Vendetta for the Saint. (16 page)

“The
same to you,” said the Saint.

He locked and bolted the door again, just on
general principles, but he
went to sleep as peace
fully
as a child. It had been a full and merry day,
and the morrow was likely to be even
livelier.
Which only
sustained his contented conviction that
the world was a beautiful place to have fun
in.

IV

How the Saint went to a Graveyard

and Don Pasquale made a Proposal

Promptly
at ten the next morning Simon an
nounced
his arrival outside the walls of the
Destamio estate with a brazen call on the Bugatti’s
horn which rebounded satisfactorily from the
neighboring hills, incidentally triggering
the re
sponsive
barking of dogs and a rattle of wings as a
startled flock of pigeons whirled overhead,
before
he confirmed
the announcement of his arrival more
conventionally with a tug on the bell-pull at the entrance.

He
did not think there was much danger that
Destamio would have prepared to sacrifice
his own
parental
portals with another charge of explosive
tied to the bell, but aside from that he had
no idea what he expected. Would there be another more
personalized elimination squad waiting to
lay on
the welcome to
end all welcomes, or would
Destamio
have refused to believe that the Saint
would have the nerve to come back and claim
his
date with
Gina? Would Donna Maria at this mo
ment be frantically telephoning to ask what she
should do now, while Gina was being hastily
in
carcerated in whatever
version of a medieval
dungeon
could be found in the establishment? Or
would the house simply remain inscrutably deaf
and blind to him as to an unwelcome salesman un
til he gave up and went away? There had been only
one way to find out, and that was to
go there and
ring the bell and see what happened.

What happened was that the gate opened and
Gina came out into the sunlight with her graceful
step that was like dancing, and Simon smiled with
sudden joy as he held the car door for
her.

Whatever might be coming next, at least the
ad
venture was not going to wallow to a soggy halt.

“This is much more than I seriously
expected,”
he said,
once she had settled into the leather seat
and the great car had made its thunderous
take-off.

“Why?”
she asked.

“I was afraid your aunt would have
changed her
mind about
letting you go on this expedition, or
talked you out of it.”

“Why should she do that? There’s nothing
wrong with my seeing you, is there?”

She forced a small smile as she said it, but
a
slight halting note in her
voice told him with pierc
ing
clarity not only that she was playing a part but
also that she was not relishing it. The
falseness was
as
transpicuous as her sincerity had been the day
before. But for the moment he was not ready
to let
her know that her effort was already
wasted.

“How could there be,” he replied
blandly, “if
neither of us has any
wickedness in mind?”

He deliberately refrained from emphasizing
that studied ambiguity by glancing at her to observe its
effect, but her silence told him that she must
be
thinking it over. The
piquancy of waiting for her
next
approach added to the pleasure of what prom
ised to be a most entertaining day.

“Sicily, fair Sicily!” he
declaimed, before the
pause
could become uncomfortable. He waved one
hand to embrace the sundrenched splendor of
orchards and hills: “The crossroads of the Mediter
ranean, where Greek fought Phoenician, and
Ro
man fought Greek; where the
light of Christendom was shadowed by the menace of Vandal, Goth,
Byzantine, and Arab … You see, I’ve
already
boned up on the
brochures.”

“Is your name really Simon
Templar?” she
asked
abruptly.

“It is. Let me guess why you ask. Head
filled
with history,
your thoughts have leapt to the
Knights
Templar, a dubiously noble band not un
known in these parts. You’re wondering whether
I’m one of their lineal descendants. I think
that de
pends where you
draw the line. I’ve never looked
too closely into
all the birds’ nests in my family
tree,
but—”

“Are
you the Saint?”

Simon
sighed.

“So you’ve discovered my guilty secret.
I hoped
to hide it from
you, letting you believe that I was a
simple salesman, a country-to-country drummer
selling ball-point pens that only write under
butter.
Little did I
dream that my shadier reputation
would
have penetrated the cloisters of your Alpine
convent.”

“I wasn’t as cut off from the world as
all that,”
she
snapped, with a touch of exasperation. “I’ve always read newspapers, but I
just didn’t connect
you at
first. What are you doing here?”

“Sightseeing—wasn’t that what we talked
about? People always seem to disbelieve me,
but I
can truthfully
say that I came to Italy just to look
around and eat and drink like any other tourist.”

“But when you’re at home—you don’t
really go
around selling
pens?”

Few women could claim the distinction of hav
ing left the Saint bereft of a suitable
rejoinder, and Gina may have been the first to achieve it unintentionally. But
her question was perfectly serious, as
he assured himself by a swift sidelong
glance. Ap
parently her
convent reading had been somewhat
less catholic than she believed, and its lacunae had
not been filled in by any recent briefing.

