Vendetta for the Saint. (38 page)

Destamio growled deep in his throat, but made
no articulate answer. He
abandoned his effort re
luctantly,
with a disgusted shrug that tried to convey that anyone stupid enough to
accept such reasoning deserved all the nonsense that it would get
him. But his beady eyes were tense and
vicious.

“That’s better,” drawled the Saint.
“Now we can
have a
civilized chat.”

He advanced to within reach of the bottle on
the
table, picked
it up, and took a sampling swig from it, without shifting his gaze from his
captive audience. He lowered the bottle again promptly, with
a grimace and a shudder, but did not put it
down.

“Ugh,” he said politely. “I
don’t wonder that
people who
drink this stuff start vendettas. I
should start my first one with the distiller.”

“How
did you get here?” Cirano asked abruptly.

“A
stork brought me,” said the Saint. “How
ever, if you were wondering whether I had
some
connivance
from your guard at the gate outside,
forget it. He never drew a disloyal breath, poor fel
low. But he had an acute attack of
laryngitis. If he
is still
breathing when you find him, which is some
what doubtful, I hope you will not add
insult to his
injuries.”

“At the least, he will have to answer
for negli
gence,”
Cirano said. “But since you are here, what
do you want?”

“Some information about Alessandro
here—for
which I may be able to give you some
in return.”

“He is playing for time,” Destamio
rasped
shrewdly.
“What could he possibly tell any of you
about me?”

“That is what I should like to
know,” Cirano
said,
with his great nose questing like a bird-dog.

He was nobody’s fool. He knew that the Saint
would not be standing there to talk without a reason, but he was not ready to
jump to Destamio’s
conclusion
as to what the reason was. Even the re
mote possibility that there might be more to
it than
a play for time
forced him to satisfy his curiosity,
because he could not afford to brush off anything
that might weight the scales between them.
And
being already
aware of this bitter rivalry, Simon
gambled his life on playing them and their partisans against each
other, keeping them too preoc
cupied
to revert to the inexorable arithmetic which
added and subtracted to the cold fact that
they
could overwhelm
him whenever they screwed up
their resolve to
pay the price.

“Of course you know all about his riper
or even
rottener
years,” said the Saint agreeably. “But I
was talking about the early days, when the Al we
know was just a punk, if you will excuse the ex
pression. Don Pasquale may have known—but
doubtless he knew secrets about all of you which
he
took with him. But Al is older
than the rest of you,
and there may
not be anyone left in the mob who
could
say they grew up with him. Not many of you
can look forward to reaching his venerable old age:
there are too many occupational hazards. So there
can’t be many people around unlucky enough to be
able to recognize him under the name he had
before
he went to America.”

“He is crazy!” Destamio choked.
“You all know
my
family—”

“You all know the Destamios,” Simon
cor
rected. “And a good
sturdy Mafia name it is, no
doubt.
And a safe background for your new chief.
On the other hand, in these troubled times,
could you afford to elect a chief with an air-tight charge
of bank robbery and murder against him on
which
he could not
fail to be convicted tomorrow—or
with
which he might be black-mailed into betray
ing you instead?”

4

Simon Templar knew
that at least he had made
some impression.
He could tell it from the way
Skullface
and Scarface looked at Destamio, inscrutably waiting for his response. In such
a hierarchy, no such accusation, however preposterous it
might seem, could be dismissed without an answer.

“Lies!
Nothing but lies!” blustered Destamio, as
if he would blast them away by sheer vocal
volume.
“He will
say anything that comes into his head—”

“Then why are you raising your
voice?” Simon
taunted him. “Is it a
guilty conscience?”

“What
is this other name?” Cirano asked.

“It
might be Dino Cartelli,” said the Saint.

Destamio looked at the faces of his cronies,
and
seemed to draw
strength from the fact that the
name obviously had
no impact on them.

“Who is this Cartelli?” he jeered.
“I told you,
this
Saint is only trying to make trouble for me. I
think he is working for the American govern
ment.”

“It
should be easy enough to prove,” Simon said calmly, speaking to Cirano as
if this were a private
matter
between them. “All you have to do is take
Al’s fingerprints and ask the Palermo police
to
check them against the
record of Dino Cartelli. No
doubt
you have a contact who could do that—per
haps the
maresciallo
himself?
Cartelli, of course, is
supposed
to be dead, and they would be fascinated
to hear of someone walking around alive with
his identical prints. It would call for an urgent investigation, with the whole
world looking on, or it
might
pop the entire fingerprint system like a pin in a balloon. But I’d suggest
keeping Al locked up somewhere while you do it, or a man at his time of
life might be tempted to squeal in exchange
for a
chance to spend his declining years
in freedom.”

Destamio’s face turned a deeper shade of
purple,
but he had
more control of himself now. He had to,
if he was going to overcome suspicion and
main
tain his
contested margin of leadership. And he
had not climbed as high as he stood now
through
nothing but
loudness and bluster.

