1
The city of Rome, according to legend, is built upon the spot where the twin sons of Mars, Romulus and Remus (by a Vestal who must have been somewhat less than virgin) were suckled by a maternally-minded she-wolf, and there were bitter men in the police departments of many countries who would have said that that made it a very appropriate city for Simon Templar to gravitate into, even today. But they would have been thinking of him as a wolf in terms of his predatory reputation, rather than in the more innocuous modern connotation of an eye for a pretty girl. He had both, it is true, but it was as a lone wolf in the waste lands of crime that his rather sensational publicity had mostly featured him.
Simon Templar himself would have said, with an impish twinkle, that his affinity for Rome would be better attributed to the traditional association of the place as a holy city, for who could more aptly visit there than one who was best known by the nickname of “The Saint”?
It troubled him not at all that the incongruity of that sobriquet was a perpetual irritant to the officers of the law who from time to time had been called upon to try and cope with his forays: to revert to the wolf simile, it was enough for him that even his worst enemies had to concede that the sheep who had felt his fangs had always been black sheep.
But that morning, as he stood on the entirely modern sidewalk outside the ancient Colosseum, his interests were only those of the most ordinary sightseer, and any vulpine instincts he may have had were of the entirely modern kind just referred to — the kind which produces formalized whistles at the sight of a modern Vestal, virtuous or not.
The Saint was too well-mannered for such crude compliments, but the girl he was watching could have been no stranger to them. From the top of her close-cropped curly golden head, down through her slim shapely figure and long slender legs to her thorough-bred ankles, she was fresh clean young American incarnate, the new type of goddess that can swim and ride and play tennis and laugh like a boy, to the horror of the conservatives on old Olympus.
Also, as happens all too seldom in real life, she was most providentially in trouble. Providentially from the point of view of any healthy footloose cavalier, that is. She was engaged in a losing argument with the driver of the carriage from which she had just alighted, a beetle-browed individual with all the assurance of a jovial brigand.
“But I made the same trip yesterday,” she was protesting indignantly, “and it was only two hundred lire!”
“One t’ousand lire,” insisted the driver. “You give-a me one t’ousand lire, please, Signora. Dat-a da right-a fare.”
It was all the opening that Simon could have asked.
He strolled up beside the girl.
“Where did you take him from?” he asked.
A pair of level gray eyes sized him up and accepted him gratefully.
“From the Excelsior.”
Simon turned to the driver.
“ Scusami,” he said pleasantly, “ ma lei scherza? The fare cannot be one thousand lire.”
“ Mille lire,” said the driver obdurately. “It is the legal fare.” He waved his whip in the direction of three or four other unemployed carrozze parked expectantly in the shade of the Arch of Constantine. “Ask any other driver,” he suggested boldly.
“I prefer a more impartial witness,” said the Saint, with imperturbable good humor.
He reached out for the blanket that was neatly draped over the seat beside the driver, and flipped it back with a slight flourish. It disclosed a conventional taxi-meter which would have been in plain sight of the passenger seat if the blanket had not been so carefully arranged to hide it. Simon’s pointing finger drew the girl’s eyes to the figures on it.
“One hundred and ninety lire,” he said. “I’d give him exactly that, and forget the tip. It may teach him a lesson — although I doubt it.”
The coachman’s unblushing expostulations, accompanied by some scandalous reflections on their ancestry and probable relationship, followed them as the Saint drew her tactfully through the arches and out of earshot.
“All the carriages in Rome have meters. Just like a taxi,” he explained easily. “But there isn’t one of them that doesn’t have a blanket artistically draped over it, so that you’d never think it was there unless you knew about it. The driver can’t lose, and with the average tourist he usually wins. It’s brought the country almost as many dollars as the Marshall Plan.”
“I’m the original innocent,” she said ruefully. “This is my first trip abroad. Do you live here? You speak Italian as if you did.”
“No, but I’ve been around.”
A seedy-looking character wearing the typical emblem of his fraternity, a two-days growth of beard, sidled up to them.
“You want a guide?” he suggested. “I tell you all about the Colosseum. This is where they had the circus. Lions and Christians.”
“I know all about it,” said the Saint. “In a previous incarnation, I was Nero’s favorite clown. My name was Emmetus Kellius. Everybody used to laugh themselves sick when the lions bit me. So did I. I was smeared all over with hot mustard. Unfortunately, though, I was color-blind. One day, just for a laugh, Poppaea changed the mustard in my make-up pot for ketchup. Everyone said I gave the funniest performance of my life. It even killed me. However—”
The would-be guide stared at him disgustedly and went away.
The girl tried to stop giggling.
“Do you really know anything about it?” she asked. “It makes me wish I’d paid more attention to Latin when I was in school. But I never got much beyond Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.”
“ ‘De Gaulle is divided in three parties,’ ” he translated brightly. “I wonder if our State Department knows about that.”
She shot him a sudden sharp glance which he did not understand at the time. It made him think that he was overdoing the flippancy, and he didn’t want to spoil such a Heaven-sent beginning.
He said, gazing across the arena, “I don’t care about knowing a lot of dull statistics about it. I just try to imagine it as it was before it began to fall apart. Those tiers with nothing but seats like rows of steps, right up to the top. The bleachers, full of excited bloodthirsty people. The arena baking in the same sun that’s on it now.”
“It’s so much smaller than I thought it would be.”