“No,” he said weakly. “I don’t
really work at
anything
seriously, because I hate to take a job
away from somebody who might need it.”

That gave her something to think about in her
turn, which occupied her until it occurred to her
to
ask: “Where are you going? I
thought I was sup
posed to show you the
sights, but you seem to
know the way
somewhere.”

“I had breakfast with a map and a guide book,”
he said. “I thought
it might help if the lamb could
find
its own way to the first sacrificial altar.”

“I don’t know of any of those near
Palermo,”
she said
seriously. “Very few of the pagan temples
have survived at all, and certainly no
altars.”

“Well, let’s give this a whirl
instead,” said the
Saint
resignedly, as he came in sight of his first des
tination.

He pulled into the free public parking lot,
and
paid the local
extortioner the customary blackmail
for seeing that nobody walked off with his car or
any of its detachable components.

“San Giovanni degli Eremiti!” Gina
cried, clap
ping her hands in enthusiastic
recognition. “It’s
about the most
romantic old church around here—
it
goes back to the Norman times. How clever of
you to find it!”

“It’s the natural affinity of one
ancient mon
ument for
another,” said the Saint, gazing up at the gray walls whose crumbling
scars bore witness to
the
countless battles that had been fought around
them. “I suppose we have to give this
one the full
treatment?”

He permitted himself to be led through the
moldering glories of pillars and porticos, and what
was unmistakably the remains of a mosque around
which the thrifty Crusaders had constructed their
own place of worship. When they finally arrived in
a beautiful little cloistered garden, he sank down
on a bower-shaded bench and drew Gina down
beside him.

“It was a wonderful tour, and I can
never thank
you enough for
showing me the antiquities of Palermo.”

“But we’ve only just begun,” she
protested.
“There
are lots more churches—the Cathedral—
the museum—”

“That’s what I’ve been dreading. In
spite of my name, I’ve always preferred to leave the churches
and cathedrals to more deserving Saints. But
we told your sweet old Aunt that we were going
sightseeing, and now even you can look her in
the
eye and
solemnly and truthfully swear that we did
so. Thus having kept the letter of our word,
we can
turn to
something more in keeping with the reality
of this climate than tramping around a lot of
sweltering ruins. Let’s face it, if it
weren’t for me, would you be sightseeing today?”

“No,
but—”

“But me no buts; the ‘no’ is quite
enough. That
means I’m
inflicting something on you which you’d
never have chosen, and I hate to be part of
an infliction. Now, wouldn’t you much rather be going
for a swim?”

“Well yes, perhaps. But I didn’t think
of bring
ing anything
with me—”

“And you can’t go back home for it
without
probably
running afoul of Auntie. Never mind.
Anyone who looks as sensational as you do in a
bikini should have a new one every
day.” Simon
stood up.
“Come along and prepare to revel in
woman’s time-honored pastime of buying
clothes.”

With no more delay for argument, the Bugatti
was speeding on its way again in a few minutes. At
the near-by seaside resort of
Romagnolo they
found a little beach
shop which supplied the requi
site
minimum of water-wear; and in what seemed
like little more than the span of a movie lap-dis
solve he was on the beach in his trunks watching
her come out of her cabana in the nearest
approach to the simple costume of Eve permitted by the cus
toms of the
time.

“I didn’t see you buying anything,”
she observed
belatedly.

“I didn’t have to,” he said without
shame. “I
had these
in the car, just in case we accidently de
cided to change our program. Now let’s get in
the water and cool off before you give heat-stroke to
half the population of this
lido.”

They swam and splashed away the dust and
stickiness of the morning, until they were
complete
ly refreshed
and buttressed with a reserve of coolness to make another spell in the sun seem
welcome
for a while. As they came ashore, a
white-coated
cameriere
greeted them at the water’s edge.

“Ecco la lista delle vivande,
signore,”
he said,
ex
tending a menu. “I am
sure you have already decided to lunch at the best restaurant on the
beach.”

Simon had already noticed a number of attractively
shaded restaurants at the edge of the strand,
and realized that the more enterprising of
them
were not
proposing to leave the selection of possible customers to chance. Such
initiative would
have taken a fairly dedicated
curmudgeon to resist.

“Che cosa
raccomandate?”
he asked.

“Everything is good, but the lobster is most ex
cellent, Do not move, and I will show you.”

The waiter rushed away, to return in a few
minutes with a wire basket in which a couple
of
lively
aragoste
squirmed
and flapped in futile re
bellion
against their destiny.

“I suppose they could get to be a
monotonous
diet, if you
lived here long enough,” Simon said, “but I’m a long way from
reaching that stage yet.
How
about you, Gina?”

“Donna Maria isn’t an extravagant house
keeper,” she said. “So they’re
still a treat for me.”

“Then we’ll make this an occasion,” he said, and
proceeded to round out the order.