Vendetta for the Saint. (40 page)

In a bare attic room with no other outlet
than a
skylight now
pale with dawn, Gina gasped as she
saw him and
then flung herself into his arms.

“So
you’re all right,” he said. “That’s good.”

“They accused me of showing you the vault
where they caught you. Of
course I denied it, but it
was
no use,” she said. “Uncle Alessandro told
Donna Maria to keep me locked up until he
found
out what else
you knew and saw to it that you
wouldn’t make any
more trouble. I thought they
were taking you
for a ride like they do in the
gangster
movies.”

“I suppose that was the general idea,
eventually,” he said. But people have had plans like
that before, and I always seem to keep
disappoint
ing them.”

“But how did you get away? And what has
been
happening?”

“I’ll have to tell you most of that
later. But you’ll
hear the
important answers in a minute, when Al
and I have a last reunion.” Reluctantly
he put
away for the
time the temptations of her soft vi
brant body. “Come along.”

He led her by the hand out on to the landing.
The thudding and pounding still came from
below.

“What is
it?” she whispered.

“I think it’s Uncle Al opening another
grave,”
he replied in
the same undertone. “We’ll see.”

As they reached the entrance hall, Simon took
the gun from his pocket for the first time since
he
had been in the house.

The door of the once somberly formal
reception room was ajar, and through the opening they could see the chaos that
had been wrought in it. The fur
niture
in one far corner had been carelessly pushed
aside, a rug thrown back, and the tiles
assaulted
and smashed
with a heavy sledge-hammer. Then a hole had been hacked and gouged in the layer
of
concrete under the tiles
with the aid of a pickaxe
added
to the sledge, which had afterwards been dis
carded. The hole disclosed a rusty iron plate
which
Destamio was now using the pickaxe
to pry out.
He was in his shirt-sleeves,
dusty, dishevelled, and
sweat-soaked,
panting from the fury of his unac
customed
exertion.

Donna Maria leaned on the back of a chair
with
one hand,
using the other to clutch the front of a
flannel dressing-gown that covered her from
neck
to ankle,
watching the vandalism with a kind of helpless fascination.

“You promised me that nothing would go
wrong,” she was moaning in Italian.
“You prom
ised
first that you would leave the country and nev
er return, and there would be enough money
for
the
family—”

“I did not come back because I wanted
to,”
Destamio
snarled. “What else could I do when the
Americans threw me out?”

“Then you promised that everything would
still
be all right,
that you would keep away from us with
your affairs. Yet for these last three days every
thing has involved us.”

“It is not my fault that that goat Templar came
to stick his horns into everything, old woman.
But
that is all finished now. Everything is finished.”

Grunting and cursing, he finally broke the
sheet
of metal loose, and flung it
clanking across the
room. He went down on
his knees and reached into
the cavity
which it exposed, and lugged out a cheap
fiber valise covered with dust and dirt. He lifted it heavily, getting
to his feet again, and dumped it
recklessly on the polished top of a
side table.

“I take what is mine, and this time you
will never
see me again,” he said.

It seemed to the Saint that it would have
been
sheer
preciosity to wait any longer for some possi
bly more dramatic juncture at which to make
his
entrance. It
was not that he had lost any of his zest
for festooning superlatives on a situation,
but that
in maturity he
had recognized that there was
always
the austerely apt moment which would nev
er improve itself.

He pushed the door wider, and stepped
quietly
in.

“Famos
é
ultime parole,”
he remarked.

The heads of Alessandro Destamio and Donna
Maria performed simultaneous semicircular spins
as if they had been snapped around by
strings at
tached to their
ears, with a violence that must have come close to dislocating their necks.
Discovering
the source of
the interruption, they seemed at first to be trying to extrude their eyes on
stalks, like
lobsters.

Destamio had one additional reflex: his hand
started a snatching movement towards his hip
pocket.

“I wouldn’t,” advised the Saint
gently, and gave
a slight lift to the gun which
he already held, to
draw attention to it.

Destamio let his hand drop, and straightened
up slowly. His eyes sank back into their sockets, and from the shift of them
Simon knew that Gina had
now followed him
into the room.

Without turning his head, the Saint gave a
pan
oramic wave of
his free left hand which invited her
to connect the wreckage of the room and the hole
in the corner with the dusty bag on the table.

He explained: “The game is Treasure
Hunt. But
I’m afraid Al
is cheating. He knew where it was all
the time,
because he buried it himself—after he
stole
it from a bank in Palermo where he worked
long ago under another name.”

“Is that true, Uncle Alessandro?”
Gina asked in
a small voice.

“I’m not your uncle,” was the
impatient rasping
answer.
“I never was your uncle or anybody’s un
cle, and you might as well forget that nonsense.”

“His
real name,” Simon said, “is Dino Cartelli.”

Cartelli-Destamio glowered at him with un
wavering venom.

