“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.