Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 2

  That is, he thought so until the next morning.

  Breakfasting in his room, he was trying to utilize the exercise of reading an Italian newspaper to divert his attention from the vile taste of the coffee, without much success in spite of the normal quota of international crises and local scandals. Until he reached a small item low down on the second page.

  “TURISTA INGLESE TROVATO ASSASSINATO,” said the headline.

  A silent relay closed in his brain, setting off a peal of soundless alarm bells in his inner ear, even before he came to the second paragraph, where the murdered man was identified as James Euston, of London.

  2

  A number of reasons have been suggested at different times for Simon Templar’s superficially incongruous title of The Saint, and there may be a kernel of truth in all of them, while not one is the complete answer. The sobriquet is a derivative and outgrowth of so many contributory and contradictory factors attempting to crystallize the supreme paradox of the man himself. But one truly sanctified quality which had never been imputed to him was a forgiving disposition.

  James Euston had never been his friend, and probably never could have been. With all his possibly sterling virtues, Mr. Euston had the essential ingredients of a crashing bore. His demise would be no great loss to anyone, except perhaps his nearest kin, if he had any. And Simon had no personal obligation to protect him, beyond a basic civilized responsibility which he had already more than fulfilled. Yet by not taking the Englishman’s earnestness seriously enough, and blithely ascribing the gangsterish reflexes of Not-Dino and his bully boy to an almost amusing coincidence, he had let Euston go bumbling off to a death which might easily have been averted. He had been made an accomplice, however unwittingly, in the slaughter of a harmless innocent, and even if his involvement had been unintentional, he could not forgive his own blindness. And therefore he could not forgive the men who had profited by it.

  Which meant especially the one who must after all have been Dino Cartelli.

  That at least was a viable assumption. In the light of what Simon had witnessed the day before, it seemed as if James Euston’s vacation could only have been so violently terminated because he had identified Cartelli. If it had only been an accidental and unfounded resemblance, Euston would not have had to be killed. The newspaper, of course, gave robbery as the obvious motive. Euston’s corpse, with its head beaten in and its clothing emptied of cash, had been found in an alley a few blocks from his hotel: it seemed self-evident that he had had the bad luck to be waylaid by footpads on his way home. And such a coincidence could not be ruled out—though all the Saint’s instincts, belatedly sharpened as they had now become, rejected it with hoots of derision. To him, the aroma of double-distilled skulduggery had been unmistakably added to the other noisome and omniprevalent effluvia of Naples.

  Simon settled on those conclusions while he showered and dressed, and when he walked out into the furnace blast of Neapolitan heat it was not for a sightseeing stroll.

  It was still too early for lunch, a meal which in Italy never begins before one o’clock and when combined with a necessary nap to aid digestion of the pasta and vino can extend into the late afternoon. But at Le Arcate some torpid waiters were sweeping and dusting and setting out arrays of silver and napery in readiness for the activity to come. Without too much prompting, one of them was persuaded to retire to the gloomy back quarters in search of the head waiter.

  In a soiled collarless shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and still in need of his first shave, this was a much less august personage than he appeared on duty, but he accepted the off-hour summons with professionally reserved aplomb. He shook hands easily when Simon extended his, and there was no change of expression when he felt the folded bill in his palm. The paper vanished with the dexterity of many such passings, and he tilted his head with grave attention to learn what small service had been purchased.

  “If you remember, I had lunch here yesterday,” Simon began.

  “Sissignore. I remember.”

  “At the same time, there was a man here named Dino Cartelli.”

  “The man who sat down with you for a few minutes? I thought he was English.”

  “He was. I’m talking about another customer.”

  The head waiter’s forehead wrinkled above a perfectly blank face.

  “Cartelli? I do not know that name.”

  Unless the man was a consummate actor, he must have been telling the truth, and the Saint would usually back his own judgment against any modern electronic substitute. If it was not letting him down, then, Cartelli had not merely been reluctant to be recognized: he had a new name now and did not even want to be reminded of the old.

  “An Italian,” Simon said. “In a light gray suit. Heavy, almost bald, with a deep rough voice. He was sitting with a younger man at that table there.”

  This time he had even less need of a lie detector, as the man’s eyes swivelled in the direction of the pointing finger and swivelled back again to focus on the Saint with a pronounced diminution of cordiality.

  “I do not remember such a man, signore. You realize, Napoli is a big city, and this is a busy restaurant. It is impossible to know everyone. Mi rincresce molto.”

  He escorted Simon to the door, multiplying his protestations of regret, but not saddened enough by his inability to help to be moved to refund the money that had already settled in his pocket.

  He would need absolution for perjury before he partook of another Mass, but Simon realized that it would have been a waste of time to discuss this with him.

  Outside, the doorman, not yet gorgeous in his coat of office, was stolidly sweeping the night’s debris from the stretch of sidewalk over which he reigned. The Saint approached him and said, “Do you remember a man who was here for lunch yesterday—rather stout, bald, with a grating voice, in a gray suit?”

