Vendetta for the Saint. (19 page)

He drove the Bugatti past the cemetery
entrance
and around the
next corner before he parked it,
and
came silently back on foot. The moon which
had been so helpful the night before was up
again,
giving perhaps
more light than he would have ordered if the specifications had been left to
him, but
in
compensation it made complete concealment
almost as difficult for any remotely possible
bushwhacker as it was for him. There was, how
ever, most literally no other sign of life in
the vicin
ity, and the
only sound was the rustle of leaves in
the hesitant breeze.

The wrought-iron gates were closed but not
locked, as he had anticipated, and opened with
only a slight creak.
Crossing to the Destamio
mausoleum,
he automatically gave a wide berth to
the tombs and headstones which were big enough
for a man to skulk behind, and probed the
shadows behind them with cat eyes as he passed; but that perfunctory precaution
seemed to be in fact as unnecessary as the backward glances which he threw
over alternate shoulders at brief irregular
intervals
while he worked
on the lock which secured the
bronze
grille door of the vault. It succumbed to his
sensitive manipulations in less than three
minutes, and with a last wary look behind him he passed
through into the alley between the piled-up
ranks
of stone
caskets; and there for the first time he had
to bring out his pocket flashlight to begin
decipher
ing the inscriptions on their ends.

Then there was an instant of intense pain in
the
back of his
head, and a coruscating blackness rose
up and swallowed him.

A
distant throbbing, as of some gargantuan tom
tom pulsating deep in the earth, thudded and
swelled. An indefinite time passed before
Simon became aware that the hammering drum was in his
own head, and that each percussion was accom
panied by a red surge of agony. He fought down
the pain with his growing consciousness until
after
an immeasurable battle he had
subjugated it
enough to be able to receive other impressions.

His face was pressed against something rough
and dusty that smelled of
goats, and when he tried to move his head and change position he realized that
his hands were bound behind his back. It took
an additional effort of will to force himself
to lie
still while a
modicum of strength flowed back into his body and the cobwebs cleared
sluggishly from
his brain.

It was painfully obvious that he had been hit
on the head, like any numb-skulled private eye in a
bosom-and-bludgeon paperback; and what made
it
hurt more was the proof
that, for such a thing to
have
happened, he had to have been out-thought.
He still fancied himself long past the stage
where
anyone could
sneak up behind and cosh him if he
was even minimally on his guard, as he had been at the cemetery. But
now it dawned on him belatedly
that
he had been tricked by the simple fact of having had to pick the lock of the
mausoleum grille,
which had
subconsciously blinded him to the possi
bility that someone else might have arrived
before him and locked the gate again from inside. Some
one who could then have crouched in the total
darkness atop one of the
banks of coffins and
waited
patiently for him to pass through the passageway below …

After which came the question: how could the
ambush have been planned with such accurate
ex
pectation of his arrival?

A door opened near by, and heavy footsteps
clacked across a tile floor and stopped
beside him.

“Al,” said the Saint at a venture,
“if you wanted
to see me
again so badly, why didn’t you just send
me an ordinary invitation?”

A
familiar rumbling grunt confirmed his guess.

It took a great effort to move, for any
motion started the trip-hammers going again inside his
cranium, but he forced himself to roll over
so that
his face was out of the filthy
blanket. The scene
thus revealed scarcely
seemed worth the agony. He was in a small whitewashed room lighted by a sin
gle naked bulb, with a single door and a single
window covered by a soiled skimpy curtain. There was
no furniture except the cot on which he lay. A
sizeable part of this dreary setting was obscured by the
form of Al Destamio looming over him like a
jellied
mountain of menace.

“Don’t waste your time on the
jokes,” growled
the
mountain. “You just start tellin’ me what I
wanta know, an’ maybe you won’t get hurt no
more than you are now.”

Simon squirmed up into a sitting position
with
his back to the
wall, and only a faint spangling of
sweat on his forehead revealed what the exertion
cost him. Destamio saw nothing but a smile of
un
daunted mockery, and rage
rose in his throat.

“You
gonna talk or you gonna give trouble?”

“I love to talk, Al,” said the
Saint soothingly.
“Nobody
ever accused me of being tongue-tied.
What would you like to chat about? Or should I
start off by congratulating you on the way
you got
me
here?—wherever this is. It’s been quite a few
years now since I let myself get sapped like
that.
But having your
boy lock himself inside that crypt
and wait for me to burgle my way in was a real
sneaky switch. I must remember that one.”

“You’ll be lucky if you live long enough
to re
member
anything.”

“Well, I’ve always been rather lucky,
Al. A guy
has to be, when
he isn’t brilliant like you—”

The words were cut off as Destamio lashed
out
with his
slab-sized hand and dealt the Saint a
crashing blow on the side of his head, jarring him
sideways, the heavy ring splitting the skin
of his
cheek.

“No jokes, I told you, Saint. You wanna
be
smart, you give the right
answers an’ make it easy
for
yourself.”

