Vendetta for the Saint

1

His decision made, Simon Templar intended to pay his call on the Destamio manor with the least possible delay — figuring that the faster he kept moving, the more he would keep Destamio off balance, and thus gain the more advantage for himself. But to make himself suitably presentable, his slashed jacket first had to be repaired.

The cashier directed him to the nearest sartoria, where the proprietor was just unlocking after the three-hour midday break. After much energetic and colorful discussion, a price was agreed on that made allowance for the unseemly speed demanded, yet was still a little less than the cost of a new coat. Half an hour was finally set as the time for completion; and the Saint, knowing that he would be lucky to get it in three times that period, proceeded in search of his next requisite.

The tailor directed him around the next corner to where a welcoming sign announced Servizio Eccellento di Autonoleggio. But for once in the history of advertising, the auto rental service may truly have been so excellent that all its cars had been taken. At any rate, perhaps with some help from the sheer numbers of seasonal tourists, the entire fleet of vehicles seemed to be gone. The only one left in sight was an antique and battered Fiat 500 that had been largely dismembered by the single mechanic who crawled from its oily entrails and wiped his hands on a piece of cotton waste as Simon approached.

“You have cars to rent?” said the Saint.

“Sissignore.” The man’s sapient eye took in his patently un-Italian appearance. “I guess mebbe you like-a rent-a one?”

“I guess I would,” said the Saint, patiently resigning himself to haggling down a price that would be automatically doubled now that the entrepreneur had identified him as a visiting foreigner.

“We got-a plenty cars, but all-a rent-a now, gahdam, except-a dis sonovabitch.”

It was evident that the mechanic’s English had been acquired from the ubiquitous font of linguistic elegance, the enlisted ranks of the American armed services.

“You mean that’s your very last machine?” Simon asked, nodding at the disembowelled Fiat.

“Sissignore. Cute-a little turista, she built like a brick-a gabinetto. I ’ave ’er all-a ready dis evening.”

“I wouldn’t want her, even if you do get her put together again. Not that I want to hurt her feelings, but she just wasn’t built to fit me. So could you perhaps tell me where I might find something my size?”

“Mebbe you like-a drive-a da rich car, Alfa-Romeo or mebbe Ferrari?”

There was a trace of a sneer in the question which Simon chose to ignore in the hope of saving time in his search.

“I have driven them. Also Bentleys, Lagondas, Jaguars, and in the good old days a Hirondel.”

“You drive-a da Hirondel, eh? How she go, gahdam?”

“Like a sonovabitch,” said the Saint gravely. “But that has nothing to do with the present problem. I still need a car.”

“You like-a see sumping gahdam especial, make-a you forget Hirondel?”

“That I would like to see.”

“Come-a wid me.”

The man led the way to a door at the rear of the garage, and out into the dusty yard behind. Apart from the piles of rusty parts and old threadbare tires, there was a large amorphous object shrouded in a tarpaulin. With an air of reverence more usually reserved for the lifting of a bride’s veil preparatory to the nuptial kiss, he untied the binding cords and gently drew back the canvas. Sunlight struck upon blood-red coachwork and chromed fittings; and the Saint permitted himself the uncommon luxury of a surprised whistle.

“Is that what I think it is?” he said.

“It gahdam-a sure is,” the mechanic replied, with his eyes half closed in ecstatic contemplation. “You’re-a look at a Bugatti!”

“And if I’m not mistaken, a type 41 Royale.”

“Say, professore, you know all about-a dese bastards,” said the man, giving Simon the title of respect due to his erudition.

There was once a body of aficionados who looked upon motoring as a sport, and not an air-conditioned power-assisted mechanical aid to bringing home the groceries, and among their ever-dwindling survivors there are still some purists who maintain that only in the golden years between 1919 and 1930 were any real automobiles constructed, and who dismiss all cars before or after that era as contemptible rubbish. The Saint was not quite such a fanatic, but he had an artist’s respect for the masterpieces of that great decade.

He was now looking at one of the best of them. The name of Ettore Bugatti has the same magic to the motoring enthusiast as do those of Annie Besant or Karl Marx to other circles of believers. Bugatti was an eccentric genius who designed cars to suit himself and paid no attention to what other designers were doing. In 1911, when all racing cars were lumbering behemoths, a gigantic Fiat snorted to victory in the Grand Prix. This was expected; but what was totally unexpected was the second-placing of Bugatti’s first racer, looking like a mouse beside an elephant, with an engine only one-eighth the size of the monstrous winner. Bugatti continued to pull mechanical miracles like that. Then, in 1927, when everyone else was building small cars, he brought out the juggernaut on which Simon was now feasting his eyes.

“Dey build only seven,” the owner crooned, carefully flicking a speck of dust from the glistening fender. “Bugatti ’imself bust-a one up in a wreck, and now dey only six sonovabitch in ’ole gahdam-a world.”

Immense is an ineffective word for such a car. Over a wheel-base of more than fourteen feet, the rounded box of the coupe-de-ville shrank in perspective when seen along the unobstructed length of the brobdingnagian hood. The front fenders rose high, then swept far back to form a running-board.

“And-a look-a dis—”

The mechanic was manipulating the intricate locks and handles that secured the hood, and with no small effort he threw it open. He pointed with uncontainable pride to the spotless engine, which resembled the power plant of a locomotive rather than that of an automobile. It must have been more than five feet long.

“I have heard,” Simon said, “that if a Bugatti starts at all, it will start with just one pull on the crank.”

