Leslie Charteris - Vendetta for the Saint

The sky was paling when he roared into the outskirts of Palermo and slowed up to thread through back roads that were already becoming familiar. There was just one piece of evidence that he had been cheated of, which he still needed before this adventure could be wound up; and when he finally brought the Bugatti to a stop, the gates of the cemetery which he had visited the night before had just slid past the edge of its headlights before he switched them off.

The gates were not locked, but the padlock on the Destamio mausoleum had been fastened again. He had no key this time, but he had brought a jack handle from the car which would do just as well if more crudely. He inserted it and twisted mightily. Metal grated and snapped, and the broken hasp fell to the ground.

He knew that there was no fallacy like the cliché that lightning never strikes in the same place twice, but for someone else to be lurking there to attack him again, as he had been waylaid on his previous visit, would have been stretching the plausibilities much farther than that. Secure in the confidence that no biographer could inflict such a dull repetition on him, he walked inside without hesitation or trepidation, aiming for the tomb that he had so narrowly missed seeing before.

His pocket flashlight had long since vanished, but he had found a book of matches in the glove compartment of the Bugatti. He struck one that flared high in the windowless vault. There was a bronze casket almost at his eye level which looked newer than the others, though it was itself well aged and coated with dust. He bent close, and brought the match near the tarnished bronze plate on the side.

It read:

The main portals of the Destamio manse stood wide open when the Saint saw them again. It was the first time he had seen them that way, and his pulse accelerated by an optimistic beat at the thought of what this difference could portend. As his angle of vision improved, he discerned on the driveway inside the shape of a small but very modern car limned by the dim light of a bulb over the front door. It had been backed around so that it faced the gateway, as if in readiness for the speediest possible departure; and it did not seem too great a concession to wishful thinking to visualize it as the vehicle in which the man known as Alessando Destamio had made his getaway from the village hideout, and its position as indicating that this was not for a moment intended to be the end of the flight.

But, now, it seemed that it could be the end of the story...

Simon came on foot, after coasting the Bugatti to a stop a good two hundred yards away, since its stentorian voice was impossible to mute to any level consistent with a stealthy approach towards apprehensive ears. But as he cat-footed up the drive, he began to hear from inside the villa a steady thumping and hammering which might well have drowned out any exterior noise except during its own occasional pauses. Yet, far from being puzzled by the clangor within, the Saint had an instantaneous uncanny intuition of the cause of it, and a smile of beatific anticipation slowly widened his eyes and his mouth.

Even while he was enjoying a moment of his mental vision, however, his active gaze was already scanning the windows of the upper floor. All of them were dark, but one pair of shutters was open a few inches, enough to show that they were not bolted on the inside, and those gave on to the balcony formed by the portico over the front door. For a graduate second-story man, it was no more than an extension of walking up the front steps to climb one of the supporting columns and enter the room above.

There was a sound of heavy breathing and a movement in the room as he crossed it, and a light clicked on over the bed. It revealed the almost mummified features of Lo Zio, sitting up, the ruffled collar of a nightshirt buttoned under his chin and a genuine tasselled nightcap perched on his head.

The Saint smiled at him reassuringly.

“Buon giorno,” he said. “We only wanted to be sure you were all right. Now lie down again until we bring your breakfast.”

The ancient grinned a toothless grin of senile recognition, and lay down again obediently.

Simon went out quickly into the corridor, where a faint yellow light came from the stairway. The hammering noises continued to reverberate from below, louder now that he was inside the building, but before he investigated them or took any more chances he had to find out whether Gina was in the house. It was unlikely that she would be on that floor, from which escape would have been too easy, but the stairs continued up to another smaller landing on which there were only four doors. Simon struck a match to observe them more clearly, and his glance settled on one which had a key on the outside. He tested the handle delicately, and confirmed that it was locked, but with his ear to the panel he heard someone stir inside. There could be only one explanation for that anomaly, and without another instant’s hesitation he turned the key and went in.

In a bare attic room with no other outlet than a skylight now pale with dawn, Gina gasped as she saw him and then flung herself into his arms.

“So you’re all right,” he said. “That’s good.”

“They accused me of showing you the vault where they caught you. Of course I denied it, but it was no use,” she said. “Uncle Alessandro told Donna Maria to keep me locked up until he found out what else you knew and saw to it that you wouldn’t make any more trouble. I thought they were taking you for a ride like they do in the gangster movies.”

“I suppose that was the general idea, eventually,” he said. But people have had plans like that before, and I always seem to keep disappointing them.”

“But how did you get away? And what has been happening?”

“I’ll have to tell you most of that later. But you’ll hear the important answers in a minute, when Al and I have a last reunion.” Reluctantly he put away for the time the temptations of her soft vibrant body. “Come along.”

He led her by the hand out on to the landing. The thudding and pounding still came from below.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“I think it’s Uncle Al opening another grave,” he replied in the same undertone. “We’ll see.”

As they reached the entrance hall, Simon took the gun from his pocket for the first time since he had been in the house.

The door of the once somberly formal reception room was ajar, and through the opening they could see the chaos that had been wrought in it. The furniture in one far corner had been carelessly pushed aside, a rug thrown back, and the tiles assaulted and smashed with a heavy sledge-hammer. Then a hole had been hacked and gouged in the layer of concrete under the tiles with the aid of a pickaxe added to the sledge, which had afterwards been discarded. The hole disclosed a rusty iron plate which Destamio was now using the pickaxe to pry out. He was in his shirt-sleeves, dusty, dishevelled, and sweat-soaked, panting from the fury of his unaccustomed exertion.

Donna Maria leaned on the back of a chair with one hand, using the other to clutch the front of a flannel dressing-gown that covered her from neck to ankle, watching the vandalism with a kind of helpless fascination.

“You promised me that nothing would go wrong,” she was moaning in Italian. “You promised first that you would leave the country and never return, and there would be enough money for the family—”

“I did not come back because I wanted to,” Destamio snarled. “What else could I do when the Americans threw me out?”

“Then you promised that everything would still be all right, that you would keep away from us with your affairs. Yet for these last three days everything has involved us.”