Vendetta for the Saint. (15 page)

“I
would like to call Capri,” said the Saint.

“It is not easy at night,
signore.
If
you would
wait until
morning—”

“It
would be too late. I want the call now.”

“Sissignore,”
sibilated the clerk, in a tone of in
jured dignity.

There followed a series of rasping sounds,
not
unlike a coarse
file caressing the edge of a pane of
glass, followed by a voiceless silence. Far in the dis
tance could be heard the dim rush of an
electronic
waterfall, and
Simon shouted into it until another
voice spiralled up from the depths. It was the night
operator in Palermo, who was no more
enthused about trying to establish a telephonic connection at
that uncivilized hour than the hotel clerk
had been.
Too late Simon
realized the magnitude of the task
he had undertaken, but he was not going to back out now.

With grim politeness he acceded to
obstructive
demands for an
infinitude of irrelevant information, of which the name and location of
residence
of the person
he was calling and his own home ad
dress and passport number were merely a begin
ning, until the operator tired first and
consented to essay the impossible.

The line remained open while the call
progressed
somewhat less
precipitately than Hannibal’s
elephants had
crossed the Alps.

A first hazard seemed to be the water
surrounding the island of Sicily. It could only have been in
his imagination, but Simon had a vivid
sensation of
listening to
hissing foam and crashing waves as the
connection forced its way through a
waterlogged
cable,
struggling with blind persistence to reach the mainland. The impression was
affirmed when a mainland operator was finally reached and the wa
tery noises died away to a frustrated background
susurration.

For a few minutes the Palermo operator and
this
new link in
the chain exchanged formalities and in
cidental gossip, and at last reluctantly came
to the
subject of
Simon’s call. A mutual agreement was
reached that, though the gamble was sure to fail,
the sporting thing would be at least to try
whether
the call could
be pushed any further. Both opera
tors laughed hollowly at the thought, but switches
must have been thrown, because a hideous
grumbling roar like a landslide swallowing an acre of
greenhouses rose up and drowned their
voices.

Simon lighted his remaining cigarette,
crumpled
the empty pack,
and made himself as comfortable
as
possible. The phone was beginning to numb his
ear, and he changed to the other side.

There was more of the ominous crunching,
periodically varying in timbre and volume, and after a
long while the second operator’s voice
struggled
back to the surface.

“I am sorry, I have not been able to
reach
Naples. Would you like to cancel the
call?”

“I would not like to cancel the
call,” Simon said
relentlessly.
“I can think of no reason why you
should not reach Naples. It was there this
morning,
and it must be
there now, unless there has been
another
eruption of Mount Vesuvius.”

“I do not know about that. But all the
lines to
Naples are engaged.”

“Try again,” said the Saint
encouragingly.
“While
we are talking someone may have hung up
or dropped dead. Persevere.”

The operator mumbled something indistin
guishable, which Simon felt he was probably
bet
ter off for not hearing, and the
background of
crashings and inhuman
groanings returned again.
But after another interminable wait,
persistence
was rewarded by a new voice
saying
“Napoli.”

Reaching Capri from Naples was no worse than
anything that had gone
before, and it was with a
justifiable
thrill of achievement that Simon at last
heard the ringing of Destamio’s phone through
the overtones of din.
Eventually someone answered
it,
and Simon shouted his quarry’s name at the top of his voice.

“Il
Signore
is busy,” came the
answer. “He cannot be disturbed. You must call again in the morning.”

After all he had been through, the Saint was
not
going to be stopped there.

“I do not care how busy he is,” he
said coldly.
“You will
tell him that this call is from Sicily, and
I have news that he will want to hear.”

There was an explosive crackle as if the
entire
instrument at the other end had been
shattered on
a marble slab, and for a while
Simon thought the
servant had
summarily disposed of the problem by
hanging
up; but he held on, and presently another
voice spoke, with grating tones that even the
telephone’s distortions could not completely dis
guise.

“Parla,
ascolto!”

The Saint stubbed out the remains of his last
cigarette and finally
relaxed.

“Alessandro, my dear old chum, I knew
you’d
be glad to hear
from me, even at this hour.”

“Who’s-a
dat?”

“This is Simon Templar, Al, you fat gob
of over
cooked
macaroni. Just calling to tell you that your
comic-opera assassins have flunked again—and
that I don’t want them trying any more. I want
you
to call them off, chum.”

“I dunno what ya talkin’ about,
Saint.” There
was a
growing note of distress in the harsh voice as
it assimilated the identity of the caller.
“Maybe you
drink too
much wine tonight. Where you calling
from?”

“From my hotel in Palermo, which I’m
sure you
can easily
find. But don’t send any more of your
stooges here to annoy me. The firework they
planted in my car while Donna Maria was
being so
hospitable
didn’t go off. But I found out a lot of
interesting things during my visit, to add on
to
what I knew before. And I
wanted to tell you that
I’ve
just put all this information on paper and de
posited it in a place from which it will be
forwarded
to a much less
accommodating quarter than your
tame
maresciallo
here, if anything happens to me.
So tell your goons to lay off, Al.”

