Vendetta for the Saint

VIII How Dino Cartelli dug it, and the Saint made a deal

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 Alessando 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.

“That’s a good start,” Cartelli croaked. “What’s next?”

“Whether it was Dino’s own idea, because he’d already been tapping the till in a small way and an audit by the bank examiners was coming up, or whether he was recruited for the job from higher up, is something else I can’t tell you which doesn’t matter either. The milestone is that the bank was robbed, apparently by some characters who broke in while he was working late one night. He seems to have put up a heroic fight before he was killed by a shotgun blast in the face and hands which mutilated him beyond recognition or even routine identification. But have you read enough detective stories to guess what really happened?”

“Go on,” Cartelli said. “You’re the guy who was gonna dope it out.”

“For a first caper, it was quite a classic,” Simon went on imperturbably. “In fact, it was a variation on the gimmick in quite a few classic stories. Of course, the robbers were Dino’s pals and he let them in. He helped them to bust the safe and shovel out the loot, and then changed clothes with another bloke who’d been brought along to take the fall. He was the one who was killed with the shotgun — but who would ever doubt that it was the loyal Dino Cartelli? Dino got a nice big cut off the cake in return for disappearing, a lot of which I think is still in that valise; the Mafia got the rest, and everyone was happy except the insurance company that had to make good the loss. And maybe the man with no face. Who was he, Dino?”

“Nobody, nobody,” Cartelli said hoarsely. “A traitor to the Mafia, why not? A nobody. Don’t tell me you care about some sonovabitch like that!”

“Maybe not,” said the Saint. “If the Mafia confined themselves to knocking off their own erring brothers, I might even give them a donation. But then, many years after, in fact just the other day, something went wrong with the perfect crime that Dino thought had been buried and forgotten. A silly old English tourist named Euston, who once upon a time worked in the bank beside Dino, recognized him in a restaurant in Naples after all those years — partly from that scar on his cheek, which Euston happened to have given him in a youthful brawl. And this Euston was too stupid and stubborn to be convinced that he could be mistaken. So — perhaps without too much reluctance, after such a reminder of that bygone clout in the chops, Dino had him liquidated. That was when I got interested. And practically everything that’s happened since has stemmed from Dino’s efforts to buy me off or bump me off.”

“But my uncle?” Gina asked bewilderedly. “How does he fit in?”

“Your uncle is dead,” Simon said in a more sympathetic tone. “I went back to the mausoleum before I came here, and finished the search we started the other night. Alessandro Destamio did die in Rome of that illness in 1931, as you suspected, and Dino here stepped into his shoes. But the family still had enough sentiment to insist on putting Alessandro’s coffin in the ancestral vault. Why they let Dino take his name should only take a couple of guesses.”

He had spoken in Italian again, with the calculated intention of including the comprehension of Donna Maria, and now she responded as he had hoped.

“I will answer that, Gina,” she said, with some of the old iron and vinegar back in her voice. “Your uncle was a good man, but a foolish one with money, and he had wasted all that we had. He was dying when this Dino came to me and offered a way to keep our home and the family together. I accepted for all our sakes, with the understanding that he would never try to be with us himself. But first he broke that promise and now he will leave us destitute.”

“You should have taken over his loot while you had the chance, for insurance,” said the Saint, touching the lock on the valise.

The matriarch drew up her dumpy figure with pride.

“I am not a thief,” she said. “I would not touch stolen money.”

Simon shrugged his renewed bafflement at the vagaries of the human conscience.

“I wish I could see the difference between that and the money he used to send you from America.”

“What she forgets,” Cartelli said viciously, “is that Lo Zio himself was once a Mafia Don—”

“Sta zitto!” shrieked Donna Maria unavailingly.

“— and she had nothing against his support in those days. And after he had a stroke and was no more good for anything, Don Pasquale offered him this deal as a kind of pension, and he was glad to take it.”

“Enough, vigliacco! Lo Zio is sick, dying — you cannot speak of him like that—”

“I tell the truth,” Cartelli said harshly.