“Dat’s-a-right. Sono raffinate — what you call, ’igh-strung like-a race ’orse — but when she fix-a right, she always start. I show you!”

The man turned on the ignition, adjusted the hand throttle and the spark, and slipped the gleaming brass crank-handle into its socket. Then he waved the Saint to it with an operatic gesture.

“You try it yourself, professore!”

Simon stepped up, grasped the handle and engaged it carefully, and with a single coordinated effort gave it a crisp turn through a half-circle. Without a cough or a choke, the engine burst into responsive life, with a roar which did not entirely drown out a strangely pleasing metallic trill not unlike a battery of sewing machines in full stitch.

“That,” said the Saint, raising his voice slightly, “would give me a lot of fun for a few days.”

“No, no,” protested the owner. “Dat sonovabitch not-a for rent. Much-a too valuable, should-a be in museum. I only show you.”

His voice ran down as he stared at the currency which the Saint was peeling off the roll in his hand. The sum at which Simon stopped was perhaps wantonly extravagant, but to the Saint it did not seem too high to pay for the fun of having such a historic toy to play with. And after all, he reflected, it was only Al Destamio’s money.

Thus, in due course, having gone back to collect his jacket while the rental paper-work was being prepared, after signing the necessary forms and being checked out on the controls, the Saint seated himself at the wheel, engaged first gear, and let up gently on the clutch. With a tremor of joy the mighty monster gathered itself and sprang through the open gates into the alley behind while its owner waved a dramatic and emotional farewell.

For a motorist of refined perceptions, driving a Bugatti is an experience like hearing the definitive performance of a classical symphony. Dynamic efficiency and supreme road-holding were the qualities that Bugatti wanted before anything else; and since he was a man incapable of compromise, that was what he obtained. The steering wheel vibrated delicately in the Saint’s fingers, like a live member, sensitive to his lightest touch; guidance was like cutting butter with a hot knife. There was a little more difficulty with slowing up, since Bugatti always intended his cars to go rather than stop, but this could be overcome by adroit down-shifting and extra assistance from the hand brake. Simon happily sounded the horn, which gave out a rich tuneful note like a trombone, as he passed groups of cheering urchins and gaping adults on his way out of the town. The engine boomed with delight, and the great length of the red hood surged forth into the countryside.

Only too quickly the details of Ponti’s sketch map spun by until at a last turning he saw the Destamio manse before him. With some reluctance he turned off the pavement and parked under the shade of a tree.

A high wall, topped with an unfriendly crest of broken bottles and shards of tile, surrounded the grounds and hid all of the house except the roof. He pressed a button beside a pair of massive iron-bound wooden doors, and waited patiently until at long last a medieval lock grated open and a smaller door set in one of the vast ones creaked open. A short swarthy woman in a maid’s apron peered out suspiciously.

“Buona sera,” he said pleasantly. “My name is Templar, to see Donna Maria.”

He stepped forward confidently, and the maid let him pass through. His first strategy was to give the impression that he was expected, and to go as far as he could on that momentum, but this was not enough to get him into the house. On the balustraded terrace which ran across the full width of the building, the maid waved him towards a group of porch furniture.

“Wait here, if you please, signore. I will tell Donna Maria. What was the name?”

Simon repeated it, and remained standing while he surveyed the house, a typically forbidding and cumbersome box-like structure of chipped and fading pink plaster with shutters that badly needed repainting, a shabby contrast with the well-kept and ordered brilliance of the garden. He had transferred his attention to that more agreeable scene when he heard a measured and heavy tread behind him, and turned again.

“Donna Maria?” he said, with his most engaging smile, profferring his hand. “My name is Simon Templar. I am an old friend of your brother Alessandro. When he heard that I was coming to Palermo, he insisted that I should come and see you.”

2

The woman stood unmoving, except to glance down at his hand as if it were a long-dead fish. This expression perfectly fitted the lines around her mouth and flared nostrils, and was obviously one that she used a great deal. Her straggly mustache was black; but the mass of her hair, pulled back into a tight bun, was a dull steel gray. She was a head shorter than the Saint, but at least twice his diameter, and this bulk was encased in a corset of such strength and inelasticity that there was little human about the resultant shape. In the traditionally characterless black dress outside it, she reminded him of a piano-legged barrel draped for mourning.

“I never see my brother’s friends,” she said. “He keeps his business separate from his family life.”

Just as no ornament relieved the drabness of her robe, no trace of cordiality tempered the chill of her words. Only a person with the Saint’s self-assurance and ulterior motives could have survived that reception; but his smile was brazenly unshaken.

“That shows you how much he values our friendship. We were in the same business in America, where I come from — almost partners. So when I was at his villa in Capri the other day, for lunch, he made me promise to call on you.”

“Why?”

The question was a challenge and almost a rebuttal in advance. It was clear that Al Destamio did not send his friends to the ancestral demesne out of spontaneous good-fellowship — if he ever sent them at all. Simon realized that he would have to improve his excuse, and quickly, or in a few seconds he would be outside again with nothing achieved but a glimpse of the unprepossessing facades of Donna Maria and her lair.

“Alessandro insisted that I should get to know you,” he said, allowing a rather sinister frigidity to creep into his own voice. “He told me what a good sister you were, and how he wanted to be sure that in any time of trouble you would know which of his friends to turn to.”

The ambiguity reached a mark of some kind: at least, there was an instant’s uncertainty in the woman’s basilisk gaze, and afterwards a very fractional unbending in her adamantine reserve.

“It has been a hot day, and you will enjoy a cold drink before you leave.”

