Vendetta for the Saint. (7 page)

“And if you want to find out whether
he’s
jealous, tell
him I did this,” he said.

He bent further and kissed her on the lips.
They
tasted like warm paint.

2

The
helicopter leaped skywards, and Simon’s spir
its soared with it. What had begun as the
most triv
ial
happenstance, sharpened by a curt sequel in the
newspaper, had grown into the adumbration of
a
full-scale intrigue.

He had some of the sensations of an angler
who
was expecting
to play with a sardine and instead
has hooked a tuna. What he would do with the
tuna on such a flimsy thread was something
else again; and no one but Simon Templar would have
made such a point of setting the barb so solidly.
But it was one of the elementary tricks of
fishing to
make the fish work for you, and the Saint felt
cheerfully confident that his fish would not
waste much time sulking on the bottom. As soon as the
‘Gopher’ barb sank in
…

To share that optimism, some readers may
have to overcome the limitations of a sheltered life, and
be informed of its connotations in some circles
where they may not ordinarily revolve. In some of
the far-fetched variations of American slang, a
gopher (aside from his primitive zoological de
termination to be a small rodent of retiring but
horticulturally destructive habits) can also be a bumpkin, a ruffian, or a
toady. These are general
terms, not
confined to the so-called “under”-world
with which Destamio must have had some il
lustrious connections. But in the idiom of that
nether clique, a ‘gopher’ is either an iron or
steel
safe, or the technician who
specializes in blowing
open such
containers in order to obtain illegal
possession
of their contents.

This was the idiomatic detail which gave the
lie
to everything
Destamio had tried to sell him, and which had to connect with the sudden demise
of
James Euston, Esquire, a
former bank clerk. And
the
certainty of it added no little brilliance to
Simon’s esthetic appreciation of the golden
after
noon clouds
gathering behind Ischia.

When the helicopter landed at the Naples
harbor
station, he
remained in his seat until the pilot came
and said courteously: “This is the destination of
your ticket,
signore.”

“I’ve
decided to go on to Capodichino.”

“Then
there is an extra charge.”

“How
much?” Simon asked carelessly.

He was not nearly so concerned about being
branded an arrogant plutocrat, which he
could sur
vive, as about
being caught in an even swifter
riposte
by Al Destamio, which he might not. Even
in the few minutes for which he had been
airborne,
Lily could have returned to the
villa, Destamio
could have picked up a
telephone and contacted
henchmen on the
mainland, and the Naples
heliport
might be no safer than a booby-trapped
quagmire.

On the other hand, an arrival at Capodichino
might confuse the Ungodly still more, and
possibly
leave them standing
flatfooted.

Once he had decided on that detour, Simon re
alized that he had no need to return to
Naples at
all. His
baggage had been rendered practically
worthless anyhow, and from a phone booth at the
airport he promised to come back later for
what
ever was worth
salvaging. There was anguished dis
belief in the manager’s voice when Simon guaran
teed that he would take care of the bill at
the same
time; but the
Saint allowed his heart to be hard
ened by the thought of how much more joyfully
surprised that entrepreneur would be when the
payment actually arrived.

A kiosk sold him a book about the glories of
Sicily, after some argument, for very little more
than the price printed on the cover, and left him
just enough time to catch the evening plane to
Palermo.

Palermo was even hotter than Naples, and
there
are few
airconditioned hotel rooms in Sicily, de
spite the suffocating need for them; but by a
com
bination of seasoned
instinct, determination, good luck, and extravagant bribery, the Saint
succeeded
in securing
one. This involved staying at a hotel
with the hideously inappropriate name of The Jol
ly, which was anything but. However, it gave
him a restful night, and he was able to console himself for
the cost with the reflection that it only made
a
small dent in Al Destamio’s
advance donation.

In the morning, after a leisurely breakfast,
a
shave with a cut-throat
razor borrowed from the
valet,
and in relatively clean and spruce linen by
courtesy of the ingenious manufacturers of
wash-
and-wear
synthetics, he strolled over to the local
office of the City & Continental Bank
(Foreign Di
vision)
Limited, to which the hotel porter had only
been able to direct him after his memory was
re
freshed by a reasonable
honorarium. In fact it was
such
a modest building, evidently maintained prin
cipally as a convenience for touring
clients, that
there was
barely room for its impressive name to
spread across the frontage.

A dark-haired girl with Botticelli eyes
smiled up at him from behind the counter and asked what she
could do for him, and it required some
discipline
not to give her
a truthful answer.

“I’m trying to contact one of your
employees,”
he said.
“It’s several years since he worked here, so
he may have been transferred.”

“And his
name?”

“Dino
Cartelli.”

