Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “You think so?”

  Destamio met the Saint’s level and unflinching gaze for several motionless seconds, and then a throaty chuckle came up from some source around his diaphragm like the grumbling sound of an earthquake, and opened the fissure of his lipless mouth as it emerged.

  “You don’t have to tell me you’re tough. I seen plenty guys worked over in different ways, an’ a few of ’em never did sing. But we don’t have to work that way no more. We got scientific ways to loosen you up, an’ what’s more we’ll know you’re tellin’ the truth. So since I don’t have to make no promises I ain’t gonna keep, like I would if I was gonna work you over in the old way, I can tell you we’re just gonna give you a little shot in the arm, an’ after you spill everything I’m gonna blow your brains out myself.”

  He went to the door and called out, “Entra, dottore!”

  Simon Templar knew the feeling of a sinking heart, and not merely as a metaphor. Al Destamio was certainly not bluffing. In those enlightened days, there was no longer any practical need for the clumsy instruments of the medieval torture chamber, or even their more modern electrical refinements: there were drugs available which when injected into a vein would induce a state of relaxed euphoria in which the victim would happily babble his most precious secrets. Even the Saint, with all his courage and determination, could not resist that chemical coercion. Grinning idiotically, he would tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth—and once he had done that, God help him.

  The man who came in was stocky and plump, although on nothing like the same scale as Destamio. He was younger, and his dewlaps were freshly shaved and powdered, his hands soft and pink; his double-breasted suit was dark blue, and his shoes, though sharply pointed, an even more conservative black. The expression on his slightly porcine features was wise and solemn, as befitted one whose trade was based upon reminders of mortality: he did not need the universal symbol of the black satchel, which he nevertheless carried with him, to identify it.

  “Is this the patient?” he asked, as if he were making the most routine of house calls.

  “I am if you want to prescribe something for a mild concussion, and a long cold drink to wash it down,” Simon said. “If you’ve hired yourself out for anything else, you must have dedicated yourself to hypocrisy—not Hippocrates.”

  The doctor’s expression did not alter as he put down his bag on the floor and opened it.

  “Do you have any allergies?” he asked with stolid conscientiousness. “Sodium pentothal sometimes has side reactions, but then again so does scopolamine. It is sometimes difficult to decide which is best to use.”

  “My worst allergy is to medical quacks,” said the Saint. “But I don’t want to be unfair. Perhaps you’re wonderful with horses.”

  “Affretate, dottore,” growled Destamio impatiently.

  The physician was unperturbed by either of them. Taking his own time, he brought out a vial of clear fluid and a hypodermic, filled the syringe, and went through the standard procedure of forcing a small jet of liquid through the upraised needle to remove any trapped bubbles of air—a somewhat finicky precaution, it seemed, considering that Destamio’s announced program would be more positively lethal than any accidentally introduced embolism.

  The Saint was turning his wrists over behind him, testing the bonds that held them. They were tied with a piece of light rope which was soft and supple with age, and there was stretch in it which could be exploited by setting his arms in certain positions known to escape artists, to gain the maximum leverage, and then applying all the power of his exceptional muscles to it. He knew that he could release himself eventually, but it would take at least several minutes. His legs, however, were not bound, and as the doctor approached Simon braced himself and measured the distance for a vicious kick which if it found its target would indubitably cause quite an interregnum in the scheduled proceedings. By fair means or foul, no matter how foul, he had to win that essential time…

  Time was given to him, miraculously, by a man who looked like anything but an agent of Providence, who flung open the door at that precise moment and rattled a sentence in dialect at Destamio. Simon could not understand a word of it, but it had an instantaneous effect on its recipient that would have been envied by Paul Revere. Destamio spun around with a single grating oath, and waddled to the door with grotesque celerity.

  “Wait until I get back,” he spat over his shoulder as he went out.

  Simon watched as the doctor carefully put down the hypodermic inside his bag and strolled over to the window. He drew aside the dingy curtain and threw open the casement, giving the Saint an unimpeded view of the night sky. The lack of bars on the opening was like a symbol, and Simon felt a sudden new surge of hope. Behind his back his arms writhed and strained in desperate but disciplined hate as he did everything he could to profit by the Heaven-sent reprieve, while at the same time avoiding any struggles violent enough to attract attention.

  “What is the excitement about, dottore?” he asked, less in expectation of an answer than to cover the small sounds of his contortions.

  “It is Don Pasquale,” the doctor said, his back to Simon as he continued to inhale the fresh air. “He is very old and very sick, and there are two other medici here besides myself to prove again that science can make old age more comfortable but never cure it.”

  “You must excuse my ignorance, but who is this Don Pasquale? And why does he get such a special fuss made over him?”

  The doctor turned and looked at him curiously.

  “Your ignorance is indeed surprising, for a man who has information that the Mafia seems to want very badly. Don Pasquale is the head of the organization, and when he dies they will have to elect a new Don. That is why the leaders are all here.”

  “The vultures gather…” Simon tried to keep any sign of effort from his face, while his sinews flexed and corded like steel wire. “And I suppose my fat friend would love to become Don Alessandro.”

