Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  The Bugatti burnt rubber as it slowed, and Simon side-stepped to let it bring Ponti up to him.

  “You took long enough,” he said rudely. “Did I forget to show you how to get into top gear?”

  “Lieutenant Fusco would not abandon his scout car, and I had to hold back for them to keep up with us,” said the detective. “Did you have any luck?”

  “Quite a lot—and in more ways than one.” Simon thought the details could wait. “There are at least six of them in that house behind the wall: four live ones, big shots, a guard whom I may have killed, and a woman who would make a good mother to an ogre.”

  Fusco jumped out and shouted back to his detachment: “Report to the Major where we are and that we are going in after them, then follow me.”

  “A good thing we’re not trying to surprise them,” Simon remarked. “But they already know they’re in trouble. The only question is whether they will surrender or fight.”

  They went through the gate and up the short driveway together. The three soldiers from Fusco’s scout car followed, their boots making the noise of a respectable force before they fanned out across the lawn.

  Ponti produced a flashlight and shone it at the front door which Simon had left half open.

  “Come out with your hands up,” he shouted from the foot of the steps, “or we shall come in and take you.”

  There was no answer, and the beam showed no one in what could be seen of the hall.

  “This is my job,” Ponti said, and shoved Simon aside as he ran up the steps.

  Fusco ran after him, and Simon had to recover his balance before he could get on the Lieutenant’s heels. But no shots greeted them, and the hall and staircase showed empty to the sweep of Ponti’s flashlight. A flickering yellow luminance came from the door of the dining room, however, and when they reached it they saw Skullface and Scarface lying on the floor groaning, while the woman of the house tried to minister to their bloodstained legs by the light of a candle.

  Cirano also lay on the floor, but he was not groaning. There was a single red stain on his shirt, and his eyes were open and sightless. His magnificent nose stood up between them like a tombstone.

  Ponti bent over him briefly, and looked up at the Saint.

  “Did you do this?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “No. The others, yes—with this.” He broke the shotgun, extracting one spent and one unused shell. “I didn’t have a pistol. But Destamio did, and so did these two, and so did Florence Nightingale. I broke the light”—he pointed to it—“and they were all blazing away in the dark. It could have been an accident. You will have to try matching bullets to guns. But there is one gun missing.” He turned to the woman. “Dov’é Destamio?”

  She glared at him without answering.

  “There must be a back way out,” Simon said. “Or else—”

  He turned and pushed two of the bersaglieri who were crowding at the door.

  “Go and watch the garage,” he snapped. “And one of you block the driveway with your car.”

  He went on across the hall and opened the door on the opposite side. It led to the kitchen, which was lit by a weak electric bulb over the sink. He strode across it to another door, which was ajar. Ponti was following him. They stepped out into darkness and fresh air.

  “Your back way,” Ponti said. “We should have looked for it before we came in at the front.”

  “If Al used it, he was probably gone before you got here,” said the Saint. “Now, is he holed up somewhere else in the village, or would he try to make it out of here on foot? If Olivetti and his troops catch up soon enough, you might still be able to cordon off the area.”

  The detective was shining his flashlight this way and that. They were in a small walled courtyard with an old well in one corner, garbage cans in another, and an opening to a narrow alley in a third. The light swung to the fourth corner, and a brief pungent malediction dropped from Ponti’s lips.

  “I think we are already much too late,” he said.

  In the fourth corner, a short passage led back to a pair of large wide-open doors, beyond which was a bare-walled emptiness, and at the back of that the inside of another pair of doors, which were closed.

  “God damn and blast it, the garage!” Simon gritted. “With doors at both ends, and a back alley to drive out. What every Mafia boss’s home should have. And if there was a boss-grade car in it, he could be twenty kilometers away already.”

  They returned through the house, and Simon went on out of the front door and across to the gate. Ponti stayed with him.

  “The guard I incapacitated is under those bushes,” Simon said, pointing as he passed them.

  “Where are you going?” Ponti asked.

  Simon squeezed past the scout car which had been moved into the opening.

  “I’m taking back my car and going home, thanking you for a delightful evening,” said the Saint. “There’s nothing more I can do here. But if I happen to run into Al again I will let you know.”

  “I think you have an idea where to look for him, and I ought to forbid you to try anything more on your own,” Ponti grumbled. “But since you would only deny it, I can only ask you to let me see him alive if possible. The two whose legs you peppered, I know them, and they will be good to see in the dock, but Destamio would make it still better.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” said the Saint ambiguously. He cranked up the Bugatti and climbed in. “Which is the way to the coast road?”

  “Turn to the right on the main street, and take the next fork on the left. It is not very far. Arriverderci.”

  “Ciao,” said the Saint, and backed the great car around and gunned it away.

