“I must look in my diary and see if there is any day when I can spare her,” she said finally. “If you will excuse me.”
She lurched to her feet and waddled into the house without waiting for confirmation.
“I’m afraid she doesn’t like me,” Simon remarked.
“It isn’t you in particular,” Gina said apologetically. “She hates practically everybody, and twice as much if they’re men. I sometimes think that’s what keeps her alive. She’s so pickled in her own venom that she’s probably indestructible and will still be here in another fifty years.”
“It’s funny there should be such a difference between her and her brother. Al is such a big-hearted guy.”
“That’s true! Do you know, he takes care of the whole family and pays all the bills. He sent me to school and everything. If it hadn’t been for him I don’t know what would have happened to us all. When my parents were killed in a car accident they didn’t have any insurance, and there was hardly any money in the bank. I was only seven at the time, but I remember people looking at the house and talk about selling it. Even Uncle Al was very sick just then and everyone thought he was going to die. But he got better and went to America, and soon he began sending back money. He’s been looking after us ever since. And yet he hardly ever comes near us. Aunt Maria says it may be because he feels we’d be embarrassed by remembering how much we owe him.”
The Saint lounged in his chair with long legs outstretched, sipping his drink perfunctorily and listening with the appearance of only casual interest, but under that camouflage his mind was ticking over like a computer, registering every word, correlating it with previous information, and reaching on towards what hypotheses might be derived from their multiple combinations. He had an extrasensory feeling that the answer to the Cartelli-Destamio riddle was close at hand, if he could only grasp it, or if one more link would bring it within reach…
And then the fragments that were starting to fit together were rudely pushed apart again by the voice that spoke behind him.
“Signore, it is getting late for you to return to the city.” Donna Maria was returning from her errand. “It would not be well-bred to send a friend of Alessandro’s away at such an hour. You will stay for dinner?”
Even more devastating than the astonishing reversal of her attitude was the expression that accompanied it. A ripple of life passed across her inflexible cheeks, and her bloodless lips curled back to expose a fearsome row of yellow fangs. For a moment Simon wondered if she was preparing to leap on him and rend him like a werewolf, or whether she was merely suffering the rictus of some kind of epileptic seizure. It was a second or two before it dawned on him what was really happening.
Donna Maria was trying to smile.
3
“Thank you. You are very kind,” said the Saint, making a heroic effort to overcome the shock of that horrendous sight.
Gina was more openly dumbfounded by the switch, and took a moment longer to recover.
“Well—I must get changed. Excuse me.”
She ran into the house.
“And I must give some orders to the servants.” Donna Maria’s face was positively haggard with the strain of being gracious. “Please make yourself comfortable for a few minutes. And help yourself to another drink.”
She withdrew again, leaving the Saint alone to digest the startling reversal of his reception.
And in another moment the maid reappeared, bearing a bottle of Lloyd’s gin which she added to the selection on the tray.
“Donna Maria thought you might prefer this,” she said, and retired again.
Simon lighted a cigarette and examined the bottle. It was new and unopened, to every appearance, and there had certainly not been time since Donna Maria’s change of attitude for it to have been doped or poisoned and cunningly re-sealed; so unless bottles of pre-hoked liquor were a standard item in stock at the Destamio hacienda there could be no risk in accepting it. In moderation…The Saint gratefully emptied the glass he had been nursing into a flower-pot and proceeded to concoct himself a very dry martini, feeling much like a prodigal son for whom the best barrel had been rolled out.
But deep inside him he felt an intangible hollowness which came from the tightening of nerves which were not nervous but only sharpening their sensitivity and readiness to whatever call might be suddenly made on them.
He could not cherish the beautiful illusion that after a life-time of notorious malevolence Donna Maria had chosen that evening to be struck as by lightning with remorse for her churlishness, and after a brief absence to commune with her soul had returned radiant and reformed to make amends for all her past unpleasantnesses. Or that his own handsome face and charming manners had broken through an obsidian crust to the soft heart that it encased. Some very practical reason had to be responsible for the alteration, and he could not make himself generous enough to believe that it was without ulterior motive.
The question remained: what motive?
The sun had descended behind the western hills, and purple shadows reached into the courtyard, deepening the dusty gray-green of the olive trees, and the first cool breeze drifted in from the sea. With the dusk, the house was not softened, but seemed to become even more stark and sinister. Somewhere in its depths a clock chimed with deep reverberant notes that made one think of the tolling of funeral bells.
As the hour struck, a door opened under the balcony at the far end of the terrace, and a wheelchair appeared with the promptitude of a cuckoo called forth by some horologic mechanism. Simon watched in fascination as the maid wheeled it to the table opposite him and vanished again without a word. The occupant of the chair matched the building in senescence; in fact, he looked old enough to have built it himself.
“A lovely evening,” Simon ventured at last, when it became clear that any conversational initiative would have to come from him.
“Ah,” said the ancient.
It extended a withered and tremulous claw, not to shake hands, but towards the glasses on the table.
“What can I get you?” Simon asked.
“Ah.”
Simon made what he felt was an inspired compromise by pouring a half-and-half mixture of sweet and dry vermouths and proffering it.
