Vendetta for the Saint. (2 page)

“Tombs,” he said, and won the
toss-up gamble. “Sebastian Tombs.” It struck no spark from James
Euston. “Think nothing of it. But next time you
make a mistaken identification, it might be a
good
idea not to
insist on it too hard.”

“But it wasn’t a mistake,” Euston
said, mopping
his brow.
“I’ll swear he was Dino Cartelli, a chap
I worked with in Sicily before the war. I was training for the
foreign department of the City and Con
tinental
then, and a year at their branch in Palermo
was part of the course. Dino worked next to me,
and we were fairly good friends. Except for the
time when he got that scar.”

“How
did that happen?”

“I gave it to him. It was a difference
of opinion, Latin temperament and all that, over some girl. He
opened a knife and I had to hit him. I wasn’t
an
amateur champion or
anything like that, but my
signet ring cut
him.”

Simon’s
interested regard took a quizzical slant.

“Well, that might account for why he
didn’t see
you as a
long-lost buddy.”

“Oh, no, we didn’t start a vendetta. The
girl ran
off with
somebody else and left us both feeling sil
ly. We apologized to each other and made up,
and
we were still
good friends again when I was sent to
another post. And yet now he not only pretends he
doesn’t know me, but he—or the fellow with
him—
they behave
like gangsters!”

“They did seem to have some of the man
nerisms,” Simon admitted thoughtfully.
“Are you absolutely certain you couldn’t have been wrong?”

“Absolutely.”

“After all those years, even a thing
like a small
scar—”

“I’m positive it was Cartelli, and still more so
after hearing his voice. I used to tease him about
sounding like a frog instead of a
Caruso. No; it
only shows you,”
said Mr. Euston, taking a brooding
refuge
in one of the cardinal tenets of a true-blue
Briton, “you never really know where you are with
foreigners.”

This line of thought was punctuated by the ar
rival of the lobster that Simon had been
awaiting,
mounted on a
wheeled trolley, attended by a re
tinue
of waiters, and trailing clouds of elysian fra
grance. He made a hospitable gesture.

“Would you care to join me? We can share
this
while they fix another one.”

Mr. Euston, however, seemed to feel that he
had
already shared
more than enough confidences for
such
an informal acquaintance. He pushed his
chair back and climbed hurriedly to his feet.

“It’s very kind of you, Mr. Tombs, but I’ve
al
ready imposed on you too
much. Besides, I don’t think I could eat anything for a while.” He pulled
out his wallet and extracted a card. “If you’re ever
in London and I can do anything for you,
please
give me a ring. And again, thanks
awfully for your
help.”

He pumped Simon’s hand vigorously, turned,
and marched firmly away and out of Simon’s
world for ever; and with a shrug Simon
dismissed
the encounter
from his mind and devoted to the
aragosta
the
whole-hearted attention which it de
served. Mr. Euston’s enlargements on the theme of
the nasty surprises which could befall anyone
who
ventured
outside the counties and clans of Albion
might have provided a fascinating
accompaniment
to lunch, but
not so much that to be deprived of it would impair his appetite. As for the
incident that
had brought them together, Simon was
still half in
clined to write it off as a
simple case of human er
ror. The most
interesting feature of it was that
Euston
had had the bad luck to pick on a character
who had all the earmarks of having spent some
time in the USA in associations which are not
high
ly approved of by the
Immigration Service.

That
is, he thought so until the next morning.

Breakfasting in his room, he was trying to utilize
the exercise of reading an Italian newspaper to di
vert his attention from the vile taste of the
coffee, without much success in spite of the normal quota
of international crises and local scandals. Until
he
reached a small item low down on
the second page.

TURISTA
INGLESE TROVATO ASSASSINATO
,
 
Said the
headline
.

A silent relay closed in his brain, setting off a
peal of soundless alarm bells in his inner ear,
even
before he came to the second
paragraph, where the murdered man was identified as James Euston, of London.

2

A
number of reasons have been suggested at dif
ferent times for Simon Templar’s
superficially in
congruous
title of The Saint, and there may be a
kernel of truth in all of them, while not one
is the complete answer. The sobriquet is a derivative and
outgrowth of so many contributory and
contradic
tory factors
attempting to crystallize the supreme paradox of the man himself. But one truly
sanc
tified quality
which had never been imputed to him
was a forgiving disposition.

James Euston had never been his friend, and
probably never could have been. With all his
possi
bly sterling
virtues, Mr. Euston had the essential in
gredients of a crashing bore. His demise
would be no great loss to anyone, except perhaps his nearest
kin, if he had any. And Simon had no personal
ob
ligation to protect him,
beyond a basic civilized re
sponsibility
which he had already more than
fulfilled. Yet by
not taking the Englishman’s
earnestness
seriously enough, and blithely ascrib
ing
the gangsterish reflexes of Not-Dino and his
bully boy to an almost amusing coincidence, he
had let Euston go bumbling off to a death which
might easily have been averted. He had been made
an accomplice, however unwittingly, in the
slaughter of a harmless innocent; and even if his
involvement had been unintentional, he could not
forgive his own blindness. And therefore he could
not forgive the men who had profited by it.

Which meant especially the one who must after
all have been Dino Cartelli.