“It’s bigger than it looks. You could put a football field in the middle and have plenty of room to run around.”
“But the bottom — it’s all cut up into sort of dungeons.”
“They probably were. Locker rooms for the gladiators, cells for the Christians, dens for the wild beasts. They must have been roofed over with planks which rotted away long ago, which made the floor of the arena, with a layer of sand on top for easy cleaning. I expect you could hear everything that went on — from underneath. Until your turn was called... I wonder how many people have come up blinking into this same sunlight that we’re seeing, and these stones were the last thing they ever saw?”
She shuddered.
“You make it seem much too real.”
But there were no holiday crowds filling the amphitheater then. Just a handful of wandering tourists, a few self-appointed guides loafing in hopes of a generous audience, a few peddlers with trays of mass-produced cameos. Simon Templar was hardly aware of any of them. He was wholly enjoying the company of the refreshingly lovely girl whom a buccaneer’s luck had thrown into his life.
That is why he was completely astounded to realize, in the split second of pain and coruscating lights before unconsciousness rolled over him, that someone had come up behind and hit him on the head.
2
He had to repeat the steps of realization, laboriously, as the blackness slowly dissolved again. His first impression was that he had simply passed out, and he thought hazily of sunstroke, but he couldn’t believe that a little sun could do that to him. Then, as a focal point in his skull began to assert itself with painful throbbing, that last instant of awareness came back to him in a flash. He struggled up and opened his eyes.
He was not on the ground, but on a wooden bunk that was almost as hard. There was stone around him, but not the moldering stones of the Colosseum: there were modern blocks, trimly morticed. A door made of iron bars. And the only evidence of sun was a little light that came through a barred window high above his head.
He could not recall exactly when he had last looked at his watch, but it told him that at least two hours must have passed since he was talking to a delightful young blonde whose name he had not even learned. If he needed anything more than the ache in his head to attest the efficacy of the blow he had taken, the measurement was there on the dial.
He felt his pockets, thinking stupidly of robbery. They were empty. Robbery might have had something to do with it, but it would not account for the stone walls and the bars.
He was in jail.
He dragged himself to his feet, mastering a desire to vomit, and stumbled to the door. Holding on to the bars, he called out, “Hey! Hullo there!”
It reminded him idiotically of an arty play he had once seen.
Ponderous footsteps clumped deliberately along the passage, and a turnkey came in sight. The uniform clinched any lingering doubt about the jail.
“What am I doing here?” Simon demanded in Italian.
The man surveyed him unfeelingly.
“ Aspette,” he said, and went away again.
Simon sat down on the hard cot and held his head in his hands, fighting to clear the cobwebs out of it.
Presently there were footsteps again, brisker and more numerous. Simon looked up and found the jailer unlocking the door.
It opened to admit a small delegation. First, in a kind of inverted order of precedence, came a burly police sergeant in uniform. After him came a superior officer in plain clothes, who was slight and rather dapper, but just as obvious a police type in European terms. Those two the Saint might have expected, if he had thought about it, no matter why he was where he was. But it was the third man, for whom they made way only after they had apparently satisfied themselves that the Saint’s attitude was not violent, who was the stopper.
He was a tall iron-gray man with a scholarly stoop, most formally dressed in swallow-tail coat and striped trousers, even carrying white gloves and a silk hat, and Simon recognized him at once. Several million other people would have made the same startled recognition, for Mr Hudson Inverest was not exactly an international nonentity.
“Well,” said the Saint, somewhat incredulously, “this is certainly a new high in service. I know the Secretary of State is technically responsible for people who get themselves in trouble abroad, but I didn’t expect you to bail me out in person.”
“You know who I am?” Inverest said matter-of-factly.
The Saint smiled.
“I’ve seen you in enough news pictures, caricatures — and television. Now I remember reading about you being here on an official visit. It’s really very thoughtful of you to be around just at this moment.”
The Secretary stared at him grimly over the top of his glasses.
“Mr Templar, what do you know about my daughter?”
Simon Templar’s eyebrows rose a little and drew together.
“Your daughter? I didn’t even know you had one.”
The uniformed sergeant started a threatening gesture, but the plainclothes man checked it with an almost imperceptible movement of his hand.
“My daughter, Sue,” Inverest said.
“A willowy blonde?” Simon said slowly. “With short curly hair and gray eyes?”
“You were with her at the Colosseum — just before she was kidnaped.”
It all clicked in the Saint’s recuperating mind, with a blind and devastating simplicity — even to a reaction of hers which had puzzled him at the time.
“I was talking to a girl like that,” he said. “I’d just made some silly crack about the State Department, and I noticed she took it in a rather funny way. But I hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. And then I got slugged over the head myself. If there were any witnesses, they must have seen that.”
“That was seen,” said the plainclothes man. “But it did not explain your presence there.”
“I was unable to leave,” said the Saint. “I was knocked cold, remember? Do you always arrest any innocent bystander who gets hurt at the scene of a crime?”
“When your pockets were searched for identification,” said the plainclothes man suavely, “it was found out at once who you are. Therefore you were brought here. I am sure that being arrested is not such a new experience for you.”
Simon turned to the Secretary.
“Mr Inverest, I never saw your daughter before in my life. I didn’t have the faintest idea who she was. I just happened to meet her outside the Colosseum. She was having an argument with a cab driver who was trying to overcharge her. I helped her out, and we went into the place together. We went on talking, naturally. And then I was conked on the head. That’s all I know.”
