Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “I can hardly believe it—a bomb, and right outside our house, while we were having dinner!”

  “A very sensible time to do it. You should try planting a bomb in a car without being noticed, when somebody’s sitting in it, driving at sixty miles an hour.”

  All this talk was not quite as consecutive as it reads, having been spread over several courses, with the necessary breaks for tasting, sipping, chewing, absorbing, and cogitating, and interruptions by the waiter for serving and changing plates and appealing for approbation.

  It was later still, after another of those pauses divided between gastronomic appreciation and the separate pursuit of their own thoughts, that Gina said, “I did think of a way once to settle whether Uncle Alessandro really is the same man as my uncle, but of course I never had the nerve to do it.”

  “If that’s all it takes, it’s practically done. People are always complaining that I’ve got too much nerve. Let me offer you some of my surplus. What do we do with it?”

  “It’s so simple, actually. If my uncle is dead, and this man is an imposter, the real uncle will be buried in the family vault. We just have to open it and look.”

  The Saint frowned.

  “Does that follow automatically? Wouldn’t they be more likely to have buried him somewhere else, under another name?”

  “Oh, no! I can’t believe that they’d go as far as that. You don’t know how traditional everything is in Sicily, especially with an old family like mine. Even if Donna Maria and Lo Zio allowed this Alessandro Destamio to pretend to be my uncle, for money or any other reason—and he couldn’t do it without their help—nothing would make them allow my real uncle to be buried under a false name and outside the vault where all the Destamios have been buried for three hundred years. It would be almost like committing sacrilege!”

  Simon pondered this, pursuing a last exquisite tidbit with delicately determined knife and fork. It was psychologically believable. And the Mafia could easily have arranged to satisfy the orthodox scruples of the close relatives concerned, with a captive doctor to juggle a death certificate and a mafioso priest to preside over a midnight interment.

  It was a possibility. And the best prospect in sight at that moment for another break-through.

  “Would you be a party to cracking the ancestral mausoleum?” he asked. “Or at least show me where it is and turn your back?”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  The meal came to an end at last with fresh yellow peaches at their peak of luscious ripeness, after which Gina accepted coffee but the Saint declined it, preferring to finish with the clean taste of the fruit and a final glass of wine.

  “When you’re finished,” he said, “I think we might throw on some clothes and run over and case the joint—if you’ll excuse the expression. Anyhow we can’t go swimming again right away after gorging ourselves like this.”

  Thus after a while they were driving back again almost into Palermo, then swinging out again under Gina’s directions while the Saint registered every turning on a mental map that would retrace the route unhesitatingly whenever he called on it, by night or day. In daylight, the fine stand of cypress trees which landmark all cemeteries in Italy loomed up as an early beacon to their destination, and when they had almost reached it, a funeral cortege debouching from a dusty side road completed the identification while at the same time effectively blocking all further progress.

  The hearse, unlike the dachshund-bodied Cadillacs beloved of American morticians, was a superbly medieval juggernaut towering a good ten feet from the ground, decorated with carved flowers, fruit, and cherubs framing glass panes the size of shop windows which gave a clear view of the coffin within and its smothering mantle of flowers. It was towed by two trudging black horses in harness to match, their heads bent under the weight of huge plumes of the same stygian hue.

  Behind it followed a shuffling parade of mourners. First the women, identically garbed in rusty black dresses with black scarves over their heads, bearing either long-stemmed flowers or candles; this was a big outing for them, and there was not a dry eye in the column. Then came the men—a few in their black Sunday suits, doubtless the next of kin, while the rest were more comfortable in their shirt-sleeves, to which some of them added the respectful touch of black bands on the upper arm. Many dawdled along in animated conversation, as if they had attached themselves to the procession merely from a temporary lack of any other attraction, or because a social obligation required their presence but not any uncontrollable display of grief.

  Simon stopped the car by the roadside and said, “We might as well walk from here, instead of dragging behind them.”

  He helped Gina out, and they easily overtook the phalanx of the bereaved without unseemly scurrying, and squeezed past it through the cemetery gates. He looked closely at the gates as he went through, and saw that there was no lock on them: it was unlikely that they would ever be secured in any way, though they might be kept shut at other times to keep stray dogs out.

  “Our vault is over there,” Gina said, pointing.

  It was not so much a vault as a mausoleum, occupying a whole large corner of the graveyard, an edifice of granite and marble so imposing that at first Simon had taken it for some kind of chapel. The entrance was a door made of bronze bars that would have served very well as the gateway of a jail; beyond it, what looked at first like a narrow passageway led straight through the middle of the building to a small altar at the other end backed by a stained-glass window just big enough to admit a modicum of suitable sepulchral light. It was not until after a second or two, when his eyes adapted to the gloom, that he realized that the passageway was in fact only a constricted maneuvering space between the banks of serried individual sarcophagi stacked one upon the other like courses of great bricks which in places rose all the way to the ceiling.

  “It seems to have gotten a bit crowded,” he remarked. “I wouldn’t say there was room for more than a couple more good generations. Do you have your nook picked out, or is it a case of first gone, first served?”