“You are much too hospitable,” said the Saint, achieving the miracle of keeping all sarcasm out of his reading.

She made a sign to the maid, who had been pointedly waiting within range, and lowered herself stiffly into one of the chairs.

Simon turned to choose a seat for himself, and in so doing was confronted by a vision which almost equalled his wildest expectations.

Approaching through an archway of rambler roses, from a hedged area of the garden where she had apparently been taking a sunbath, was Gina Destamio, clad only in a bikini of such minuscule proportions that its two elements concealed little more of her than did her sunglasses. Her skin was a light golden-brown in the last rays of sunlight, and the ultimate details of her figure more than fulfilled every exquisite promise they had made under the dress in which he had last seen her. It was a sight to make even a hardened old pirate like Simon Templar toy with the idea of writing just one more sonnet.

Not so Donna Maria, who sucked in her breath like an asthmatic vacuum cleaner, then let it whoosh out in a single explosive sentence, crackling with lightning and rumbling with volcanic tension. It was in dialect, of which Simon understood hardly a word, but its themes were abundantly clear from the intonation: shamelessness, disgracing a respectable family before a total stranger, and the basic depravity of the new generation. The thunderbolts sizzled around Gina’s tousled head, and she only smiled. Whatever other effect the Swiss finishing school might have had, it had certainly finished her awe of matriarchal dragons.

She turned the same smile on the Saint, and he basked in it.

“You must excuse me,” she said. “I did not know we had a visitor.”

“You must excuse me for being here,” he replied. “But I refuse to say I am sorry.”

She slipped leisurely into the cotton jacket which she had carried over her arm, while Donna Maria painfully forced herself to perform a belated introduction.

“My niece, Gina. This is Signor Templar from America.”

“Haven’t I seen you before?” Gina asked innocently, in perfect English.

“I didn’t think you’d recognize me,” he answered in the same language. “You looked right through me to the wall behind, as if I were a rather dirty window that somebody had forgotten to wash.”

“I’m sorry. But our rules here are very old-fashioned. It’s scandalous enough that I sometimes go into town alone. If I let myself smile back at anyone who hadn’t been properly introduced, I should be ruined for life. And even a nice Sicilian would get the wrong ideas. But now I’m glad that we have another chance.”

“Non capisco!” Donna Maria hissed.

“My aunt doesn’t speak English,” Gina said, and reverted to Italian. “Are you here for business or pleasure?”

“I was beginning to think it was all business, but since your uncle sent me here it has suddenly become a pleasure.”

“Not Uncle Alessandro? I am glad you know him. He has been so good to us here—”

“Gina,” interrupted the chatelaine, her voice as gentle as a buzz-saw cutting metal, “I am sure the gentleman is not interested in our family affairs. He is only having a little drink before he leaves.”

The maid returned from the house, opportunely, with a tray on which were bottles of vermouth, a bowl of ice, a siphon, and glasses.

“How nice,” Gina said. “I am ready for one myself. Let me pour them.”

Her aunt shot her a venomous glance which openly expressed a bitter regret that her niece was no longer at an age when she could be bent over a knee and disciplined properly. But the girl seemed quite oblivious to it, and the Dragon Queen could only glower at her back as she proceeded to pour and mix with quite sophisticated efficiency.

“Have you seen much of Palermo yet?” Gina asked, as if seeking a neutral topic out of respect for her guardian’s blood-pressure.

“Nothing much,” Simon said. “What do you think I should see?”

“Everything! The Cathedral, the Palatine Chapel, Zisa, Casa Professa — and you should drive out to Monreale, it is only a few kilometers, and see the Norman cathedral and cloisters.”

“I must do that,” said the Saint, with surprising enthusiasm for one who, in spite of his sobriquet, seldom included cathedrals and cloisters among his sightseeing objectives. “Perhaps you could come with me and tell me all about them.”

“I would like to—”

“My niece cannot accompany you,” Donna Maria rasped. “There are professional guides to do that.”

Gina opened her mouth as if to protest, then seemed to think better of it. Apparently she knew from experience that such battles could not be won by direct opposition. But she gazed thoughtfully at the Saint, biting her lip, as though inviting him to think of some way to get around or over the interdiction.

Simon raised his glass to the chaperone with a courteous “Salute!” and sipped it, wishing there had been more choice of beverage. His palate would never learn to accept the two vermouths as drinks in their own right, instead of as mere ghostly flavorings added to gin or bourbon respectively.

“I did not want to cause any trouble,” he said. “But it was Alessandro’s suggestion that Gina might like to show me around.”

Donna Maria glared at him sullenly — he could not decide whether she was more resentful at having to control an impulse to call him a liar, or at a disconcerting possibility that he might be telling the truth.

“I must look in my diary and see if there is any day when I can spare her,” she said finally. “If you will excuse me.”

She lurched to her feet and waddled into the house without waiting for confirmation.

“I’m afraid she doesn’t like me,” Simon remarked.

“It isn’t you in particular,” Gina said apologetically. “She hates practically everybody, and twice as much if they’re men. I sometimes think that’s what keeps her alive. She’s so pickled in her own venom that she’s probably indestructible and will still be here in another fifty years.”

“It’s funny there should be such a difference between her and her brother. Al is such a big-hearted guy.”

