“We mustn’t be seen here together,” she said. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”
His hunch anchored itself solidly enough at that to provide a springboard for tentative exultation.
“Why not?” he said.
He turned her around and changed his grip more swiftly than she could have taken advantage of the instant’s liberty. Now locking the fingers of her right hand in his left, with his arm inside hers holding it tight against his side, he steered her briskly towards the station exit, as firmly attached to him as if they had been Siamese twins. But she went along as obediently as a puppet; and if any of Destamio’s men were waiting for a sign from her, they did not seem to get it.
He opened the door of the first cab on the rank outside, and followed her in without letting go her hand.
“I suppose you know this town,” he said. “Where would be a safe place to go, where we won’t be likely to run into Al or any of his pals?”
“The Hotel Baronale,” she said at once, and Simon repeated it to the driver.
Obviously the Hotel Baronale was a prime place to avoid, but Simon waited till they had whipped around the next corner before he leaned forward and pushed a bill from his stolen roll over the driver’s shoulder.
“I think my wife is having me followed,” he said hoarsely. “Try to shake off anyone behind us. And instead of the Baronale, I think it would be safer to drop us at the Cathedral, if you understand.”
“Do I understand?” said the chauffeur enthusiastically. “I have so much sympathy for you that it shames me to take your money.”
Nevertheless, he succeeded in stifling his shame sufficiently to make the currency vanish as if it had been sucked up by a starving vacuum cleaner. But he also made a conscientious effort to earn it, with an inspired disregard for the recriminations of a few deluded souls who thought that even in Sicily there were some traffic courtesies to be observed.
Looking back through the rear window, Simon became fairly satisfied that even if any second-team goons had been backing up Lily at the station, which seemed more unlikely every minute, they were now floundering in a subsiding wake.
“What are you so afraid of?” Lily asked, ingenuously.
“Mainly of being killed before I’m ready,” said the Saint. “I suppose I’m a bit fussy; but since it’s something you can only do once, I feel it should be done well. I’ve been working up to it for years, but I still think I need a few more rehearsals.”
His flippancy bounced off her like a sandbag off a pillow.
“It can only be Fate, meeting you again like this,” she said solemnly. “I never thought it would happen. I thought of you, but I didn’t know where to find you.”
It was a long speech for her, and he regarded her admiringly for having worked it out.
“Why were you thinking of me?” he inquired, resigning himself to playing it straight.
“I’ve left Al. When I found out how much he was mixed up in, I got scared.”
“You didn’t know this when you took up with him?”
“I haven’t been with him as long as that. I’m a dancer. I was with a troupe doing a tour. I met him at a club in Naples, and he talked me into quitting. I liked him at first, and I wasn’t getting on with the producer who booked the tour. Al took care of everything. But I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
In uttering so many sentences she was forced to give away clues to her mysterious accent; and with mild surprise he finally placed it as London-suburban cramped with some elocution-school affectations, and overlaid with a faint indefinable “foreign” intonation which she must have adopted for additional glamor.
“But if you’ve left Al, how did you get here to Cefalù?”
“I was afraid he’d catch me if I tried to get out of Italy by any of the ways he’d expect. You see, I took some money — I had to. I took the plane to Palermo and I thought I could take the next plane to London, but it was full up. There’s only one a day. I was afraid to wait in Palermo, because Al has friends there, so I came here to wait till tomorrow.”
The Saint had no way to know whether she was adlibbing or if her lines had been carefully taught her, but he nodded with the respectful gravity to which a good try was entitled.
“It’s lucky that I ran into you,” he said. “Luckier than you know, maybe. These men are dangerous!”
The cab shook as the driver spun it around another corner and braked it to a squealing halt in front of the Cathedral. Simon tossed another bonus into his lap, with the generosity which is best indulged from some other rogue’s misappropriated roll, and dragged Lily quickly out and across the fronting pavement.
“Why do you come here?” she protested, tottering to keep up with him on her high stiletto heels.
“Because all cathedrals have side doors. If cabdriver got inquisitive, he couldn’t cover all of them; and if anyone asks him questions, he won’t know which way we went after he dropped us.”
Inside, he slowed to a more moderate pace, and he noticed that he no longer seemed to have any resistance to overcome. He surmised that now she was temporarily parted from any protective hoodlums who may have been posted in the vicinity of the station — or the Hotel Baronale — she must feel that her most vital interest was to stay close to him rather than escape from him, for if she lost track of him now she might be in the kind of trouble that it was painful even to imagine. He felt free enough to take out his guide book and turn the pages, making like any swivel-eyed tourist.
“The columns,” he said, cribbing brazenly from the book, “take particular note of the columns, because they’re the handsomest you are going to see in a long while. And those capitals! Byzantine, by golly, intermixed with Roman, and all of them standing foursquare holding up those stilted Gothic arches. Don’t they do something to you? Or anything?”
“We can’t stay here,” Lily said, with a suppressed seethe. “If you’re in trouble with Al, you must get out of town too.”
“What do you suggest?”
“If you’re afraid of the railway, there is a bus station—”
“I came here on a bus,” he said, “and something happened that makes me feel that I’m probably passeggero non grata with the bus company.”
“What, then?”
“I must think of you, Lily. I suppose you made a reservation on the plane to London tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Then you daren’t go back to Palermo. By this time, Al could have checked with the airlines and found out about it. So we can fool him by going the opposite way, to Catania. We can get a plane from there to Malta — and that’s British territory.”
“How do we get there?”
“You don’t feel like walking?”
She gazed at him in silent disgust.
“Maybe it is a bit far,” he admitted. “But if we try to rent a car, that’s the next thing the Ungodly will have thought of, too. There must be something left that they won’t think of — if I can only think of it...”
He riffled the pages of the guide book, fumbling for an inspiration somewhere in its recital of the antique grandeurs and modern comforts of the city. To lose themselves in a population of less than 12,000 was a very different problem from doing the same thing in New York or even Naples. But there had to be a solution, there always was.
And suddenly it was staring him in the face.
“I know,” he said. “We’ll go to the beach and cool off.”
Lily’s mouth opened in an expression not unlike that of a beached fish — an expression which the Saint had a fatal gift of provoking, and which always gave him a malicious satisfaction. With no intention of prematurely alleviating her bewilderment, he captured her hand again and led her down an aisle and out into a tree-shaded cloister. From there, a small gate let them out into what his map showed to be the Via Mandralisca, where he turned back in the direction of the sea.