With the luminous dial of his watch turned to the inside of his wrist so that its glow would not betray him to any hidden watcher, if there were one, he verified that it was twenty minutes past three. So much had happened that night that it seemed as if it should already have been completely spent, yet he estimated that there must still be about an hour of darkness left. An hour which would give him the most concealment, before the early risers began to stir and the gray pre-dawn exposed him to their view.
Which was either plenty of time, or nothing like enough...
At first impression, it might have seemed an impossible task, to locate the hideout of Al Destamio and his buddies among all those barred and silent buildings. But actually it was by no means a search without clues. In the first place, by far the greater part of the village, through which Simon had had the limousine in sight, could be ruled out. Secondly, his quarry’s choice of that particular town had not been dictated by its cultural amenities or picturesque charm, nor would it have been picked on the spur of the moment: the Ungodly must have known exactly what refuge they were going to dive into when they hopped out of their car, without trusting that blind luck would let them blunder into something suitable. Nor would this merely be the home of some known sympathizer, since this would have involved an impossible delay for banging on the door to rouse him and waiting for him to open up. It had to be a place that they could get into at once; and since the telephone lines to the chateau had been cut long before their flight, they could not have called ahead to announce their arrival and prepare anyone to receive them. Therefore it would have to be a place to which they had a key, or where they knew that some door was always unlocked. Therefore it was most probably the home of one of them. And to qualify as the domicile of such an exalted member of the Mafia, it would have to be perceptibly more pretentious than the average of its neighbors. So that again a greater part of the remaining theoretical possibilities could be eliminated.
Satisfied now that he was not being observed, Simon Templar eased himself out of the doorway and made his way back up the side street as soundlessly as the cat.
The hideout was almost certainly beyond the second turning at the end of the block, since that would have given the fugitives more time to disappear before the Bugatti could come in sight of them again, and somewhere within the fifty-yard stretch that had separated him from the limousine when he saw it again. The Saint moved more slowly from the corner, staying in the deepest shadows and assessing the buildings on each side, his eyes and ears straining to pick up any glimmer of light or whisper of sound that would betray a suspiciously early wakefulness within.
The houses were ranged shoulder to shoulder, but not in an even line, some having chosen to set farther back from the road than others. Simon prowled past two, then three, a small shop with living quarters above, another tall narrow building, none of them giving any sign of life. Then there was something only about two meters high which pushed out closer to the road than any of its neighbors, and in a moment Simon realized that it was not the projection of a ground floor but simply of a wall enclosing the front garden of a building which was itself set back quite a distance from the street.
And as he drifted wraith-like towards the angle, he heard from beyond it a soft scuff of footsteps, and his pulse beat a fraction faster at the virtual certainty that this must be the place where Destamio & Co had holed up.
As he flattened himself against the side wall, with his head turned to allow only one eye to peep around the corner, a black shape took one step out from a gateway in the front and stood to glance up and down the road. The firefly glow of a cigarette-end brightened to reveal the coarse cruel face of a typical subordinate goon, and to glint on the barrel of what looked like a shotgun tucked under his arm.
That was the obliging clincher. A large house, behind a walled garden — and an armed guard at the gate. Any skeptic who insisted on more proof would probably have refused to believe that an H-bomb had hit him until his dust had been tested with a Geiger counter.
So now all that Simon had to do was to withdraw as softly as he had come, meet Ponti and the soldiers outside the town, and lead them to the spot.
Except that such relatively passive participation had never been the Saint’s favorite role. And it would certainly have been an anticlimactic denouement to the enterprise which had brought him that far. Besides which, he had already been pushed around too much by the Mafia to complacently leave others to administer their comeuppance. Major Olivetti and his bersaglieri had been fine for a frontal attack on the castle fortress, the boom of mortar shells and the flicker of tracer bullets had made it a stirring production number worthy of wide-screen photography; but Simon felt that something more intimate was called for in his personal settlement with Al Destamio.
He waited motionless, with infinite patience, until finally the bored sentinel turned and went back into the garden.
With the fluid silence of a stalking tiger the Saint followed behind him, and sprang.
The first intimation of disaster that the sentry had was when an arm snaked over his shoulder and the braced thumb-joint of its circling fist thumped into his larynx. Paralyzed, he could neither breathe nor yell, and he never noticed the second blow on the side of his neck that rendered him mercifully unconscious.
The Saint caught the shotgun as it dropped, and with his other hand clutched the man’s clothing and eased his fall to the ground into a mere rustling collapse. Then he picked the limp form off the driveway and carried it to the shadow of a clump of bushes and rolled it under.
The driveway led straight to the doors of a garage, a status symbol which had obviously been cut into one corner of the ground floor of an edifice much older than the horseless carriage, and a flagged path branched from it to three steps which mounted to the front door. Simon tiptoed up the steps, and the door yielded to his touch — which was no more than he expected, for the Ungodly would hardly have been old-maidishly apprehensive enough to have locked the guard outside. The hallway inside was dark; but light came from a crack under a door at the back, and a deep murmur of male voices. With the shotgun in one hand, Simon inched towards the light with hyper-sensory alertness for any invisible obstacle that might catastrophically trip him.
The voices came through the door distinctively enough for him to recognize the hoarse rasp of Destamio’s; but the conversation was mostly in Sicilian dialect, mangled and machine-gun fast, which made it almost impossible for him to follow. Occasionally someone would slip into ordinary Italian, which was more tantalizing than helpful, since the responses instantly became as unintelligible as the context. There seemed to be a debate as to whether they should lie low there, or leave together in a car which appeared to be available, or disperse; the argument seemed to hinge on whether their assembly should be considered to have completed its business for the present, or to have only been adjourned. The controversy flowed back and forth, with Destamio’s voice becoming increasingly louder and more forcefuclass="underline" he seemed to be well on the way to dominating the opposition. But the next most persistent if quieter voice cut in with some proposal which seemed to find unanimous acceptance: the general mutter of approval merged into a scraping of chairs and a scuffle of feet, the inchoate clatter of men rising from a council table and preparing to fly the coop.
Which was precisely the move that Simon Templar had undertaken to deter.