“That’s true! Do you know, he takes care of the whole family and pays all the bills. He sent me to school and everything. If it hadn’t been for him I don’t know what would have happened to us all. When my parents were killed in a car accident they didn’t have any insurance, and there was hardly any money in the bank. I was only seven at the time, but I remember people looking at the house and talk about selling it. Even Uncle Al was very sick just then and everyone thought he was going to die. But he got better and went to America, and soon he began sending back money. He’s been looking after us ever since. And yet he hardly ever comes near us. Aunt Maria says it may be because he feels we’d be embarrassed by remembering how much we owe him.”

The Saint lounged in his chair with long legs outstretched, sipping his drink perfunctorily and listening with the appearance of only casual interest; but under that camouflage his mind was ticking over like a computer, registering every word, correlating it with previous information, and reaching on towards what hypotheses might be derived from their multiple combinations. He had an extrasensory feeling that the answer to the Cartelli-Destamio riddle was close at hand, if he could only grasp it, or if one more link would bring it within reach...

And then the fragments that were starting to fit together were rudely pushed apart again by the voice that spoke behind him.

“Signore, it is getting late for you to return to the city.” Donna Maria was returning from her errand. “It would not be well-bred to send a friend of Alessandro’s away at such an hour. You will stay for dinner?”

Even more devastating than the astonishing reversal of her attitude was the expression that accompanied it. A ripple of life passed across her inflexible cheeks, and her bloodless lips curled back to expose a fearsome row of yellow fangs. For a moment Simon wondered if she was preparing to leap on him and rend him like a werewolf, or whether she was merely suffering the rictus of some kind of epileptic seizure. It was a second or two before it dawned on him what was really happening.

Donna Maria was trying to smile.

3

“Thank you. You are very kind,” said the Saint, making a heroic effort to overcome the shock of that horrendous sight.

Gina was more openly dumbfounded by the switch, and took a moment longer to recover.

“Well — I must get changed. Excuse me.”

She ran into the house.

“And I must give some orders to the servants.” Donna Maria’s face was positively haggard with the strain of being gracious. “Please make yourself comfortable for a few minutes. And help yourself to another drink.”

She withdrew again, leaving the Saint alone to digest the startling reversal of his reception.

And in another moment the maid reappeared, bearing a bottle of Lloyd’s gin which she added to the selection on the tray.

“Donna Maria thought you might prefer this,” she said, and retired again.

Simon lighted a cigarette and examined the bottle. It was new and unopened, to every appearance, and there had certainly not been time since Donna Maria’s change of attitude for it to have been doped or poisoned and cunningly re-sealed; so unless bottles of pre-hoked liquor were a standard item in stock at the Destamio hacienda there could be no risk in accepting it. In moderation... The Saint gratefully emptied the glass he had been nursing into a flower-pot and proceeded to concoct himself a very dry martini, feeling much like a prodigal son for whom the best barrel had been rolled out.

But deep inside him he felt an intangible hollowness which came from the tightening of nerves which were not nervous but only sharpening their sensitivity and readiness to whatever call might be suddenly made on them.

He could not cherish the beautiful illusion that after a life-time of notorious malevolence Donna Maria had chosen that evening to be struck as by lightning with remorse for her churlishness, and after a brief absence to commune with her soul had returned radiant and reformed to make amends for all her past unpleasantnesses. Or that his own handsome face and charming manners had broken through an obsidian crust to the soft heart that it encased. Some very practical reason had to be responsible for the alteration, and he could not make himself generous enough to believe that it was without ulterior motive.

The question remained: what motive?

The sun had descended behind the western hills, and purple shadows reached into the courtyard, deepening the dusty gray-green of the olive trees, and the first cool breeze drifted in from the sea. With the dusk, the house was not softened, but seemed to become even more stark and sinister. Somewhere in its depths a clock chimed with deep reverberant notes that made one think of the tolling of funeral bells.

As the hour struck, a door opened under the balcony at the far end of the terrace, and a wheelchair appeared with the promptitude of a cuckoo called forth by some horlogic mechanism. Simon watched in fascination as the maid wheeled it to the table opposite him and vanished again without a word. The occupant of the chair matched the building in senescence; in fact, he looked old enough to have built it himself.

“A lovely evening,” Simon ventured at last, when it became clear that any conversational initiative would have to come from him.

“Ah,” said the ancient.

It extended a withered and tremulous claw, not to shake hands, but towards the glasses on the table.

“What can I get you?” Simon asked.

“Ah.”

Simon made what he felt was an inspired compromise by pouring a half-and-half mixture of sweet and dry vermouths and preferring it.

“Ah,” said the venerable mummy, and, after taking a small sip, carefully spilled the rest on the ground.

“What did you think of Dante’s latest book?” Simon tried again.

“Ah,” said the patriarch wisely, and sat back to enjoy a slow chomping of toothless gums while he examined the Saint from the blinking moist caverns of his eyes.

The possibilities of small talk seemed to have been exhausted, and Simon was wondering whether to try making faces at his vis-a-vis and see whether that would evoke any livelier response, when he was saved from that decision by the return of Gina, now wearing something thin and simple that clung provocatively to the curves that he could reconstruct in clinical detail from memory.

“Has Uncle been bothering you?” she asked.

“Not at all,” said the Saint. “I just haven’t been able to find anything to talk about that he’s interested in. Or maybe my accent baffles him.”

“Povero Zio,” Gina said, smiling and patting the ancient’s hand. “I can’t even remember a time when he wasn’t old, but he was nice to me when I was a little girl. He used to tell me wonderful stories about how he marched with Garibaldi in his last campaign, and I’d forget to be worried about when we were going to be kicked out of our house.”

“Ah... ah,” said the old man, straightening up a little as if the words had sparked some long-forgotten memory; but it was a transient stimulus and he slumped back down again without producing his scintillating comment.

