Vendetta for the Saint. (14 page)

Simon
manipulated the corkscrew with expert gentleness, but not without the thought
that he
might have been
given the job as yet another move to reassure him. Certainly it enabled him to
verify
that this
bottle, with all its incrustations of age,
would have been even harder to tamper with
than the gin which he had drunk before dinner. He de
ciphered with approval the name of Jules
Robin under the grime on the scarred label, and poured
generous doses into the snifters which were
pro
duced from some dark recess—not omitting one
for Lo Zio, who showed some of his vague signs of
human animation as he fastened his
rheumy eyes
on the bottle.

“Salute!”
Simon said, and watched them all
drink before he allowed his own first swallow
to
actually pass his lips.

It was a magnificent cognac, which had
probably
been lying in
the cellar since the death of Gina’s
father, and nothing seemed to have been done to
turn it into a lethal or even stupefying
nightcap.

Was all this hospitality, then, nothing but a
stall to
create time,
during which Al Destamio might
round
up a few commandos and get them out to
the mansion to capture the Saint or quietly
mow
him down?

Whatever the reason, he felt sure that Gina
was
not in on it.
He looked again at her lovely radiant
face, alight with the spontaneous pleasure of the
kind of company which she could almost never
have been permitted, and decided that he could
lose nothing by testing just how far this
astounding
acceptance could be
stretched.

“I am looking forward to seeing the
local sights
tomorrow, even
though I have to do it with a com
mercial guide,” he said, and turned to Donna
Maria. “Or now that you know me a
little better,
would you
reconsider and let Gina accompany
me?”

An observer who was unacquainted with the
pre
ceding circumstances would
have assumed, at a
glance,
that Donna Maria was trying inconspicu
ously to swallow a live cockroach which she had
carelessly sucked in with her brandy.

“Perhaps I was being too hasty,”
she said.
“Since you
are such a close friend of Alessandro, there is really no reason for me to
object. What are
you most interested in?”

The resultant discussion of Sicilian
antiquities
continued this
time with no contribution from
Gina,
whose eyes had become slightly glassy and
her jaw slack, either from renewed
bewilderment or
from
trepidation lest anything she interjected
would change her aunt’s mind again.

Another refill of cognac was pressed on the
not
too resistant
Saint, though curtly refused to Lo
Zio, who having smacked his way through his first
was plaintively extending his glass for
more. But after that there was nothing left to stay for, short of
asking if they had a spare room for the
night.

“Tomorrow at ten, then, Gina,” he
said, and
stood up.
“And I’ll tell Alessandro how nice all of
you have been.”

The last remark was principally intended for
the
reigning
tyrant of the establishment, but it scored
first on Lo Zio, who must have been feeling
some
effects from
his unaccustomed libations.

“Ah, Alessandro,” he said, as if
some cobwebby relay had been tripped. “I told him. I warned him.
Told him he should not go to Rome—”

“It
is late, Lo Zio, and well past your bed time,”
Donna Maria said hastily.

She whipped the wheel-chair around with a
sud
denness that had the old
man’s head bobbing like a
balloon
on a string. The maid came scurrying in on
a barked command, and whisked away the chair and its mumbling
contents.

“Buona notte, signore,”
Donna Maria said, with
one more spasm of her overworked facial
muscles, and the impression of it seemed to remain even af
ter she had closed the front door, like the
grin of
some
Sicilian-Cheshire cat.

Simon made the short walk to the driveway
gate with his nerves as taut as violin strings, his ears
straining, and his eyes darting into every
shadow.
But there was
no warning scuff or stir to herald an
onslaught by lurking assailants, no crack of a shot
to make belated announcement of a bullet. He
opened the inset door, flung it open, and
leapt far
through it in
an eruptively connected series of cat-swift movements calculated to disconcert
any am
bush that
might be waiting outside; but no attack
came. An almost-full moon that was rising
above
the hills
showed a road deserted except for his own car where he had left it, and the
only sound was the
thin
shrill rasping of multitudinous nocturnal insects. Feeling a trifle foolish,
he turned back and shut the little door, and then walked towards the Bugatti,
making a wide swing out into the road
around it, just in case someone was skulking on the
side from which he would not have been
expected
to approach.
But no one was.

Then he had not been detained in order to
gain
time to organize a bushwacking, it
seemed …

But the instinct of an outlaw who had
carried his
life in his
hands so often that his reflexes had
adapted to it as a natural condition was not lulled
into somnolence merely because logic seemed
to
have suspended the
immediate need for it. If any
thing,
it was left more on edge than ever, seeking
the flaw in conclusions which did not jibe
with in
tuition.

