Vendetta for the Saint. (13 page)

Donna Maria was
trying to smile.

3

“Thank
you. You are very kind,” said the Saint,
making a heroic effort to overcome the shock
of
that horrendous sight.

Gina was more openly dumbfounded by the
switch, and took a moment longer to recover.

“Well—I
must get changed. Excuse me.”

She ran into the
house.

“And I must give some orders to the servants.”
Donna Maria’s face was positively haggard with
the strain of being gracious. “Please make
yourself
comfortable for a few
minutes. And help yourself
to another
drink.”

She withdrew again, leaving the Saint alone
to
digest the startling
reversal of his reception.

And in another moment the maid reappeared,
bearing a bottle of Lloyd’s gin which she
added to
the selection
on the tray.

“Donna Maria thought you might prefer this,” she said,
and retired again.

Simon lighted a cigarette and examined the
bot
tle. It was new and
unopened, to every appearance,
and
there had certainly not been time since Donna
Maria’s change of attitude for it to have been
doped or poisoned and
cunningly re-sealed; so un
less
bottles of pre-hoked liquor were a standard
item in stock at the Destamio hacienda there
could
be no risk in
accepting it. In moderation …The
Saint gratefully emptied the glass he had been nurs
ing into a flower-pot and proceeded to
concoct
himself a very
dry martini, feeling much like a
prodigal
son for whom the best barrel had been
rolled out.

But deep inside him he felt an intangible
hollow
ness which came from the tightening
of nerves
which were not nervous but only
sharpening their sensitivity and readiness to whatever call might be
suddenly made on them.

He could not cherish the beautiful illusion
that after a life-time of notorious malevolence Donna Maria had chosen that
evening to be struck as by
lightning
with remorse for her churlishness, and af
ter a brief absence to commune with her soul
had returned radiant and reformed to make amends for
all her past unpleasantnesses. Or that his
own
handsome face
and charming manners had broken
through
an obsidian crust to the soft heart that it
encased. Some very practical reason had to be
re
sponsible for the
alteration, and he could not make
himself generous enough to believe that it was without ulterior motive.

The
question remained: what motive?

The sun had descended behind the western
hills,
and purple
shadows reached into the courtyard,
deepening the dusty gray-green of the olive trees,
and the first cool breeze drifted in from
the sea. With the dusk, the house was not softened, but
seemed to become even more stark and
sinister.
Somewhere in its
depths a clock chimed with deep
reverberant
notes that made one think of the toll
ing of funeral bells.

As the hour struck, a door opened under the
balcony at the far end of the terrace, and a
wheel
chair appeared with the
promptitude of a cuckoo
called forth
by some horlogic mechanism. Simon
watched
in fascination as the maid wheeled it to the
table opposite him and vanished again without a
word. The occupant of the chair matched the
building in senescence; in fact, he looked old
enough to have built it
himself.

“A lovely evening,” Simon ventured
at last,
when it became
clear that any conversational in
itiative would have
to come from him.

“Ah,”
said the ancient.

It extended a withered and tremulous claw,
not
to shake hands,
but towards the glasses on the
table.

“What
can I get you?” Simon asked.

“Ah.”

Simon made what he felt was an inspired com
promise by pouring a half-and-half mixture of
sweet and dry vermouths and preferring it.

“Ah,” said the venerable mummy,
and, after
taking a small
sip, carefully spilled the rest on the
ground.

“What did you think of Dante’s latest
book?” Simon tried again.

“Ah,” said the patriarch wisely,
and sat back to enjoy a slow chomping of toothless gums while he
examined the Saint from the blinking moist
caverns of his eyes.

The possibilities of small talk seemed to
have
been exhausted,
and Simon was wondering wheth
er
to try making faces at his
vis-a-vis
and see wheth
er that would evoke any livelier response,
when he
was saved from
that decision by the return of Gina, now wearing something thin and simple that
clung
provocatively to
the curves that he could re
construct
in clinical detail from memory.

“Has
Uncle been bothering you?” she asked.

“Not at all,” said the Saint.
“I just haven’t been
able to find
anything to talk about that he’s interested in. Or maybe my accent baffles
him.”

“Povero Zio,”
Gina said, smiling and patting the
ancient’s hand. “I can’t even remember a
time
when he wasn’t
old, but he was nice to me when I
was a little girl. He used to tell me wonderful
stories about how he marched with Garibaldi
in his
last campaign,
and I’d forget to be worried about
when we were going to be kicked out of our
house.”

“Ah …ah,” said the old man,
straightening up
a little
as if the words had sparked some long-forgotten memory; but it was a transient
stimulus and
he slumped back down again without
producing
his scintillating comment.

“Uncle—you can’t mean that he’s
Alessandro’s
brother?” Simon said.

“Oh, no. He’s really Uncle Alessandro’s
uncle—
and Donna
Maria’s.”