That at least was a viable assumption. In the
light of what Simon had witnessed the day
before,
it seemed as if James Euston’s
vacation could only have been so violently terminated because he had identified
Cartelli. If it had only been an accidental
and
unfounded resemblance, Euston would not
have had to be killed. The newspaper, of course,
gave robbery as the obvious motive. Euston’s
corpse, with its head beaten in and its clothing
emptied
of cash, had been found in an alley a few
blocks
from his hotel: it seemed self-evident that he
had had the bad luck to be waylaid by footpads on
his way home. And such a coincidence could not be
ruled out—though all the Saint’s
instincts, belatedly sharpened as they had now become, rejected it
with hoots of derision. To him, the aroma of
double-distilled skulduggery had been unmis
takably added to the other noisome and omniprevalent
effluvia of Naples.

Simon settled on those conclusions while he
showered and dressed, and when he walked out
into the furnace blast of Neapolitan heat it
was not
for a
sightseeing stroll.

It was still too early for lunch, a meal
which in
Italy never begins before one
o’clock and when
combined with a necessary
nap to aid digestion of
the
pasta
and
vino
can extend into the late afternoon. But at Le Arcate some torpid
waiters were
sweeping and dusting and
setting out arrays of sil
ver and
napery in readiness for the activity to
come. Without too much prompting, one of them
was persuaded to retire to the gloomy back quar
ters in search of the head waiter.

In a soiled collarless shirt with sleeves
rolled up
to the elbows,
and still in need of his first shave,
this was a much less august personage than he appeared on duty, but he
accepted the off-hour sum
mons
with professionally reserved aplomb. He
shook hands easily when Simon extended his, and
there was no change of expression when he felt
the folded bill in his palm. The paper vanished with the
dexterity of many such passings, and he tilted his
head with grave attention to learn
what small ser
vice had been
purchased.

“If you remember, I had lunch here yesterday,”
Simon began.

“Sissignore.
I
remember.”

“At the same time, there was a man here
named
Dino
Cartelli.”

“The man who sat down with you for a few
minutes? I thought he was
English.”

“He
was. I’m talking about another customer.”

The head waiter’s forehead wrinkled above a
perfectly blank face.

“Cartelli?
I do not know that name.”

Unless the man was a consummate actor, he
must have been telling the truth; and the
Saint
would usually back his own judgment
against any
modern electronic substitute. If
it was not letting
him down, then, Cartelli had not merely been re
luctant to be recognized: he had a new name now
and did not even want to be reminded of the old.

“An Italian,” Simon said. “In
a light gray suit.
Heavy,
almost bald, with a deep rough voice. He
was sitting with a younger man at that table
there.”

This time he had even less need of a lie
detector,
as the man’s
eyes swivelled in the direction of the pointing finger and swivelled back again
to focus on the Saint with a pronounced diminution of cor
diality.

“I do not remember such a man,
signore.
You realize, Napoli is a big city, and this is a busy restaurant. It is impossible
to know everyone.
Mi rincresce
molto.”

He escorted Simon to the door, multiplying
his
protestations
of regret, but not saddened enough
by his inability to help to be moved to refund the
money that had already settled in his pocket.

He would need absolution for perjury before
he
partook of another Mass, but Simon realized that
it would have been a waste of time to
discuss this with him.

Outside, the doorman, not yet gorgeous in
his coat of office, was stolidly sweeping the night’s
debris from the stretch of sidewalk over
which he
reigned. The
Saint approached him and said: “Do
you remember a man who was here for lunch yes
terday—rather stout, bald, with a grating
voice, in
a gray suit?”

Folding money between Simon’s fingertips
promised gratitude in advance, and the
doorman’s hand started an automatic move towards it before
the full import of the question drilled into
his head. With comprehension came reaction, and his fingers
jerked back as if from the touch of a hot
iron. He
glanced apprehensively
over his shoulder, and a
drowned-fish
expression washed over his face.

“Non mi ricordo,”
he gabbled. “We have so
many customers, I forget all of them.”

He
returned to his sweeping with far more in
dustrious concentration than he had shown
before.

Simon looked where the doorman’s eyes had
swerved, and saw the head waiter still lurking in
the doorway. With a shrug of resignation, he
turned and strode away.

The visual impression that he had given up
lasted only until he rounded the next corner.
Then
immediately
his stride lengthened and quickened as
he circled the block to approach the
restaurant
from the
opposite side. This was somewhat easier
begun than accomplished, for there are few
such
things- as
“blocks” in the American sense in any Italian city—there are only
chunks and gobbets of
buildings of all
ages and stages of decrepitude, in
tersected
by a completely haphazard network of
streets
and stairways that would seem to have been laid out by a jigsaw puzzle fan
rather than a cartographer. Calling upon his sense of direction for a
prodigious effort, the Saint managed to achieve his
purpose with an accuracy which, in the Africa of
H. Rider Haggard, might have earned him the
cognomen of Lord of the Labyrinths, or He-Who-Finds-All-Crooked-Paths. In a
surprisingly short time he had completed the meandering detour and
was leaning against the wall of the adjacent
building, out of sight of anyone who did not step all the
way out of the restaurant, as the doorman pushed
his broom towards that side with the normal
apathy which it had not taken long to restore.