  “I doubt if he will be chosen. He has been out of the country too long. Here in the South we tend to be rather provincial, and a little suspicious of all things foreign.”

  “That never seems to have stopped you exporting your mafiosi missionaries to less insular parts, such as the United States. I should think the organization would welcome a new top thug with international experience.”

  The doctor shrugged impassively. Either he was too discreet to be baited into further discussion, or he was genuinely uninterested in anything the Saint could possibly contribute. He continued to gaze at Simon as impersonally as he would have contemplated an anatomical chart, and the Saint goaded his brain frantically to think of some other gambit that might divert attention from the movements that he had to keep on making.

  Then both of them turned as the door opened again. It was the messenger who had called Destamio away who reappeared.

  “Tu,” he said to the Saint, in understandable Italian. “Come with me.”

  “Il signor Destamio wants him here for medical treatment,” the doctor interposed, without expression.

  “It will have to wait,” said the man curtly. “It is Don Pasquale who sends for him.

  4

  At this revelation the doctor pointedly lost interest again, and devoted himself to closing up his satchel as the emissary pulled Simon to his feet. The Saint for his part submitted to the new orders with the utmost docility, not only because it would have required the apathy of a turnip to resist such an intriguing summons, but also to avoid giving his escort any reason to re-check the rope on his wrists.

  The tie was loosening, but it would still take him several more minutes to get free. He would have to wait for that time.

  They went down a long musty whitewashed corridor with other closed doors in it, then up a flight of stone stairs which brought them into an enormous kitchen, from which another short passage and another doorway led into a vast baroque hall heavy with tapestries, paintings, suits of armor, and ponderously ornate wood
work. He realized then that the cell where he had revived was only an ignoble storage room in the basement of what could legitimately be called a palazzo. There was a floating population of dark men in tight suits with bulging armpits, all of them with fixed expressions of congenital unfriendliness. No further proof was needed that he had penetrated to the very heart of the enemy’s camp, although not quite in the manner he would have chosen for himself.

  The messenger pushed him towards the baronial stairway that came down to the center of the hall. They went up to a gallery, from which he was steered through a pair of half-open oak portals into a somber ante-room. Beyond it, an almost equally imposing inner door stood closed, and the guide tapped lightly on it. There was no reply from the interior, but he did not seem to expect one, for he turned the handle quietly and pulled the door open. Remaining outside himself, he gave the Saint a last shove which sent him in.

  Simon found himself in a bedroom that was in full proportion to the other master rooms he had seen, panelled in dark red brocade and cluttered with huge and hideous pieces of age-darkened furniture. The windows were carefully sealed against the noxious vapors of the night, and effectively sealed in the half-stale half-antiseptic odors of the sickroom. Next to the high canopied bed stood an enameled metal table loaded with a pharmaceutical-looking assortment of bottles and supplies, over which hovered two men with the same unmistakably professional air as the medico who had been brought to Simon’s cell, one of them gaunt and gray and the other one short and black-goateed.

  The other men grouped around the bed were older, and had a subtle aura of individual authority in spite of their deference to the central figure in the tableau. There were four of them, ranging in age from the late fifties upwards. The eldest, perhaps, was Al Destamio. There was a stout smooth faced man with glasses who could have passed for a cosmopolitan business executive, and one with cruel eyes and the build of a wrestler whose thick mustache gave him a pseudo-military air. The youngest, at least from the impression of nervous vigor which he gave, was almost as tall and trim-waisted as the Saint, but overbalanced by a beak which an Andean condor might justifiably have envied. Although modelled on classical Roman lines, it expanded and enlarged the theme on a heroic scale which would have made General De Gaulle look almost pudding-faced. And having apparently conceded to his shaving mirror that there was nothing he could do to minimize it, he wore it with a defiance that would have delighted Cyrano de Bergerac.

  This was the inner circle, the peers in their own right, assembled at the death-bed of the King to pay him homage—and vie among themselves for the succession.

  They turned and looked at the Saint with a single concerted motion, as if they were wired together, leaving an open path to the bed.

  At the zenith of his powers, the man who lay there must have been a giant, judging by the breadth of his frame. But some wasting disease had clutched him, stripping away tissue, bringing him down to this bed in which he must soon die. That much was obvious; the marks of approaching dissolution were heavy upon him. The skin once taut with muscle now hung in loose folds on his neck. Black marks like smeared soot were painted under the sunken eyes, and the gray hair lay thin and lifeless across the mottled brow. Yet, sick as he was, the habit of command had not left him. His eyes burned with the intensity of a madman or a martyr, and his voice, though weakened, had the vibrant timbre of an operatic basso.

  “Vieni qui.”

  It was not a request, or even an order, so much as the spoken assurance of knowledge that obedience would follow. This was the way that absolute monarchs of the past must have spoken, who had the power of life and death over their subjects, and Don Pasquale was one of the last heirs to that kind of authority.

