Vendetta for the Saint.

VENDETTA
FOR
THE SAINT

BY
LESLIE CHARTERIS

CHARTER

NEW YORK

A DIVISION
OF CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS INC.
A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY

VENDETTA FOR THE SAINT

Copyright « 1964 by Leslie Charteris

Copyright
© 1963, 1964 by Fiction Publishing Company

All
Rights Reserved

Published by arrangement with Doubleday &
Company, Inc.

Charter Books

A
Division of Charter Communications Inc.

A Grosset & Dunlap Company

360 Park Avenue South

New York, New York 10010

246
 
8
 
097531
Manufactured in the United States of
America

There
is no doubt that the Mafia is one of the
principal causes of the misery weighing on the
population in Sicily. Whenever there is an of
fense to the law, one hears repeated: ‘That is
an affair of the Mafia.’

The Mafia is
that mysterious feeling of fear
which a man
celebrated for crime and
strength
imparts to the weak. The
mafioso
can
do what he likes because, out of fear, no one
will denounce him. He carries forbidden
weapons, incites to duels, stabs from behind,
pretends to forgive offenses so as to settle
them later. The first canon of the Mafia is per
sonal vengeance.

We must note
that there are families in
which the
traditions of the Mafia are passed
on from
father to son, as in the physical order congenital illnesses are inherited.
Also, there
are
mafiosi
in every walk of life, from the
baron to the worker in the sulphur mines.

Luigi Berti

Prefect of
Agrigento

1875

I

How Simon
Templar’s Lunch was Delayed

 
and his Wardrobe suffered for It

It
was the pleasant pause after the
antipasto
when the healthy appetite,
only slightly assuaged by the
opening
course, rests in happy anticipation of good
things to come. The
Rosa del Vesuvio
was
cool and
light on Simon Templar’s
tongue, and for a few
rare
minutes in his adventurous life he prepared to
surrender to whatever gastronomic pleasures
Naples might provide, and tried not to think
of cer
tain other
distractions for which that city is also
somewhat notorious. Somewhere behind him, in
the cavernous depths of Le Arcate, the restaurant
where he sat, a lobster was leaving the
humble
ranks of the
Crustacea and being ushered into the realm of great art in the guise of
Aragosta
alla Ve
suvio.
This was a moment to be savored and treas
ured to the full.

Therefore the loud and angry voice which
suddenly disturbed his peaceful mood was a gross and
egregious intrusion.

“Go
away!” it snarled. “I don’t know you!”
Simon turned a little in his chair for better
ob
servation of the tableau,
which he had quite disin
terestedly
noticed as it developed.

The source of the grating voice sat a couple
of
tables away, a man in at
least his late fifties, whose
paunchy
build was well masked by some superb
tailoring in pearl-gray raw silk. Under the coat was
a shirt of the finest chambray, clinched at
the
throat with a
hand-painted tie nailed by a diamond
pin and at
the wrists with cuff-links of ten-carat
star
sapphires. On one highly manicured finger he
wore a massive gold ring, which served to frame a cabochon emerald the
size of a pigeon’s egg. But in spite of all this expensive elegance, his face
was
completely nondescript, looking
as if it had been
roughly thrown
together in clay by a rather un
skillful
sculptor as a base to model a proper
portrait
on. All its features were untidy except the lipless slit of the mouth and the
sparse border of carefully barbered hair plastered down around the gleamingly
bald dome.

His companion was perhaps twenty years
younger and dressed at less than
one-twentieth the cost, with broad shoulders and curly black hair and
the looks of any untravelled spinster’s
conception
of a Venetian
gondolier, somewhat gone to seed.
Intellectually they seemed to have even less in com
mon, for they had hardly exchanged half a
dozen words while they were under Simon’s indifferent
attention. They had finished their meal and
were
sipping coffee
when the third of the
dramatis personae
had arrived.

This one was as obviously English as he was
a
gentleman. His flannel bags
and Harris tweed
jacket
were of unmistakable origin, and the act of
wearing them in Naples in mid-summer proved
that their owner, conditioned by damper and
chillier climes, stubbornly regarded them as the
only correct holiday wear for any country. The
cut
and texture of the cloth, as well
as the hand-rubbed
glaze on the
conservatively laced shoes, indicated a
man of means and good taste within rigidly traditional limits. Yet this
was the individual who had,
apparently,
committed the frightfully un-British
solecism of annoying a total
stranger.

He had been strolling past the terrace,
gazing all
around like
any tourist, when he had had a delayed
reaction, stopped, turned, stared, hesitated,
and
finally turned in
to address the putty-faced
plutocrat who had
responded so uncivilly.