“I will gladly arrange the fingerprint
test my
self,” he said. “And
anyone who has doubted me
will apologize on
his knees.”

It was the technique of the monumental
bluff, so
audacious that
it might never be called—or if it
was, he could hope by then to have devised a way
to juggle the result. It was enough to
tighten the
lips of
Cirano, as he felt the mantle of Don Pasquale
about to be twitched again from hovering
over his shoulders.

“But that will not be done in these two
minutes,”
Destamio went on, pressing his
counter-attack.
“And I tell you, he is
only trying to distract you for
some
minutes, perhaps until more soldiers or police arrive—”

His black button-eyes switched to a point
over
the Saint’s
shoulder and above his head, widening
by a microscopic fraction. If he had said anything
like “Look behind you!” Simon would
have simply
hooted at the
time-worn wheeze, but the involun
tary
reaction was a giveaway which scarcely needed
the stealthy creak of a board from the same
focal
direction to authenticate it.

The Saint half turned to glance up and
backwards, knowing exactly the risk he had to
take, like a lion-tamer forced to take his
eyes off
one set of
beasts to locate another creeping behind him, and glimpsed on the dimness of a
staircase disclosed by the light that spilled from the room a
fat gargoyle of a woman in a high-necked
black
dressing-gown trying to take
two-handed aim at
him with a shaky
blunderbuss of a revolver—the
wife
or housekeeper of Cirano or Skullface or Scarface, whoever was the host, who
must have
been listening to
everything since the dining-room
door
opened, and who had gallantly responded to
the call of domestic duty.

In
a flash Simon turned back to the room, as the
hands of the men in it clawed frantically for the
guns at their hips and armpits, and flung the
grappa
bottle which he still held up at the naked light
bulb. It clanged on the brass shade like a gong,
and
he leapt sideways as the light
went out.

The antique revolver on the stairs boomed
like a
cannon, and
sharper retorts spat from the pitch
blackness which had descended on the dining
room, but the Saint was out in the hall then
and
untouched. He fired one barrel of
the shotgun in
the direction of the
dining-room door, aimed low,
and was
rewarded by howls of rage and pain. The
pellets would not be likely to do mortal damage at
that elevation, but they could reduce by one or
two
the number of those in condition to take up the
chase. He deliberately held back on the second
trig
ger, figuring that the
knowledge that he still had another barrel to fire would slightly dampen the
eagerness of the pursuit.

Another couple of shots, perhaps loosed from
around the shelter of the dining-room door
frame,
zipped past him
as he sprinted to the front door
and
cleared the front steps in one bound, but re
spect for his reserve fire-power permitted
him to
make a diagonal
run across the garden to the gate
without any additional fusillade.

Outside the gate he stopped again, listening
for following footsteps, but he did not hear any. He
could have profited by his lead to run on
down the
road in either direction, leaving
the Ungodly to guess which way he had chosen; but that would
also have left them one avenue of escape where he
could not hinder them or see them go. Now if two
of them came on foot, he worked it out, he would
have
to slug the nearest one with his gun barrel and
hope he would still have time to fire it at the second; if there were
three or more, the subsequent
developments would be very dicey indeed.
On the
other hand, if they came by car, he
would have to shoot at the driver and hope that the glass was not
tough enough to resist buckshot.

He waited tensely, but it seemed as if the
pursuers had paused to lick their wounds, or were
maneuvering for something more stealthy.

Then he heard something quite different: a
dis
tant sound of machinery rumbling rapidly closer.
It was keyed by the throaty voice of the Bugatti, but filled out by an
accompaniment of something more high-pitched and fussy. Lights silhouetted the
bend
from the village and then swept around
it. The Bugatti, with Ponti at the wheel and Lieutenant
Fusco beside him, was plainly illuminated for a
moment by the lights of the following scout car,
before its own headlights swung around and
blinded him. Simon ran towards them, holding
both hands high with the shotgun in one of them,
hoping that it would stop any trigger-happy war
rior mistaking him for an attacking enemy.

The Bugatti burnt rubber as it slowed, and Si
mon side-stepped to let it bring Ponti up to
him.

“You took long enough,” he said
rudely. “Did I
forget to
show you how to get into top gear?”

“Lieutenant Fusco would not abandon his scout
car, and I had to hold back for them to keep up
with us,” said the detective. “Did you
have any
luck?”

“Quite a lot—and in more ways than
one.” Si
mon thought the
details could wait. “There are at
least six of them in that house behind the wall: four
live ones, big shots, a guard whom I may have
killed, and a woman who would make a good
mother to an ogre.”

Fusco jumped out and shouted back to his de
tachment: “Report to the Major where we
are and
that we are going in after them,
then follow me.”

“A good thing we’re not trying to
surprise
them,”
Simon remarked. “But they already know
they’re in trouble. The only question is
whether
they will surrender or fight.”