Simon Templar, willy-nilly, was given as unobstructed a view of the men in the car as they were given of him.
But after the first glance there was only one face that held his attention: the face of the man in front, beside the driver. A fat, reddened, unshaven face that cracked in a lipless grin like a triumphant lizard as the recognition became mutual.
The face of Al Destamio.
Simon wished he had been wearing a hat, so that he could have raised it in a mocking salute that seemed to be the only possible gesture at the moment. Instead, he had to be content with giving his pursuer a radiant smile and a friendly wave which was not returned.
Destamio’s exultant travesty of a grin was replaced by a vindictive snarl. The barrel of an automatic appeared over the sill of his open window, and he steadied it with both hands to aim.
The Saint’s smile also faded as he snatched the pistol from his belt and ducked to shelter as much of himself as possible below the dubious steel of the bus’s coachwork. He had no misgivings as to who would be the victor in a straight shoot-out under those conditions; but when Destamio’s henchmen chimed in, as they would without caring how many bystanders were killed or injured in the exchange, a lot of non-combatants were likely to become monuments to another of the perils of neutralism. And pusillanimous as they might have shown themselves, and perhaps undeserving of too much consideration, Simon had to think of the consequences to himself of a lucky score on the bus driver at that speed.
The problem was providentially resolved when Destamio suddenly disappeared. His startled face slid backwards with comical abruptness, taking the car with it, as if it had been snagged by some giant hook in the pavement; it took Simon an instant to realize that it was because the driver had been forced to jam on his brakes and drop back to avoid a head-on collision with oncoming traffic. No sooner had the sedan swung in behind the bus than an immense double-trailered truck roared by in the opposite direction, followed by a long straggle of weaving honking cars that had accumulated behind it.
The Saint didn’t wait to see any more. His guardian angel was apparently trying to outdo himself, but there was no guarantee of how long that inordinate effort would continue. He had to make the most of it while it lasted — and before a break in the eastbound lane gave the Mafia chauffeur a chance to draw level again.
Through the broad windshield could be seen the outskirts of a city, and a cog-wheeled sign whipped by with its international invitation to visiting Rotarians, followed by the name CEFALÙ. Now he knew where he was, and it would do for another stage.
As he pushed towards the front again, and the door, one of the men in a seat behind the driver was leaning forward to mutter something in his ear, and the bus was slowing.
“There is no need to stop,” Simon said clearly. “No one wants to get off yet.”
He was in the right-hand front corner by then, one shoulder towards the windshield and the other towards the door, and the gun in his hand was for everyone to see but especially favored the driver.
“I am supposed to stop here,” the man mumbled, his foot wavering between the accelerator and the brake.
“That stop has just been discontinued,” said the Saint, and his forefinger moved ever so slightly on the trigger. “Keep going.”
The bus rumbled on, and its other passengers glowered at the Saint sullenly, no longer trying to avoid his gaze, plainly resenting the danger that he had brought to them more violently and immediately than if he had been the carrier of a plague, but not knowing what to do about it. Simon remained impersonally alert and let his gun do all the threatening. Everyone received the message and declined to argue with it; the driver stared fixedly ahead and gripped the wheel as if it had been a wriggling snake.
From behind came repeated blares from the horn of the following sedan, and fresh sweat beaded the driver’s already moist forehead. Through the length of the bus and over the heads of the other riders, Simon could catch glimpses of the sedan hanging on their tail and fretting for a chance to draw alongside again, but the increasing traffic of the town gave it no opening. And in the longitudinal direction, the passengers who were now crowded into the rear two-thirds of the bus could not open up a channel through which the Saint could be fired at from astern. Yet with all its advantages, it was a situation which could only be temporary: very soon, a traffic light or a traffic cop or some other hazard must intervene to change it, or the pursuing mafiosi would become more desperate and start shooting at the tires.
Simon decided that it was better to keep the initiative while he had it. He threw a long glance at the road ahead, then turned to wave the passengers back into submission before any of them could capitalize on his momentary inattention.
“Put your foot over the brake,” he told the driver, “but do not touch it until I tell you to. Then give it all your weight — which can be alive or dead, as you prefer.”
He had photographed the next quarter-mile of road on his memory, and now he waited for the first landmark he had picked to go by.
“Hold on tight, amici,” he warned the passengers. “We are going to make a sudden stop, and I do not want you to fall on your noses — or on this very hard piece of metal.”
Again, through a momentary opening in the crowd, he glimpsed the trailing sedan edging out behind the left rear corner. And the wine-shop sign he had chosen for a marker was just ahead of the driver. The timing was perfect.
“Ora!” he yelled, and braced himself.
The brakes bit, and the bus slowed shudderingly. The standing passengers stumbled and collided and cursed, but miraculously held on to various props and managed to avoid being hurled down upon him in a human avalanche. And from the rear came a muted crash and crumpling sound, accompanied by a slight secondary jolt, which was the best of all he had hoped for.
The bus had scarcely even come to a complete standstill when he reached across the driver and in a swift motion turned off the ignition and removed the key.
“Anyone who gets out in less than two minutes will probably be shot,” he announced, and pulled the lever that controlled the door next to him.
Then he was out, and one glance towards the rear confirmed that the Mafia sedan was now most satisfactorily welded to the back of the bus which it had been over-ambitiously trying to pass. Its doors were still shut, and the men in it, even if not seriously injured, were apparently still trying to pick themselves off the floor or otherwise pull themselves together. The car itself might or might not be out of the chase for a considerable time, but the bus solidly blocked any vehicular access to the alley across the entrance of which it had parked itself with a symmetry which the Saint could not have improved on if he had been driving it himself.
He had put the pistol back in his waistband under his shirt during the last second before he stepped out of the bus, so that there was nothing to make him noticeable except the fact that he was walking briskly away from the scene of an interesting accident instead of hurrying towards it like any normal native. But even so, those who passed him were probably too busy hustling to secure a front-row position in the gathering throng to pay any attention to his eccentric behavior.
He strode down the alley to where it crossed another even narrower passage, flipped a mental coin, and turned left. Half a block down on the right, a youth in a filthy apron was emptying a heaped pail of garbage into one of a group of overflowing cans, and went back through the battered door beside them, which emitted an almost palpable cloud of food and seasoning effluvia before it closed again. The Saint’s nostrils twitched as he reached it: scent confirmed sight to justify the deduction that it was the back door of a restaurant, which had to have another more prepossessing entrance on the other side. Without hesitation he opened the door and found himself in a bustling steaming kitchen, and still without a pause he walked on through it, as if he owned the place or owned the proprietor, with a jaunty wave and an affable “Ciao!” to a slightly perplexed cook who was hooking yards of spaghetti from an enormous pot, heading for the next door through which he had seen a waiter pass. It took him straight into the restaurant, where other waiters and customers disinterestedly assumed that he must have had business in the kitchen or perhaps the men’s room and hardly spared him a second look as he ambled purposefully but without unseemly haste through to the front entrance and the street beyond.