Leslie Charteris - Vendetta for the Saint

“Oh, no! I can’t believe that they’d go as far as that. You don’t know how traditional everything is in Sicily, especially with an old family like mine. Even if Donna Maria and Lo Zio allowed this Alessandro Destamio to pretend to be my uncle, for money or any other reason — and he couldn’t do it without their help — nothing would make them allow my real uncle to be buried under a false name and outside the vault where all the Destamios have been buried for three hundred years. It would be almost like committing sacrilege!”

Simon pondered this, pursuing a last exquisite tidbit with delicately determined knife and fork. It was psychologically believable. And the Mafia could easily have arranged to satisfy the orthodox scruples of the close relatives concerned, with a captive doctor to juggle a death certificate and a mafioso priest to preside over a midnight interment.

It was a possibility. And the best prospect in sight at that moment for another break-through.

“Would you be a party to cracking the ancestral mausoleum?” he asked. “Or at least show me where it is and turn your back?”

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

The meal came to an end at last with fresh yellow peaches at their peak of luscious ripeness, after which Gina accepted coffee but the Saint declined it, preferring to finish with the clean taste of the fruit and a final glass of wine.

“When you’re finished,” he said, “I think we might throw on some clothes and run over and case the joint — if you’ll excuse the expression. Anyhow we can’t go swimming again right away after gorging ourselves like this.”

Thus after a while they were driving back again almost into Palermo, then swinging out again under Gina’s directions while the Saint registered every turning on a mental map that would retrace the route unhesitatingly whenever he called on it, by night or day. In daylight, the fine stand of cypress trees which landmark all cemeteries in Italy loomed up as an early beacon to their destination; and when they had almost reached it, a funeral cortege debouching from a dusty side road completed the identification while at the same time effectively blocking all further progress.

The hearse, unlike the dachshund-bodied Cadillacs beloved of American morticians, was a superbly medieval juggernaut towering a good ten feet from the ground, decorated with carved flowers, fruit, and cherubs framing glass panes the size of shop windows which gave a clear view of the coffin within and its smothering mantle of flowers. It was towed by two trudging black horses in harness to match, their heads bent under the weight of huge plumes of the same stygian hue.

Behind it followed a shuffling parade of mourners. First the women, identically garbed in rusty black dresses with black scarves over their heads, bearing either long-stemmed flowers or candles; this was a big outing for them, and there was not a dry eye in the column. Then came the men — a few in their black Sunday suits, doubtless the next of kin, while the rest were more comfortable in their shirtsleeves, to which some of them added the respectful touch of black bands on the upper arm. Many dawdled along in animated conversation, as if they had attached themselves to the procession merely from a temporary lack of any other attraction, or because a social obligation required their presence but not any uncontrollable display of grief.

Simon stopped the car by the roadside and said: “We might as well walk from here, instead of dragging behind them.”

He helped Gina out, and they easily overtook the phalanx of the bereaved without unseemly scurrying, and squeezed past it through the cemetery gates. He looked closely at the gates as he went through, and saw that there was no lock on them: it was unlikely that they would ever be secured in any way, though they might be kept shut at other times to keep stray dogs out.

“Our vault is over there,” Gina said, pointing.

It was not so much a vault as a mausoleum, occupying a whole large corner of the graveyard, an edifice of granite and marble so imposing that at first Simon had taken it for some kind of chapel. The entrance was a door made of bronze bars that would have served very well as the gateway of a jail; beyond it, what looked at first like a narrow passageway led straight through the middle of the building to a small altar at the other end backed by a stained-glass window just big enough to admit a modicum of suitable sepulchral light. It was not until after a second or two, when his eyes adapted to the gloom, that he realized that the passageway was in fact only a constricted maneuvering space between the banks of serried individual sarcophagi stacked one upon the other like courses of great bricks which in places rose all the way to the ceiling.

“It seems to have gotten a bit crowded,” he remarked. “I wouldn’t say there was room for more than a couple more good generations. Do you have your nook picked out, or is it a case of first gone, first served?”

She shivered in spite of the warmth of the air.

“I don’t understand jokes like that,” she said stiffly; and he was reminded that in spite of everything that had drawn them together there were still distances between them that might never be bridged.

He gave his attention to the lock on the bronze gate, which had a keyhole almost big enough to receive his finger.

“Who has the key?” he asked. “Donna Maria?”

“I expect so. But I don’t know where I’d look for it. I could try to find out—”

“I’m afraid that might take too long. But you needn’t bother. Now that I’ve seen the lock, I know exactly what I need to open it. Unfortunately I don’t have the tool in my pocket. And anyhow, this doesn’t seem to be quite the ideal moment to start making burglarious motions.” He indicated the tag-end of the funeral party, whose easily distracted concentration was now unfairly divided between the goings-on at the graveside where the hearse had halted and the contrastingly lively loveliness of Gina in her outrageously figure-moulding cotton dress. “Let’s pass the time driving back to a shop where I can buy what we need.”

After he had made his purchase, he suggested another swim to cool off again. Caution dictated a nocturnal return to the cemetery, when the risk of attracting unwanted attention would be practically eliminated, and meanwhile he wanted to keep Gina’s mind from dwelling too much on the prospect. But the sun was still a hand’s breadth from setting when she said: “If we don’t go back to the vault now, you’ll have to take me home.”

“I don’t want to go until after dark,” he said. “I thought we might drift along somewhere for an aperitif and maybe an early dinner first.”

“I can’t have dinner with you,” she said. “If I don’t get home before it’s dark, Donna Maria will be exploding. And she’d certainly never let me go out with you again, even if Uncle Alessandro asked her to.”

Simon thought about this for a moment, and was surprisingly undepressed by the further reminder of the problems of romance in the land of Romeo and Juliet. Much as he would have liked to spend more time with Gina, a tomb-tapping excursion would not have been his own choice of an occasion for her companionship.

“I guess you’re right,” he said. “And I know you weren’t really looking forward to joining me in a game of ghouls. Get dressed again, and we’ll make sure that Auntie has no reason to disintegrate.”

She was rather silent on the drive back to the manse; but after a while she said: “What shall I tell them I found out about you?”

“Everything I told you at lunch, if you like. But of course nothing about our plan to check up on the vault.”

“Then what shall I say your plans are?”