  She shivered in spite of the warmth of the air.

  “I don’t understand jokes like that,” she said stiffly, and he was reminded that in spite of everything that had drawn them together there were still distances between them that might never be bridged.

  He gave his attention to the lock on the bronze gate, which had a keyhole almost big enough to receive his finger.

  “Who has the key?” he asked. “Donna Maria?”

  “I expect so. But I don’t know where I’d look for it. I could try to find out—”

  “I’m afraid that might take too long. But you needn’t bother. Now that I’ve seen the lock, I know exactly what I need to open it. Unfortunately I don’t have the tool in my pocket. And anyhow, this doesn’t seem to be quite the ideal moment to start making burglarious motions.” He indicated the tag-end of the funeral party, whose easily distracted concentration was now unfairly divided between the goings-on at the graveside where the hearse had halted and the contrastingly lively loveliness of Gina in her outrageously figure-moulding cotton dress. “Let’s pass the time driving back to a shop where I can buy what we need.”

  After he had made his purchase, he suggested another swim to cool off again. Caution dictated a nocturnal return to the cemetery, when the risk of attracting unwanted attention would be practically eliminated, and meanwhile he wanted to keep Gina’s mind from dwelling too much on the prospect. But the sun was still a hand’s breadth from setting when she said, “If we don’t go back to the vault now, you’ll have to take me home.”

  “I don’t want to go until after dark,” he said. “I thought we might drift along somewhere for an aperitif and maybe an early dinner first.”

  “I can’t have dinner with you,” she said. “If I don’t get home before it’s dark, Donna Maria will be exploding. And she’d certainly never let me go out with you again, even if Uncle Alessandro asked her to.”

  Simon thought a
bout this for a moment, and was surprisingly undepressed by the further reminder of the problems of romance in the land of Romeo and Juliet. Much as he would have liked to spend more time with Gina, a tomb-tapping excursion would not have been his own choice of an occasion for her companionship.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “And I know you weren’t really looking forward to joining me in a game of ghouls. Get dressed again, and we’ll make sure that Auntie has no reason to disintegrate.”

  She was rather silent on the drive back to the manse, but after a while she said, “What shall I tell them I found out about you?”

  “Everything I told you at lunch, if you like. But of course nothing about our plan to check up on the vault.”

  “Then what shall I say your plans are?”

  “Tell ’em you couldn’t find out. Tell ’em I hinted that I’d got some sensational scheme up my sleeve, but I refused to talk about it…Yes, that’s perfect—you can say that you think you could break me down, if you had just a little more time to work on me, and that we made a date for more sightseeing tomorrow. Then you can be sure that they won’t just let you keep it, they’ll beg you to.”

  The Bugatti stopped at the forbidding gates, and Simon came around the car and gave her a hand to dismount, and held on to it after the assistance was no longer needed.

  “Till tomorrow, then,” she said, with her intense dark eyes lingering on his face as if she wanted to learn it again feature by feature.

  But when he bent to kiss her, she drew back with subtle skill, releasing her hand quickly and hurrying to the inset door, from which she turned to throw him another of her intoxicating smiles before she disappeared.

  Verily, he thought, the conquest of Gina Destamio could be something like crossing the Alps by a goat trail on a bicycle with hexagonal wheels…

  However, both remembrance and anticipation continued to weave her image through his thoughts during the aperitif and the dinner which he had to enjoy alone, and were only relegated to the background at the same time when he decided that the cemetery should have become as deserted and safely set up for violation as it would ever be.

  Then he became purely professional. And as far as he was concerned, any similarity of his mission to the themes of gothic novels or horror movies was purely coincidental. To him, the mausoleum was just another crib to be cracked, and a much easier prospect than many that he had tackled.

  He drove the Bugatti past the cemetery entrance and around the next corner before he parked it, and came silently back on foot. The moon which had been so helpful the night before was up again, giving perhaps more light than he would have ordered if the specifications had been left to him, but in compensation it made complete concealment almost as difficult for any remotely possible bushwhacker as it was for him. There was, however, most literally no other sign of life in the vicinity, and the only sound was the rustle of leaves in the hesitant breeze.

  The wrought-iron gates were closed but not locked, as he had anticipated, and opened with only a slight creak. Crossing to the Destamio mausoleum, he automatically gave a wide berth to the tombs and headstones which were big enough for a man to skulk behind, and probed the shadows behind them with cat eyes as he passed, but that perfunctory precaution seemed to be in fact as unnecessary as the backward glances which he threw over alternate shoulders at brief irregular intervals while he worked on the lock which secured the bronze grille door of the vault. It succumbed to his sensitive manipulations in less than three minutes, and with a last wary look behind him he passed through into the alley between the piled-up ranks of stone caskets, and there for the first time he had to bring out his pocket flashlight to begin deciphering the inscriptions on their ends.

  Then there was an instant of intense pain in the back of his head, and a coruscating blackness rose up and swallowed him.