“There were two others,” said the superior policeman impartially. “After they knocked out Mr Templar, they grabbed Miss Inverest and rushed her out to a car which was waiting outside. I think, your Excellency, that if you give us a little time alone with Mr Templar, we may persuade him to tell us who they were and how he arranged to — as you say — put the finger on your daughter.”
Inverest waved him down impatiently. “Mr Templar is to be released at once.”
“Your Excellency must be joking.”
“I demand it in the name of the Government of the United States. There is no reasonable charge that can be brought against him.”
“But a man of his reputation—”
Inverest’s level gray eyes, oddly reminiscent of his daughter’s, searched the Saint’s face over his spectacle rims with the same detached appraisal that the girl had given it.
“Inspector Buono,” he said, “Mr Templar is rumored to have considerable disregard for the law, but there are no actual charges of lawbreaking pending against him in my country. His notoriety, as I understand it, comes from his reprehensible habit of taking the law into his own hands. But it is well known that he is a relentless enemy of criminals. I cannot think of anyone who would be less likely to have any part of such a crime as this. O si sic omnes! ”
It was a quaintly professorial and almost pedantic speech, even to the Latin quotation at the end, of the type that frequently made Mr Inverest an easy butt for the more ribald type of political heckling, but his handling of it gave it an austere dignity.
Inspector Buono shrugged helplessly.
They went into an office. The Saint’s personal belongings were returned, and a paper was drawn up.
“Your Excellency will have to sign this,” Buono said, with ill-concealed disapproval. “I have to protect myself. And I hope your Excellency knows what he is doing.”
“I accept full responsibility,” Inverest said, taking out his pen.
Simon watched the signature with the feeling of being at an international conference.
“You’re a really big man, sir,” he said, with a sincere respect which came strangely from him. “Not many people would be capable of giving a ready-made devil like me his due, in a situation like this. Certainly not the average small-time cop.”
Buono scowled.
“ Damnant quod non intelligunt,” Inverest said wryly. “It’s part of my job to be some sort of judge of human nature. Besides, I have access to special information. I checked on your record in Washington by telephone while we were waiting for you to come to. I talked to the man who was in charge of the OSS section you worked for during the last war.”
“Hamilton?”
“He gave you quite a remarkable reference.”
Simon lighted a cigarette. He had almost forgotten the throbbing in his head, and his brain was starting to feel normal again.
“I wish I could be some use to you now,” he said sympathetically. “I liked your daughter a lot... If I’d only had the least idea who she was, I might have been a little on guard. But there wasn’t any reason for me to be suspicious of anyone who came near us. How come she was running around on her own like that, without any kind of protection? Or does that question embarrass Inspector Buono?”
“A special escort was provided for Miss Inverest,” Buono said coldly. “But she gave them the slip. Deliberately, I am told.”
“There was a young fellow detailed by the Embassy to take her around, too,” Inverest said, “and she stood him up. Sue’s always been like that. She hates the VIP treatment. Getting away from Secret Service men and all that sort of thing is just like playing hookey from school to her. She says she just wants to get around on her own and see things like any ordinary girl. I can’t really blame her. I couldn’t be telling her all the time what special danger she might be in.”
“Do you have some idea what the special danger might be right now?” Simon asked.
“Unfortunately, I do. In fact, I know it.”
Inverest took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. That mechanical movement was the first break in his Spartan self-control, the first outward betrayal of the desperate anxiety that must have been eating his insides.
“Does the name Mick Unciello mean anything to you?”
“I read all the crime news,” said the Saint, with a slight smile. “He was the official executioner of the Midwestern crime syndicate. The FBI finally got the goods on him, and he was sentenced to the chair some time ago.”
“His final appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected last week.”
“The Supreme Court can collect a bouquet from me.”
“Now, do you remember the name Tony Unciello?”
“Yes. He was the vice lord in the same syndicate. The FBI didn’t do so well with him, but they were able to get him deported — I think that was in 1948.”
“Mick Unciello, of course, is the younger brother of Tony. And Tony is here in Italy.”
“It begins to figure,” said the Saint quietly.
“Nothing can save Mick Unciello’s life now except the personal intervention of the President,” Inverest said in his dry schoolmasterish voice. “That, of course, is unthinkable. But it may be quite another matter to convince Tony that my influence would not be enough to bring it about.”
“Is this something more than a fast guess on your part?”
“Oh, yes,” said the Secretary wearily. “I’ve already had a telephone call from a person claiming to be Tony Unciello, and I have no reason to doubt its authenticity. He said that unless Mick Unciello is reprieved, Sue would die too — but more slowly.”
Simon Templar drew at his cigarette, holding it with fingers that were almost self-consciously steady. The naturally devil-may-care lines of his strong reckless face might never have known laughter. He faced the set-up in all its naked ugliness. A memory of Sue Inverest’s gay clean-limbed confident youth slid across his mind, and his stomach curled again momentarily.
Then his eyes went to the sleek Inspector.
“But if it’s as open as all that,” he said, “why haven’t you picked up Tony Unciello?”
“It is not so easy,” Buono said stonily. “Unciello has dropped out of sight since several days. You understand, there was nothing against him here, so he is not watched all the time. Now, he cannot be found. We look for him, of course, but it is not a simple matter of going to his apartment. He is hiding.”
