Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Read online

  THE ADVENTURES OF THE SAINT

  Enter the Saint (1930), The Saint Closes the Case (1930), The Avenging Saint (1930), Featuring the Saint (1931), Alias the Saint (1931), The Saint Meets His Match (1931), The Saint Versus Scotland Yard (1932), The Saint’s Getaway (1932), The Saint and Mr Teal (1933), The Brighter Buccaneer (1933), The Saint in London (1934), The Saint Intervenes (1934), The Saint Goes On (1934), The Saint in New York (1935), Saint Overboard (1936), The Saint in Action (1937), The Saint Bids Diamonds (1937), The Saint Plays with Fire (1938), Follow the Saint (1938), The Happy Highwayman (1939), The Saint in Miami (1940), The Saint Goes West (1942), The Saint Steps In (1943), The Saint on Guard (1944), The Saint Sees It Through (1946), Call for the Saint (1948), Saint Errant (1948), The Saint in Europe (1953), The Saint on the Spanish Main (1955), The Saint Around the World (1956), Thanks to the Saint (1957), Señor Saint (1958), Saint to the Rescue (1959), Trust the Saint (1962), The Saint in the Sun (1963), Vendetta for the Saint (1964), The Saint on TV (1968), The Saint Returns (1968), The Saint and the Fiction Makers (1968), The Saint Abroad (1969), The Saint in Pursuit (1970), The Saint and the People Importers (1971), Catch the Saint (1975), The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (1976), Send for the Saint (1977), The Saint in Trouble (1978), The Saint and the Templar Treasure (1978), Count On the Saint (1980), Salvage for the Saint (1983)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2014 Interfund (London) Ltd.

  Foreword, Publication History, and Author Biography © 2014 Ian Dickerson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477842966

  ISBN-10: 1477842969

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  There is no…

  CHAPTER ONE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR’S LUNCH WAS DELAYED AND HIS WARDROBE SUFFERED FOR IT

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  CHAPTER TWO: HOW ALESSANDRO DESTAMIO MADE A BID, AND MARCO PONTI TOLD STORIES

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  CHAPTER THREE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR HIRED A MUSEUM PIECE, AND GINA DESTAMIO BECAME AVAILABLE

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  CHAPTER FOUR: HOW THE SAINT WENT TO A GRAVEYARD AND DON PASQUALE MADE A PROPOSAL

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  CHAPTER FIVE: HOW SIMON TEMPLAR WALKED IN THE SUN, AND DRANK FROM VARIOUS BOTTLES

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  CHAPTER SIX: HOW THE SAINT ENJOYED ANOTHER REUNION AND MARCO PONTI INTRODUCED REINFORCEMENTS

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  CHAPTER SEVEN: HOW THE FIREWORKS WENT OFF AND CIRANO TURNED UP HIS NOSE

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

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  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

  THE SAINT CLUB

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original edition and includes vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation that might differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, allowing only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  I must have been around the age of ten when I first discovered this book. It wasn’t the first Saint book I ever read, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but this one held a certain attraction for me because the edition I came across summed up the story in five words: the Saint versus the Mafia.

  I was young and impressionable. I knew about the Saint of the 1930s, and I knew at some stage he would evolve into Roger Moore and subsequently Ian Ogilvy but still, one man—the Saint—versus the Mafia; five words that held so much promise, everything else got abandoned while I read this book.

  I loved it. It was everything a Saint novel should be: action, adventure, humor, style…But perhaps noted reviewer Anthony Boucher of the New York Times said it best when he reported that “All the old vigor and color is still here. All the grand sweep of adventurous narrative, all the humor and the absurd polysyllables, and the good food and wine—everything that makes Simon Templar such a superb hero of romance.”

  Sadly this book now usually gets overlooked in favor of the TV adaptation and subsequent film edit that starred Roger Moore and Ian Hendry. And whilst I wouldn’t want to denigrate that production in any way, shape, or form, I have to say the book is better. Because this is the Saint of your imagination, a more ruthless Saint, a swashbuckling devil-may-care adventurer out for justice. Don’t get me wrong, Roger Moore did a grand job as the Saint, but whenever anyone asks me who my favorite Saint is, it’s the one in my head when I read the books.

  As a Saint adventure this stands rightly and proudly alongside many of the classics from the 1930s and ’40s.

  —Ian Dickerson

  There is no doubt that the Mafia is one of the principal causes of the misery weighing on the population in Sicily. Whenever there is an offense to the law, one hears repeated: “That is an affair of the Mafia.”

  The Mafia is that mysterious feeling of fear which a man celebrated for crime and strength imparts to the weak. The mafioso can do what he likes because, out of fear, no one will denounce him. He carries forbidden weapons, incites to duels, stabs from behind, pretends to forgive offenses so as to settle them later. The first canon of the Mafia is personal vengeance.

  We must note that there are families in which the traditions of the Mafia are passed on from father to son, as in the physical order congenital illnesses are inherited. Also, there are mafiosi in every walk of life, from the baron to the worker in the sulphur mines.

