Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 10

  “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 his be taken.”

  “Perhaps he had a premonition about when he would have his picture taken with a number unde
r 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’s, 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.