“And you haven’t any idea where to look.”
“It is not made easy for us.”
“What Inspector Buono isn’t saying,” Inverest put in, “is that the Unciellos are both members of the Mafia. Tony himself is reputed to be one of the very top men. Perhaps you don’t know what a stranglehold that terroristic secret society has on this country. Nobody knows how many members there are, but at least three-quarters of the population are scared to death of them. If a man of Unciello’s class wants to disappear, there are thousands who would help to hide him, and literally millions who wouldn’t betray him if they knew where he was.”
The Saint took another long drag at his cigarette. He tilted his head back and exhaled the smoke in a trickle of seemingly inexhaustible duration, watching it with rapt lazy-lidded blue eyes.
“Just the same,” he said, “I think I know how to find him.”
3
It was as if he had hit them with a paralysis ray out of some science-fiction story. Hudson Inverest stiffened where he sat. Inspector Buono made one sharp jerky movement and then froze.
“Do you mean you know more about this man than you’ve told us?” Inverest said.
Simon nodded.
“Funny things happen when you’re knocked out,” he said. “I was hit on the head, and I went down like a wet rag. But I didn’t black out all at once. My eyes must have gone on working for several seconds, like a camera with the shutter left open, before I passed out completely. And then, when I first recovered consciousness, I’d forgotten all about what I saw. Now it’s suddenly all come back — as if the film had been developed. I know I can find Tony Unciello.”
“What did you see?” Buono demanded.
Simon looked him in the eyes.
“I can’t tell you.”
“I do not understand you, Signor!”
“What I saw happens to be something that wouldn’t be any use at all to anyone else. I’m the only man in the world who could use it. So I shall keep it to myself — until I’ve found Tony. I don’t think it’ll take very long.”
“That is absurd!” Buono insisted waspishly. “I insist that you tell us how you propose to do this.”
The Saint turned to Inverest.
“I will tell you, sir, in private, and let you be the judge. But I’m quite sure you’ll agree with me. You see, what I know has some really shocking political complications. If it leaked out, the international repercussions would be bigger than an atom bomb. If you knew what I know, you’d be the first to order me to keep my mouth shut.”
Inspector Buono bounced to his feet.
“It is against the law to conceal information about a crime from the police,” he said furiously. “This alters everything. I shall refuse to release you!”
Inverest gazed at the Saint intently from under lowered brows.
“He has already been released,” he pointed out at length. “Furthermore, as regards anything that has transpired since then, I must inform you that Mr Templar has just been appointed a special attaché to the American Embassy, and therefore claims diplomatic immunity.” He stood up. “I shall communicate with you later, Inspector, if I decide that Mr Templar’s information should be disclosed. Come, Mr Templar.”
He gestured with his shiny top hat towards the door, and Simon went and opened it.
The Secretary of State stalked out without a backward glance, but Simon Templar could not resist turning to give the baffled Inspector a mocking bow before he followed.
Uniformed guards outside saluted them into a waiting black limousine with CD plates and the Stars and Stripes fluttering from a little mast on the hood. It was the finest exit the Saint had ever made from any police station, and he would treasure the remembrance for the rest of his life — however long that might be.
“The driver is an Italian,” Inverest said. “Better wait until we’re alone.”
Simon nodded, and said nothing more until the door had closed behind them in the office at the Embassy which had been placed at the Secretary’s disposal.
“Well, Mr Templar,” Inverest said, dropping his hat and gloves on the desk, “you’ve placed me in a most peculiar position. Unless you have something extraordinary up your sleeve, I might well deserve to be impeached. All that talk of yours about international complications, of course, was arrant nonsense.”
“You realized that, did you?”
“I’m not completely naive.”
“After what you said about the Mafia,” Simon explained, “I couldn’t take any chances. Not even in police headquarters. It’d only take one tiny leak to blow the whole works. And that’d mean goodbye to Sue.”
“That’s understood,” Inverest said brusquely. “I took the risk of backing you up. But what is it that you know?”
Simon took out a cigarette and placed it between his lips. Then he took out his lighter and held it poised.
“Nothing.”
He lighted the cigarette.
Hudson Inverest’s features seemed to crumple from inside, as if he had received a physical blow. He sank slowly into a chair.
“Good God, man,” he cried shakily. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know a thing. I haven’t a clue. I was knocked cold on the spot, and that was the end of it. But,” Simon went on quickly, “nobody knows that except you and me.”
Inverest clasped his hands together as if to steady them.
“Go on.”
“If there’s a leak in the police department,” said the Saint, “so much the better. It’ll make the story that much more convincing when it gets to Tony. But we’re not going to gamble on that chance alone. I want you to call in your public relations boys and tell them to see that every newspaper in Rome gets the story. Let ’em be as mysterious as they like, but sell it big. Then we’ll know for sure that Tony Unciello will hear it. His men already know that they slugged a guy who was with Sue, but they didn’t know who it was. My name’ll hit them with a big bang. I think it’ll make ’em believe almost anything.”
“But if they do believe it,” Inverest said, “what good will it do? They’ll just shoot you down in the street.”
Simon shrugged.
“That’s quite a possibility. But I’m betting on the angle of curiosity. I don’t think a man like Unciello could bear never to know what this one thing was that I had on him. So I think he’ll want me taken alive.”
“Even so,” Inverest protested, “if they catch you and take you to him — what would you be able to do?”