“Uncle — you can’t mean that he’s Alessandro’s brother?” Simon said.

“Oh, no. He’s really Uncle Alessandro’s uncle — and Donna Maria’s.”

As if answering to her name, the lady of the manse made another entrance. If she had changed her black dress for an evening model, it would have taken the eye of a couturier’s spy to tell the difference, but she had hung a gold chain around her neck and stuck a comb set with brilliants in her hair as evidence that she was formally dressed for dinner.

“You need not trouble yourself about Lo Zio, Signor Templar,” she said, with another labored display of her death’s-head smirk. “He hears very little and understands even less, but it makes him happy to be in our company. If you have finished your drink, we can go in to dinner.”

She led the way into the house, into a large dimly lighted hallway with an ornate wooden staircase that led up into a lofty void of darkness from which Simon would not have been surprised to see bats fly out. Gina pushed Lo Zio’s wheel-chair, and the Saint ingratiatingly gave her a hand. The dining room was almost as spooky as the hall, illuminated only by candles which hardly revealed the dingy ancestral paintings which looked down from the walls.

“I hope you won’t mind the dinner,” Gina said. “We never have guests, and all the cook knows is plain country food. I’m sure it isn’t the sort of thing you’re used to.”

“I’m sure it’ll be a pleasant change,” said the Saint politely.

His optimism was not misplaced. Home cooking is a much crumpled appellation in some parts of the world, too often synonymous with confections from the freezer and the can, but in Italy it still retains some of its original meaning, and occasionally in restaurants labeled “casalinga” one can find family-style cooking of a high order. But the literal authentic article, of course, is served only in private homes to relatives and close friends, and rarely is the foreigner allowed to penetrate this inner circle.

Nothing is purchased prefabricated by the traditional Italian housewife. If tomato sauce is needed, the tomatoes are pressed and the seeds removed by hand. The delicate doughs that enfold cannelloni and cappelletti are handrolled from a mixture of flour and egg with never a drop of water added. Fresh herbs and spices, grown in the kitchen garden, are added with the loving care that lifts a sauce from the pedestrian to the ambrosial. It goes without saying that in the south one must expect a liberal hand in the application of garlic and olive oil; but that was no disadvantage to the Saint, who was gifted with the digestion to cope happily with such robust ingredients.

Since the evening meal is customarily a light one, it began with olive schiacciate, a succulent salad of olives, celery, and peppers. After this came the Involtini alla siciliana, a toothsome filling in envelopes of gossamer-light paste smothered in a sauce so savory that good manners could only encourage the pursuit of every last drop with mops of the crusty brown home-baked bread. A large circulating carafe of young home-made red wine provided ample and impeccable liquid accompaniment; and after observing that everyone’s glass was filled from it, just as the same platters were presented to all of them to help themselves, except Lo Zio whose plate was tended by Gina sitting next to him, Simon was able to suppress all disturbing memories of the Borgias and give himself up to unstinting enjoyment of his gastronomic good fortune.

They made a strange quartet around the massive age-blackened table, and the medieval gloom around them and the echoing footsteps of the maid on the bare floor did little to encourage relaxation and conviviality, but by concentrating on Gina and the food he was able to maintain some harmless and totally unmemorable conversation, while wondering all the time why he had been invited to stay and when the reason would be revealed in some probably most unpleasant and distressing way.

“A most wonderful meal,” he complimented Donna Maria at the end of it. “I feel guilty for imposing on you, but I shall always be glad that I did.”

“You must not rush away. We will have coffee in the drawing room, and I will see if there is some brandy, if you would like that.”

She flashed her alligator smile as she rose; and Simon, steeled now not to recoil, smiled back.

“Perhaps I should refuse,” he said. “But that might suggest that you did not mean it, and I am sure you do.”

As he helped Gina to push the wheel-chair again, which somehow seemed to give them a sort of secret companionship, she said: “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but nobody ever broke her down like this before. Brandy, now!”

“Brandy, ah!” repeated Lo Zio, his head lifting like a buzzard’s and swivelling around.

“You should have given me a chance in that restaurant,” said the Saint. “If I could have persuaded you to stay for lunch, we might have had all the afternoon together.”

The drawing room had three electric lights of thrifty wattage which made it very little brighter than the dining room. The furniture was stiff and formal, a baroque mixture of uncertain periods, upholstered with brocades as faded as the heavy drapes. Donna Maria came in with a dusty bottle, followed by the maid with a tray of coffee.

“Would you be so kind as to open it, Signor Templar? I am sure you know how to handle such an old bottle better than we women.”

Simon manipulated the corkscrew with expert gentleness, but not without the thought that he might have been given the job as yet another move to reassure him. Certainly it enabled him to verify that this bottle, with all its incrustations of age, would have been even harder to tamper with than the gin which he had drunk before dinner. He deciphered with approval the name of Jules Robin under the grime on the scarred label, and poured generous doses into the snifters which were produced from some dark recess — not omitting one for Lo Zio, who showed some of his vague signs of human animation as he fastened his rheumy eyes on the bottle.

“Salute!” Simon said, and watched them all drink before he allowed his own first swallow to actually pass his lips.

It was a magnificent cognac, which had probably been lying in the cellar since the death of Gina’s father, and nothing seemed to have been done to turn it into a lethal or even stupefying nightcap.

Was all this hospitality, then, nothing but a stall to create time, during which Al Destamio might round up a few commandos and get them out to the mansion to capture the Saint or quietly mow him down?

