Vendetta for the Saint

1

Promptly at ten the next morning Simon announced his arrival outside the walls of the Destamio estate with a brazen call on the Bugatti’s horn which rebounded satisfactorily from the neighboring hills, incidentally triggering the responsive barking of dogs and a rattle of wings as a startled flock of pigeons whirled overhead, before he confirmed the announcement of his arrival more conventionally with a tug on the bell-pull at the entrance.

He did not think there was much danger that Destamio would have prepared to sacrifice his own parental portals with another charge of explosive tied to the bell, but aside from that he had no idea what he expected. Would there be another more personalized elimination squad waiting to lay on the welcome to end all welcomes, or would Destamio have refused to believe that the Saint would have the nerve to come back and claim his date with Gina? Would Donna Maria at this moment be frantically telephoning to ask what she should do now, while Gina was being hastily incarcerated in whatever version of a medieval dungeon could be found in the establishment? Or would the house simply remain inscrutably deaf and blind to him as to an unwelcome salesman until he gave up and went away? There had been only one way to find out, and that was to go there and ring the bell and see what happened.

What happened was that the gate opened and Gina came out into the sunlight with her graceful step that was like dancing, and Simon smiled with sudden joy as he held the car door for her.

Whatever might be coming next, at least the adventure was not going to wallow to a soggy halt.

“This is much more than I seriously expected,” he said, once she had settled into the leather seat and the great car had made its thunderous take-off.

“Why?” she asked.

“I was afraid your aunt would have changed her mind about letting you go on this expedition, or talked you out of it.”

“Why should she do that? There’s nothing wrong with my seeing you, is there?”

She forced a small smile as she said it, but a slight halting note in her voice told him with piercing clarity not only that she was playing a part but also that she was not relishing it. The falseness was as transpicuous as her sincerity had been the day before. But for the moment he was not ready to let her know that her effort was already wasted.

“How could there be,” he replied blandly, “if neither of us has any wickedness in mind?”

He deliberately refrained from emphasizing that studied ambiguity by glancing at her to observe its effect, but her silence told him that she must be thinking it over. The piquancy of waiting for her next approach added to the pleasure of what promised to be a most entertaining day.

“Sicily, fair Sicily!” he declaimed, before the pause could become uncomfortable. He waved one hand to embrace the sundrenched splendor of orchards and hills: “The crossroads of the Mediterranean, where Greek fought Phoenician, and Roman fought Greek; where the light of Christendom was shadowed by the menace of Vandal, Goth, Byzantine, and Arab... You see, I’ve already boned up on the brochures.”

“Is your name really Simon Templar?” she asked abruptly.

“It is. Let me guess why you ask. Head filled with history, your thoughts have leapt to the Knights Templar, a dubiously noble band not unknown in these parts. You’re wondering whether I’m one of their lineal descendants. I think that depends where you draw the line. I’ve never looked too closely into all the birds’ nests in my family tree, but—”

“Are you the Saint?”

Simon sighed.

“So you’ve discovered my guilty secret. I hoped to hide it from you, letting you believe that I was a simple salesman, a country-to-country drummer selling ball-point pens that only write under butter. Little did I dream that my shadier reputation would have penetrated the cloisters of your Alpine convent.”

“I wasn’t as cut off from the world as all that,” she snapped, with a touch of exasperation. “I’ve always read newspapers, but I just didn’t connect you at first. What are you doing here?”

“Sightseeing — wasn’t that what we talked about? People always seem to disbelieve me, but I can truthfully say that I came to Italy just to look around and eat and drink like any other tourist.”

“But when you’re at home — you don’t really go around selling pens?”

Few women could claim the distinction of having left the Saint bereft of a suitable rejoinder, and Gina may have been the first to achieve it unintentionally. But her question was perfectly serious, as he assured himself by a swift sidelong glance. Apparently her convent reading had been somewhat less catholic than she believed, and its lacunae had not been filled in by any recent briefing.

“No,” he said weakly. “I don’t really work at anything seriously, because I hate to take a job away from somebody who might need it.”

That gave her something to think about in her turn, which occupied her until it occurred to her to ask: “Where are you going? I thought I was supposed to show you the sights, but you seem to know the way somewhere.”

“I had breakfast with a map and a guide book,” he said. “I thought it might help if the lamb could find its own way to the first sacrificial altar.”

“I don’t know of any of those near Palermo,” she said seriously. “Very few of the pagan temples have survived at all, and certainly no altars.”

“Well, let’s give this a whirl instead,” said the Saint resignedly, as he came in sight of his first destination.

He pulled into the free public parking lot, and paid the local extortioner the customary blackmail for seeing that nobody walked off with his car or any of its detachable components.