“I’ll try to think of that when the time comes.” Simon stood over the older man, very lean and straight, and something like the strength of a sword invested him. “But it’s the only chance we’ve got of finding your daughter. You’ve got to let me try it.”
The statesman blinked up at him, trying to dispel a ridiculous illusion that a musketeer’s feather tossed above that impossibly handsome face.
“It might still cost you your life,” he said.
“For a gal like Sue,” said the Saint lightly, “I wouldn’t call that expensive.”
4
Simon Templar came out of the front gates of the Embassy and stood on the sidewalk for a while, gazing idly up and down the Via Vittorio Veneto, like a man trying to make up his mind where to go. What he wanted was to be sure that anyone who might already be watching for him outside would not be left flat-footed by too sudden a departure.
Presently he walked a few steps to the entrance of the Hotel Excelsior, which was only next door. He paused inside to give the lobby a leisurely survey, and at the same time to give the population of the lobby plenty of time to survey him. Then he crossed to the porter’s desk.
“Do you have any messages for me?” He added, very clearly. “The name is Templar — Simon Templar.”
“Your room number, sir?”
“Six-seventeen.”
The porter examined his pigeonholes.
“No, Mr Templar.”
“Thank you. Where is the cocktail bar?”
“On the left, sir, down the stairs.”
That ought to take care of anyone who might be waiting to pick him up at the hotel.
He went down the stairs. The room was filling up, the hour being what it was, but he found a place at the bar and ordered a Dry Sack. He was aware of other people filtering in after him — at least two couples, and a single man who sat at the far end of the bar and started reading a newspaper. But Simon paid none of them any direct attention. He watched more carefully to see the bottle taken off the shelf and his drink poured without any legerdemain. After all, he reflected, the Borgias were Italians, and any bartender would be a likely candidate for the Mafia.
The general level of conversation, he was pleased to note, was pitched discreetly low.
He said to the bartender, just loudly enough for anyone who cared to overhear, “Tell me, I hear there are two restaurants claiming to be the original Alfredo’s — the place that’s famous for fettuccini. Which is the real one?”
The bartender grinned.
“Ah, yes, they make much propaganda against each other. But the real one, the old one, is in the Via della Scrofa.”
“Then I must have been taken to the imitation last night. Tonight I’ll have to try the old original.”
“You will have a good dinner.”
And that should be plenty of help to anyone who picked up the trail late, or who wanted to make plans ahead...
But nothing was likely to happen in the Excelsior cocktail lounge, which was obviously not adapted to tidy abductions, and the Saint was too impatient to wait there for long. The laughing face of Sue Inverest kept materializing in front of him, turning into a mask of pitiful terror, dissolving into imagined scenes of unspeakable vileness. He knew the mentality of men like Tony Unciello too well to be complacent about the inevitable passing of time. He wanted something to happen fast. He wanted to leave nothing undone that would help it to happen.
He finished his sherry, paid for it, and went out into the street again.
A glance at his watch only reasserted the fact that it was still early to go to dinner. He strolled up towards the Borghese Park, making a conscious effort to slow down a stride that wanted to hurry but had no place to hurry to.
The crowded tables of a sidewalk cafe were suddenly on both sides of him. Perhaps there, Unciello’s men might see an opportunity.
He saw a vacant table at the edge of the sidewalk, next to the street, where it would be as easy as possible for them, and sat down.
A waiter took his order. A boy came by with an armful of newspapers, and Simon bought one. The kidnapping of Sue Inverest qualified for the biggest headline on the front page, and early in the story he found himself referred to as a friend of the girl, who had been “beaten and left for dead” on the scene; with a fine disregard for obvious probabilities, which was no more inconsistent than the facts, he was later reported being held by the police for investigation of his possible complicity in the crime.
His drink came, and he paid for it but did not touch it. He extracted a grim kind of satisfaction out of realizing that the chances of any food or drink offered to him being poisoned must be increasing with every minute. He could cope with that danger easily enough, at least for a while. It was less easy to become accustomed to the crawly feeling that at any instant a knife from nowhere might strike him between the shoulder-blades, or a fusillade of shots from a passing car smash him down into bloody oblivion. But that was what he had asked for, and he was beginning to sympathize with the emotions of a goat that had not merely been staked out to attract a tiger, but was cooperating with every resource of capric coquetry to coax the tiger to the bait. And all he could do was hope he was not mistaken in his estimate of Tony Unciello’s vein of curiosity...
He read on, looking for a reference to the mysterious secret clue he was supposed to have.
And then he had company.
There were two of them, and because he had studiously avoided watching for them they might have sprung up out of the ground. They stood one on each side of him, crowding him, and at the same time practically blocking him from the sight of the other patrons of the cafe. They were men of perfectly average size and build, dressed in perfectly commonplace dark suits, with perfectly unmemorable faces distinguished only by the perfect expressionlessness of their prototypes in any gangster movie. It was just like home.
The street was behind Simon, but that opening was closed, with admirable timing, by a car which simultaneously slid in to the curb and stopped at his back.
One of the men leaned on Simon’s shoulder with a hand that was buried in his coat pocket, but what the Saint felt was harder than a hand, and he knew that the muzzle of a gun was no more than an inch from his ear.
“Let’s-a go, sport,” the man said.
Simon tried to look up with the right combination of fear, surprise, and bluster.
“What are you talking about?”
“You, sport,” said the spokesman laconically. “Get in-a da car.”