Whatever the reason, he felt sure that Gina was not in on it. He looked again at her lovely radiant face, alight with the spontaneous pleasure of the kind of company which she could almost never have been permitted, and decided that he could lose nothing by testing just how far this astounding acceptance could be stretched.

“I am looking forward to seeing the local sights tomorrow, even though I have to do it with a commercial guide,” he said, and turned to Donna Maria. “Or now that you know me a little better, would you reconsider and let Gina accompany me?”

An observer who was unacquainted with the preceding circumstances would have assumed, at a glance, that Donna Maria was trying inconspicuously to swallow a live cockroach which she had carelessly sucked in with her brandy.

“Perhaps I was being too hasty,” she said. “Since you are such a close friend of Alessandro, there is really no reason for me to object. What are you most interested in?”

The resultant discussion of Sicilian antiquities continued this time with no contribution from Gina, whose eyes had become slightly glassy and her jaw slack, either from renewed bewilderment or from trepidation lest anything she interjected would change her aunt’s mind again.

Another refill of cognac was pressed on the not too resistant Saint, though curtly refused to Lo Zio, who having smacked his way through his first was plaintively extending his glass for more. But after that there was nothing left to stay for, short of asking if they had a spare room for the night.

“Tomorrow at ten, then, Gina,” he said, and stood up. “And I’ll tell Alessandro how nice all of you have been.”

The last remark was principally intended for the reigning tyrant of the establishment, but it scored first on Lo Zio, who must have been feeling some effects from his unaccustomed libations.

“Ah, Alessandro,” he said, as if some cobwebby relay had been tripped. “I told him. I warned him. Told him he should not go to Rome—”

“It is late, Lo Zio, and well past your bed time,” Donna Maria said hastily.

She whipped the wheel-chair around with a suddenness that had the old man’s head bobbing like a balloon on a string. The maid came scurrying in on a barked command, and whisked away the chair and its mumbling contents.

“Buona notte, signore,” Donna Maria said, with one more spasm of her overworked facial muscles, and the impression of it seemed to remain even after she had closed the front door, like the grin of some Sicilian-Cheshire cat.

Simon made the short walk to the driveway gate with his nerves as taut as violin strings, his ears straining, and his eyes darting into every shadow. But there was no warning scuff or stir to herald an onslaught by lurking assailants, no crack of a shot to make belated announcement of a bullet. He opened the inset door, flung it open, and leapt far through it in an eruptively connected series of cat-swift movements calculated to disconcert any ambush that might be waiting outside; but no attack came. An almost-full moon that was rising above the hills showed a road deserted except for his own car where he had left it, and the only sound was the thin shrill rasping of multitudinous nocturnal insects. Feeling a trifle foolish, he turned back and shut the little door, and then walked towards the Bugatti, making a wide swing out into the road around it, just in case someone was skulking on the side from which he would not have been expected to approach. But no one was.

Then he had not been detained in order to gain time to organize a bushwacking, it seemed...

But the instinct of an outlaw who had carried his life in his hands so often that his reflexes had adapted to it as a natural condition was not lulled into somnolence merely because logic seemed to have suspended the immediate need for it. If anything, it was left more on edge than ever, seeking the flaw in conclusions which did not jibe with intuition.

He climbed halfway into the driver’s seat and peered in search of the ignition lock. He located it and inserted the key; but as he raised his head again above the dashboard before switching on, his eye was caught by a blemish on the gleaming expanse of hood which did not belong at all on such a lovingly burnished surface.

Clearly revealed by the moonlight was the print of a greasy hand.

4

Simon very carefully withdrew the key, stepped down to the road again, and went around to examine the hood more closely. But the print seemed to have disappeared. Bending over until his face almost touched the metal, he sighted towards the radiator and found the mark again, a dull slur in the reflected moonlight.

A ghostly breath stirred the hairs on the nape of his neck as he realized how narrowly he might have missed that discovery. If he had come out a few minutes earlier or later, the moon would not have been striking the hood at the precise angle required to show it up. Or if he had not already been keyed to the finest pitch of vigilance, he might still have thought nothing of it. But now he could only remember how affectionately the garage owner had wiped the hood again after showing him the engine, and he knew with certainty that there could have been no such mark on it when he set out. He had not stopped anywhere on the way, to give anyone a chance to approach the machine before he parked it there. Therefore the mark had been made since he arrived, while he was enjoying Donna Maria’s hospitality.

With the utmost delicacy he manipulated the fastenings of the hood and opened it up. The pencil flashlight that he was seldom without revealed that the mammoth engine was still there, but with a new feature added that would have puzzled Signor Bugatti.

A large wad of something that looked like putty had been draped over the rear of the engine block and pressed into shape around it. Into this substance had been pushed a thin metal cylinder, something like a mechanical pencil, from which two slender wires looped over and lost themselves in the general tangle of electrical connections.

With surgically steady fingers the Saint extracted the metal tube, then gently and separately pulled the wires free from their invisible attachments. Deprived of its detonator, the plastic bomb again became as harmless as the putty it so closely resembled.

“This one almost worked, Al,” he whispered softly. “And if it had, I’d have had only myself to blame. I underestimated you. But that won’t happen again...”

There were some excellent fingerprints in the plastic material where the demolition expert had squeezed it into place, doubtless in all confidence that there would be nothing left of them to incriminate him. Taking care not to damage them, Simon peeled the blob off the engine and put it in the trunk, wedging it securely where it could not roll around when he drove.