Then he spoke again in English: “Lookit, Saint, these people don’t mean nut’n to you. When I hadda give a contract for Euston — yeah, an’ for you too — it was self defense, nut’n else, self defense like you get off for in court. Nut’n personal. Okay, so now I’m licked. You tipped off the cops about me, an’ even the Mafia won’t back me no more after all this trouble I brought on them. But you an’ me can talk business.”

The Saint’s thumb moved against the catch on which it was resting, and the fastening snapped open. The valise had not been locked. He lifted the lid, and exposed its contents of neatly tied and packed bundles of paper currency in the formats and colors of various solvent nations.

“About this?” he asked.

“Yeah. I oughta have left it anyhow — I done without it all these years, an’ I got enough stashed in a Swiss bank to keep me from starving now, once I get outa Italy. You take it — give what you like to the old woman an’ Gina, an’ keep the rest. There’s plenty to make up for all the trouble you had.” Desperate earnestness rasped through the gravel in Cartelli’s voice. “No one ain’t never gonna hear about it from me, if you just gimme a chance an’ let me go.”

Simon Templar relaxed against the table, half hitching one leg on to it to make a seat, and played the fingers of his free hand meditatively over the bundles of cash in the open bag. For some seconds of agonizing suspense he seemed to be waiting and listening for some inner voice to advise him.

At last he looked up, with a smile.

“All right Dino,” he said. “If that’s how you want it, get going.”

Gina gave a little gasp.

Cartelli gave nothing, not even a grunt of thanks. Without a word he grabbed up his coat and huddled into it as he went out.

Simon followed him far enough to watch his flat footed march across the hallway, and to make sure that when the front door slammed it was with Cartelli on the outside and not turning to sneak back for a surprise counter-attack. He waited long enough to hear the little car outside start up and begin to move away.

He came back into the room again to see Donna Maria sitting in a chair with her face buried in her hands, and Gina staring at him in a kind of lost and lonely perplexity.

“You let him go,” she said accusingly. “For his stolen money.”

“Well, that was one good reason,” Simon said cheerfully.

“Do you think I would touch it?”

“You sound like Donna Maria. So don’t touch it. But I’m sure the bank, or their insurance company, would pay a very handsome reward for having it returned. Do you see anything immoral about that?”

“But after all he’s done — the murders—”

From outside, but not far away, they were suddenly aware of a confused sequence of roaring engines, squealing brakes, shouts, a crash, and then shots. Several shots. And then the disturbance was ended as abruptly as it had begun.

“What was that?” Gina whispered.

Simon was lighting a cigarette, with the feeling that this was a moment for rather special indulgence.

“I think that was Dino’s curtain call,” he said calmly. “As he told us, he should never have come back for these souvenirs of that old boyish escapade. But—” he reverted to Italian again for the benefit of Donna Maria, who had raised her head in be-muddled but fearful surmise — “I suppose greed got him into this, and it’s only poetic that greed should put him out. Digging up this money cost him enough time for me to catch up with him, and then I only had to gain a little more time for the police and the army to catch up with me. We’ve been having a lot of fun since last night which I’ll have to tell you about. A little while ago I managed to take over the fastest transportation, which was mine to begin with anyway because I hired it most respectably; but the head policeman this time is nobody’s fool, and I knew he would not take long to guess that this might be the place where I was going.”

“The police,” Donna Maria repeated stonily.

Simon looked at her steadily.

“This one, Marco Ponti, is not like some others,” he said. “I think I could persuade him to let Dino Cartelli be buried under his own name — shot while trying to escape after digging up his share of the bank robbery, which he buried in the Destamio house, where the family had been kind enough to receive him as a guest in his young days, knowing nothing about his Mafia connections. I don’t think he will mind leaving Lo Zio to another Judge whom he will have to face soon enough. I think Marco will buy all that — if you will agree not to try to keep Gina here against her will.”

“But where will I go?” Gina asked.

“Wherever the sun shines, and you can dance and laugh and play, as a girl should when she’s young. You could try St Tropez for a change from everything you’ve been used to. Or Copenhagen or Nassau or California, or any other place you’ve dreamed of seeing. If you like, I’ll go some of the way with you and get you started.”

Her wonderful eyes were still fixed on him in demoralizing contemplation when the jangle of the front door bell announced an obligatory but obviously parenthetic interruption.