“San Giovanni degli Eremiti!” Gina cried, clapping her hands in enthusiastic recognition. “It’s about the most romantic old church around here — it goes back to the Norman times. How clever of you to find it!”

“It’s the natural affinity of one ancient monument for another,” said the Saint, gazing up at the gray walls whose crumbling scars bore witness to the countless battles that had been fought around them. “I suppose we have to give this one the full treatment?”

He permitted himself to be led through the moldering glories of pillars and porticos, and what was unmistakably the remains of a mosque around which the thrifty Crusaders had constructed their own place of worship. When they finally arrived in a beautiful little cloistered garden, he sank down on a bower-shaded bench and drew Gina down beside him.

“It was a wonderful tour, and I can never thank you enough for showing me the antiquities of Palermo.”

“But we’ve only just begun,” she protested. “There are lots more churches — the Cathedral — the museum—”

“That’s what I’ve been dreading. In spite of my name, I’ve always preferred to leave the churches and cathedrals to more deserving Saints. But we told your sweet old Aunt that we were going sightseeing, and now even you can look her in the eye and solemnly and truthfully swear that we did so. Thus having kept the letter of our word, we can turn to something more in keeping with the reality of this climate than tramping around a lot of sweltering ruins. Let’s face it, if it weren’t for me, would you be sightseeing today?”

“No, but—”

“But me no buts; the ‘no’ is quite enough. That means I’m inflicting something on you which you’d never have chosen, and I hate to be part of an infliction. Now, wouldn’t you much rather be going for a swim?”

“Well yes, perhaps. But I didn’t think of bringing anything with me—”

“And you can’t go back home for it without probably running afoul of Auntie. Never mind. Anyone who looks as sensational as you do in a bikini should have a new one every day.” Simon stood up. “Come along and prepare to revel in woman’s time-honored pastime of buying clothes.”

With no more delay for argument, the Bugatti was speeding on its way again in a few minutes. At the near-by seaside resort of Romagnolo they found a little beach shop which supplied the requisite minimum of water-wear; and in what seemed like little more than the span of a movie lap-dissolve he was on the beach in his trunks watching her come out of her cabana in the nearest approach to the simple costume of Eve permitted by the customs of the time.

“I didn’t see you buying anything,” she observed belatedly.

“I didn’t have to,” he said without shame. “I had these in the car, just in case we accidently decided to change our program. Now let’s get in the water and cool off before you give heat-stroke to half the population of this lido.”

They swam and splashed away the dust and stickiness of the morning, until they were completely refreshed and buttressed with a reserve of coolness to make another spell in the sun seem welcome for a while. As they came ashore, a white-coated cameriere greeted them at the water’s edge.

“Ecco la lista delle vivande, signore,” he said, extending a menu. “I am sure you have already decided to lunch at the best restaurant on the beach.”

Simon had already noticed a number of attractively shaded restaurants at the edge of the strand, and realized that the more enterprising of them were not proposing to leave the selection of possible customers to chance. Such initiative would have taken a fairly dedicated curmudgeon to resist.

“Che cosa raccomandate?” he asked.

“Everything is good, but the lobster is most excellent, Do not move, and I will show you.”

The waiter rushed away, to return in a few minutes with a wire basket in which a couple of lively aragoste squirmed and flapped in futile rebellion against their destiny.

“I suppose they could get to be a monotonous diet, if you lived here long enough,” Simon said, “but I’m a long way from reaching that stage yet. How about you, Gina?”

“Donna Maria isn’t an extravagant housekeeper,” she said. “So they’re still a treat for me.”

“Then we’ll make this an occasion,” he said, and proceeded to round out the order.

The waiter departed again, promising to send for them when everything was ready; and they spread their rented towels on the sand and sprawled on them in sybaritic relaxation.

“At times like this,” said the Saint, “I often wonder who was the fathead who first proclaimed that work was a noble and rewarding activity. Or was he a really brilliant fellow who thought of a line to kid the suckers into doing the dirty jobs and liking it?”

“But you must work at something, don’t you?” she said after a pause.

“As seldom as possible.”

“But you told us you had business with Uncle Alessandro.”

“Do I look like a type of character who would have business with him?”

“No,” she said emphatically, and then was instantly appalled and open-mouthed. “I mean—”

He grinned.

“You mean exactly what you said,” he insisted gently. “I never did convince you that I was part of the ordinary commercial world, and since then you’ve remembered more of what you’ve read or heard about some of my adventures, which your educational background would have to regard as slightly nefarious. In spite of which, you apparently know that Uncle Al’s private line of skulduggery is much worse than anything a comparatively respectable buccaneer like me would be mixed up in.”

