Vendetta for the Saint. (3 page)

“Amico,”
said the Saint softly, “would you like
to try your memory again?”

His voice froze the pavement sanitizer into immobility.
Then, with painful slowness, the man’s
eyes travelled all the way up the Saint’s figure from
the shoes to the smiling face.

“Now don’t go and have a stroke,”
Simon urged him kindly. “Nobody inside can see me, and they
need never know I came back. Just prod those
brain cells and try to make them give out the
name
of the
gentleman I was asking about.”

“Non capisco,”
said the doorman hoarsely, and
resumed a pretense of sweeping that would
scarcely
have convinced
a five-year-old microcephalic.

The axiom that money talks has its
exceptions,
but something
told the Saint that he had found one
individual who would not be permanently deaf to
sufficient shouting. This time it was a
10,000-
lire
note that
he produced and unfolded to the size of a small bedsheet; it shone goldenly in
the sun. He
refolded it to
a small wad and let it drop. The
doorman’s
eyes followed it covetously as it fell, un
til Simon’s foot covered it.

“Do you understand that?” Simon
asked. “It would be so easy for you to sweep it up.”

“No!”
was the mechanical answer, but the em
phasis was dwindling.

“At least you might tell me somewhere
else to
ask. The hotel
where he stays, perhaps. The driver
of the taxi they took from here might have told me
that, if I found the right driver. No one
will know
it was
you.”

Beads of sweat broke out on the man’s
swarthy face as fear fought with avarice. Simon took out a
second 10,000-
lire
bill and folded it
carefully like
the first.

“Excelsior!”
gasped the doorman huskily.

Simon gazed at him for a long moment, and,
when the man failed to unfurl a banner with a
strange device and head for the nearest
mountain,
it became clear that the speaker was
not planning
to emulate the eccentric youth
in the poem but was simply uttering the name of the plushest hotel in Naples.

“Grazie,”
said the Saint, releasing the second
bill, and turned away without waiting to
watch it
and its
predecessor being raked briskly into the lit
tle pile of jetsam that the
portinaio
had
been ma
neuvering
towards the frontage of the estab
lishment next door.

To some investors it might have seemed inade
quate yield for the outlay, since it would not
have
taken any
Sherlock Holmes to deduce that a citizen
dressed and bedecked like Cartelli would not
be
likely to bunk in some
obscure
pensione;
but to the
Saint it was worth it for the time that could be
saved from canvassing alternative
palazzi
—
not to
mention
eliminating the possibility that he resided
in an apartment or house of his own. Now,
pro
vided the information was
true, Simon could make
a
more positive move.

A green and black cab followed after him
when he turned into the Via A Falcone, while the driver
expounded the advantages of his cool
upholstery
and dazzling
speed over the dusty travail of walk
ing under the noonday sun. Simon succumbed with
only token resistance and climbed in; but he
was not so blinded by the shady interior that he failed
to notice the 300
lire
already
registered on the
meter, nor
too proud to draw the driver’s attention
to the undoubted oversight. After a brief
verbal
brannigan during which certain
special charges
were mentioned, so special
indeed that they could
not be found in
the quadrilingual list of com
plicated
tariffs posted inside the cab, a decision
was reached that perhaps the meter should be
readjusted ; and the chauffeur launched his
vehicle
through the lunatic traffic
with an emotional aban
don which
suggested that only homicide or suicide
would salve his injured feelings.

Simon called a premature halt to the ride at
a
leather-goods shop which
he spotted within sight of the Hotel Excelsior. There he bought a hand
some gold-bound pigskin cigar case, making no
more attempt to stint on quality than a man with
his quarry’s evident tastes would have done.
To
him it was only another
investment, like the solvent
which
had opened the doorman’s impermanently
sealed
lips.

He took the case and the same attitude to the
Sale e Tabacchi
a few doors farther on. On some other
occasion it might have amused him to engage
the tobacconist in a long and profound
debate over
the selection
of a package of salt, which for reasons
which may remain eternally obscure to
non-Ital
ians is a
monopoly of the same government-
licensed
stores. But that morning he was driven by too much impatience to waste time on
anything but
the purchase of
two of the very best cigars, and the shopkeeper who sold them at the inflated
official
price never
knew what torment he had been spared.

Simon put the cigars in the case and kept the
case in his hand as he entered the ornate
lobby of
the Excelsior,
and located the desk of the con
cierge.

“I believe this belongs to one of your
guests,” he
said.
“Would you see that he gets it?”

The attendant examined the case which Simon
had laid on the counter, with the olympian
detach
ment befitting
his office, which is believed by all
concierges to be only slightly inferior to that of the
managing director.

“Do you know which one?” he
inquired, with a
subtle suggestion that his
responsibility covered
not merely thousands
but tens of thousands, and
that
anyone who did not realize it was probably a peasant.

Simon shook his
head.

