Leslie Charteris - Vendetta for the Saint

“It is not my fault that that goat Templar came to stick his horns into everything, old woman. But that is all finished now. Everything is finished.”

Grunting and cursing, he finally broke the sheet of metal loose, and flung it clanking across the room. He went down on his knees and reached into the cavity which it exposed, and lugged out a cheap fiber valise covered with dust and dirt. He lifted it heavily, getting to his feet again, and dumped it recklessly on the polished top of a side table.

“I take what is mine, and this time you will never see me again,” he said.

It seemed to the Saint that it would have been sheer preciosity to wait any longer for some possibly more dramatic juncture at which to make his entrance. It was not that he had lost any of his zest for festooning superlatives on a situation, but that in maturity he had recognized that there was always the austerely apt moment which would never improve itself.

He pushed the door wider, and stepped quietly in.

“Famosé ultime parole,” he remarked.

The heads of Alessandro Destamio and Donna Maria performed simultaneous semicircular spins as if they had been snapped around by strings attached to their ears, with a violence that must have come close to dislocating their necks. Discovering the source of the interruption, they seemed at first to be trying to extrude their eyes on stalks, like lobsters.

Destamio had one additional reflex: his hand started a snatching movement towards his hip pocket.

“I wouldn’t,” advised the Saint gently, and gave a slight lift to the gun which he already held, to draw attention to it.

Destamio let his hand drop, and straightened up slowly. His eyes sank back into their sockets, and from the shift of them Simon knew that Gina had now followed him into the room.

Without turning his head, the Saint gave a panoramic wave of his free left hand which invited her to connect the wreckage of the room and the hole in the corner with the dusty bag on the table.

He explained: “The game is Treasure Hunt. But I’m afraid Al is cheating. He knew where it was all the time, because he buried it himself — after he stole it from a bank in Palermo where he worked long ago under another name.”

“Is that true, Uncle Alessandro?” Gina asked in a small voice.

“I’m not your uncle,” was the impatient rasping answer. “I never was your uncle or anybody’s uncle, and you might as well forget that nonsense.”

“His real name,” Simon said, “is Dino Cartelli.”

Cartelli-Destamio glowered at him with unwavering venom.

“Okay, wise guy,” he growled in English. “Make like a private eye on television. Tell ’em my life story like you figure it all out in your head.”

“All right, since you ask for it,” said the Saint agreeably. “I’ve always rather liked those scenes myself, and wondered if anyone could really be so brilliant at reconstructing everything from all the way back, without a lot of help from the author who dreamed it up. But let’s see what I can do.”

Gina had moved in to where he could include her in his view without shifting his gaze too much from its primary objective. It made it easier for him than addressing an audience behind his back.

“Dino — and let’s scrub that Alessandro Destamio nonsense, as he suggests,” he said, “is a man of various talents and very lofty ambitions. He started out as a two-bit punk right here in Palermo, and although he is still a punk he is now in the sixty-four thousand dollar class, or better. He once had an honest job in the local branch of a British bank, but its prospects looked a bit slow and stodgy for a lad who was in a hurry to get ahead. So he joined the Mafia, or perhaps he was already a member — my crystal ball is a little unclear on this point, but it isn’t important. What matters is that somebody thought of a bigger and faster way to get money out of the bank than working for it.”

Cartelli’s eyes were small and crafty again now, and Simon knew that behind them a brain that was far from moronic was flogging itself to find a way out of its present corner, and would take advantage of all the time it could gain by letting someone else do the talking.

“That’s a good start,” Cartelli croaked. “What’s next?”

“Whether it was Dino’s own idea, because he’d already been tapping the till in a small way and an audit by the bank examiners was coming up, or whether he was recruited for the job from higher up, is something else I can’t tell you which doesn’t matter either. The milestone is that the bank was robbed, apparently by some characters who broke in while he was working late one night. He seems to have put up a heroic fight before he was killed by a shotgun blast in the face and hands which mutilated him beyond recognition or even routine identification. But have you read enough detective stories to guess what really happened?”

“Go on,” Cartelli said. “You’re the guy who was gonna dope it out.”

“For a first caper, it was quite a classic,” Simon went on imperturbably. “In fact, it was a variation on the gimmick in quite a few classic stories. Of course, the robbers were Dino’s pals and he let them in. He helped them to bust the safe and shovel out the loot, and then changed clothes with another bloke who’d been brought along to take the fall. He was the one who was killed with the shotgun — but who would ever doubt that it was the loyal Dino Cartelli? Dino got a nice big cut off the cake in return for disappearing, a lot of which I think is still in that valise; the Mafia got the rest, and everyone was happy except the insurance company that had to make good the loss. And maybe the man with no face. Who was he, Dino?”

“Nobody, nobody,” Cartelli said hoarsely. “A traitor to the Mafia, why not? A nobody. Don’t tell me you care about some sonovabitch like that!”

“Maybe not,” said the Saint. “If the Mafia confined themselves to knocking off their own erring brothers, I might even give them a donation. But then, many years after, in fact just the other day, something went wrong with the perfect crime that Dino thought had been buried and forgotten. A silly old English tourist named Euston, who once upon a time worked in the bank beside Dino, recognized him in a restaurant in Naples after all those years — partly from that scar on his cheek, which Euston happened to have given him in a youthful brawl. And this Euston was too stupid and stubborn to be convinced that he could be mistaken. So — perhaps without too much reluctance, after such a reminder of that bygone clout in the chops, Dino had him liquidated. That was when I got interested. And practically everything that’s happened since has stemmed from Dino’s efforts to buy me off or bump me off.”

“But my uncle?” Gina asked bewilderedly. “How does he fit in?”

“Your uncle is dead,” Simon said in a more sympathetic tone. “I went back to the mausoleum before I came here, and finished the search we started the other night. Alessandro Destamio did die in Rome of that illness in 1931, as you suspected, and Dino here stepped into his shoes. But the family still had enough sentiment to insist on putting Alessandro’s coffin in the ancestral vault. Why they let Dino take his name should only take a couple of guesses.”

He had spoken in Italian again, with the calculated intention of including the comprehension of Donna Maria, and now she responded as he had hoped.

“I will answer that, Gina,” she said, with some of the old iron and vinegar back in her voice. “Your uncle was a good man, but a foolish one with money, and he had wasted all that we had. He was dying when this Dino came to me and offered a way to keep our home and the family together. I accepted for all our sakes, with the understanding that he would never try to be with us himself. But first he broke that promise and now he will leave us destitute.”