  Nevertheless, Simon reminded himself, it was no honorable kingdom of which he was supreme ruler, but a ruthless secret society for which no crime was too sordid if it showed sufficient profit. Viewed in that light, the regal-cathedral atmosphere of the gathering was too incongruous for the Saint’s basic irreverence. He moved up to the foot of the bed, as he was told, but with a lazy trace of swagger that made it seem as if his hands were clasped behind his back of his own choice instead of being tied there, and a smile of brazen mockery curled his lips.

  “Ciao, Pasquale,” he said cheerfully, as one buddy to another.

  He could feel the chieftains on either side of him wince and stiffen incredulously at this lèse-majesté, but the man propped up on the pillows did not even seem to notice it, perhaps because he could not fully believe that he had heard it, or because in his assured supremacy it meant no more to him than an urchin thumbing its nose.

  “So you are the one they call the Saint. You have given us trouble before.”

  “I am pleased that it was enough for you to notice,” Simon said. “But I don’t remember the occasion. What were you doing at the time?”

  Since Don Pasquale had addressed him with the familiar “tu,” which is used only to inferiors or intimates, Simon saw no reason not to respond in the same manner.

  “You interfered with some plans of Unciello, who was one of us. And we had a useful man in the police in Rome, an Inspector Buono, whom we lost because of you.”

  “Now it comes back to me,” said the Saint. “I have an unfortunate knack of crossing up crooked cops. What ever happened to the poor grafter?”

  “He got in trouble in jail. A knife fight. He is dead.”

  Don Pasquale still had the memory of a computer. All the threads of a world-wide network of crime led back to him, and he controlled it because he knew the exact length and strength of every single one. More than ten years had passed since that incident in Rome, but he had not forgotten any of the details.

  “What has the Saint done now, Alessandro?”

  “He is trying to make trouble for me,” Destamio said. “He has followed me, spied on me, gone to my family and questioned them, threatened to blackmail me. I have to find out what he knows, and who else knows it, and then get rid of him.”

  “That may be, but why bring him here?”

  “I thought it was the safest place, and besides I did not want to be away myself at this time—”

  “What information could the Saint have that he could possibly blackmail Alessandro with?”

  It was a new voice that broke in, and Destamio started visibly at the sound of it. It came from the man with the majestic proboscis whom Simon had already intuitively assessed as the most dynamic of the council.

  “Nothing, Cirano, nothing at all,” Destamio replied, his voice sounding a trifle hoarser than usual. “But I want to know why he thinks he can give me trouble, who he is working with, so that I can take care of everything.”

  The man called Cirano—probably a nickname rather than a fortunate choice by his parents—turned his fascinating beak towards Destamio and actually sniffed, as if all his powers of perception were brought to focus in that incredible olfactory organ.

  “If he cannot be dangerous, what are you afraid of, Alessandro?” he persisted mercilessly. “What is there to take care of?”

  “Basta!” Don Pasquale interrupted Destamio’s retort before it even came to voice. “You can wait to fight with each other after I am dead. Until then, I make the decisions.”

  His lips barely moved when he talked, and there was no sign of animation or emotion on the pallid face. Only the eyes were indomitably alive, and they fastened on the Saint again with a concentration which could almost be physically felt.

  “I have long wanted to see you, Simon Templar,” he said, still in the clear correct Italian which seemed to be used as a neutral language to bridge the differences of dialect that must have existed between some of those present, and which can make a Sicilian just as unintelligible to a Calabrian as to any foreigner. “Nobody who defies the Mafia lives so long afterwards as you have. You should have been eliminated before you left Rome, after you crossed Unciello. Yet here you are crossing us again. I should be telling Alessandro to waste no more time in putting you out
of the way. But in the meantime I have heard and learned much more about you. I am not sure that you must inevitably be our enemy. With our power behind you, you could have become many times richer than you are. With your cleverness and your daring, we might have become even greater.”

  The room was deathly silent. Even at the end of his reign, Don Pasquale remained the unchallenged autocrat by sheer force of will-power and tradition. The satraps around him were still only his lieutenants, and would remain subservient until his extinction unleashed the new battle for supremacy.

  “Do you mean,” Simon asked slowly, “that after all that, you would offer me a chance to join you?”

  “It is not impossible,” Don Pasquale said. “Such things happen in the world. Even great nations which have been bitter enemies become allies.”

  The Saint hesitated for an instant, while a score of possibilities flashed back and forth across his mind like bolts of lightning, speculating on what use he could make of such a fantastic offer and how far he might play it along.

  But for once the bronze mask of his face was no more defense than a shell of clear glass against the searching stare that dwelt on it.

  “But no,” Don Pasquale said, before he could even formulate a response. “You are thinking only of how you might turn it to your advantage, to escape from the position you are now in. That is why I had to see you, to have your answer myself. L’audienza e finita.”

  Without affectation, he used the same words to declare the audience finished that would have come from a king or a pope.

  Al Destamio grabbed the Saint and hustled him to the door with what might have seemed like almost inordinate zeal, and Don Pasquale spoke again.

  “Wait here one moment, Alessandro.”

  Destamio gave the Saint a push which sent him stumbling up against the messenger who waited outside, and snapped, “Take him back downstairs and lock him in.”