“I’m afraid I don’t. I just happened to see him
getting into a cab, and heard him tell the driver
to
come here, and then I saw the
case on the ground.
I picked it up
and yelled at him, but the cab was
driving
off and he didn’t hear.”

“What
did he look like?”

“Heavy set—about sixty—a little gray
hair, but
mostly
bald—wearing a very fancy gray silk suit—
diamond pin in his tie—star sapphire
cuff-links—a
gold ring with a
huge emerald …”

The functionary, who like all his brethren
of that
unique European
order could be counted on to
know
everyone who had a room in the cara
vanserai
during his tenure, and almost as much
about
their activities as God, listened with a concentration that progressed from the
condescend
ingly labored to the
tentatively perspicacious to the
final
flash of connection.

“Ah
yes! I think you mean Signore Destamio.”

The
Saint’s pause was imperceptible.

“Not—Carlo
Destamio?”

“No. The name is Alessandro
Destamio.” The
case
disappeared under the counter. “I will take
care of it for him.”

“Now, just a minute,” Simon said
amiably.
“Why not
call his room and ask if he did lose a
cigar case? I didn’t actually
see
him
drop it, you
know. It might
have been lying there all the time.”

“I cannot ask him at once, sir. He left
yesterday
afternoon.”

“Oh, did he?” Simon did not bat an
eyelid.
“That’s
too bad. It was yesterday when I picked it
up, of course, but I’ve been too busy to
come by
before this. Where did he go?”

“He
did not tell me, sir.”

It was apparent that the concierge did not
warm
to that type of
interrogation, from the darkening of
his face which was quickly masked with a sneer.

“I will ask him when he comes back, sir.
He is
not a
tourist—he keeps his suite here all the time. If
you would like to leave your name and
address, I
will send you
back the case if it does not belong to
him.”

And, the impeccable manner implied, if
there’s
any question
of a reward, don’t worry, I’ll see that
you get it; you probably need it.

“Don’t bother,” said the Saint
airily. “If it turns out not to be his, you keep it. Just be careful how
you light the cigars, in case some practical
joker
planted the whole thing.”

It was not, he felt, an entirely
discreditable exit;
and it
left interesting vistas for future speculation.

Besides which, the visit had produced all
that he
had any right
to expect, if not more: a name.

Alessandro Destamio.

3

A
hard core of literate Americans who can still
read the printed word when they get their
eyes un-
gummed from
the nearest television set would be
capable of distinguishing the name of Alessandro
Destamio from all the synonyms who have gone
down in windrows before the movie cameras. It
was a name that had become familiar through
much repetition in news reports and popular
articles, even to a vast number of people who
still
had only the vaguest idea of
what he actually did.
Al Destamio was
a member of “The Syndicate”, a nebulous and to most readers still
semi-mythical
organization which controlled all the lucrative
rackets in the United States and a shocking
percentage of local politicians. He had not been one of its
chief executives, at the rarifled elevation of a
Lu
ciano or a Costello, but he was at
least what might
be called a minor
cabinet minister—one of those
names
which can be regularly flagellated by colum
nists without fear of libel suits, which are intermit
tently rousted by federal officers, and which
never
theless appear seldom or never
on a roster of penitentiary inmates, and when they do it is usually because of
some technical flaw in their income tax
returns.

Al Destamio, Simon clearly recalled, had been
one of those unlucky ones a
few years before, and
had
been deported back to his native land after a
year’s cure in Leavenworth which only cost
the US
Government a
few thousand dollars more than he
was already alleged to have short-changed them.

And yet, back here at home, he was
apparently suffering from no shortage of pin-money, and his
aura could still inspire terror or loyal
compliance among restaurant and hotel employees. An unappreciative
Uncle Sam might have given Alessandro
the boot, but back in his homeland he was man
ifestly not washed up. Far from it. In fact,
he
seemed to command a respect
which might have
been
envied by the Prodigal Son.

At this point the Saint felt that some
reliable lo
cal briefing on
such mysteries might be helpful.
Unfortunately
there was not a single resident of
that city in his slim but strategically indexed ad
dress book. Then he recollected that his old
friend
Giulio Trapani kept a villa at
Sorrento, which
couldn’t be more than a
couple of hours away, to
which he
retreated for a vacation every summer.
Simon
could find nothing in the telephone book which he consulted in his garage, and
decided at once it would be faster to drive there and conduct inquiries on the
spot than to do battle with the In
formation
Service of the Italian telephone system.
In less time than he could have initiated a phone
call, he was in his car and heading for the
famous
Amalfi Drive.

But in this case it made no difference. He
was
able to track
down the villa without too much trou
ble, but
il padrone
had not yet arrived. No doubt he
was still skimming the cream of the
expense-ac
count crop in
the Thames Valley. And good luck to
him—but Simon wished only gastritis on the bene
ficiaries.