“I didn’t say that at all!” she flared. “I know everyone says he made his money in rum-running or rackets or some of the other things you have in the United States, and I know he was in trouble with the police about taxes or something. It was in all the papers when I was at school, and the other girls teased me to death because I had the same name. I didn’t dare admit he was a relation. But since then he’s told me that all the best people dealt with him, only the Americans are so hypocritical, and he just happened to run up against the wrong politicians. And he’s always been so good to us—”

“So when he talked to you on the phone late last night or early this morning and told you he was afraid I meant him some harm, and asked you to use our date to find out all that you could about me and what I was cooking, you felt it was your duty to take on the job.”

For a moment her eyes flashed with the instinctive threat of another and even more indignant denial; and then the fire was quenched in a traitorous upwelling of moisture that she could not voluntarily control. Her lip trembled, and she dropped her face suddenly in her hands.

Simon patted her sympathetically on the shoulder.

“Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “You just haven’t had much experience with the Mata Hari bit.”

“You’re a beast,” she sobbed.

“No, I’m not. I’m a nice friendly bloke who hates to refuse a beautiful girl anything. To prove it, I’ll answer all your questions anyhow.”

The soft satin under his hand shook with another muted tremor which was somehow distractingly exciting, but he made himself go on single-mindedly:

“No, I am not a policeman. No, I am not working for the FBI, or any agency of any Government. Yes, I have the worst intentions towards your Uncle Alessandro. I think he’s a very evil man and that he may be guilty of a number of murders besides lesser crimes; but there’s one murder I’m morally certain he’s responsible for, which I’m going to see that he pays for in one way or another. Unless he succeeds in having me murdered first, which he’s already tried a couple of times.”

She sat up abruptly, and he reflected that only the very very young could still look lovely with reddened eyes and tear-stained cheeks.

“That’s enough,” she said. “You’d better take me home now.”

“Not until after lunch. Could you live with the knowledge that you’d sentenced one of those lobsters to die for nothing?”

“I expect you can eat them both.”

“Why should I risk indigestion because you don’t like to hear the truth?”

“I can’t listen to you! It would be too disloyal. It’s my family you’re talking about, calling Uncle Alessandro a murderer. I want to go home.”

“Then wouldn’t you feel better,” said the Saint deliberately, “if Al Destamio wasn’t really your uncle after all?”

The shot scored, more violently even than he had hoped. Gina’s reaction ran the gamut of all the conventional symptoms of shock, from staring eyes and sagging jaw to the cataleptic rigidity in which all her responses were frozen. After such a visible impact, there could be no return to pretense or hauteur.

“So — you know,” she breathed finally.

“I can’t go quite that far,” he said candidly. “I suspect. I can’t prove it — yet. But I think I shall. I need help. And I think you could give it. Now you’ve as good as told me, haven’t you, that you’ve suspected the same thing.”

His blue eyes held her steadily, like magic crystals defying her to try to deceive them; but this time she made no attempt to escape their penetration.

“Yes,” she said. “For a long time. But I was afraid to believe it, because I knew how much I hoped it was true. And that seemed awful, somehow.”

“But if it turned out we were right,” he continued — and the subtle assimilation of their interests into the inclusive “we” was so smooth that she probably never even noticed it, “it’d be rather like the start of a new life for you.”

“Yes, it would.”

“Then what’s your problem? Al is asking you to get involved in what you’re afraid is more dirty business. You’ve got suspicions which you can’t take to the police, because you’re afraid of being wrong, or of what it might mean to your family name. I’m not the police, but I have a corny bee in my bonnet about justice. I think I’m your obvious answer, sent directly from heaven.”

“I think you’re wonderful,” she said, and leaned over and kissed him with impulsive warmth.

Simon Templar recorded a vivid impression that her stretch in a convent had effected no irremedial inhibitions on her Mediterranean instincts.

“La pasta e pronta,” said the too-helpful waiter, with impeccable timing.

2

The dining room was nothing more than a verandah shaded with cane matting, overlooking the beach and the sea, with the kitchen and other working quarters in the stucco building that backed it up. The substitute for a cellar appeared to be an immense glass-fronted refrigerator from which the wine came mountain-cold, as it should be in such a climate, especially when of the sturdy Sicilian type. The meal itself made a commendable effort to live up to its advance billing, and would have justified interrupting almost anything except what it had actually cut short. But at least it gave the Saint an opportunity to hear the rest of Gina’s confession from a slightly less disturbing distance.

“It’s just... well, a feeling that’s been growing through the years. At first it seemed so fantastic that I tried to laugh it off. But the small things added up to a big thing that I couldn’t put out of my mind. Now I look back, it must have all begun about the time Uncle Alessandro was so sick in Rome. I told you that I only remember that part vaguely, because I was very small. I know he had cancer, and I thought they said it was incurable; but now Donna Maria says I’m wrong, it wasn’t cancer at all, and he got better. Is that possible?”