“Ah,” said the venerable mummy, and, after taking a small sip, carefully spilled the rest on the ground.
“What did you think of Dante’s latest book?” Simon tried again.
“Ah,” said the patriarch wisely, and sat back to enjoy a slow chomping of toothless gums while he examined the Saint from the blinking moist caverns of his eyes.
The possibilities of small talk seemed to have been exhausted, and Simon was wondering whether to try making faces at his vis-a-vis and see whether that would evoke any livelier response, when he was saved from that decision by the return of Gina, now wearing something thin and simple that clung provocatively to the curves that he could reconstruct in clinical detail from memory.
“Has Uncle been bothering you?” she asked.
“Not at all,” said the Saint. “I just haven’t been able to find anything to talk about that he’s interested in. Or maybe my accent baffles him.”
“Povero Zio,” Gina said, smiling and patting the ancient’s hand. “I can’t even remember a time when he wasn’t old, but he was nice to me when I was a little girl. He used to tell me wonderful stories about how he marched with Garibaldi in his last campaign, and I’d forget to be worried about when we were going to be kicked out of our house.”
“Ah…ah,” said the old man, straightening up a little as if the words had sparked some long-forgotten memory, but it was a transient stimulus and he slumped back down again without producing his scintillating comment.
“Uncle—you can’t mean that he’s Alessandro’s brother?” Simon said.
“Oh, no. He’s really Uncle Alessandro’s uncle—and Donna Maria’s.”
As if answering to her name, the lady of the manse made another entrance. If she had changed h
er black dress for an evening model, it would have taken the eye of a couturier’s spy to tell the difference, but she had hung a gold chain around her neck and stuck a comb set with brilliants in her hair as evidence that she was formally dressed for dinner.
“You need not trouble yourself about Lo Zio, Signor Templar,” she said, with another labored display of her death’s-head smirk. “He hears very little and understands even less, but it makes him happy to be in our company. If you have finished your drink, we can go in to dinner.”
She led the way into the house, into a large dimly lighted hallway with an ornate wooden staircase that led up into a lofty void of darkness from which Simon would not have been surprised to see bats fly out. Gina pushed Lo Zio’s wheel-chair, and the Saint ingratiatingly gave her a hand. The dining room was almost as spooky as the hall, illuminated only by candles which hardly revealed the dingy ancestral paintings which looked down from the walls.
“I hope you won’t mind the dinner,” Gina said. “We never have guests, and all the cook knows is plain country food. I’m sure it isn’t the sort of thing you’re used to.”
“I’m sure it’ll be a pleasant change,” said the Saint politely.
His optimism was not misplaced. Home cooking is a much crumpled appellation in some parts of the world, too often synonymous with confections from the freezer and the can, but in Italy it still retains some of its original meaning, and occasionally in restaurants labeled “casalinga” one can find family-style cooking of a high order. But the literal authentic article, of course, is served only in private homes to relatives and close friends, and rarely is the foreigner allowed to penetrate this inner circle.
Nothing is purchased prefabricated by the traditional Italian housewife. If tomato sauce is needed, the tomatoes are pressed and the seeds removed by hand. The delicate doughs that enfold cannelloni and cappelletti are hand rolled from a mixture of flour and egg with never a drop of water added. Fresh herbs and spices, grown in the kitchen garden, are added with the loving care that lifts a sauce from the pedestrian to the ambrosial. It goes without saying that in the south one must expect a liberal hand in the application of garlic and olive oil, but that was no disadvantage to the Saint, who was gifted with the digestion to cope happily with such robust ingredients.
Since the evening meal is customarily a light one, it began with olive schiacciate, a succulent salad of olives, celery, and peppers. After this came the Involtini alla siciliana, a toothsome filling in envelopes of gossamer-light paste smothered in a sauce so savory that good manners could only encourage the pursuit of every last drop with mops of the crusty brown home-baked bread. A large circulating carafe of young home-made red wine provided ample and impeccable liquid accompaniment, and after observing that everyone’s glass was filled from it, just as the same platters were presented to all of them to help themselves, except Lo Zio whose plate was tended by Gina sitting next to him, Simon was able to suppress all disturbing memories of the Borgias and give himself up to unstinting enjoyment of his gastronomic good fortune.
They made a strange quartet around the massive age-blackened table, and the medieval gloom around them and the echoing footsteps of the maid on the bare floor did little to encourage relaxation and conviviality, but by concentrating on Gina and the food he was able to maintain some harmless and totally unmemorable conversation, while wondering all the time why he had been invited to stay and when the reason would be revealed in some probably most unpleasant and distressing way.
“A most wonderful meal,” he complimented Donna Maria at the end of it. “I feel guilty for imposing on you, but I shall always be glad that I did.”
“You must not rush away. We will have coffee in the drawing room, and I will see if there is some brandy, if you would like that.”
She flashed her alligator smile as she rose, and Simon, steeled now not to recoil, smiled back.
“Perhaps I should refuse,” he said. “But that might suggest that you did not mean it, and I am sure you do.”
As he helped Gina to push the wheel-chair again, which somehow seemed to give them a sort of secret companionship, she said, “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but nobody ever broke her down like this before. Brandy, now!”