“Okay, wise guy,” he growled in
English. “Make
like a
private eye on television. Tell’em my life
story like you figure it all out in your
head.”

“All right, since you ask for it,”
said the Saint agreeably. “I’ve always rather liked those scenes
myself, and wondered if anyone could really
be so
brilliant at
reconstructing everything from all the
way back, without a lot of help from the
author
who dreamed it
up. But let’s see what I can do.”

Gina had moved in to where he could include
her in his view without shifting his gaze
too much
from its
primary objective. It made it easier for him
than addressing an audience behind his back.

“Dino—and let’s scrub that Alessandro
Destamio nonsense, as he suggests,” he
said, “is a
man of
various talents and very lofty ambitions. He started out as a two-bit punk
right here in
Palermo, and
although he is still a punk he is now
in the
sixty-four thousand dollar class, or better.
He
once had an honest job in the local branch of a
British bank, but its prospects looked a bit slow and stodgy for a lad
who was in a hurry to get
ahead. So
he joined the Mafia, or perhaps he was
already
a member—my crystal ball is a little un
clear on this point, but it
isn’t important. What
matters is that somebody
thought of a bigger and
faster way to
get money out of the bank than work
ing
for it.”

Cartelli’s eyes were small and crafty again
now,
and Simon knew
that behind them a brain that was far from moronic was flogging itself to find
a way out of its present corner, and would take advantage of all the time it
could gain by letting someone else
do the talking.

“That’s a good start,” Cartelli croaked. “What’s
next?”

“Whether
it was Dino’s own idea, because he’d al
ready been tapping the till in a small way and
an audit by the bank examiners was coming up, or
whether he was recruited for the job from
higher
up, is
something else I can’t tell you which doesn’t
matter either. The milestone is that the bank
was robbed, apparently by some characters who broke
in while he was working late one night. He
seems to
have put up a
heroic fight before he was killed by
a shotgun blast in the face and hands which
mutilated him beyond recognition or even
routine identification. But have you read enough detective
stories to guess what really happened?”

“Go on,” Cartelli said.
“You’re the guy who was
gonna
dope it out.”

“For
a first caper, it was quite a classic,” Simon went on imperturbably.
“In fact, it was a variation
on the gimmick in quite a few classic stories. Of
course, the robbers were Dino’s pals and he
let
them in. He
helped them to bust the safe and
shovel
out the loot, and then changed clothes with
another bloke who’d been brought along to
take
the fall. He
was the one who was killed with the shotgun—but who would ever doubt that it
was the
loyal Dino
Cartelli? Dino got a nice big cut off the
cake in return for disappearing, a lot of which I
think is still in that valise; the Mafia got the
rest,
and everyone was happy except
the insurance com
pany that had to make
good the loss. And maybe
the man with
no face. Who was he, Dino?”

“Nobody, nobody,” Cartelli said
hoarsely. “A traitor to the Mafia, why not? A nobody. Don’t tell
me you care about some sonovabitch like
that!”

“Maybe not,” said the Saint.
“If the Mafia con
fined
themselves to knocking off their own erring
brothers, I might even give them a donation.
But
then, many
years after, in fact just the other day,
something went wrong with the perfect crime
that Dino thought had been buried and forgotten. A sil
ly old English tourist named Euston, who once
upon a time worked in the
bank beside Dino, rec
ognized
him in a restaurant in Naples after all
those years—partly from that scar on his
cheek,
which Euston
happened to have given him in a
youthful
brawl. And this Euston was too stupid
and stubborn to be convinced that he could be mis
taken. So—perhaps without too much
reluctance, after such a reminder of that bygone clout in the chops, Dino had
him liquidated. That was when I
got
interested. And practically everything that’s
happened since has stemmed from Dino’s
efforts to
buy me off or
bump me off.”

“But my uncle?” Gina asked
bewilderedly.
“How does
he fit in?”

“Your uncle is dead,” Simon said
in a more sym
pathetic tone.
“I went back to the mausoleum
before I
came here, and finished the search we started the other night. Alessandro
Destamio did
die in Rome of that illness in
1931, as you sus
pected, and Dino here
stepped into his shoes. But the family still had enough sentiment to insist on
putting Alessandro’s coffin in the ancestral vault. Why they let Dino take his
name should only take
a couple of
guesses.”

He had spoken in Italian again, with the
calcu
lated intention
of including the comprehension of
Donna Maria, and now she responded as he had
hoped.

“I will answer that, Gina,” she said, with some
of the old iron and vinegar back in her voice.
“Your uncle was a good man, but a foolish one
with money, and he had wasted all that we had. He
was dying when this Dino came to me
and offered
a way to keep our home
and the family together. I
accepted
for all our sakes, with the understanding
that he would never try to be with us himself. But
first he broke that promise and now he will leave
us
destitute.”

“You should have taken over his loot
while you
had the
chance, for insurance,” said the Saint,
touching the lock on the valise.