“It’s not impossible. Doctors have been mistaken. And there have been what you might call spontaneous remissions, which means that the doctors don’t know why the patient was cured, but he was.”

“But not very often?”

“Not very often after the case has been called incurable, that have lasted as long as since you were a little girl, and with the patient looking as hearty as Al did the other day.”

“Then I happened to notice that there weren’t any pictures of Uncle Alessandro in any of the family albums, when he was younger. When I asked Donna Maria, she said that when he was younger he was superstitious about being photographed and would never let himself be taken.”

“Perhaps he had a premonition about when he would have his picture taken with a number under it,” Simon remarked.

“And then a girl whom I used to be taken out with, because her mother was an old friend of Donna Maria, who always finds the nastiest things to say about everyone and yet you usually have to admit they’re true, once said that Uncle Alessandro’s cure must have been more in his mind than his body, if he did so well in business in America, when all he ever did here in Italy was to throw away most of the family fortune.”

“Is that what he did?”

“Oh, yes. Even Lo Zio, when it wasn’t so hard for him to talk, told me how foolish he was and some of the crazy schemes he threw money away on. And I couldn’t believe he had become such a different man.”

Simon nodded.

“Unless he is a different man.”

“But how could he be? Unless Lo Zio—”

“Who, let’s face it, isn’t so very bright these days—”

“And Donna Maria—”

“Yes, she would have to be in on it.” The Saint held her eyes remorselessly. “And don’t try to tell me you can’t possibly imagine such a dear sweet old lady being involved in anything dishonest.”

She made no attempt to evade the challenge; it was as if she had grown up, in one way, very suddenly. She only asked: “But why?”

“When we know that,” he said, “we’ll have a lot of answers.”

After a while she said: “You want me to trust you, but you still haven’t told me much about yourself, only the things you’re not. If you aren’t a detective, how did you get so interested in Uncle Alessandro?”

His hesitation was only momentary, more to marshal his recollections than to make up his mind whether or not to share them with her. After all, even if she was an extraordinarily unsuspected Delilah, capable of far more deviousness and duplicity than one could easily credit her, and this whole last performance was only another trick to gain his confidence, there was very little he could tell her that would be news to Al Destamio, or that would help the Mafia to frustrate his investigations.

Therefore he told her his whole story, from the accidental meeting with the late James Euston to the plastic bomb which he had disarmed the night before, omitting only his private luncheon conversation with Marco Ponti and his disposal of the plastic with the fingerprints on it, since even if she had come over whole-heartedly to his side those items of information might be tricked or forced out of her. At the end of the recital she was big-eyed and open-mouthed again.

“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 shirtsleeves, 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 about 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 really 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.”

“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 woodwork. 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 smoothfaced 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’ udienza 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.”

The massive door slammed shut; and the guide grasped Simon’s arm at the elbow and propelled him forcefully across the ante-room, along the gallery, and down the magnificent stairway with such brutal vigor that it took all the Saint’s agility to keep his footing and save himself from being hurled down the steps on his face.

In the same bullying manner, he was marched through the kitchen, down the back stairs, and along the basement corridor to the room from which he had been brought. But at that especial moment he almost welcomed the sadistic treatment, for under cover of a natural resistance to it he was able to wrestle more vigorously and concentratedly with the rope that held his wrists.

A last brutal kick with his escort’s knee sent him flying into the little cell. The door banged behind him, and the key grated in the lock.

He was alone again, for the doctor had not waited; but he knew it would not be for long. Whatever business the dying Don Pasquale wanted to conclude with Destamio could not take more than a short while, and then Destamio would be in even more haste to complete his own project.

But alone and unobserved, the Saint could writhe and struggle without restraint; and he already had a good start. .

In less than three more minutes he dragged one hand free, and the cord was slack on his other wrist.

Even while it was falling to the floor, he reached the window in a soundless rush.

Until then, he had had no clue to how long he had been unconscious after he had been knocked out in the mausoleum, and with his hands tied behind him he had been unable to see the time on his wrist watch. But now, with the electric bulb behind him, he saw that the sky was no longer black but gray with the first dim promise of dawn. And that faint glimmer of illumination was enough to show him why his captors were so unconcerned about leaving him in a room with an open unbarred window.

The palazzo was perched on the very edge of a precipice. The window from which he leaned out was pierced in a smooth wall with no other openings for fifteen feet on either side or above. Below, the wall merged without a break into the vertical cliff which served as its foundation. And below that juncture the rock sheered away into still unfathomable blackness.