  It was in fact less than ten minutes to the coast highway, and it was with a heartfelt sigh of relief that he greeted its firm paving and comparatively easy curves. In spite of his steel-wire stamina, the accumulated exertions and shortage of sleep of the last few days had taken their inevitable toll, and he was beginning to fight a conscious battle with fatigue. Now it was less of a strain to make speed, and in the next miles he broke all the speed limits and most of the traffic laws, but fortunately it was still too early for any police cars or motorcycles to be abroad.

  The sky was paling when he roared into the outskirts of Palermo and slowed up to thread through back roads that were already becoming familiar. There was just one piece of evidence that he had been cheated of, which he still needed before this adventure could be wound up, and when he finally brought the Bugatti to a stop, the gates of the cemetery which he had visited the night before had just slid past the edge of its headlights before he switched them off.

  The gates were not locked, but the padlock on the Destamio mausoleum had been fastened again. He had no key this time, but he had brought a jack handle from the car which would do just as well if more crudely. He inserted it and twisted mightily. Metal grated and snapped, and the broken hasp fell to the ground.

  He knew that there was no fallacy like the cliche that lightning never strikes in the same place twice, but for someone else to be lurking there to attack him again, as he had been waylaid on his previous visit, would have been stretching the plausibilities much farther than that. Secure in the confidence that no biographer could inflict such a dull repetition on him, he walked inside without hesitation or trepidation, aiming for the tomb that he had so narrowly missed seeing before.

  His pocket flashlight had long since vanished, but he had found a book of matches in the glove compartment of the Bugatti. He struck one that flared high in the windowless vault. There was a bronze casket almost at his eye level which looked newer than the others, though it was itself well aged and coated with dust. He bent close, and brought the match near the tarnished bronze plate on the side.

  It read:

  ALESSANDRO LEONARDO DESTAMIO

  1898–1931

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  HOW DINO CARTELLI DUG IT, AND THE SAINT MADE A DEAL

  1
>
  The main portals of the Destamio manse stood wide open when the Saint saw them again. It was the first time he had seen them that way, and his pulse accelerated by an optimistic beat at the thought of what this difference could portend. As his angle of vision improved, he discerned on the driveway inside the shape of a small but very modern car limned by the dim light of a bulb over the front door. It had been backed around so that it faced the gateway, as if in readiness for the speediest possible departure, and it did not seem too great a concession to wishful thinking to visualize it as the vehicle in which the man known as Alessandro Destamio had made his getaway from the village hideout, and its position as indicating that this was not for a moment intended to be the end of the flight.

  But, now, it seemed that it could be the end of the story…

  Simon came on foot, after coasting the Bugatti to a stop a good two hundred yards away, since its stentorian voice was impossible to mute to any level consistent with a stealthy approach towards apprehensive ears. But as he cat-footed up the drive, he began to hear from inside the villa a steady thumping and hammering which might well have drowned out any exterior noise except during its own occasional pauses. Yet, far from being puzzled by the clangor within, the Saint had an instantaneous uncanny intuition of the cause of it, and a smile of beatific anticipation slowly widened his eyes and his mouth.

  Even while he was enjoying a moment of his mental vision, however, his active gaze was already scanning the windows of the upper floor. All of them were dark, but one pair of shutters was open a few inches, enough to show that they were not bolted on the inside, and those gave on to the balcony formed by the portico over the front door. For a graduate second-story man, it was no more than an extension of walking up the front steps to climb one of the supporting columns and enter the room above.

  There was a sound of heavy breathing and a movement in the room as he crossed it, and a light clicked on over the bed. It revealed the almost mummified features of Lo Zio, sitting up, the ruffled collar of a nightshirt buttoned under his chin and a genuine tasselled nightcap perched on his head.

  The Saint smiled at him reassuringly.

  “Buon giorno,” he said. “We only wanted to be sure you were all right. Now lie down again until we bring your breakfast.”

  The ancient grinned a toothless grin of senile recognition, and lay down again obediently.

  Simon went out quickly into the corridor, where a faint yellow light came from the stairway. The hammering noises continued to reverberate from below, louder now that he was inside the building, but before he investigated them or took any more chances he had to find out whether Gina was in the house. It was unlikely that she would be on that floor, from which escape would have been too easy, but the stairs continued up to another smaller landing on which there were only four doors. Simon struck a match to observe them more clearly, and his glance settled on one which had a key on the outside. He tested the handle delicately, and confirmed that it was locked, but with his ear to the panel he heard someone stir inside. There could be only one explanation for that anomaly, and without another instant’s hesitation he turned the key and went in.

  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 disappointing 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 vibrant 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 furniture 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 discarded. 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 unaccustomed 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 promised first that you would leave the country and never 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 everything 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 possibly 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 never improve itself.

  He pushed the door wider, and stepped quietly in.

  “Famosé 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 attached 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 panoramic 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 uncle, and you might as well forget that nonsense.”

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

  Cartelli-Destamio glowered at him with unwavering 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 unclear 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 working 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.