The Saint relinquished his grip and listened calculatingly to the thrumming roar that was now reverberating from the valley walls.
“Drink up,” he said encouragingly, “and let me do your work for you.”
As he spoke, he gently detached the reins from the other’s limp hold. The erstwhile driver turned and opened his mouth for another outburst of indignation, to be greeted with a smile of such seraphic innocence and friendliness that he forgot what he was going to complain about and wisely settled for another swig at the flagon. As his head went all the way back to drain the last gulp from it, the cart lurched over a well-chosen rut and his hat fell off. Simon caught it neatly and put it on his own head, tilted down over his eyes. In an instant his shoulders slumped with the defeat of the overworked and underfed, and the reins drooped as listlessly from his fingers as they had from those of the previous holder.
The timing and the performance were perfect. As the motor-scooter blatted deafeningly up behind and hurtled past, the rider should have seen only a pair of local peasants, the younger one dozing over the reins, the older one groping foggily for something he seemed to have lost in the back of the cart.
Nevertheless the courier jammed on his brakes and skidded to a halt in a billowing cloud of dust, squarely across the road in front of them. From the fact that he did not threaten them with a weapon, Simon could still hope that it was only a routine check, a matter of asking the cartmen if they had seen anything of the quarry. His crude disguise might still be effective, enhanced as it was by his authentically local companion and the wagon they were riding in.
“Alt!” shouted the messenger. “I want to talk to you!”
In spite of the torrid temperature, he wore the short black leather blouse required by the protocol of his fraternity, inside which he must have enjoyed all the amenities of a portable Turkish bath; but as he pushed back his goggles Simon realized that he had seen him before, even though they had been hidden from each other in the barber’s shop. It was one of the stone-faced security guards who had lurked sleeplessly around the marble columns of Don Pasquale’s palazzo above Mistretta.
With every faculty pitilessly aware of its thin margin for survival, the Saint lazily flicked the reins to urge the jenny as close as possible to the gunman — just in case...
“What kind of way is that to talk to anyone?” grumbled the chariot’s owner, blinking perplexedly at the interception.
Then, as he turned to his passenger for confirmation, he saw for the first time something that drove the more complex affront completely out of his fumbling mind.
“You stole my hat, ladrone!” he squawked.
He reached to retrieve the disputed headgear, but his alcoholic aim combined with Simon’s instinctive divergence only succeeded in knocking it off the Saint’s head. It fell almost at the feet of the startled scooterist, who had moved around to the side of the cart for less stentorian conversation, and whose reciprocal recognition was a coruscating gem of over-statement.
Then the mafioso’s right hand darted inside his jacket for the hardware that he should have displayed from the beginning.
Simon Templar moved even faster. He shifted sideways and swung his outside leg faster than the gunman could disengage his gun, and there was a distinct and satisfying crunch as the toe of his shoe caught the thug accurately in the side of the temple.
The man folded quietly to the ground and lay face down in the dirt.
Simon was leaping down for the clincher even while his opponent was falling, but no further effort was necessary. The scooter jockey had lost all interest in his mission, and would not be likely to regain it for a long time.
The Saint swiftly took possession of the half-drawn automatic, and tucked it inside his shirt under the waistband of his trousers where his belt would hold it in place. Then he ran through the man’s other pockets, and came up with a switchblade knife and a well-stuffed wallet. He looked up from it to find that his travelling companion had clambered down from the cart and was staring with mounting bewilderment at the sundry components of the scene.
“What is this all about?” pleaded the cart-driver distractedly.
Simon faced his next problem. The old man would inevitably be grilled by the Mafia before long, and he was likely to have an uncomfortably hard time absolving himself of complicity in the Saint’s escape. Unless he was provided with evidence that would convince even the hard-boiled mafiosi that he was only another hapless fellow-victim of the Saint’s lengthening list of atrocities.
There was an inordinate number of five-thousand-lire notes in the wallet, besides other denominations, and Simon extracted four of them and tucked them away under a sack of melons in the cart, while the driver gaped at him.
“If I gave those to you now, they might search you and find them,” he said. “Say nothing about them, and leave them there until you get home. Also, when you are questioned, remember how I jumped on your cart and forced you to let me stay there. Now, I am sorry to repay you so unkindly, but it will hurt you less than if the Mafia thought you had helped me.”
“What is this talk of the Mafia?” muttered the other blearily, swaying a little.
“Look at those birds in the sky,” said the Saint, steadying him; and as the man raised his chin he hit him under it as crisply and scientifically as he knew how.
The driver crumpled without a sound into another peaceful siesta.
For a second time Simon was tempted by the scooter, purely for its ground-covering potential; and now he might be able to afford a little time to unravel its mechanical secrets. But nothing less than a major operation would silence it, and he was still in a situation where stealth seemed to offer more advantages than speed.
He fired a single shot into its gas tank to eliminate it from further participation in the pursuit, and set off again at a mile-eating trot that tried to ignore the heat.
The mountain road twisted and doubled back upon itself like a tortured serpent. At some of the turns, when no unscaleable cliff or other geological barrier intervened, a rough footpath short-circuited the loop for the benefit of pedestrians. The Saint took advantage of all of them without slackening speed, although some of them dropped at forty-five degree angles and any slip might have meant violent injury.
The slopes were broken and rough, with little but cactus and thorny bushes holding their superficial shale together, and twice he picked his own route across the pebble-strewn beds of gullies gouged by torrents of some mythical rainy season rather than following even the slightly more cautious trail worn by previous short-cutters.
He was in the middle of one of these when he heard the anguished whine of an automobile’s straining gear-box coming up the valley from below, and he did not need to call on his clairvoyant gifts to divine that no innocent tourist conveyance would be in such a screaming rush to get to the drab cittadina at the head of that forsaken gorge.
There was no cover in the flat stream bed, and he would be instantly noticeable from anything crossing the stone bridge forty yards away. The bridge itself offered the only possible concealment, but that meant running towards the approaching car with the certainty of being still more conspicuous if he failed to win the race. Simon sprinted with grim determination, the loose rocks spurting from under his feet and the shrill grind of the car coming closer with terrifying rapidity. He dived under the shadow of the bridge’s single arch only a heart-beat before the car rumbled over it and yowled on up the grade.