Vendetta for the Saint. (41 page)

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 Ameri
ca.”

“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 gon
na 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 com
pany, would pay a very handsome reward for hav
ing 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 sud
denly aware of a confused sequence of roaring
en
gines, 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 in
dulgence.

“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
esca
pade.
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 oth
ers,” 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 de
moralizing contemplation when the jangle of
the front door bell announced an obligatory but ob
viously parenthetic interruption.

WATCH
FOR THE SIGN OF

THE
SAINT

HE WILL BE BACK!