He climbed halfway into the driver’s seat and
peered in search of the
ignition lock. He located it
and
inserted the key; but as he raised his head
again above the dashboard before switching
on, his
eye was caught
by a blemish on the gleaming ex
panse
of hood which did not belong at all on such
a lovingly burnished surface.

Clearly revealed by the moonlight was the
print
of a greasy hand.

Simon
very carefully withdrew the key, stepped
down to the road again, and went around to
ex
amine the hood more
closely. But the print seemed to have disappeared. Bending over until his face
almost touched the metal, he sighted towards
the
radiator and
found the mark again, a dull slur in
the reflected moonlight.

A ghostly breath stirred the hairs on the
nape of
his neck as he
realized how narrowly he might have
missed that discovery. If he had come out a few
minutes earlier or later, the moon would not
have
been striking
the hood at the precise angle required
to show it up. Or if he had not already been
keyed
to the finest
pitch of vigilance, he might still have thought nothing of it. But now he could
only re
member how
affectionately the garage owner had
wiped the hood again after showing him the en
gine, and he knew with certainty that there
could
have been no
such mark on it when he set out. He had not stopped anywhere on the way, to
give any
one a chance to
approach the machine before he
parked
it there. Therefore the mark had been made
since he arrived, while he was enjoying Donna
Maria’s hospitality.

With the utmost delicacy he manipulated the
fastenings of the hood and opened it up. The
pencil
flashlight
that he was seldom without revealed that the mammoth engine was still there,
but with a new
feature added that would have
puzzled Signor
Bugatti.

A large wad of something that looked like
putty
had been
draped over the rear of the engine block
and pressed into shape around it. Into this sub
stance had been pushed a thin metal cylinder,
something like a mechanical pencil, from which
two slender wires looped over and lost themselves
in the general tangle of electrical
connections.

With surgically steady fingers the Saint
extracted
the metal tube,
then gently and separately pulled
the wires free from their invisible attachments.
Deprived of its detonator, the plastic bomb
again
became as
harmless as the putty it so closely re
sembled.

“This one almost worked, Al,” he whispered
softly. “And if it had, I’d have had only
myself to
blame. I underestimated
you. But that won’t hap
pen again…”

There were some excellent fingerprints in the
plastic material where the
demolition expert had
squeezed
it into place, doubtless in all confidence that there would be nothing left of
them to in
criminate him.
Taking care not to damage them,
Simon
peeled the blob off the engine and put it in
the trunk, wedging it securely where it
could not
roll around
when he drove.

He cranked up the engine and drove slowly and
pensively back to Palermo,
the impatient motor
growling
a basso accompaniment to his thoughts.

It was easy enough now to understand every
thing that had been puzzling before. Donna
Maria’s first absence from the terrace had
given
her time to telephone Al Destamio on
Capri and
ask for confirmation of the
alleged friendship. Al’s
reaction
could be readily imagined. He would al
ready
have learned of the failure of the first as
sassination attempt; and the revelation that the
Saint had had the effrontery to head straight for
the Destamio mansion and blarney his way in,
instead of thankfully taking the next plane for some
antipodean sanctuary, must have done wondrous
things to his adrenalin production. The dinner in
vitation must have followed on his orders, to
keep
the Saint there long enough for
another hatchet
man to be sent there
to arrange a more final and effective termination of the nuisance.

And this deduction made Donna Maria’s bit
part somewhat more awesome. Throughout the
dinner and crocodile congeniality, she had
been
setting him up
like a clay pipe in a shooting gallery.
That was why she could afford to give in so
readily
on the
question of granting permission for Gina to
go out with him the next day: she had been
com
placently certain that the
Saint would not be
around to
hold her to the promise. Only one in
teresting speculation remained—had she known
just how violently it had been intended to
insure his
non-appearance?

Simon tooled the big car in through the
garage
entrance of the
hotel and slipped it into an empty
stall. As the thunder of the engine died away, he was aware of an even
heightened resentment.

It was bad enough to be continually sniped
at
himself, the perplexed
target of an incom
prehensible
vendetta. But now these monsters had exposed the utter depths of their
depravity by their willingness to destroy that historic treasure of a car
merely in the process of putting a bomb under him.

It followed imperatively that no extra effort
could be spared to insure that Al Destamio
spent
the most
troubled night that could be organized for
him. Even if the effort involved the
prodigious haz
ards of trying
to inaugurate a long-distance tele
phone communication against the obstacles of the
hour and the antiquated apparatus available.

The phone in Simon’s room was apparently
dead, and only a great deal of bopping on
the button and some hearty thumps on the bell box suc
ceeded in restoring it to a simulacrum of
life. The resultant thin buzzing was presently interrupted by
the yawning voice of the desk clerk,
obviously re
sentful at being disturbed.