Vendetta for the Saint. (18 page)

“I can hardly believe it—a bomb, and
right out
side our
house, while we were having dinner!”

“A very sensible time to do it. You should
try
planting a bomb in a car without
being noticed,
when somebody’s sitting in
it, driving at sixty miles
an
hour.”

All this talk was not quite as consecutive as
it
reads, having been spread over several courses,
with the necessary breaks for tasting, sipping,
chewing, absorbing, and cogitating, and interrup
tions by the waiter for serving and changing
plates
and appealing for approbation.

It was later still, after another of those
pauses
divided between
gastronomic appreciation and the
separate
pursuit of their own thoughts, that Gina
said: “I did think of a way once to
settle whether
Uncle
Alessandro really is the same man as my
uncle, but of course I never had the nerve to
do
it.”

“If that’s all it takes, it’s
practically done. People
are
always complaining that I’ve got too much
nerve. Let me offer you some of my surplus.
What
do we do with it?”

“It’s so simple, actually. If my uncle
is dead, and
this man is an
imposter, the real uncle will be
buried
in the family vault. We just have to open it
and look.”

The Saint frowned.

“Does that follow automatically?
Wouldn’t they
be more likely
to have buried him somewhere else,
under another name?”

“Oh, no! I can’t believe that they’d go
as far as
that. You
don’t know how traditional everything is
in Sicily, especially with an old family like
mine.
Even if Donna
Maria and Lo Zio allowed this
Alessandro Destamio
to pretend to be my uncle,
for money or any
other reason—and he couldn’t
do it
without their help—nothing would make
them
allow my real uncle to be buried under a false
name and outside the vault where all the Destamios
have been buried for three hundred years. It
would be almost like committing sacrilege!”

Simon pondered this, pursuing a last
exquisite
tidbit with
delicately determined knife and fork. It
was psychologically believable. And the Mafia
could easily have arranged to satisfy the
orthodox scruples of the close relatives concerned, with a
captive doctor to juggle a death certificate and a
mafioso
priest to preside over a midnight inter
ment.

It was a possibility. And the best prospect
in
sight at that moment for
another break-through.

“Would you be a party to cracking the
ancestral
mausoleum?”
he asked. “Or at least show me
where it is and turn your back?”

“I’ll
go with you,” she said.

The meal came to an end at last with fresh
yellow
peaches at
their peak of luscious ripeness, after
which Gina accepted coffee but the Saint
declined
it, preferring to finish with the
clean taste of the fruit and a final glass of wine.

“When you’re finished,” he said,
“I think we
might
throw on some clothes and run over and case the joint—if you’ll excuse the
expression. Anyhow we can’t go swimming again right away after gorg
ing ourselves like this.”

Thus after a while they were driving back
again
almost into
Palermo, then swinging out again un
der Gina’s directions while the Saint registered ev
ery turning on a mental map that would
retrace the route unhesitatingly whenever he called on it, by night or day. In daylight,
the fine stand of cypress
trees
which landmark all cemeteries in Italy
loomed up as an early beacon to their
destination;
and when they
had almost reached it, a funeral cor
tege debouching from a dusty side road completed
the identification while at the same time
effectively
blocking all
further progress.

The
hearse, unlike the dachshund-bodied
Cadillacs beloved of American morticians, was a
superbly medieval juggernaut towering a good
ten
feet from the
ground, decorated with carved
flowers,
fruit, and cherubs framing glass panes the
size of shop windows which gave a clear view
of the
coffin within
and its smothering mantle of flowers. It was towed by two trudging black horses
in harness to match, their heads bent under the weight of
huge plumes of the same stygian hue.

Behind
it followed a shuffling parade of
mourners. First the women, identically garbed in rusty black dresses
with black scarves over their
heads,
bearing either long-stemmed flowers or
candles; this was a big outing for them, and
there
was not a dry eye in the column.
Then came the
men—a few in their black
Sunday suits, doubtless
the next of
kin, while the rest were more com
fortable
in their shirtsleeves, to which some of
them added the respectful touch of black bands on
the upper arm. Many dawdled along in animated
conversation, as if they had attached themselves
to
the procession merely from a
temporary lack of
any other
attraction, or because a social obligation required their presence but not any
uncontrollable display of grief.

Simon stopped the car by the roadside and
said:
“We might
as well walk from here, instead of drag
ging behind them.”

He helped Gina out, and they easily overtook
the phalanx of the bereaved without unseemly
scurrying, and squeezed past it through the ceme
tery gates. He looked closely at the gates
as he went
through, and
saw that there was no lock on them:
it was unlikely that they would ever be secured in
any way, though they might be kept shut at
other times to keep stray dogs out.

“Our
vault is over there,” Gina said, pointing.

