheet. Then, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the half-light, he perceived something which he thought at first must be a hallucination conjured up by his thirst-tortured senses. A white foam-plastic box stood against the wall, filled with chunks of ice from which projected the serrated caps of four bottles.
“What’s that you’ve got in the ice?” he asked in an awed voice.
“Some beer, Mac. I keep a few bottles around in case anyone wants it.”
“For sale?”
“You bet.”
“I’ll buy.”
It took the barber four steps to the cooler, where the ice rattled crisply and stimulatingly as a bottle was withdrawn, and four steps back; each step seemed to take an eternity as the Saint counted the footfalls. It took another age before the top popped off and he was allowed to grasp the cold wet shape which seemed more exquisitely conceived than the most priceless Ming vase.
“Salute,” he said, and emptied half of it in one long delicious swallow.
“Good ’ealth,” said the barber.
Simon delayed the second installment while he luxuriated in the first impact of cool and tasty liquid on his system.
“I suppose you wouldn’t have anything around that I could nibble?” he said. “I always think beer tastes better with a bite of something in between.”
“I got-a some good salami, if you like that.”
“I’m crazy about good salami.”
The barber disappeared through another bead curtain at the back of the room, and returned after a few minutes with several generous slices on a chipped plate. By that time Simon had finished his bottle and could indicate with an expressive gesture that another would be needed to wash down the sausage.
“What made you speak to me in English?” he asked curiously, while it was being opened.
“The way you was lookin’ aroun’, I can see you never been in dis town before,” said the barber complacently. “So I start-a thinkin’, how you got your last hair-cut an’ how you dress an’ carry yourself. People from different countries all got their own face expressions an’ way of walkin’. You put a German in an Italian suit an’ he still don’t look Italian. I work-a sixteen years in Chicago an’ I seen all kinds.”
He was trending into his sixties, and with his smoothly shaven and powdered blue jowls and balding head with a few carefully nurtured strands of hair stretched across it he was himself a sort of out-dated but cosmopolitan barber-image. How and why he had gone to America and returned to this Sicilian dead-end was a story that Simon had no particular desire to know, but which he was sure he would be hearing soon, if there was any truth in the traditional loquacity of tonsorial craftsmen.
While he could still do some talking himself, however, before being partly gagged by lather and the need to maintain facial immobility, the Saint thought it worth trying to implant some protective fiction about himself.
“And only an English-speaking tourist would be nutty enough to hike all the way up here from the coast in the middle of a day like this,” he said.
If that version took hold, it might briefly dissociate him from someone else who was believed to have come over the crest from the other direction. Perhaps very briefly indeed, but nothing could be despised that might help to confuse the trail.
The barber deftly washed the dust of the hills from the Saint’s face and replaced it with a soothing balm of suds. His inscrutably lugubrious air might have seemed to mask the thought anyone who was not condemned to permanent residence in that backwater of civilization should not complain about the purely transitory discomfort of a mere day’s visit, no matter how arduous.
“You like-a ver’ much walking, I guess?”
“Somebody sold me on getting off into the back country and finding the real Sicily that the ordinary tourists miss,” Simon answered between swigs at his second bottle. “Unfortunately I didn’t ask all the details I should have about the gradients and the climate. I’m glad I saw this town, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to walking back down that road I came up. Does there happen to be a taxi in town, or anyone who drives a car for hire?”
“No, nothing like-a that, Mac.” The barber was stropping his formidable straight-edge razor. “There’s a bus twice a day, mornin’ an’ evenin’.”
“What time?”
“Six o’clock, both times. Whichever you choose, you can’t-a go wrong.”
Far from feeling that he had made a joke, the barber seemed to sink into deeper gloom before this illustration of the abysmal rusticity of the campagna where ill fortune had stranded him. He placed his thumb on the Saint’s jawbone and pulled to tighten the skin, and scraped down despondently with his ancient blade.
“You’re a big-a fool to get in trouble wit’ da Mafia,” he said without a change of intonation.
It was an immortal tribute to the Saint’s power of self-control that he didn’t move a fraction of a millimeter in response to that sneak punch-line. The razor continued its downward track, skimming off a broad band of soap and stubble, but the epidermis behind it was left smooth and bloodless where the slightest twitch on his part would have registered a nick as surely as a seismograph. The cutting edge rested like a feather on the base of his throat for a moment that seemed endless, while the barber looked down glumly into his eyes and Simon stared back in unflinching immobility.