He cranked up the engine and drove slowly and pensively back to Palermo, the impatient motor growling a basso accompaniment to his thoughts.

It was easy enough now to understand everything that had been puzzling before. Donna Maria’s first absence from the terrace had given her time to telephone Al Destamio on Capri and ask for confirmation of the alleged friendship. Al’s reaction could be readily imagined. He would already have learned of the failure of the first assassination attempt; and the revelation that the Saint had had the effrontery to head straight for the Destamio mansion and blarney his way in, instead of thankfully taking the next plane for some antipodean sanctuary, must have done wondrous things to his adrenalin production. The dinner invitation must have followed on his orders, to keep the Saint there long enough for another hatchet man to be sent there to arrange a more final and effective termination of the nuisance.

And this deduction made Donna Maria’s bit part somewhat more awesome. Throughout the dinner and crocodile congeniality, she had been setting him up like a clay pipe in a shooting gallery. That was why she could afford to give in so readily on the question of granting permission for Gina to go out with him the next day: she had been complacently certain that the Saint would not be around to hold her to the promise. Only one interesting speculation remained — had she known just how violently it had been intended to insure his non-appearance?

Simon tooled the big car in through the garage entrance of the hotel and slipped it into an empty stall. As the thunder of the engine died away, he was aware of an even heightened resentment.

It was bad enough to be continually sniped at himself, the perplexed target of an incomprehensible vendetta. But now these monsters had exposed the utter depths of their depravity by their willingness to destroy that historic treasure of a car merely in the process of putting a bomb under him.

It followed imperatively that no extra effort could be spared to insure that Al Destamio spent the most troubled night that could be organized for him. Even if the effort involved the prodigious hazards of trying to inaugurate a long-distance telephone communication against the obstacles of the hour and the antiquated apparatus available.

The phone in Simon’s room was apparently dead, and only a great deal of bopping on the button and some hearty thumps on the bell box succeeded in restoring it to a simulacrum of life. The resultant thin buzzing was presently interrupted by the yawning voice of the desk clerk, obviously resentful at being disturbed.

“I would like to call Capri,” said the Saint.

“It is not easy at night, signore. If you would wait until morning—”

“It would be too late. I want the call now.”

“Sissignore,” sibilated the clerk, in a tone of injured dignity.

There followed a series of rasping sounds, not unlike a coarse file caressing the edge of a pane of glass, followed by a voiceless silence. Far in the distance could be heard the dim rush of an electronic waterfall, and Simon shouted into it until another voice spiralled up from the depths. It was the night operator in Palermo, who was no more enthused about trying to establish a telephonic connection at that uncivilized hour than the hotel clerk had been. Too late Simon realized the magnitude of the task he had undertaken, but he was not going to back out now.

With grim politeness he acceded to obstructive demands for an infinitude of irrelevant information, of which the name and location of residence of the person he was calling and his own home address and passport number were merely a beginning, until the operator tired first and consented to essay the impossible.

The line remained open while the call progressed somewhat less precipitately than Hannibal’s elephants had crossed the Alps.

A first hazard seemed to be the water surrounding the island of Sicily. It could only have been in his imagination, but Simon had a vivid sensation of listening to hissing foam and crashing waves as the connection forced its way through a waterlogged cable, struggling with blind persistence to reach the mainland. The impression was affirmed when a mainland operator was finally reached and the watery noises died away to a frustrated background susurration.

For a few minutes the Palermo operator and this new link in the chain exchanged formalities and incidental gossip, and at last reluctantly came to the subject of Simon’s call. A mutual agreement was reached that, though the gamble was sure to fail, the sporting thing would be at least to try whether the call could be pushed any further. Both operators laughed hollowly at the thought, but switches must have been thrown, because a hideous grumbling roar like a landslide swallowing an acre of greenhouses rose up and drowned their voices.

Simon lighted his remaining cigarette, crumpled the empty pack, and made himself as comfortable as possible. The phone was beginning to numb his ear, and he changed to the other side.

There was more of the ominous crunching, periodically varying in timbre and volume, and after a long while the second operator’s voice struggled back to the surface.

“I am sorry, I have not been able to reach Naples. Would you like to cancel the call?”

“I would not like to cancel the call,” Simon said relentlessly. “I can think of no reason why you should not reach Naples. It was there this morning, and it must be there now, unless there has been another eruption of Mount Vesuvius.”

“I do not know about that. But all the lines to Naples are engaged.”

“Try again,” said the Saint encouragingly. “While we are talking someone may have hung up or dropped dead. Persevere.”

The operator mumbled something indistinguishable, which Simon felt he was probably better off for not hearing, and the background of crashings and inhuman groanings returned again. But after another interminable wait, persistence was rewarded by a new voice saying “Napoli.”

Reaching Capri from Naples was no worse than anything that had gone before, and it was with a justifiable thrill of achievement that Simon at last heard the ringing of Destamio’s phone through the overtones of din. Eventually someone answered it, and Simon shouted his quarry’s name at the top of his voice.

“Il Signore is busy,” came the answer. “He cannot be disturbed. You must call again in the morning.”

After all he had been through, the Saint was not going to be stopped there.

“I do not care how busy he is,” he said coldly. “You will tell him that this call is from Sicily, and I have news that he will want to hear.”

There was an explosive crackle as if the entire instrument at the other end had been shattered on a marble slab, and for a while Simon thought the servant had summarily disposed of the problem by hanging up; but he held on, and presently another voice spoke, with grating tones that even the telephone’s distortions could not completely disguise.

“Parla, ascolto!”

