“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.