  Luigi Berti

  Prefect of Agrigento

  1875

  CHAPTER ONE:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR’S LUNCH WAS DELAYED AND HIS WARDROBE SUFFERED FOR IT

  1

  It was the pleasant pause after the antipasto when the healthy appetite, only slightly assuaged by the opening course, rests in happy anticipation of good things to come. The Rosa del Vesuvio was cool and light on Simon Templar’s tongue, and for a few rare minutes in his adventurous life he prepared to surrender to whatever gastronomic pleasures Naples might provide, and tried not to think of certain other distractions for which that city is also somewhat notorious. Somewhere behind him, in the cavernous depths of Le Arcate, the restaurant where he sat, a lobster was leaving the humble ranks of the crustacea and being ushered into the realm of great art in the guise of Aragosta alla Vesuvio. This was a moment to be savored and treasured to the full.

  Therefore the loud and angry voice which suddenly disturbed his peaceful mood was a gross and egregious
intrusion.

  “Go away!” it snarled. “I don’t know you!” Simon turned a little in his chair for better observation of the tableau, which he had quite disinterestedly noticed as it developed.

  The source of the grating voice sat a couple of tables away, a man in at least his late fifties, whose paunchy build was well masked by some superb tailoring in pearl-gray raw silk. Under the coat was a shirt of the finest chambray, clinched at the throat with a hand-painted tie nailed by a diamond pin and at the wrists with cuff-links of ten-carat star sapphires. On one highly manicured finger he wore a massive gold ring, which served to frame a cabochon emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg. But in spite of all this expensive elegance, his face was completely nondescript, looking as if it had been roughly thrown together in clay by a rather unskillful sculptor as a base to model a proper portrait on. All its features were untidy except the lipless slit of the mouth and the sparse border of carefully barbered hair plastered down around the gleamingly bald dome.

  His companion was perhaps twenty years younger and dressed at less than one-twentieth the cost, with broad shoulders and curly black hair and the looks of any untravelled spinster’s conception of a Venetian gondolier, somewhat gone to seed. Intellectually they seemed to have even less in common, for they had hardly exchanged half a dozen words while they were under Simon’s indifferent attention. They had finished their meal and were sipping coffee when the third of the dramatis personae had arrived.

  This one was as obviously English as he was a gentleman. His flannel bags and Harris tweed jacket were of unmistakable origin, and the act of wearing them in Naples in mid-summer proved that their owner, conditioned by damper and chillier climes, stubbornly regarded them as the only correct holiday wear for any country. The cut and texture of the cloth, as well as the hand-rubbed glaze on the conservatively laced shoes, indicated a man of means and good taste within rigidly traditional limits. Yet this was the individual who had, apparently, committed the frightfully un-British solecism of annoying a total stranger.

  He had been strolling past the terrace, gazing all around like any tourist, when he had had a delayed reaction, stopped, turned, stared, hesitated, and finally turned in to address the putty-faced plutocrat who had responded so uncivilly.

  “But, Dino!” stammered the tourist, with acute embarrassment heightening the color of his naturally ruddy complexion. “I know it’s a long time ago, but don’t you remember me?”

  “What is this Dino?” The answering growl had an American accent that was incurably Italian at the same time. “I don’t know no Dino. Don’t bother me.”

  “I’m Jimmy Euston,” persisted the Englishman, struggling to hold on to his temper and his dignity. “Have you forgotten Palermo? The bank? And that scar on your chin—”

  The seated man’s fingers moved involuntarily to an inconspicuous white cicatrice on the side of his jaw.

  “You’re crazy with the heat,” he said. “Beat it, before I get mad!”

  “Now look here, Dino—”

  The response was no more than a flicker of a finger, a fractional movement of the head, but it brought the other man at the table smoothly to his feet. He grasped the Englishman by the arm, and what happened next would have been missed by any spectator but Simon.

  Euston’s mouth opened soundlessly, and his red face became white. He bent forward, attacked by a sudden spasm. Simon, to whom such tactics were as familiar as elementary drill to a sergeant, recognized at once what had happened: under cover of the victim’s body and his own, the curly-haired one had delivered a short wicked jab to the solar plexus.

  There was more to come. The goon’s arm drew back again, and the cheap striped suiting wrinkled over a bulge of powerful muscles. Once more the contraction came that would send the arm forward again with enough force to crack a rib.

  Except that this time the conclusion failed to materialize. If a steel vise anchored to a stone pillar had suddenly appeared and clamped home around the elbow, the arm would have been no more firmly fixed. With shocked incredulity the goondolier turned and gaped at the browned fingers that locked casually on his arm and rendered it immobile. From there his gaze travelled up over the broad chest and sinewy neck to the intruder’s face, the tanned face of a buccaneer with blue eyes that laughed and yet were colder than an arctic sea.

  “That’s very naughty,” Simon remarked.

  If it had not been for the tenseness of imminent explosion, they would have made an almost comic trio, joined arm to arm like three convivial friends about to burst into song. But there was a far from convivial expression in the yellowed and bloodshot stare of the man whom Simon held, a darkening menace that brought a hopeful smile to Simon’s lips.