The Saint stubbed out the remains of his last cigarette and finally relaxed.

“Alessandro, my dear old chum, I knew you’d be glad to hear from me, even at this hour.”

“Who’s-a dat?”

“This is Simon Templar, Al, you fat gob of overcooked macaroni. Just calling to tell you that your comic-opera assassins have flunked again — and that I don’t want them trying any more. I want you to call them off, chum.”

“I dunno what ya talkin’ about, Saint.” There was a growing note of distress in the harsh voice as it assimilated the identity of the caller. “Maybe you drink too much wine tonight. Where you calling from?”

“From my hotel in Palermo, which I’m sure you can easily find. But don’t send any more of your stooges here to annoy me. The firework they planted in my car while Donna Maria was being so hospitable didn’t go off. But I found out a lot of interesting things during my visit, to add on to what I knew before. And I wanted to tell you that I’ve just put all this information on paper and deposited it in a place from which it will be forwarded to a much less accommodating quarter than your tame maresciallo here, if anything happens to me. So tell your goons to lay off, Al.”

“I don’t understand! Are you nuts?” blustered Destamio, almost hysterically. “What you tryin’ to do to me?”

“You’ll find out,” said the Saint helpfully. “And I hope your bank account can stand it. Meanwhile, pleasant dreams...”

He replaced the receiver delicately in its bracket, and then dropped the entire contraption into the wastebasket, where it whirred and buzzed furiously and finally expired.

As if on cue, there followed a light tapping on the door.

The Saint took his precautions about opening it. There was still the possibility that some of Destamio’s henchmen might be working on general instructions to scrub him — it would certainly take time for countermanding orders to circulate, even if the Mafia had also penetrated the telephone service. Until the word had had time to get around, he was playing it safe.

Marco Ponti entered, and eyed with mild surprise the gun that was levelled at his abdomen. Then he calmly kicked the door shut behind him.

“That is a little inhospitable,” he remarked. “And illegal too, unless you have an Italian license for that weapon.”

“I was going to ask you how to get one, the next time I saw you,” said the Saint innocently, and caused the weapon to vanish and be forgotten. “But I was not expecting you to call at such an hour as this, amico.”

“I am not being social. I wanted to hear how your visit turned out. And I have learned something that may be of value to you.”

“I would like one of your cigarettes while you give me your news. It may have some bearing on what I can tell you.”

“I hardly expect that,” Ponti said, throwing his pack of Nazionali on the table. “It is only that you gave me a name, and like a good policeman I have checked the records. Though you may sneer — and I sometimes sneer myself at the middenheaps of records we keep — occasionally we find a nugget in the slag. I searched for the name you gave me, the murdered bank clerk, Dino Cartelli. I found nothing about him except the facts of his death. But I also found the record of another Cartelli, his elder brother, Ernesto, who was killed by the Fascisti.”

Simon frowned.

“Now I’m out of my depth. Why should that be worth knowing?”

“In his early days, Il Duce had a campaign to wipe out the Mafia — perhaps on the theory that there was only room for one gang of crooks in the country, and he wanted it to be his gang. So for a while he shot some of the small fry and hung others up in cages for people to laugh at. Later on, of course, the Mafia joined forces with him, they were birds of a feather — but that is another story. At any rate, in one of the early raids, Ernesto Cartelli shot it out with the Blackshirts, who proved to be better shots.”

“Do you mean,” Simon ventured slowly, “that since Ernesto was a mafioso, his brother Dino may have been one too?”

“It is almost certain — though of course it cannot be proved. But the Mafia is a closed society, very hard to enter, and when anyone is a member it usually means that his other close male relatives are members too.”

The Saint’s eyes narrowed in thought as he inhaled abstractedly and deeply from the strong Italian cigarette — an indiscretion which he instantly regretted.

“So the Mafia keeps coming back into the picture,” he said. “Al Destamio is in it, now it seems that Dino Cartelli was probably in it, whether or not they are the same person; and they have me at the top of their list of people to be dispensed with. I knew you would be glad to hear that they tried again tonight to put me out of the way.”

“Not: at the Destamio house?”

“Just outside it. If they had succeeded, it might even have broken some windows.”

Simon told the story of his macabre evening, and the fortunate discovery that had not quite ended it.

“And there are some wonderful fingerprints in the plastic, which is still intact,” he concluded.

“That is splendid news,” Ponti said delightedly. “These Mafia scum can usually get out of anything by producing armies of false witnesses, but it is another matter to witness away fingerprints. At least this will tell us who placed the bomb, and he may lead us to someone else.”

“I was sure you would be happy about my narrow escape from death,” said the Saint ironically.

“My dear friend, I am overjoyed. May you have many more such close scrapes, and each time bring back evidence like that. You did bring it back, of course?”

Simon grinned, and tossed him the car keys.

“You will find it in the trunk. Leave the keys under the front seat, they will be safe enough there. I think Alessandro will take time to think out his next move.”

“I hope he does not take too long,” said the detective. “But whenever you want to get in touch with me again, I will give you a number to call.” He scribbled on a page from his notebook, tore it out, and handed it to Simon. “This is not the questura, but a place which can be trusted with any messages you leave, and which can always find me very quickly.” He turned and opened the door, with unconcealed impatience to get to the garage and the evidence there. “Goodnight, and good luck.”

“The same to you,” said the Saint.

He locked and bolted the door again, just on general principles, but he went to sleep as peacefully as a child. It had been a full and merry day, and the morrow was likely to be even livelier. Which only sustained his contented conviction that the world was a beautiful place to have fun in.