Vendetta for the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The matriarch drew up her dumpy figure with pride.

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

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

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

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

  “Sta zitto!” shrieked Donna Maria unavailingly.

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

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

  “I tell the truth,” Cartelli said harshly.

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

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

  “About this?” he asked.

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

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

  At last he looked up, with a smile.

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

  Gina gave a little gasp.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Do you think I would touch it?”

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

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

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

  “What was that?” Gina whispered.

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

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

  “The police,” Donna Maria repeated stonily.

  Simon looked at her steadily.

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

  “But where will I go?” Gina asked.

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

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

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  The origins of this book can be traced back to a 1959 dinner conversation between Leslie Charteris and Harry Harrison. Charteris had been introduced to the writer by their mutual friend Hans Stefan Santesson, editor of The Saint Magazine in almost all of its forms, who had gotten Harrison to ghostwrite some book reviews for that publication. Santesson suggested that Harrison might be able to contribute to further adventures of the Saint. An initial exchange of letters occurred with Harrison confirming, “I will of course turn over to you all rights on any Saint scripts, ideas, or stories that I do for you,”1 and Charteris steered him towards a story outline for the New York Herald Tribune comic strip that had been drafted but not used.

  “Leslie suggested I use the plot as a basis for a novel,” Harrison later recalled.2 Charteris subsequently revised Harrison’s draft, making several minor changes and one major change, before the book was published, initially starting serialization in the May 1964 edition of The Saint Mystery Magazine; a US hardcover was published on 21 August 1964 and a UK edition on 5 April 1965. Harrison’s name was kept off the book at his own request.

  Foreign editions were on the increase with a Brazilian edition, O Santo e a vendetta, being published in 1964; the Dutch followed with Vendetta voor de Saint in October 1965 whilst the Finns published Pyhimys Sisiliassa in 1966 and the Danes Helgenen tager haven in 1968. Interestingly, given the subject matter, an Italian edition, Vendetta per il Santo, was published in January 1968. Rather uniquely for both the Saint and Leslie Charteris, this book was translated into Chinese and published under the title Hei shou dang in 1966.

  The novel formed the basis for the two-part story of the same name in The Saint television series, starring Roger Moore, which was directed by Jim O’Connolly and scripted by John Kruse and Harry Junkin. It was first shown on Sunday, 5 January 1969. The two-parter was subsequently re-edited as a ninety-seven-minute film and given a charity premiere in Malta, which was attended by Prince Philip.

  * * *

  1 Harry Harrison, letter to Leslie Charteris, 4 May 1960

  2 Burl Barer, The Saint, A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television, 1928–1992 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”

  —Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview

  Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.

  He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years earlier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.

  “I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1

  One of his favourite things to read was a magazine called Chums. “The Best and Brightest Paper for Boys” (if you believe the adverts) was a monthly paper full of swashbuckling adventure stories aimed at boys, encouraging them to be honourable and moral and perhaps even “upright citizens with furled umbrellas.”2 Undoubtedly these types of stories would influence his later work.

  When his parents split up shortly after the end of World War I, Charteris accompanied his mother and brother back to England, where he was sent to Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was then a very stereotypical English public school, and it struggled to cope with this multilingual mixed-race boy just into his teens who’d already seen more of the world than many of his peers would see in their lifetimes. He was an outsider.

  He left Rossall in 1924. Keen to pursue a creative career, he decided to study art in Paris—after all, that was where the great artists went—but soon found that the life of a literally starving artist didn’t appeal. He continued writing, firing off speculative stories to magazines, and it was the sale of a short story to Windsor Magazine that saved him from penury.

  He returned to London in 1925, as his parents—particularly his father—wanted him to become a lawyer, and he was sent to study law at Cambridge University. In the mid-1920s, Cambridge was full of Bright Young Things—aristocrats and bohemians somewhat typified in the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies—and again the mixed-race Bowyer-Yin found that he didn’t fit in. He was an outsider who preferred to make his own way in the world and wasn’t one of the privileged upper class. It didn’t help that he found his studies boring and decided it was more fun contemplating ways to circumvent the law. This inspired him to write a novel, and when publishers Ward Lock & Co. offered him a three-book deal on the strength of it, he abandoned his studies to pursue a writing career.

  When his father learnt of this, he was not impressed, as he considered writers to be “rogues and vagabonds.” Charteris would later recall that “I wanted to be a writer, he wanted me to become a lawyer. I was stubborn, he said I would end up in the gutter. So I left home. Later on, when I had a little success, we were reconciled by letter, but I never saw him again.”3

  X Esquire, his first novel, appeared in April 1927. The lead character, X Esquire, is a mysterious hero, hunting down and killing the businessmen trying to wipe out Britain by distributing quantities of free poisoned cigarettes. His second novel, The White Rider, was published the following spring, and in one memorable scene shows the hero chasing after his damsel in distress, only for him to overtake the villains, leap into their car…and promptly faint.

  These two plot highlights may go some way to explaining Charteris’s comment on Meet—the Tiger!, published in September 1928, that “it was only the third book I’d written, and the best, I would say, for it was that the first two were even worse.”4

  Twenty-one-year-old
authors are naturally self-critical. Despite reasonably good reviews, the Saint didn’t set the world on fire, and Charteris moved on to a new hero for his next book. This was The Bandit, an adventure story featuring Ramon Francisco De Castilla y Espronceda Manrique, published in the summer of 1929 after its serialisation in the Empire News, a now long-forgotten Sunday newspaper. But sales of The Bandit were less than impressive, and Charteris began to question his choice of career. It was all very well writing—but if nobody wants to read what you write, what’s the point?

  “I had to succeed, because before me loomed the only alternative, the dreadful penalty of failure…the routine office hours, the five-day week…the lethal assimilation into the ranks of honest, hard-working, conformist, God-fearing pillars of the community.”5

  However his fortunes—and the Saint’s—were about to change. In late 1928, Leslie had met Monty Haydon, a London-based editor who was looking for writers to pen stories for his new paper, The Thriller—“The Paper with a Thousand Thrills.” Charteris later recalled that “he said he was starting a new magazine, had read one of my books and would like some stories from me. I couldn’t have been more grateful, both from the point of view of vanity and finance!”6

  The paper launched in early 1929, and Leslie’s first work, “The Story of a Dead Man,” featuring Jimmy Traill, appeared in issue 4 (published on 2 March 1929). That was followed just over a month later with “The Secret of Beacon Inn,” starring Rameses “Pip” Smith. At the same time, Leslie finished writing another non-Saint novel, Daredevil, which would be published in late 1929. Storm Arden was the hero; more notably, the book saw the first introduction of a Scotland Yard inspector by the name of Claud Eustace Teal.

  The Saint returned in the thirteenth issue of The Thriller. The byline proclaimed that the tale was “A Thrilling Complete Story of the Underworld”; the title was “The Five Kings,” and it actually featured Four Kings and a Joker. Simon Templar, of course, was the Joker.