“Madre mia!”
the girl gasped, rolling her doe eyes and turning pale. “One
moment—”

She went over and spoke to a man working at
another desk, who dropped his pen without
even
noticing the
splotch of ink it made on his ledger.
He gave Simon a startled suspicious look, and hur
ried behind a partition at the rear of the
office. In
another minute
he came back to the Saint.

“Would you
like to speak to the manager, sir?”

Simon wanted nothing more. He followed the
clerk to the inner sanctum, where he was left to repeat his question, feeling
rather like the man in
the
Parisian story who has a note in French that no
one will read to him. This time the reaction
was less
exaggerated,
except for the altitude to which it
raised the manager’s eyebrows.

“Did
you know Dino Cartelli well, sir?”

“I never even met him,” Simon
admitted
cheerfully.
“An old friend of his, James Euston,
whom you might remember, told me to look him
up when I was in Sicily.”

“Ah,
Yes. Mr. Euston. Perhaps that explains it.”

The
manager stared gloomily at his hands folded
on the desk. He was a very old man, with
wispy
gray hair and a
face that had almost abdicated in
favor of his skull.

“That was so long ago,” he said.
“He couldn’t
have known.”

“What
couldn’t who have known?” Simon
demanded, feeling more and more like the man with
the mysterious note.

“Dino Cartelli is dead. Heroically
dead,” said
the
manager, in the professionally hushed voice of
an undertaker.

“How
did he do that?”

“It happened one night in the winter of
1949. A
tragic night I
shall never forget. Dino was alone in
the bank, working late, getting his books in order
for the following day. The bank inspectors
were
coming then,
and everything had to be brought up
to date. He was a very conscientious chap. And he
died for the bank, even though it was to no
avail.”

“Do
you mean he died from overwork?”

“No,
no. He was murdered.”

“Would you mind telling me exactly what
hap
pened?” Simon asked
patiently.

The manager lowered his head for a moment of
silence.

“No one will ever know exactly. He was
dead when I found him in the morning, with ghastly
wounds on his hands and face. I shall never
forget
the sight. And
the vault was blown open, and
everything
of value gone. The way the police re
constructed it, he must have been surprised by the
thieves. He knew the combination to the
vault, but
he did not
give it to them. Instead, he must have
tried to grab their gun—a shotgun—and that
was
when his hands
were blown to shreds. But even
that
didn’t stop poor Dino. He must have gone on
struggling with them, until they shot him in
the
face and he died.”

“And
how much did they get?”

“New and used lira notes, to the value of about
a hundred thousand pounds, as well as some nego
tiable bonds and other things. Some of it has
turned up since then, but most of it was never
traced. And the criminals have never been
caught.”

Simon asked a few more questions, but
elicited
nothing more
that was important or relevant. As
soon as he found that he had exhausted all the useful information that
that source could give him, he
thanked
the manager and excused himself.

“Please give Euston my regards,”
the manager
said. “I’m
afraid he will be shocked to hear the story. He and Dino were quite good
friends.”

“If Dino hasn’t told him already,”
said the
Saint, “I
wouldn’t quite know how to get the news
to him.”

The manager looked
painfully blank.

“Euston is dead too,” Simon
explained. “He got
himself murdered in
Naples the other night.”

“Dear me!” The manager was
stunned. “What a
tragic
coincidence—there couldn’t be any connec
tion, of course?”

“Of course,” said the Saint, who
saw no point in
wasting
time discussing his nebulous suspicions
with this interlocutor.

Outside, the heat of the day was already
filling
the street,
but Simon hardly noticed it. His brain
was too busy with the new thread that had
been
added to the tangled web.

At least one detail had been confirmed: the
large
parcel of
boodle about which he had theorized had now become a historical fact and could
be identi
fied as the
proceeds of the bank robbery. The ques
tion remained whether it had been dispersed or
whether it was still hidden somewhere. But
in ex
change, another
part of the puzzle became more obscure: if Destamio was not Cartelli, how did
he
fit into the picture?

“Scusi,
signore
—
ha un
fiammifero?”

A thin man stopped him at the mouth of a nar
row passageway leading off the main street,
hold
ing up an unlit
cigarette in one hand. The other
hand
was inside his jacket as he gave a small polite
bow. The everyday bustle of the street flowed
around them as Simon took out his lighter.

“Will
this do?”

He flicked the lighter into flame and held it,
almost unthinkingly, his mind still occupied with
other things. The man bent forward with his
cigarette, and at the same time brought his other
hand out and plunged a knife straight into Simon’s
midriff.

Or rather, that was his intention, and
anyone but
the Saint would
have been dying with six inches of
steel in his stomach. But Simon had not been un
thinking for quite long enough, and the signifi
cance of the thin man’s concealed hand sparked his
lightning reflexes in the nick of
time to twist aside
from the slashing
blade. Even so, it was so close that
the
point caught in his coat and tore a long gash.