  3

  A distant throbbing, as of some gargantuan tom-tom pulsating deep in the earth, thudded and swelled. An indefinite time passed before Simon became aware that the hammering drum was in his own head, and that each percussion was accompanied by a red surge of agony. He fought down the pain with his growing consciousness until after an immeasurable battle he had subjugated it enough to be able to receive other impressions.

  His face was pressed against something rough and dusty that smelled of goats, and when he tried to move his head and change position he realized that his hands were bound behind his back. It took an additional effort of will to force himself to lie still while a modicum of strength flowed back into his body and the cobwebs cleared sluggishly from his brain.

  It was painfully obvious that he had been hit on the head, like any numb-skulled private eye in a bosom-and-bludgeon paperback, and what made it hurt more was the proof that, for such a thing to have happened, he had to have been out-thought. He still fancied himself long past the stage where anyone could sneak up behind and cosh him if he was even minimally on his guard, as he had been at the cemetery. But now it dawned on him belatedly that he had been tricked by the simple fact of having had to pick the lock of the mausoleum grille, which had subconsciously blinded him to the possibility that someone else might have arrived before him and locked the gate again from inside. Someone who could then have crouched in the total darkness atop one of the banks of coffins and waited patiently for him to pass through the passageway below…

  After which came the question: how could the ambush have been planned with such accurate expectation of his arrival?

  A door opened near by, and heavy footsteps clacked across a tile floor and stopped beside him.

  “Al,” said the Saint at a venture, “if you wanted to see me again so badly, why didn’t you just send me an ordinary invitation?”

  A familiar rumbling grunt confirmed his guess.

  It took a great effort to move, for any motion started the trip-hammers going again inside his cranium, but he forced himself to roll over so that his face was out of the filthy blanket. The scene thus revealed scarcely seemed worth the agony. He was in a small whitewashed room lighted by a single naked bulb, with a single door and a single window covered by a soiled skimpy curtain. There was no furniture except the cot on which he lay. A sizeable part of this dreary setting was obscured by the form of Al Destamio looming over him like a jellied mountain of menace.

  “Don’t waste your time on the jokes,” growled the mountain. “You just start tellin’ me what I wanta know, an’ maybe you won’t get hurt no more than you are now.”

  Simon squirmed up into a sitting position with his back to the wall, and only a faint spangling of sweat on his forehead revealed what the exertion cost him. Destamio saw nothing but a smile of undaunted mockery, and rage rose in his throat.

  “You gonna talk or you gonna give trouble?”

  “I love to talk, Al,” said the Saint soothingly. “Nobody ever accused me of being tongue-tied. What would you like to chat about? Or should I start off by congratulating you on the way you got me here?—wherever this is. It’s been quite a few years now since I let myself get sapped like that. But having your boy lock himself inside that crypt and wait for me to burgle my way in was a real sneaky switch. I must remember that one.”

  “You’ll be lucky if you live long enough to remember anything.”

  “Well, I’ve always been rather lucky, Al. A guy has to be, when he isn’t brilliant like you—”

  The words were cut off as Destamio lashed out with his slab-sized hand and dealt the Saint a crashing blow on the side of his head, jarring him sideways, the heavy ring splitting the skin of his cheek.

  “No jokes, I told you, Saint. You wanna be smart, you give the right answers an’ make it easy for yourself.”

  Simon shook his head, trying to arrest the internal pounding which the clout had started up again.

  “But I meant it sincerely, Al,” he said in a most reasonable tone, though the ice in his blue eyes would have chilled anyone more sensitive than the post-graduate goon confronting him. “It was real
ly brilliant of you to figure out that my next move would be to check the names in your family bone-box. Or did Gina tell you?”

  “Did she know?”

  The Saint could have bitten his tongue off. Now if Gina hadn’t betrayed him, he had betrayed her. It showed that the after-effects of the knock-out had left him more befuddled than he had realized.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” he tried to recover. “I meant, did you think of it all by yourself, or did she help you? She’s smart enough to have an inspiration like that, judging by the way she was trying to pump me all day. But I didn’t tell her, because I’m not such a dope that I couldn’t guess what she was after.”

  Destamio stared at him inscrutably. For all his crudities, the racketeer was as quick as a whip, and it was no more than a toss-up, at the most optimistic, whether he would be taken in by the Saint’s attempt to retrieve his slip.

  “I wanta know lotsa more things you didn’t tell her,” Destamio said. “What was it you figured to spill to the cops, like you threatened me, if you thought I was trying to have you knocked off again? An’ how you figure to do that now?”

  “That’s easy,” Simon answered. “It’s all written down and sealed in an envelope which will be delivered to the proper place whenever the person who’s taking care of it doesn’t hear from me at certain regular times. I know that’s one of the oldest gimmicks in the business, but it’s still a corker. And don’t think you can force me to call this person and say I’m okay, because if I don’t use the right code words he’ll know that somebody’s twisting my arm.”

  “I think you’re bluffing,” Destamio said coldly. “But it don’t matter. Before I’m through, you’ll tell me who’s got this envelope, an’ what the code is.”