  Folding money between Simon’s fingertips promised gratitude in advance, and the doorman’s hand started an automatic move towards it before the full import of the question drilled into his head. With comprehension came reaction, and his fingers jerked back as if from the touch of a hot iron. He glanced apprehensively over his shoulder, and a drowned-fish expression washed over his face.

  “Non mi ricordo,” he gabbled. “We have so many customers, I forget all of them.”

  He returned to his sweeping with far more industrious concentration than he had shown before.

  Simon looked where the doorman’s eyes had swerved, and saw the head waiter still lurking in the doorway. With a shrug of resignation, he turned and strode away.

  The visual impression that he had given up lasted only until he rounded the next corner. Then immediately his stride lengthened and quickened as he circled the block to approach the restaurant from the opposite side. This was somewhat easier begun than accomplished, for there are few such things as “blocks” in the American sense in any Italian city—there are only chunks and gobbets of buildings of all ages and stages of decrepitude, intersected by a completely haphazard network of streets and stairways that would seem to have been laid out by a jigsaw puzzle fan rather than a cartographer. Calling upon his sense of direction for a prodigious effort, the Saint managed to achieve his purpose with an accuracy which, in the Africa of H. Rider Haggard, might have earned him the cognomen of Lord of the Labyrinths, or He-Who-Finds-All-Crooked-Paths. In a surprisingly short time he had completed the meandering detour and was leaning against the wall of the adjacent building, out of sight of anyone who did not step all the way out of the restaurant, as the doorman pushed his broom towards that side with the normal apathy which it had not taken long to restore.

  “Amico,” said the Saint softly, “would you like to try your memory again?”

  His voice froze the pavement sanitizer into immobility. Then, with painful slowness, the man’s eyes travelled all the way up the Saint’s figure from the shoes to the smiling face.

  “Now don’t go and have a stroke,” Simon urged him kindl
y. “Nobody inside can see me, and they need never know I came back. Just prod those brain cells and try to make them give out the name of the gentleman I was asking about.”

  “Non capisco,” said the doorman hoarsely, and resumed a pretense of sweeping that would scarcely have convinced a five-year-old microcephalic.

  The axiom that money talks has its exceptions, but something told the Saint that he had found one individual who would not be permanently deaf to sufficient shouting. This time it was a ten-thousand-lire note that he produced and unfolded to the size of a small bedsheet; it shone goldenly in the sun. He refolded it to a small wad and let it drop. The doorman’s eyes followed it covetously as it fell, until Simon’s foot covered it.

  “Do you understand that?” Simon asked. “It would be so easy for you to sweep it up.”

  “No!” was the mechanical answer, but the emphasis was dwindling.

  “At least you might tell me somewhere else to ask. The hotel where he stays, perhaps. The driver of the taxi they took from here might have told me that, if I found the right driver. No one will know it was you.”

  Beads of sweat broke out on the man’s swarthy face as fear fought with avarice. Simon took out a second ten-thousand-lire bill and folded it carefully like the first.

  “Excelsior!” gasped the doorman huskily.

  Simon gazed at him for a long moment, and, when the man failed to unfurl a banner with a strange device and head for the nearest mountain, it became clear that the speaker was not planning to emulate the eccentric youth in the poem but was simply uttering the name of the plushest hotel in Naples.

  “Grazie,” said the Saint, releasing the second bill, and turned away without waiting to watch it and its predecessor being raked briskly into the little pile of jetsam that the portinaio had been maneuvering towards the frontage of the establishment next door.

  To some investors it might have seemed inadequate yield for the outlay, since it would not have taken any Sherlock Holmes to deduce that a citizen dressed and bedecked like Cartelli would not be likely to bunk in some obscure pensione, but to the Saint it was worth it for the time that could be saved from canvassing alternative palazzi—not to mention eliminating the possibility that he resided in an apartment or house of his own. Now, provided the information was true, Simon could make a more positive move.

  A green-and-black cab followed after him when he turned into the Via A Falcone, while the driver expounded the advantages of his cool upholstery and dazzling speed over the dusty travail of walking under the noonday sun. Simon succumbed with only token resistance and climbed in, but he was not so blinded by the shady interior that he failed to notice the three hundred lire already registered on the meter, nor too proud to draw the driver’s attention to the undoubted oversight. After a brief verbal brannigan during which certain special charges were mentioned, so special indeed that they could not be found in the quadrilingual list of complicated tariffs posted inside the cab, a decision was reached that perhaps the meter should be readjusted, and the chauffeur launched his vehicle through the lunatic traffic with an emotional abandon which suggested that only homicide or suicide would salve his injured feelings.

  Simon called a premature halt to the ride at a leather-goods shop which he spotted within sight of the Hotel Excelsior. There he bought a handsome gold-bound pigskin cigar case, making no more attempt to stint on quality than a man with his quarry’s evident tastes would have done. To him it was only another investment, like the solvent which had opened the doorman’s impermanently sealed lips.