Simon shook his head, trying to arrest the in
ternal pounding which the clout had started
up
again.

“But I meant it sincerely, Al,” he
said in a most
reasonable
tone, though the ice in his blue eyes
would have chilled anyone more sensitive than the post-graduate goon
confronting him. “It was really
brilliant of you to figure out that my next move
would be to check the names in your family
bone-
box. Or did
Gina tell you?”

“Did she
know?”

The Saint could have bitten his tongue off.
Now
if Gina hadn’t betrayed him, he had
betrayed her. It showed that the after-effects of the knock-out
had left him more befuddled than he had realized.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he tried to recover.
“I meant, did you think of it all by
yourself, or did
she help you? She’s
smart enough to have an in
spiration
like that, judging by the way she was
trying
to pump me all day. But I didn’t tell her, because I’m not such a dope that I
couldn’t guess
what she was
after.”

Destamio stared at him inscrutably. For all
his
crudities, the
racketeer was as quick as a whip; and
it was no more than a toss-up, at the most op
timistic, whether he would be taken in by the
Saint’s attempt to retrieve his slip.

“I wanta know lotsa more things you
didn’t tell
her,”
Destamio said. “What was it you figured to spill to the cops, like you
threatened me, if you
thought
I was trying to have you knocked off
again? An’ how you figure to do that now?”

“That’s easy,” Simon answered.
“It’s all written
down and sealed in
an envelope which will be de
livered to the
proper place whenever the person
who’s
taking care of it doesn’t hear from me at cer
tain regular times. I know that’s one of the oldest
gimmicks in the business, but it’s still a corker.
And don’t think you can force me to
call this per
son and say I’m okay,
because if I don’t use the
right code
words he’ll know that somebody’s twist
ing
my arm.”

“I think you’re bluffing,” Destamio
said coldly.
“But it
don’t matter. Before I’m through, you’ll tell
me who’s got this envelope, an’ what the code
is.”

“You
think so?”

Destamio met the Saint’s level and
unflinching gaze for several motionless seconds; and then a
throaty chuckle came up from some source around
his diaphragm like the grumbling sound of an
earthquake, and opened the fissure of his lipless
mouth as it emerged.

“You don’t have to tell me you’re tough.
I seen
plenty guys
worked over in different ways, an’ a few of ‘em never did sing. But we don’t
have to
work that way
no more. We got scientific ways to
loosen you up, an’ what’s more we’ll know you’re tellin’ the truth. So
since I don’t have to make no promises I ain’t gonna keep, like I would if I
was
gonna work you over in the old way,
I can tell you
we’re just gonna give you a
little shot in the arm,
an’ after you
spill everything I’m gonna blow your
brains
out myself.”

He went to the door and called out:
“Entra, dot
tore!”

Simon Templar knew the feeling of a sinking
heart, and not merely as a metaphor. Al
Destamio
was certainly not bluffing. In those
enlightened
days, there was no longer any
practical need for the
clumsy
instruments of the medieval torture
chamber,
or even their more modern electrical re
finements:
there were drugs available which when
injected
into a vein would induce a state of relaxed euphoria in which the victim would
happily babble
his most precious
secrets. Even the Saint, with all
his
courage and determination, could not resist
that chemical coercion. Grinning idiotically, he
would tell the whole truth and nothing but the
truth—and once he had done that, God help him.

The man who came in was stocky and plump,
although on nothing like the same scale as
Destamio. He was younger, and his dewlaps
were
freshly shaved
and powdered, his hands soft and
pink; his
double-breasted suit was dark blue, and
his
shoes, though sharply pointed, an even more
conservative black. The expression on his slightly
porcine features was wise and solemn, as befitted
one whose trade was based upon
reminders of mor
tality: he did not
need the universal symbol of the
black
satchel, which he nevertheless carried with
him, to identify it.

“Is this the patient?” he asked,
as if he were mak
ing the most routine of house
calls.

“I am if you want to prescribe something
for a
mild
concussion, and a long cold drink to wash it
down,” Simon said. “If you’ve
hired yourself out
for
anything else, you must have dedicated yourself
to hypocrisy—not Hippocrates.”

The doctor’s expression did not alter as he
put
down his bag on
the floor and opened it.

“Do you have any allergies?” he
asked with
stolid
conscientiousness. “Sodium pentothal sometimes has side reactions, but
then again so does
scopolamine.
It is sometimes difficult to decide
which is best to use.”

“My worst allergy is to medical
quacks,” said
the Saint.
“But I don’t want to be unfair. Perhaps
you’re wonderful with horses.”

“
Affretate, dottore,”
growled
Destamio impa
tiently.

The physician was unperturbed by either of
them. Taking his own time, he brought out a
vial of
clear fluid
and a hypodermic, filled the syringe, and
went through the standard procedure of
forcing a
small jet of
liquid through the upraised needle to
remove any trapped bubbles of air—a somewhat
finicky precaution, it seemed, considering
that
Destamio’s
announced program would be more
positively
lethal than any accidentally introduced
embolism.