Vendetta for the Saint. (17 page)

The waiter departed again, promising to send for
them when everything was ready; and they spread
their rented towels on the sand and sprawled on
them in sybaritic relaxation.

“At times like this,” said the
Saint, “I often won
der
who was the fathead who first proclaimed that
work was a noble and rewarding activity. Or
was
he a really brilliant fellow who
thought of a line to
kid the suckers into
doing the dirty jobs and liking
it?”

“But you must work at something, don’t
you?”
she said after a
pause.

“As
seldom as possible.”

“But you told us you had business with
Uncle
Alessandro.”

“Do I look like a type of character who
would
have business
with him?”

“No,” she said emphatically, and
then was in
stantly appalled
and open-mouthed. “I mean—”

He
grinned.

“You mean
exactly what you said,” he insisted gently. “I never did convince you
that I was part of
the ordinary commercial
world, and since then
you’ve
remembered more of what you’ve read or heard about some of my adventures, which
your
educational background would
have to regard as
slightly nefarious.
In spite of which, you apparent
ly know that Uncle Al’s private line of
skulduggery
is much worse than anything a
comparatively re
spectable buccaneer
like me would be mixed up in.”

“I didn’t say that at all!” she
flared. “I know
everyone
says he made his money in rum-running or rackets or some of the other things
you have in
the United
States, and I know he was in trouble
with the police about taxes or something. It was in all the papers when
I was at school, and the other
girls
teased me to death because I had the same
name. I didn’t dare admit he was a relation.
But
since then he’s
told me that all the best people
dealt
with him, only the Americans are so hypo
critical, and he just happened to run up
against the
wrong
politicians. And he’s always been so good to
us—”

“So when he talked to you on the phone
late last
night or early
this morning and told you he was
afraid I meant him
some harm, and asked you to
use our date to
find out all that you could about me
and
what I was cooking, you felt it was your duty
to take on the job.”

For a moment her eyes flashed with the in
stinctive threat of another and even more
indignant
denial; and
then the fire was quenched in a
traitorous
upwelling of moisture that she could not
voluntarily control. Her lip trembled, and
she
dropped her face suddenly in her
hands.

Simon patted her sympathetically on the
shoul
der.

“Don’t take it so hard,” he said.
“You just
haven’t
had much experience with the Mata Hari
bit.”

“You’re
a beast,” she sobbed.

“No, I’m not. I’m a nice friendly bloke
who
hates to
refuse a beautiful girl anything. To prove
it, I’ll answer all your questions
anyhow.”

The soft satin under his hand shook with
anoth
er muted tremor
which was somehow distractingly
exciting,
but he made himself go on single-mindedly
:

“No, I am not a policeman. No, I am not
work
ing for the
FBI, or any agency of any Government.
Yes, I have the worst intentions towards your Un
cle Alessandro. I think he’s a very evil man
and
that he may be
guilty of a number of murders
besides
lesser crimes; but there’s one murder I’m
morally certain he’s responsible for, which
I’m
going to see
that he pays for in one way or another. Unless he succeeds in having me
murdered first,
which he’s already tried a
couple of times.”

She sat up abruptly, and he reflected that only
the very very young could still look lovely with
red
dened eyes and tear-stained
cheeks.

“That’s enough,” she said.
“You’d better take
me home now.”

“Not until after lunch. Could you live
with the
knowledge that
you’d sentenced one of those
lobsters
to die for nothing?”

“I
expect you can eat them both.”

“Why should I risk indigestion because
you don’t like to hear the truth?”

“I can’t listen to you! It would be too disloyal.
It’s my family you’re talking about, calling Uncle
Alessandro a murderer. I want to go
home.”

“Then wouldn’t you feel better,”
said the Saint
deliberately, “if Al
Destamio wasn’t really your
uncle after
all?”

The shot scored, more violently even than he
had
hoped. Gina’s
reaction ran the gamut of all the
conventional symptoms of shock, from staring eyes
and sagging jaw to the cataleptic rigidity
in which
all her
responses were frozen. After such a visible
impact, there could be no return to pretense
or hauteur.

“So—you
know,” she breathed finally.

“I can’t go quite that far,” he
said candidly. “I
suspect.
I can’t prove it—yet. But I think I shall. I
need help. And I think you could give it. Now
you’ve as good as told me,
haven’t you, that you’ve
suspected the same
thing.”

His blue eyes held her steadily, like magic
crystals defying her to try to deceive them;
but this
time she made
no attempt to escape their pene
tration.

“Yes,” she said. “For a long
time. But I was
afraid to
believe it, because I knew how much I
hoped
it was true. And that seemed awful, some
how.”

“But if it turned out we were
right,” he contin
ued—and
the subtle assimilation of their interests
into the inclusive “we” was so
smooth that she
probably
never even noticed it, “it’d be rather like
the start of a new life for you.”

