Leslie Charteris - Vendetta for the Saint

“Ugh,” he said politely. “I don’t wonder that people who drink this stuff start vendettas. I should start my first one with the distiller.”

“How did you get here?” Cirano asked abruptly.

“A stork brought me,” said the Saint. “However, if you were wondering whether I had some connivance from your guard at the gate outside, forget it. He never drew a disloyal breath, poor fellow. But he had an acute attack of laryngitis. If he is still breathing when you find him, which is somewhat doubtful, I hope you will not add insult to his injuries.”

“At the least, he will have to answer for negligence,” Cirano said. “But since you are here, what do you want?”

“Some information about Alessandro here — for which I may be able to give you some in return.”

“He is playing for time,” Destamio rasped shrewdly. “What could he possibly tell any of you about me?”

“That is what I should like to know,” Cirano said, with his great nose questing like a bird-dog.

He was nobody’s fool. He knew that the Saint would not be standing there to talk without a reason, but he was not ready to jump to Destamio’s conclusion as to what the reason was. Even the remote possibility that there might be more to it than a play for time forced him to satisfy his curiosity, because he could not afford to brush off anything that might weight the scales between them. And being already aware of this bitter rivalry, Simon gambled his life on playing them and their partisans against each other, keeping them too preoccupied to revert to the inexorable arithmetic which added and subtracted to the cold fact that they could overwhelm him whenever they screwed up their resolve to pay the price.

“Of course you know all about his riper or even rottener years,” said the Saint agreeably. “But I was talking about the early days, when the Al we know was just a punk, if you will excuse the expression. Don Pasquale may have known — but doubtless he knew secrets about all of you which he took with him. But Al is older than the rest of you, and there may not be anyone left in the mob who could say they grew up with him. Not many of you can look forward to reaching his venerable old age: there are too many occupational hazards. So there can’t be many people around unlucky enough to be able to recognize him under the name he had before he went to America.”

“He is crazy!” Destamio choked. “You all know my family—”

“You all know the Destamios,” Simon corrected. “And a good sturdy Mafia name it is, no doubt. And a safe background for your new chief. On the other hand, in these troubled times, could you afford to elect a chief with an air-tight charge of bank robbery and murder against him on which he could not fail to be convicted tomorrow — or with which he might be black-mailed into betraying you instead?”

Simon Templar knew that at least he had made some impression. He could tell it from the way Skullface and Scarface looked at Destamio, inscrutably waiting for his response. In such a hierarchy, no such accusation, however preposterous it might seem, could be dismissed without an answer.

“Lies! Nothing but lies!” blustered Destamio, as if he would blast them away by sheer vocal volume. “He will say anything that comes into his head—”

“Then why are you raising your voice?” Simon taunted him. “Is it a guilty conscience?”

“What is this other name?” Cirano asked.

“It might be Dino Cartelli,” said the Saint.

Destamio looked at the faces of his cronies, and seemed to draw strength from the fact that the name obviously had no impact on them.

“Who is this Cartelli?” he jeered. “I told you, this Saint is only trying to make trouble for me. I think he is working for the American government.”

“It should be easy enough to prove,” Simon said calmly, speaking to Cirano as if this were a private matter between them. “All you have to do is take Al’s fingerprints and ask the Palermo police to check them against the record of Dino Cartelli. No doubt you have a contact who could do that — perhaps the maresciallo himself? Cartelli, of course, is supposed to be dead, and they would be fascinated to hear of someone walking around alive with his identical prints. It would call for an urgent investigation, with the whole world looking on, or it might pop the entire fingerprint system like a pin in a balloon. But I’d suggest keeping Al locked up somewhere while you do it, or a man at his time of life might be tempted to squeal in exchange for a chance to spend his declining years in freedom.”

Destamio’s face turned a deeper shade of purple, but he had more control of himself now. He had to, if he was going to overcome suspicion and maintain his contested margin of leadership. And he had not climbed as high as he stood now through nothing but loudness and bluster.

“I will gladly arrange the fingerprint test myself,” he said. “And anyone who has doubted me will apologize on his knees.”

It was the technique of the monumental bluff, so audacious that it might never be called — or if it was, he could hope by then to have devised a way to juggle the result. It was enough to tighten the lips of Cirano, as he felt the mantle of Don Pasquale about to be twitched again from hovering over his shoulders.

“But that will not be done in these two minutes,” Destamio went on, pressing his counter-attack. “And I tell you, he is only trying to distract you for some minutes, perhaps until more soldiers or police arrive—”

His black button-eyes switched to a point over the Saint’s shoulder and above his head, widening by a microscopic fraction. If he had said anything like “Look behind you!” Simon would have simply hooted at the time-worn wheeze, but the involuntary reaction was a giveaway which scarcely needed the stealthy creak of a board from the same focal direction to authenticate it.

The Saint half turned to glance up and backwards, knowing exactly the risk he had to take, like a lion-tamer forced to take his eyes off one set of beasts to locate another creeping behind him, and glimpsed on the dimness of a staircase disclosed by the light that spilled from the room a fat gargoyle of a woman in a high-necked black dressing-gown trying to take two-handed aim at him with a shaky blunderbuss of a revolver — the wife or housekeeper of Cirano or Skullface or Scarface, whoever was the host, who must have been listening to everything since the dining-room door opened, and who had gallantly responded to the call of domestic duty.

In a flash Simon turned back to the room, as the hands of the men in it clawed frantically for the guns at their hips and armpits, and flung the grappa bottle which he still held up at the naked light bulb. It clanged on the brass shade like a gong, and he leapt sideways as the light went out.

The antique revolver on the stairs boomed like a cannon, and sharper retorts spat from the pitch blackness which had descended on the dining room, but the Saint was out in the hall then and untouched. He fired one barrel of the shotgun in the direction of the dining-room door, aimed low, and was rewarded by howls of rage and pain. The pellets would not be likely to do mortal damage at that elevation, but they could reduce by one or two the number of those in condition to take up the chase. He deliberately held back on the second trigger, figuring that the knowledge that he still had another barrel to fire would slightly dampen the eagerness of the pursuit.

Another couple of shots, perhaps loosed from around the shelter of the dining-room door frame, zipped past him as he sprinted to the front door and cleared the front steps in one bound, but respect for his reserve fire-power permitted him to make a diagonal run across the garden to the gate without any additional fusillade.