“But, Dino!” stammered the
tourist, with acute
embarrassment
heightening the color of his natu
rally
ruddy complexion. “I know it’s a long time
ago, but don’t you remember me?”

“What is this Dino?” The answering
growl had
an American accent that was
incurably Italian at
the same time. “I
don’t know no Dino. Don’t both
er
me.”

“I’m Jimmy Euston,” persisted the
Englishman,
struggling to
hold on to his temper and his dignity.
“Have you forgotten Palermo? The bank?
And that scar on your chin—”

The seated man’s fingers moved involuntarily
to
an inconspicuous white
cicatrice on the side of his
jaw.

“You’re crazy with the heat,” he
said. “Beat it,
before
I get mad!”

“Now
look here, Dino—”

The response was no more than a flicker of a
finger, a fractional
movement of the head, but it
brought
the other man at the table smoothly to his
feet. He grasped the Englishman by the arm,
and
what happened
next would have been missed by any spectator but Simon.

Euston’s mouth opened soundlessly, and his
red
face became white. He bent forward,
attacked by a
sudden spasm. Simon, to whom
such tactics were
as familiar as
elementary drill to a sergeant, recog
nized
at once what had happened: under cover of
the victim’s body and his own,
the curly-haired one
had delivered a short
wicked jab to the solar plex
us.

There was more to come. The goon’s arm drew
back again, and the cheap striped suiting
wrinkled
over a bulge of powerful muscles.
Once more the
contraction came that would
send the arm forward
again with
enough force to crack a rib.

Except that this time the conclusion failed
to ma
terialize. If a
steel vise anchored to a stone pillar
had suddenly appeared and clamped home around
the elbow, the arm would have been no more firmly fixed. With
shocked incredulity the goondolier
turned and
gaped at the browned fingers that
locked
casually on his arm and rendered it im
mobile.
From there his gaze travelled up over the broad chest and sinewy neck to the
intruder’s face, the tanned face of a buccaneer with blue eyes that
laughed and yet were colder than an arctic sea.

“That’s
very naughty,” Simon remarked.

If it had not been for the tenseness of
imminent
explosion,
they would have made an almost comic
trio, joined arm to arm like three convivial friends
about to burst into song. But there was a far
from
convivial expression in the yellowed
and bloodshot
stare of the man whom Simon
held, a darkening
menace that brought
a hopeful smile to Simon’s
lips.

“Try it on me, chum,” he invited
softly. “Try
anything—and
I promise you’ll wake up in hospi
tal.”

“Basta!”
grumbled the man who denied being
Dino. “They must be from the same nut-house.
Let’s get outa here.”

In an instant the threatened eruption was dis
sipated. Obediently the bodyguard released
Euston, and turned to pull the table aside
for his
patron. Simon
let him go, a trifle reluctantly, but
reflecting that what might have been a delightful brawl would probably
have been broken up by
spoilsport
policemen and very likely resulted in his
Aragosta
getting cold while
they conducted the
post-mortem.

A banknote fluttered down between the coffee
cups, and the foppish slob turned his back and
walked away, followed by his two-legged dog; and
Simon shrugged and looked at Mr. Euston again.
The elderly Englishman’s face was still blanched,
and beaded with
perspiration from the effects of the single cruel blow he had taken.

“Sit down at my table for a
minute,” Simon said, guiding him in that direction even while he spoke.
“Have a drop of wine.” He poured a
glass. “Or
something
stronger, if you feel like it. That was
quite a dirty poke you took.”

“Thank
you. I’ll be all right in a jiffy.”

Color returned slowly to the other’s face while
he sipped—a little too much, perhaps, Simon re
alized, as it ripened towards the masculine cousin
of a blush. Mr. Euston had not only
suffered a pub
lic humiliation, but
he found himself indebted to
someone to whom he had not even been intro
duced.

“My
 
name’s Euston,” he mumbled unneces
sarily. “Jolly decent of you to come to
the rescue,
Mr.—”

Alternative replies flashed through the circuits of Simon
Templar’s mind with an electronic speed de
veloped
from much similar experience, to be
weighed and compared and chosen from
according
to the circumstances. He could
give his real name, and risk a recognitive “Not the chap they call The
Saint? The Robin Hood of Modern Crime? Well,
bless my soul!”—and so forth. Or he could give
one of the aliases to which he had become sen
timentally
attached—so much so that even some of
them
ran a fifty-fifty chance of recognition in cer
tain circles. Or he could improvise a new identity—
a creative effort which the present situation might
hardly justify…So quickly that no
one would
even have noticed any
hesitation, he selected the middle course.