“Yes,
it would.”

“Then what’s your problem? Al is asking
you to
get involved
in what you’re afraid is more dirty
business. You’ve got suspicions which you can’t
take to the police, because you’re afraid of
being
wrong, or of
what it might mean to your family
name. I’m not the police, but I have a corny bee in
my bonnet about justice. I think I’m your
obvious
answer, sent
directly from heaven.”

“I think you’re wonderful,” she
said, and leaned
over and
kissed him with impulsive warmth.

Simon Templar recorded a vivid impression
that
her stretch in
a convent had effected no irremedial
inhibitions
on her Mediterranean instincts.

“La pasta e pronta,”
said the too-helpful waiter,
with impeccable timing.

2

The dining room was
nothing more than a ver
andah shaded with
cane matting, overlooking the
beach
and the sea, with the kitchen and other
working quarters in the stucco building that
backed it up. The
substitute for a cellar appeared
to be an
immense glass-fronted refrigerator from
which the wine came mountain-cold, as it should
be in such a climate, especially when of the
sturdy Sicilian type. The meal itself made a commendable
effort to live up to its advance billing, and
would have justified interrupting almost anything except
what it had actually cut short. But at least it
gave the Saint an opportunity to hear the rest of Gina’s
confession from a slightly less disturbing
distance.

“It’s just … well, a feeling that’s
been growing
through the years. At first it
seemed so fantastic
that I tried to laugh it
off. But the small things
added up to
a big thing that I couldn’t put out of
my
mind. Now I look back, it must have all begun
about the time Uncle Alessandro was so sick in
Rome. I told you that I only remember that part
vaguely, because I was very small. I know he had
cancer,
and I thought they said it was incurable;
but
now Donna Maria says I’m wrong, it wasn’t
cancer at all, and he got
better. Is that possible?”

“It’s not impossible. Doctors have been mis
taken. And there have been what you might call
spontaneous remissions, which means that the doc
tors don’t know why the patient was cured, but he
was.”

“But
not very often?”

“Not very often after the case has been
called
incurable, that
have lasted as long as since you
were
a little girl, and with the patient looking as
hearty as Al did the other day.”

“Then I happened to notice that there
weren’t
any pictures
of Uncle Alessandro in any of the family albums, when he was younger. When I
asked
Donna Maria,
she said that when he was younger
he was superstitious about being photographed
and would never let himself be taken.”

“Perhaps he had a premonition about when
he
would have his picture
taken with a number under
it,”
Simon remarked.

“And then a girl whom I used to be taken out
with, because her mother was an old friend of Don
na Maria, who always finds the nastiest things to
say about everyone and yet you
usually have to ad
mit they’re true,
once said that Uncle Alessandro’s
cure
must have been more in his mind than his
body, if he did so well in business in America, when
all he ever did here in Italy was to throw away
most
of the family fortune.”

“Is
that what he did?”

“Oh, yes. Even Lo Zio, when it wasn’t so hard
for him to talk, told me how foolish he was and
some of the crazy schemes he threw money away
on. And I couldn’t believe he had become such a
different
man.”

Simon
nodded.

“Unless
he is a different man.”

“But how could
he be? Unless Lo Zio—”

“Who, let’s face it, isn’t so very bright these
days—”

“And
Donna Maria—”

“Yes, she would have to be in on
it.” The Saint
held her
eyes remorselessly. “And don’t try to tell
me you can’t possibly imagine such a dear
sweet
old lady being involved in anything
dishonest.”

She made no attempt to evade the challenge;
it
was as if she had grown
up, in one way, very sud
denly. She only
asked: “But why?”

“When we know that,” he said,
“we’ll have a lot
of
answers.”

After a while she said: “You want me to trust
you, but you still haven’t told me much about
yourself, only the things you’re not. If you
aren’t a
detective, how did you get
so interested in Uncle
Alessandro?”

His hesitation was only momentary, more to
marshal his recollections than to make up his
mind whether or not to
share them with her. After
all,
even if she was an extraordinarily unsuspected Delilah, capable of far more
deviousness and du
plicity
than one could easily credit her, and this
whole last performance was only another
trick to gain his confidence, there was very little he could
tell her that would be news to Al Destamio,
or that
would help the Mafia to frustrate
his investiga
tions.

Therefore he told her his whole story, from
the
accidental
meeting with the late James Euston to
the plastic bomb which he had disarmed the night
before, omitting only his private luncheon
con
versation with Marco Ponti
and his disposal of the plastic with the fingerprints on it, since even if she
had come over whole-heartedly to his side
those
items of
information might be tricked or forced out
of her. At the end of the recital she was
big-eyed
and open-mouthed again.