As if answering to her name, the lady of the
manse made another entrance. If she had
changed
her black dress
for an evening model, it would have
taken the eye of a
couturier’s
spy to tell the difference, but
she had hung a gold chain around her
neck and stuck a comb set with brilliants in her
hair as evidence that she was formally
dressed for dinner.

“You need not trouble yourself about
Lo
Zio,
Signor Templar,” she said, with another labored
display of her death’s-head smirk. “He hears very
little and understands even less, but it makes
him
happy to be in our company. If
you have finished
your drink, we can
go in to dinner.”

She led the way into the house, into a large
dimly
lighted
hallway with an ornate wooden staircase
that led up into a lofty void of darkness from
which Simon would not have
been surprised to see
bats
fly out. Gina pushed Lo Zio’s wheel-chair,
and the Saint ingratiatingly gave her a hand.
The
dining room
was almost as spooky as the hall, il
luminated only by candles which hardly revealed
the dingy ancestral paintings which looked
down
from the walls.

“I hope you won’t mind the dinner,”
Gina said.
“We never
have guests, and all the cook knows is
plain country food. I’m sure it isn’t the sort
of
thing you’re used to.”

“I’m sure it’ll be a pleasant
change,” said the
Saint
politely.

His optimism was not misplaced. Home cooking
is a much crumpled
appellation in some parts of
the
world, too often synonymous with confections
from the freezer and the can, but in Italy
it still
retains some of
its original meaning, and occasion
ally in restaurants labeled
“casalinga”
one can find
family-style cooking of a high order. But the
literal
authentic
article, of course, is served only in private
homes to relatives and close friends, and
rarely is
the foreigner
allowed to penetrate this inner circle.

Nothing is purchased prefabricated by the
tradi
tional Italian
housewife. If tomato sauce is needed,
the tomatoes are pressed and the seeds removed by
hand. The delicate doughs that enfold
cannelloni
and
cappelletti
are handrolled from a mixture of
flour and egg with never a drop of water added.
Fresh herbs and spices, grown in the kitchen
garden, are added with the loving care that
lifts a sauce from the pedestrian to the ambrosial. It goes
without saying that in the south one must
expect a
liberal hand
in the application of garlic and olive
oil; but that was no disadvantage to the
Saint, who
was gifted with
the digestion to cope happily with
such robust ingredients.

Since the evening meal is customarily a light
one, it began with
olive schiacciate,
a
succulent salad of
olives, celery, and peppers. After this came
the
Involtini
alla siciliana,
a
toothsome filling in en
velopes of
gossamer-light paste smothered in a
sauce
so savory that good manners could only en
courage the pursuit of every last drop with mops of
the crusty
brown home-baked bread. A large
circulating
carafe of young home-made red wine
provided
ample and impeccable liquid accompani
ment;
and after observing that everyone’s glass was
filled from it, just as the same platters were present
ed to all of them to help themselves, except Lo
Zio
whose plate was tended by Gina
sitting next to
him, Simon was able
to suppress all disturbing
memories
of the Borgias and give himself up to un
stinting enjoyment of his gastronomic good for
tune.

They made a strange quartet around the
massive
age-blackened
table, and the medieval gloom
around
them and the echoing footsteps of the maid
on the bare floor did little to encourage
relaxation
and
conviviality, but by concentrating on Gina and
the food he was able to maintain some harmless
and totally unmemorable conversation, while wondering
all the time why he had been invited to stay
and when the reason would be revealed in some
probably most
unpleasant and distressing way.

“A most wonderful meal,” he
complimented
Donna Maria at
the end of it. “I feel guilty for im
posing on you, but I shall always be glad
that I
did.”

“You must not rush away. We will have
coffee in
the drawing
room, and I will see if there is some
brandy, if you would like that.”

She flashed her alligator smile as she rose;
and
Simon, steeled
now not to recoil, smiled back.

“Perhaps I should refuse,” he said.
“But that
might
suggest that you did not mean it, and I am
sure you do.”

As he helped Gina to push the wheel-chair
again,
which somehow
seemed to give them a sort of se
cret
companionship, she said: “I don’t know how
you’ve done it, but nobody ever broke her down
like this before. Brandy, now!”

“Brandy, ah!” repeated Lo Zio, his
head lifting
like a buzzard’s and swivelling
around.

“You should have given me a chance in
that res
taurant,”
said the Saint. “If I could have persuaded you to stay for lunch, we might
have had all the
afternoon
together.”

The drawing room had three electric lights
of thrifty wattage which made it very little brighter
than the dining room. The furniture was stiff
and
formal, a
baroque mixture of uncertain periods,
upholstered with brocades as faded as the heavy
drapes. Donna Maria came in with a dusty
bottle,
followed by the maid with a tray of
coffee.

“Would you be so kind as to open it,
Signor
Templar? I am
sure you know how to handle such
an
old bottle better than we women.”