  “Try it on me, chum,” he invited softly. “Try anything—and I promise you’ll wake up in hospital.”

  “Basta!” grumbled the man who denied being Dino. “They must be from the same nut-house. Let’s get outa here.”

  In an instant the threatened eruption was dissipated. Obediently the bodyguard released Euston, and turned to pull the table aside for his patron. Simon let him go, a trifle reluctantly, but reflecting that what might have been a delightful brawl would probably have been broken up by spoilsport policemen and very likely resulted in his Aragosta getting cold while they conducted the post-mortem.

  A banknote fluttered down between the coffee cups, and the foppish slob turned his back and walked away, followed by his two-legged dog, and Simon shrugged and looked at Mr. Euston again. The elderly Englishman’s face was still blanched, and beaded with perspiration from the effects of the single cruel blow he had taken.

  “Sit down at my table for a minute,” Simon said, guiding him in that direction even while he spoke. “Have a drop of wine.” He poured a glass. “Or something stronger, if you feel like it. That was quite a dirty poke you took.”

  “Thank you. I’ll be all right in a jiffy.”

  Color returned slowly to the other’s face while he sipped—a little too much, perhaps, Simon realized, as it ripened towards the masculine cousin of a blush. Mr. Euston had not only suffered a public humiliation, but he found himself indebted to someone to whom he had not even been introduced.

  “My name’s Euston,” he mumbled unnecessarily. “Jolly decent of you to come to the rescue, Mr.—”

  Alternative replies flashed through the circuits of Simon Templar’s mind with an electronic speed developed from much similar experience, to be weighed and compared and chosen from according to the circumstances. He could give his real name, and risk a recognitive “Not the chap they call The Saint? The Robin Hood of Modern Crime? Well, bless my soul!” and so forth. Or he could give one of the aliases to which he had become sentimentally attached—so much so that even some of them ran a fifty-fifty chance of recognition in certain circles. Or he could improvise a new identity—a creative effort which the present situation might hardly justify…So quickly that no one would even have noticed any hesitation, he selected the middle course.

  “Tombs,” he said, and won the toss-up gamble. “Sebastian Tombs.” It struck no spark from James Euston. “Think nothing of it. But next time you make a mistaken identification, it might be a good idea not to insist on it too hard.”

  “But it wasn’t a mistake,” Euston said, mopping his brow. “I’ll swear he was Dino Cartelli, a chap I worked with in Sicily before the war. I was training for the foreign department of the City and Continental then, and a year at their branch in Palermo was part of the course. Dino worked next to me, and we were fairly good friends. Except for the time when he got that scar.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I gave it to him. It was a difference of opinion, Latin temperament and all that, over some girl. He opened a knife and I had to hit him. I wasn’t an amateur champion or anything like that, but my signet ring cut him.”

  Simon’s interested regard took a quizzical slant.

  “Well, that might account for why he didn’t see you as a long-lost buddy.�
�

  “Oh, no, we didn’t start a vendetta. The girl ran off with somebody else and left us both feeling silly. We apologized to each other and made up, and we were still good friends again when I was sent to another post. And yet now he not only pretends he doesn’t know me, but he—or the fellow with him—they behave like gangsters!”

  “They did seem to have some of the mannerisms,” Simon admitted thoughtfully. “Are you absolutely certain you couldn’t have been wrong?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “After all those years, even a thing like a small scar—”

  “I’m positive it was Cartelli, and still more so after hearing his voice. I used to tease him about sounding like a frog instead of a Caruso. No; it only shows you,” said Mr. Euston, taking a brooding refuge in one of the cardinal tenets of a true-blue Briton, “you never really know where you are with foreigners.”

  This line of thought was punctuated by the arrival of the lobster that Simon had been awaiting, mounted on a wheeled trolley, attended by a retinue of waiters, and trailing clouds of elysian fragrance. He made a hospitable gesture.

  “Would you care to join me? We can share this while they fix another one.”

  Mr. Euston, however, seemed to feel that he had already shared more than enough confidences for such an informal acquaintance. He pushed his chair back and climbed hurriedly to his feet.

  “It’s very kind of you, Mr. Tombs, but I’ve already imposed on you too much. Besides, I don’t think I could eat anything for a while.” He pulled out his wallet and extracted a card. “If you’re ever in London and I can do anything for you, please give me a ring. And again, thanks awfully for your help.”

  He pumped Simon’s hand vigorously, turned, and marched firmly away and out of Simon’s world for ever, and with a shrug Simon dismissed the encounter from his mind and devoted to the aragosta the whole-hearted attention which it deserved. Mr. Euston’s enlargements on the theme of the nasty surprises which could befall anyone who ventured outside the counties and clans of Albion might have provided a fascinating accompaniment to lunch, but not so much that to be deprived of it would impair his appetite. As for the incident that had brought them together, Simon was still half-inclined to write it off as a simple case of human error. The most interesting feature of it was that Euston had had the bad luck to pick on a character who had all the earmarks of having spent some time in the USA in associations which are not highly approved of by the Immigration Service.