Simon flicked his cigarette into the gutter, where it was immediately the center of a scramble of vulture-eyed urchins, and stood up. It was the only stir caused by his departure.
In the car, the two men sat one on each side of him, in the back seat. Each of them kept a hand in the pocket of his coat on the side nearest the Saint, one in the right, one in the left. Their two guns pressed with equal firmness against the neighborhood of the Saint’s kidneys. Neither of them offered any conversation. The driver of the car said nothing. He drove in competent silence, like a man who already had his instructions.
There were no shades inside the car, no suggestion of blindfolding the Saint, no attempt to stop him observing the route they took. The implication that nothing he saw would ever be any use to him was too obvious to be missed, but that gave him nothing unforeseen to worry about. He could still hope that the project was to take him to Tony Unciello before the only possible intended end of the ride.
They drove down to the Tiber, crossed over the Ponte Cavour, turned by the Palace of Justice. The great white dome of St Peter’s loomed ahead against the darkening sky, and lights played on the fountains in the vast circular piazza in front of the cathedral, but they left it on their right and skimmed around the walls of the Vatican City to plunge into the maze of mean streets which lies incongruously between it and the pleasant park slopes of Monte Gianicolo. A few zigzags through narrow ill-lit alleys, and the car stopped outside a small pizzeria and bar with strings of salami tastefully displayed in the dingy window.
“Get out, sport,” said the talking man.
His partner got out first, and waited for the Saint. The two of them closed in behind Simon and prodded him towards the door of the pizzeria. They kept him moving briskly through the odorous interior, but it was only to get their job done, not because they cared about anyone in the place. The drinkers at the bar just inside the entrance, the shirtsleeve bartender wiping glasses on a filthy rag, the few diners at the stained tables in the back, the slatternly woman who looked out of the open door of the kitchen in the rear, all stared at the Saint silently as he passed, but the stares were as emotionless and impersonal as the stares of zombies.
Next to the kitchen door there was a curtained archway; beyond it, a steep flight of stairs. They climbed to a narrow landing with two doors. The man who never spoke opened one of them and pushed the Saint through.
He found himself in a small untidy bedroom, but he hardly had time to glance over it before the same man was doing something to the big old-fashioned wardrobe which caused it to roll noiselessly aside like a huge sliding door.
“Keep-a moving, sport,” said the talkative one, and the Saint was shoved on through the opening.
As he stepped into the brightness beyond, as if on to a stage set, he knew that he had at least won the first leg of the double, even before he saw the man who waited for him.
“Hullo, Tony,” he said.
5
It was the contrast of the room in which he found himself after the squalor that he had been hustled through which was theatrical. It was spacious and high-ceilinged, exquisitely decorated and furnished, like a room in a set designer’s conception of a ducal palace. The Saint’s gaze traveled leisurely around it in frank fascination. From his impression of the street outside, he realized that the interiors of several ramshackle old buildings must have been torn out to provide a shell for that luxurious hideaway — a project that only a vast secret society could have undertaken and kept secret. Even the absence of windows was almost unnoticeable, for the indirect lighting was beautifully engineered and the air was fresh and cool.
“Quite a layout you have, for such a modest address,” Simon remarked approvingly. “And with air-conditioning, yet.”
“Sure, it’s plenty comfortable,” said Tony Unciello.
He sat in an immense brocaded chair, looking like a great gross frog. The resemblance held true for his sloping hairless head, his swarthy skin and heavy-lidded reptilian eyes, his broad stomach and thin splayed legs. In fact, almost the only un-froglike things about him were his clothes, the diamond rings on his fingers, and the cigar clamped in his wide thick-lipped mouth.
“So you’re the Saint,” Unciello said. “Sit down.”
Instantly Simon was pushed forward, the seat of an upright chair hit him behind the knees, and two hands on his shoulders pushed him forcefully down on it. His two escorts stood behind him like sentries.
The Saint straightened his coat.
“Really, Tony,” he murmured, “when you get hospitable, it’s just like being caught in a reaper.”
The gangster took the cigar out of one side of his mouth and put it back in the other. “I heard a lot about you, Saint.”
“I know. And you just couldn’t wait to meet me.”
“I could of waited for ever to meet you. But now it’s different. All on account of this place.” Unciello took the cigar out again to wave it comprehensively at the surroundings. “It’s quite a layout, like you said. And comfortable, like I said. You ain’t seen a half of it. I could hole up here for years, and live just like the Ritz. Only there’s nobody supposed to know about it who don’t belong to me, body and soul. And then you come along, and you don’t belong to me, but it gives out that you know how to find me.”
“Why, what gave you that idea?”
“That’s what you said.”
“I’d bought a newspaper just before your reception committee picked me up,” Simon remarked thoughtfully, “but it didn’t have that story. How did you hear it so quickly? Direct from the police, maybe?”
“You catch on fast,” Unciello said. “Sure, Inspector Buono’s one of my boys. He should of kept you locked up when he had you, and saved me this trouble.”
Simon nodded. He was not greatly surprised.
“I figured him for a bad egg,” he said. “But it’s nice to have you confirm it.”
“Buono’s a good boy,” Unciello said. “He knows where I am. That’s okay. But with you it’s different.” He leaned forward a little. His manner was very patient and earnest. “I like this place. Spent a lot of dough fixing it up. I’d hate that to be all wasted. But when a fellow like you says he could find it, it bothers me. I gotta know how you got it figured. So if maybe somebody slipped up somewhere, it can be taken care of. See what I mean?”
