Vendetta for the Saint. (5 page)

The two island resorts of fun and sun are
eight
een miles from
the city, at the outer edge of the vast
bay. They are normally reached by a varied collection of yachts,
ferries, and converted fishing boats,
in a
voyage that takes from one to four hours de
pending on the prospective passenger’s ability to
translate the misleading notices. Prosperity and
technology have now changed this for the well-
heeled few and supplied a
helicopter service that
covers the same
distance in a few minutes. There
was one that seemed to have been
waiting only for
the Saint: as soon as he was
on board, the door
shut and he was
lifted as smoothly as in an
elevator.

They swung out over the incredibly blue
waters of the bay, giving him what he had to admit was a
marvelous panorama, much as he thought it had
been over-written in the travel brochures. The
ver
tical rock walls of Capri jutting
dramatically from
the sea were as impressive from the air as when
seen from the more usual approach. The pilot
turned in over Marina Grande, circled the top of
Monte Solaro so that his passenger could ap
preciate the best parts of the view, then dropped
lightly on to the painted circle of
the heliport.

This is located on the site of Damecuta, one
of
the many palaces which the
Emperor Tiberius scat
tered
over his favorite island, on the cliff edge just
as far out of town as it is possible to get
on dry
land, and as Simon climbed down he
wondered
what transportation would be
provided for the last
lap of the
journey. He felt sure it would be no less
sumptuous than the preceding conveyances.

Something appeared wearing the minimal
shorts
and halter
which pass for clothing on that insular
lido, and the Saint leisurely surveyed the
large
areas of skin
which they made no attempt to cover,
confident in the wisdom of his years that people
who undressed like that expected to be
looked at.
The vision of long tanned legs and
golden hair
floated towards him with a
rotary motion that displayed its other accessories to great affect. “Mr.
Templar?” it asked, in a low and throbbingly
warm
voice.

“None other,” he said happily.
“How did you
find me
in all this crowd?”

The helicopter pilot and a single airport
atten
dant—the only
audience—watched appreciatively,
waiting
for the reverse view when the vision would
retreat and in so doing display the remainder
of her
delectable
curves. She ignored the Saint’s plea
santry and merely gestured towards the parking
space.

Since
the roads on Capri are barely wide enough
for two beamy baby-buggies to brush past each
other, only the smallest
cars are used and even the buses are minuscule. Therefore he was not expect
ing another Cadillac; but the little
cream-colored
Alfa-Romeo which he boarded, with
its sensationally displayed chauffeuse, was a worthy substitute.

So was her driving style, which shot it off like a compact bomb
and forced it to claw its way around
the
turns that wound up the face of the mountain
with an abandon which made the Saint hope de
voutly that she knew
what she was doing. He stole
several dubious
glances at her; but her lips were
heavily
painted and unmoving, while the upper
part of her face was so hidden by
immense flower-
wreathed sunglasses that her
eyes and any ex
pression around them were completely concealed. Her
attention seemed to concentrate entirely on the road; and Simon felt too
gentlemanly at the time to
force his
attentions on her. Particularly since they
were skirting the edge of
vertical drops so high that
the boats below
looked like toys in a pond.

Fortunately for his nervous stamina, there was
quite a short limit to the maximum mileage at her
disposal on the island, and she had not even
reached third gear when they arrived at their desti
nation, a villa overlooking the beaches and coves
of Marina Piccola.

His alertness involuntarily tautened again as
he
strolled up the flagged path. Now he had helped
to
deliver himself unresistingly exactly
where
Destamio wanted him, it would
not be much long
er before he was shown just how foolhardy he had
been. He was not even ashamed to be relieved
when
the Vision with the legs rang the door-bell herself, thus sparing him any
concern over the per
ils of the bell
mechanism. More than once in the past it had been demonstrated to him how
lethal
such commonplace fixtures
could be made. But
this time the
button activated no poisoned needles,
sprays
of gas, hidden guns, or bombs; if anything,
the opening of the door was quite anticlimactic. Instead of unleashing
mayhem, it projected only the prominent belly of Signore Destamio, dressed in a
cerise shirt and purple shorts which
did con
siderably less for his
pear-shaped figure than the
fancy
tailoring in which Simon had first seen him.

“Well, Mr. Templar! Nice of you to
come,” the
remembered
voice rasped. Destamio put out his
hand and drew Simon into the house. “I been
wanting to talk to you, and I figured this
spot was
as good as any,
better than most. Right?”

“It
could be,” said the Saint guardedly.

He was observing all the corners and
interesting
angles of the
interior without appearing to do so.
But there were no other thugs in sight, and the sit
uation looked transparently innocuous so far.

“Come on and let’s sit out on the
balcony, nice
and cool with
a great view, and Lily is gonna bring
us some drinks and then she’ll get lost.”

If Lily took offense at this rude dismissal she
gave no sign of it. As soon as Destamio and the
Saint were settled on either side of a glass and
wrought-iron table she wheeled up a bar wagon
and left. Simon heard a door close deep inside
the
house.