  He took the case and the same attitude to the Sale e Tabacchi a few doors farther on. On some other occasion it might have amused him to engage the tobacconist in a long and profound debate over the selection of a package of salt, which for reasons which may remain eternally obscure to non-Italians is a monopoly of the same government-licensed stores. But that morning he was driven by too much impatience to waste time on anything but the purchase of two of the very best cigars, and the shopkeeper who sold them at the inflated official price never knew what torment he had been spared.

  Simon put the cigars in the case and kept the case in his hand as he entered the ornate lobby of the Excelsior, and located the desk of the concierge.

  “I believe this belongs to one of your guests,” he said. “Would you see that he gets it?”

  The attendant examined the case which Simon had laid on the counter, with the olympian detachment befitting his office, which is believed by all concierges to be only slightly inferior to that of the managing director.

  “Do you know which one?” he inquired, with a subtle suggestion that his responsibility covered not merely thousands but tens of thousands, and that anyone who did not realize it was probably a peasant.

  Simon shook his head.

  “I’m afraid I don’t. I just happened to see him getting into a cab, and heard him tell the driver to come here, and then I saw the case on the ground. I picked it up and yelled at him, but the cab was driving off and he didn’t hear.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Heavy set—about sixty—a little gray hair, but mostly bald—wearing a very fancy gray silk suit—diamond pin in his tie—star sapphire cuff-links—a gold ring with a huge emerald…”

  The functionary, who like all his brethren of that unique European order could be counted on to know everyone who had a room in the caravanserai during his tenure, and almost as much about their activities as God, listened with a concentration that progressed from the condescendingly labored to the tentatively perspicacious to the final flash of connection.

  “Ah yes! I think you mean Signore Destamio.”

  The Saint’s pause was imperceptible.

  “Not—Carlo Destamio?”

  “No. The name is Alessandro Destamio.” The case disappeared under the counter. “I will take care of it for him.”

  “Now, just a minute,” Simon said amiably. “Why not call his room and ask if he did lose a cigar case? I didn’t actually see him drop it, you know. It might have been lying there all the time.”

  “I cannot ask him at once, sir. He left yesterday afternoon.”

  “Oh, did he?” Simon did not bat an eyelid. “That’s too bad. It was yesterday when I picked it up, of course, but I’ve been too busy to come by before this. Where did he go?”

  “He did not tell me, sir.”

  It was apparent that the concierge did not warm to that type of interrogation, from the darkening of his face which was quickly masked with a sneer.

  “I will ask him when he comes back, sir. He is not a tourist—he keeps his suite here all the time. If you would like to leave your name and address, I will send you back the case if it does not belong to him.”

  And, the impeccable manner implied, if there’s any question of a reward, don’t worry, I’ll see that you get it; you probably need it.

  “Don’t bother,” said the Saint airily. “If it turns out not to be his, you keep it. Just be careful how you light the cigars, in case some practical joker planted the whole thing.”

  It was not, he felt, an entirely discreditable exit, and it left interesting vistas for future speculation.

  Besides which, the visit had produced all that he had any right to expect, if not more: a name.

  Alessandro Destamio.

  3

  A hard core of literate Americans who can still read the printed word when they get their eyes un-gummed from the nearest television set would be capable of distinguishing the name of Alessandro Destamio from all the synonyms who have gone down in windrows before the movie cameras. It was a name that had become familiar through much repetition in news reports and popular articles, even to a vast number of people who still had only the vaguest idea of what he actually did. Al Destamio was a member of “The Syndicate,” a nebulous and to most readers still semi-mythical organization which controlled all the lucrative rackets in the United States and a shocking percentage of local politicians. He had not been one of its ch
ief executives, at the rarified elevation of a Luciano or a Costello, but he was at least what might be called a minor cabinet minister—one of those names which can be regularly flagellated by columnists without fear of libel suits, which are intermittently rousted by federal officers, and which nevertheless appear seldom or never on a roster of penitentiary inmates, and when they do it is usually because of some technical flaw in their income tax returns.

  Al Destamio, Simon clearly recalled, had been one of those unlucky ones a few years before, and had been deported back to his native land after a year’s cure in Leavenworth which only cost the US Government a few thousand dollars more than he was already alleged to have short-changed them.

  And yet, back here at home, he was apparently suffering from no shortage of pin-money, and his aura could still inspire terror or loyal compliance among restaurant and hotel employees. An unappreciative Uncle Sam might have given Alessandro the boot, but back in his homeland he was manifestly not washed up. Far from it. In fact, he seemed to command a respect which might have been envied by the Prodigal Son.

  At this point the Saint felt that some reliable local briefing on such mysteries might be helpful. Unfortunately there was not a single resident of that city in his slim but strategically indexed address book. Then he recollected that his old friend Giulio Trapani kept a villa at Sorrento, which couldn’t be more than a couple of hours away, to which he retreated for a vacation every summer. Simon could find nothing in the telephone book which he consulted in his garage, and decided at once it would be faster to drive there and conduct inquiries on the spot than to do battle with the Information Service of the Italian telephone system. In less time than he could have initiated a phone call, he was in his car and heading for the famous Amalfi Drive.