“You couldn’t be more lucid, Tony,” Simon reassured him. “And what do you think this information would be worth?”
Unciello chuckled, a soundless quaking of his wide belly. “Why, to you it’s worth plenty. You tell me all about it, and everything’s nice and friendly. But you don’t tell me, and the boys have to go to work on you. They do a mean job. You hold out for an hour, a day, two days — depending how tough you are. But in the end you talk, just the same, only you been hurt plenty first. To a fellow with your brains, that don’t make sense. So you tell me now, and we don’t have no nastiness.”
Simon appeared to consider this briefly, but the conclusion was obvious.
“You make everything delightfully simple,” he said. “So I’ll try to do the same. I said I could find you, and this proves it. I’m here now.”
“Only because my boys brought you here.”
“Which I figured you’d have them do as soon as you heard I was claiming to know how to find you.”
Unciello’s eyes did not blink so much as deliberately close and open again, like the eyes of a lizard.
“You’re a smart fellow. Now you’re here. What’s your angle?”
“Will one of these goons behind me start shooting if I go for a cigarette?”
“Not if it’s just a cigarette.”
Simon took one from the pack in his breast pocket, moving slowly and carefully to avoid causing any alarm. In the same way he took out his lighter and kindled it.
“I’m acting as Mr Inverest’s strictly unofficial representative,” he said. “As you very well know, he can’t officially make any deal with you. In fact, for public consumption he’s got to say loudly that nobody can blackmail him, even with his daughter’s life — or else he’d probably be out of a job and have no influence at all. But as a man, of course, you’ve got him over a barrel. He’s ready to trade.”
“He’s a smart fellow, too.”
“It’ll have to be very discreetly handled, so that it looks kosher. They’ll have to arrange to dig up some startling new evidence, to give grounds for a re-trial and an acquittal.”
“That’s his worry, I don’t care how he does it, just so Mick gets out.”
“But before he starts to work, he’s got to be sure that you’ve really got his daughter and that she hasn’t been harmed.”
“The gal’s okay.”
Simon looked at him steadily.
“I have to see her myself. Then I’ll write him a note, which you can have delivered. I’ll tell you right now that it’ll have a code word in it, which is to prove that I really wrote it and that nobody was twisting my arm to make me say the right things.”
Unciello contemplated him with the immobility of a Buddha. Then his eyes switched to a point over the Saint’s head.
“ Mena la giovane,” he said.
The hoodlum who never spoke came around from behind the Saint’s chair and crossed the big room to disappear through one of the doors at the other end. Unciello smoked his cigar impassively. There was no idle conversation.
Presently the man who had left came back, and with him he brought Sue Inverest.
She was so exactly like Simon had seen her last, and as he remembered her, that for a moment it felt as if they were back in the Colosseum. Only in a strange dislocation of time they now seemed to belong rather with the expendables who had once stood on the floor of the arena, while a modern but no less vicious Nero squatted like a toad on his brocaded throne and held their lives in his hands. But the girl still carried her curly fair head high, and Simon smiled into her shocked gray eyes.
“Your father sent me to see if you were all right, Sue,” he said gently. “Have they hurt you?”
She shook her head.
“No, not yet. Are they going to let me go?”
“Quite soon, I hope.”
“Write that letter,” Unciello said.
The taciturn thug brought a pad and pencil from a side table and thrust them at the Saint.
Simon balanced the pad on his knee and wrote, taking his time:
Dear Mr Inverest, I’ve seen Sue, and she’s still as good as new. So you’d better hurry up and meet Tony’s terms, even if it isn’t exactly “for the public good.” Perhaps that would sound better to you in Latin, but it all comes to the homo sequendum. Will report again as arranged. Simon Templar.
He held out the pad. The man who had brought it carried it across to Unciello.
Unciello read it through slowly, and looked up again at the Saint.
“What’s that homo sequendum deal?” he demanded.
“ Homo means ‘same,’ as in ‘homosexual,’ ” Simon explained patiently. “ Sequendum is the same root as our words ‘sequel’ or ‘consequences.’ It just means ‘the same result.’ Inverest goes for that Latin stuff.”
Unciello’s eyes swiveled up to the girl.
“That’s right,” she said in a low voice. “He does.”
“Guys like you with your education give me a pain,” Unciello said. His cold stare was on the Saint again. “And what’s that about reporting again?”
“I’m not stupid enough to expect you to turn me loose now,” Simon said. “And anyhow, Inverest is going to want another report on Sue — authenticated with our password — from me, before they finally let your brother go.”
The gang chieftain held out the pad towards his errand-boy.
“Have somebody downstairs send it,” he ordered.
He continued to study the Saint emotionlessly, but with deep curiosity.
“You’re a real smart fellow,” he said. “But you’re taking a lot of chances. What’s in it for you?”
Simon raised his eyebrows a fraction.
“Hudson Inverest is a rich man in his own right,” he said. “He’s offered a reward of a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who helps get his daughter back. Didn’t your pal Buono tell you that? Even he looked interested!”
The messenger returned and resumed his position behind the Saint’s chair, but Unciello did not even appear to notice him for several seconds. He remained sunk in an implacable and frightening immobility of meditation. And then at last his saurian eyes flicked up.