“Help yourself,” Destamio said. “And pour me
a brandy and ginger ale while you’re there.”

As Simon selected two clean glasses and a
bottle,
he admired the
neat and tactful way in which anxie
ty about a possibly-doctored drink had been
eliminated. Nevertheless, he took the extra
precau
tion of pouring
both drinks from the same bottle.
The cognac was Jules Robin, he noted approving
ly, though he would not normally have chosen
to
drink it before lunch.

“You by any chance working for those bastards
at the Bureau of Internal
Revenue these days,
Saint?”
Destamio asked, with no change in his con
versational tone.

He stared fixedly at Simon as he spoke and
after
wards, his
expression controlledly empty, yet not completely hiding glints of menace deep
within the
eyes.

The Saint sipped his drink and was externally
just as calm—while his brain was whirring like an
IBM machine. The mention of the
income tax de
partment nudged out a
file card that had been wait
ing for
hours to drop into the hopper.

“Gopher,” he said dreamily.
“Gopher Destamio
—isn’t
that what they called you?”

“My friends call me Al,” growled the
other.
“And
that’s what I wanna know about you: whose
side you on?”

“Do I have to take sides?” drawled
the Saint. “I
hate
paying taxes as much as anyone, so I can’t
help having a sort of sneaking sympathy for
any
one who’s had your kind of
trouble with the In
ternal
Revenue Service. But tax evasion isn’t the
worst crime you’ve been accused of, is it?”

“You
heard all about me, then.”

Al “Gopher” Destamio pulled from
his pocket a wilted package from which he extracted an object that might be
humorously described as a cigar, but
in fact resembled nothing so much as a piece of
decomposing rope that had been soaked in tar
and
buried for a
number of years. He sawed the thing in
two with a pocket-knife and offered the Saint
half
of it. Simon
shook his head politely, and watched
in fascination as Destamio pulled a yellowed straw
from the interior of one half and applied a
lighted
match to the
truncated end. After warming it thor
oughly, he
raised the revolting article to his lips
and
proceeded to puff it to life. Simon moved his
chair buck a bit, out of the direct drift of the
smoke, having had previous experience of the
asphyxiating potency of the infamous Tuscan
cheroot.

“Everyone’s heard all about me,”
Destamio
said,
apparently unconscious of the destructive ef
fect of the fumes on throat and lungs.
“That’s the
trouble.
They believe all them lies printed in the
papers, and think I got no more right than a
mad
dog. Me, I’m a
peaceful man. I just wanna be let
alone.”

“I guess none of the other guys in the
Syndicate
wants much
more than that,” Simon agreed commiseratingly
.

“Lies, all lies,” Destamio grumbled
without
much show of
heat.

He went on in a monotone, as if reciting a
story
that had been
told too many times, to reporters,
police officers, and the more inquisitive members of the judiciary:
“I go from Italy to the States with
a few bucks and invest it in the trucking
business,
and I make a
little dough. I make a little more
dough because I like playing the ponies, and I’m
lucky. So maybe I make a mistake not
reporting
some of my
winnings, and they make out I got
more money than I can account for earning. It’s
discrimination, that’s what it is. Just
because I’m Italian and some guys in the rackets are Italian,
they call me a racketeer. I love America,
but they
give me a dirty
deal.”

The record ground to a halt, and Destamio
low
ered the level
of liquid in his glass by a full inch.

Simon recalled the rest of the story now,
includ
ing some
details that Gopher Destamio had ne
glected to include. The early record was vague, but
included two or three arrests on minor
charges and a short term spent in jail for assault with a deadly
weapon before Destamio had graduated to the
upper ranks of the Syndicate. Thereafter his presence had been reported at
mysterious assemblies in re
mote
mountain cabins, and his name regularly
cropped up in popular magazine articles
about the
unpunished
aristocracy of the underworld. Although, like others similarly mentioned, he
ex
hibited extraordinary
restraint in not suing such
calumniators
for libel, no one seemed able to prove
anything positive against him until the
accountants
of the Justice
Department found enough dis
crepancies
in his financial records to build a case
around.

The legal duels that followed were expensive
both for the Government and for Gopher, and as
usual only the lawyers showed a profit. Uncle
Sam was able to lay hands on less than a tenth of
the amounts claimed for liabilities and penalties,
and could only retaliate by depriving Destamio of
his newly acquired citizenship and
deporting him
back to the land of his
birth. What Italy thought
about this was not reported, and indeed the
Ital
ians never seemed to have been asked if
they
wanted him.

“So
you know all about me, Saint,” Destamio
said. “And I know a lot about you. What
I don’t
know is why
you get so interested in me all at once. Why?”

The
question was thrown in a conversational,
almost offhand manner. But Simon knew that
this
was the
bonger, the $64,000 question, the whole
and sole reason why he had been brought there
with such ambiguous
courtesy. Many things might
hang
upon his reply, among them perhaps the
further duration of his own life.