It was not so much a vault as a mausoleum, oc
cupying a whole large corner of the
graveyard, an
edifice of
granite and marble so imposing that at
first Simon had taken it for some kind of
chapel. The entrance was a door made of bronze bars that
would have served very well as the gateway
of a
jail; beyond
it, what looked at first like a narrow passageway led straight through the
middle of the
building to a
small altar at the other end backed by
a stained-glass window just big enough to
admit a
modicum of
suitable sepulchral light. It was not
until after a second or two, when his eyes adapted
to the gloom, that he realized that the
passageway
was in fact
only a constricted maneuvering space
between the banks of serried individual sarcophagi
stacked one upon the other like courses of
great
bricks which in
places rose all the way to the ceil
ing.

“It seems to have gotten a bit
crowded,” he re
marked.
“I wouldn’t say there was room for more
than a couple more good generations. Do you
have
your nook
picked out, or is it a case of first gone,
first served?”

She shivered in
spite of the warmth of the air.

“I don’t understand jokes like
that,” she said
stiffly;
and he was reminded that in spite of every
thing that had drawn them together there were
still
distances
between them that might never be
bridged.

He gave his attention to the lock on the
bronze gate, which had a keyhole almost big enough to
receive his finger.

“Who
has the key?” he asked. “Donna Maria?”

“I expect so. But I don’t know where I’d
look for
it. I could try
to find out—”

“I’m afraid that might take too long.
But you
needn’t bother.
Now that I’ve seen the lock, I know
exactly what I need to open it. Unfortunately I
don’t have the tool in my pocket. And anyhow,
this
doesn’t seem to
be quite the ideal moment to start making burglarious motions.” He
indicated the
tag-end of the
funeral party, whose easily dis
tracted
concentration was now unfairly divided be
tween the goings-on at the graveside where
the
hearse had
halted and the contrastingly lively love
liness of Gina in her outrageously
figure-moulding
cotton
dress. “Let’s pass the time driving back to a
shop where I can buy what we need.”

After he had made his purchase, he suggested
another swim to cool off again. Caution dictated a
nocturnal return to the cemetery, when the
risk of
attracting
unwanted attention would be practically
eliminated, and meanwhile he wanted to keep
Gina’s mind from dwelling too much on the
prospect. But the sun was still a hand’s breadth from setting when she said:
“If we don’t go back to the
vault
now, you’ll have to take me home.”

“I don’t want to go until after
dark,” he said. “I
thought
we might drift along somewhere for an
aperitif and maybe an early dinner first.”

“I can’t have dinner with you,” she said. “If I
don’t get home before it’s dark, Donna Maria will
be exploding. And she’d certainly never let me go
out with you again, even if Uncle
Alessandro asked
her to.”

Simon thought about this for a moment, and
was surprisingly undepressed by the further
re
minder of the problems of romance in the land of
Romeo and Juliet. Much as he would have
liked to
spend more time with Gina, a
tomb-tapping ex
cursion would not have
been his own choice of an
occasion for her companionship.

“I guess you’re right,” he said.
“And I know you
weren’t
really looking forward to joining me in a game of ghouls. Get dressed again,
and we’ll make
sure that
Auntie has no reason to disintegrate.”

She was rather silent on the drive back to
the
manse; but
after a while she said: “What shall I tell
them I found out about you?”

“Everything I told you at lunch, if you
like. But
of course
nothing about our plan to check up on
the vault.”

“Then
what shall I say your plans are?”

“Tell ‘em you couldn’t find out. Tell
‘em I hinted
that I’d got
some sensational scheme up my sleeve,
but I refused to talk about it
…
Yes, that’s
perfect
—you can say
that you think you could break me
down, if you had just a little more time to work on me, and that we
made a date for more sightseeing
tomorrow. Then you
can be sure that they won’t
just let you keep
it, they’ll beg you to.”

The Bugatti stopped at the forbidding gates;
and Simon came around the car and gave her a hand to dismount, and held on to
it after the assistance was
no
longer needed.

“Till tomorrow, then,” she said,
with her intense dark eyes lingering on his face as if she wanted to
learn it again feature by feature.

But when he bent to kiss her, she drew back
with
subtle skill,
releasing her hand quickly and hurry
ing to the inset door, from which she turned to
throw him another of her intoxicating smiles
before she disappeared.

Verily, he thought, the conquest of Gina
Destamio could be something like crossing the
Alps by a goat trail on a
bicycle with hexagonal wheels …

However, both remembrance and anticipation
continued to weave her image through his
thoughts
during the aperitif
and the dinner which he had to
enjoy
alone, and were only relegated to the back
ground at the same time when he decided that
the
cemetery
should have become as deserted and safe
ly set up for violation as it would ever be.

Then he became purely professional. And as
far as he was concerned, any similarity of his mission
to the themes of gothic novels or horror
movies
was purely
coincidental. To him, the mausoleum
was just another crib to be cracked, and a much
easier prospect than many that he had
tackled.