“Brandy, ah!” repeated Lo Zio, his head lifting like a buzzard’s and swivelling around.
“You should have given me a chance in that restaurant,” said the Saint. “If I could have persuaded you to stay for lunch, we might have had all the afternoon together.”
The drawing room had three electric lights of thrifty wattage which made it very little brighter than the dining room. The furniture was stiff and formal, a baroque mixture of uncertain periods, upholstered with brocades as faded as the heavy drapes. Donna Maria came in with a dusty bottle, followed by the maid with a tray of coffee.
“Would you be so kind as to open it, Signor Templar? I am sure you know how to handle such an old bottle better than we women.”
Simon manipulated the corkscrew with expert gentleness, but not without the thought that he might have been given the job as yet another move to reassure him. Certainly it enabled him to verify that this bottle, with all its incrustations of age, would have been even harder to tamper with than the gin which he had drunk before dinner. He deciphered with approval the name of Jules Robin under the grime on the scarred label, and poured generous doses into the snifters which were produced from some dark recess—not omitting one for Lo Zio, who showed some of his vague signs of human animation as he fastened his rheumy eyes on the bottle.
“Salute!” Simon said, and watched them all drink before he allowed his own first swallow to actually pass his lips.
It was a magnificent cognac, which had probably been lying in the cellar since the death of Gina’s father, and nothing seemed to have been done to turn it into a lethal or even stupefying nightcap.
Was all this hospitality, then, nothing but a stall to create time, during which Al Destamio might round up a few commandos and get them out to the mansion to capture the Saint or quietly mow him down?
Whatever the reason, he felt sure that Gina was not in on it. He looked again at her lovely radiant face, alight with the spontaneous pleasure of the kind of company which she could almost never have been permitted, and decided that he could lose nothing by testing just how far this astounding acceptance could be stretched.
“I am looking forward to seeing the local sights tomorrow, even though I have to do it with a commercial guide,” he said, and turned to Donna Maria. “Or now that you know me a little better, would you reconsider and let Gina accompany me?”
An observer who was unacquainted with the preceding circumstances would have assumed, at a glance, that Donna Maria was trying inconspicuously to swallow a live cockroach which she had carelessly sucked in with her brandy.
“Perhaps I was being too hasty,” she said. “Since you are such a close friend of Alessandro, there is really no reason for me to object. What are you most interested in?”
The resultant discussion of Sicilian antiquities continued this time with no contribution from Gina, whose eyes had become slightly glassy and her jaw slack, either from renewed bewilderment or from trepidation lest anything she interjected would change her aunt’s mind again.
Another refill of cognac was pressed on the not too resistant Saint, though curtly refused to Lo Zio, who having smacked his way through his first was plaintively extending his glass for more. But after that there was nothing left to stay for, short of asking if they had a spare room for the night.
“Tomorrow at ten, then, Gina,” he said, and stood up. “And I’ll tell Alessandro how nice all of you have been.”
The last remark was principally intended for the reigning tyrant of the establishment, but it scored first on Lo Zio, who must have been feeling some effects from his unaccustomed libations.
“Ah, Alessandro,” he said, as if some cobwebby relay had been tripped. “I told him. I warned him. Told him he should not go to Rome—�
�
“It is late, Lo Zio, and well past your bed time,” Donna Maria said hastily.
She whipped the wheel-chair around with a suddenness that had the old man’s head bobbing like a balloon on a string. The maid came scurrying in on a barked command, and whisked away the chair and its mumbling contents.
“Buona notte, signore,” Donna Maria said, with one more spasm of her overworked facial muscles, and the impression of it seemed to remain even after she had closed the front door, like the grin of some Sicilian-Cheshire cat.
Simon made the short walk to the driveway gate with his nerves as taut as violin strings, his ears straining, and his eyes darting into every shadow. But there was no warning scuff or stir to herald an onslaught by lurking assailants, no crack of a shot to make belated announcement of a bullet. He opened the inset door, flung it open, and leapt far through it in an eruptively connected series of cat-swift movements calculated to disconcert any ambush that might be waiting outside, but no attack came. An almost-full moon that was rising above the hills showed a road deserted except for his own car where he had left it, and the only sound was the thin shrill rasping of multitudinous nocturnal insects. Feeling a trifle foolish, he turned back and shut the little door, and then walked towards the Bugatti, making a wide swing out into the road around it, just in case someone was skulking on the side from which he would not have been expected to approach. But no one was.
Then he had not been detained in order to gain time to organize a bushwhacking, it seemed…
But the instinct of an outlaw who had carried his life in his hands so often that his reflexes had adapted to it as a natural condition was not lulled into somnolence merely because logic seemed to have suspended the immediate need for it. If anything, it was left more on edge than ever, seeking the flaw in conclusions which did not jibe with intuition.
He climbed halfway into the driver’s seat and peered in search of the ignition lock. He located it and inserted the key, but as he raised his head again above the dashboard before switching on, his eye was caught by a blemish on the gleaming expanse of hood which did not belong at all on such a lovingly burnished surface.
Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 8