“I don’t understand! Are you nuts?”
blustered
Destamio,
almost hysterically. “What you tryin’ to
do to me?”

“You’ll find out,” said the Saint
helpfully. “And
I
hope your bank account can stand it. Meanwhile,
pleasant dreams …”

He replaced the receiver delicately in its
bracket,
and then dropped the entire
contraption into the
wastebasket, where it
whirred and buzzed furiously
and
finally expired.

As if on cue, there followed a light tapping
on
the door.

The Saint took his precautions about opening
it.
There was still
the possibility that some of
Destamio’s
henchmen might be working on gener
al
instructions to scrub him—it would certainly take time for countermanding
orders to circulate,
even if the Mafia had
also penetrated the telephone service. Until the word had had time to get
around,
he was playing it safe.

Marco Ponti entered, and eyed with mild sur
prise the gun that was levelled at his
abdomen.
Then he calmly
kicked the door shut behind him.

“That is a little inhospitable,” he
remarked.
“And
illegal too, unless you have an Italian license
for that weapon.”

“I was going to ask you how to get one,
the next
time I saw you,” said the Saint
innocently, and
caused the weapon to vanish
and be forgotten. “But I was not expecting you to call at such an
hour as this,
amico.”

“I am not being social. I wanted to hear
how your
visit turned
out. And I have learned something that
may be of value to you.”

“I would like one of your cigarettes
while you
give me your
news. It may have some bearing on
what I can tell you.”

“I hardly expect that,” Ponti said,
throwing his
pack of
Nazionali
on the table. “It is only that you
gave me a name, and like a good policeman I
have
checked the
records. Though you may sneer—and
I sometimes sneer myself at the middenheaps of
records we keep—occasionally we find a nugget
in
the slag. I searched for
the name you gave me, the
murdered
bank clerk, Dino Cartelli. I found noth
ing about him except the facts of his death.
But I also found the record of another Cartelli, his elder
brother, Ernesto, who was killed by the Fascisti.”

Simon
frowned.

“Now I’m out of my depth. Why should
that be
worth
knowing?”

“In his early days,
Il
Duce
had
a campaign to
wipe out the Mafia—perhaps on the
theory that
there was only room for one
gang of crooks in the
country, and he
wanted it to be his gang. So for
a
while he shot some of the small fry and hung oth
ers up in cages for people to laugh at. Later on, of
course, the Mafia joined forces with him, they
were
birds of a feather—but that is
another story. At
any rate, in one of
the early raids, Ernesto Cartelli
shot
it out with the Blackshirts, who proved to be
better shots.”

“Do you mean,” Simon ventured
slowly, “that
since
Ernesto was a
mafioso,
his brother Dino may
have been one too?”

“It is almost certain—though of course
it cannot be proved. But the Mafia is a closed society, very hard to enter, and
when anyone is a member it usu
ally
means that his other close male relatives are
members too.”

The Saint’s eyes narrowed in thought as he in
haled abstractedly and deeply from the
strong Italian cigarette—an indiscretion which he instantly regretted.

“So the Mafia keeps coming back into
the picture,” he said. “Al Destamio is in it, now it seems
that Dino Cartelli was probably in it, whether or
not they are the same person; and they have me at
the top of their list of people to be
dispensed with. I knew you would be glad to hear that they tried
again tonight to put me out of the way.”

“Not: at the
Destamio house?”

“Just outside it. If they had
succeeded, it might
even have
broken some windows.”

Simon told the story of his macabre evening,
and
the fortunate
discovery that had not quite ended it.

“And there are some wonderful
fingerprints in
the plastic, which is still
intact,” he concluded.

“That is splendid news,” Ponti
said delightedly.
“These
Mafia scum can usually get out of anything
by producing armies of false witnesses, but
it is an
other matter
to witness away fingerprints. At least
this will tell us who placed the bomb, and he
may
lead us to someone else.”

“I was sure you would be happy about my
nar
row escape from
death,” said the Saint ironically.

“My dear friend, I am overjoyed. May you
have
many more such
close scrapes, and each time bring
back evidence like that. You did bring it back, of course?”

Simon grinned, and
tossed him the car keys.

“You will find it in the trunk. Leave
the keys
under the front
seat, they will be safe enough there.
I think Alessandro will take time to think out his
next move.”

“I hope he does not take too
long,” said the de
tective. “But
whenever you want to get in touch
with me
again, I will give you a number to call.”
He scribbled on a page from his notebook, tore it
out, and handed it to Simon. “This is not the
questura,
but a place which can be trusted with any messages
you leave, and which can always find me
very quickly.” He turned and opened the door,
with unconcealed impatience to get to the garage
and the evidence there. “Goodnight, and good
luck.”