Tell Mario to serve dinner,” he said. “We’ll all eat together. And send word to Buono I want to see him — subito.”
6
They ate in a palatial dining room that was almost over-poweringly ornate with gilt and frescoes, Sue and the Saint on either side of Tony Unciello at the head of a long table. One of the guards stood behind each of the involuntary guests like an attendant footman, but their function was not to serve. They kept their hands in the side pockets of their coats and their eyes on every movement that was made, particularly by the Saint.
The meal, in spite of the lavish surroundings, was only spaghetti, though with an excellent sauce. Apparently that was what Unciello liked, for he tackled a huge plate of it with a practically uninterrupted series of engulfing motions, almost inhaling it in a continuous stream. Sue Inverest could only toy with hers, but the Saint ate with reasonable appetite, although the grotesque silence broken only by the clink of silverware and the voracious slurping of the host would have unnerved most other men.
“Tony doesn’t like small talk at meals,” Simon tried to encourage her, “but don’t let him put you off your feed. You’ve got to keep in good shape to go home.”
Unciello stuffed the last remnants from his plate into his mouth until his cheeks bulged, then washed them down with a draught of Chianti from a Venetian goblet. He wiped his face with the napkin tucked under his chin.
“Now I got it,” he announced, and the Saint looked at him inquiringly.
Unciello said, “I got that homo sequendum business. That’s gotta be the password you fixed up with Inverest. It’s the only phony-sounding thing in your letter. So now I don’t need you anymore. I got boys who can copy any handwriting. And with that password, now they can write letters to Inverest and tell him his daughter’s okay.”
“You mean I can go, Tony?” Simon asked hopefully.
“Yeah — to the morgue. You never was going anywhere else, because you know too much about this place. Like I told you. But now I don’t have to keep you around until they let Mick go. I guess you ain’t so smart, after all.”
Simon Templar had no argument. It would have done no good to point out that this was one occasion when he had never figured himself very smart, so far as his own personal survival was concerned. He felt lucky enough to have achieved as much as he had done. Now, if he was not going to live to see the finish, he could still hope that the gamble had not been altogether lost. As for himself, it had to come someday, and this way was as worthwhile as any.
He smiled at the girl’s comprehending horror, and his eyes were very gay and blue.
“Don’t worry, Sue,” he said. “Don’t think about it, ever. I just hope everything works out all right for you.”
“I’ll take care of her myself, personally,” Unciello said, and only then, for the first time, Simon felt ice in his heart.
The door from the living room opened abruptly, and Inspector Buono came in.
He looked very cool and elegant, and if he had any nervousness, it might only have been found in his eyes. They merely glanced at the girl and Simon, and went quickly back to Unciello.
“ Eccomi arrato,” he said obsequiously. “ Cosa desidera? ”
“Talk English,” Unciello growled. “The Saint wants to know what’s going on. It’s his funeral we’re talking about. I sent for you because you’re just the boy to take charge of it. You got the perfect set-up. You make it look like he was shot resisting arrest. You do it yourself, and maybe get yourself a medal.”
“But—”
“I’m sending a couple of the boys along to watch you.” Unciello poured another glass of wine, and his broad face was malevolently bland. “I hear some of our people are worried that one of these days you might get too interested in a reward, if it was big enough. Now, if they see you do something like this, so they can feel they’ve got something on you, it’ll give ’em a lot more confidence.”
“ Sì, Signor,” Buono said whitely.
Then the door behind him burst open again and the room suddenly filled with armed police.
Through their midst stepped a large elderly perspiring man with a superb black handlebar moustache, who surveyed the scene with somewhat pompous satisfaction.
“Everyone here,” he said, not without a trace of awe, “is under arrest.”
The stooped scholarly figure of the Secretary of State followed him in, and Sue Inverest flung herself into her father’s arms.
Simon Templar prudently reached for the Chianti bottle and refilled his glass.
7
Most of what Sue Inverest did not know had been told her while the official limousine was still on its way to the Embassy.
“But I still don’t know how you got there,” she said, “like... like the posse coming over the hill in the last reel of a western.”
“My dear,” Mr Inverest said mildly, “surely even you learned enough Latin in school to know that homo sequendum means ‘man who must be followed’?”
She gave a shaky half-laugh.
“I might have thought of that, but the Saint was so convincing with his translation... And anyway, how did you know who to follow?”
“Whom,” said Mr Inverest.
“You remember that tag about for the public good?” Simon said. “I told your father he’d like it better in Latin. That’s pro bono publico. I could only hope he’d be fast enough to turn the bono into Buono.”
“Fortunately I’m not quite the imbecile that I’m sometimes called,” Inverest said. “Once I had that clue, I went straight to the top. That was the Minister of the Interior himself who was in charge of the raid.”
“And you remember,” Simon added, “how I threw in that bit about Buono’s unseemly interest in a reward which he hadn’t reported — for the simple reason that it was never offered. I was banking on that to bother Tony enough so that he’d send for Buono, which would lead the posse straight to the right place.”
The girl cuddled her father’s arm, but her gray eyes were on the Saint.
“I know you’re not really rich, Daddy,” she said. “But he ought to have some reward.”
Simon grinned.
“I’ll settle for the privilege of buying you a real dinner. And then maybe dancing with you till dawn. And then if there’s anything still owing, I’d better leave it on deposit. I’m liable to need it one of these days,” said the Saint.