“No. The others, yes — with this.” He broke the shotgun, extracting one spent and one unused shell. “I didn’t have a pistol. But Destamio did, and so did these two, and so did Florence Nightingale. I broke the light” — he pointed to it — “and they were all blazing away in the dark. It could have been an accident. You will have to try matching bullets to guns. But there is one gun missing.” He turned to the woman. “Dov’é Destamio?”
She glared at him without answering.
“There must be a back way out,” Simon said. “Or else—”
He turned and pushed two of the bersaglieri who were crowding at the door.
“Go and watch the garage,” he snapped. “And one of you block the driveway with you car.”
He went on across the hall and opened the door on the opposite side. It led to the kitchen, which was lit by a weak electric bulb over the sink. He strode across it to another door, which was ajar. Ponti was following him. They stepped out into darkness and fresh air.
“Your back way,” Ponti said. “We should have looked for it before we came in at the front.”
“If Al used it, he was probably gone before you got here,” said the Saint. “Now, is he holed up somewhere else in the village, or would he try to make it out of here on foot? If Olivetti and his troops catch up soon enough, you might still be able to cordon off the area.”
The detective was shining his flashlight this way and that. They were in a small walled courtyard with an old well in one corner, garbage cans in another, and an opening to a narrow alley in a third. The light swung to the fourth corner, and a brief pungent malediction dropped from Ponti’s lips.
“I think we are already much too late,” he said.
In the fourth corner, a short passage led back to a pair of large wide-open doors, beyond which was a bare-walled emptiness, and at the back of that the inside of another pair of doors, which were closed.
“God damn and blast it, the garage!” Simon gritted. “With doors at both ends, and a back alley to drive out. What every Mafia boss’s home should have. And if there was a boss-grade car in it, he could be twenty kilometers away already.”
They returned through the house, and Simon went on out of the front door and across to the gate. Ponti stayed with him.
“The guard I incapacitated is under those bushes,” Simon said, pointing as he passed them.
“Where are you going?” Ponti asked.
Simon squeezed past the scout car which had been moved into the opening.
“I’m taking back my car and going home, thanking you for a delightful evening,” said the Saint. “There’s nothing more I can do here. But if I happen to run into Al again I will let you know.”
“I think you have an idea where to look for him, and I ought to forbid you to try anything more on your own,” Ponti grumbled. “But since you would only deny it, I can only ask you to let me see him alive if possible. The two whose legs you peppered, I know them, and they will be good to see in the dock, but Destamio would make it still better.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” said the Saint ambiguously. He cranked up the Bugatti and climbed in. “Which is the way to the coast road?”
“Turn to the right on the main street, and take the next fork on the left. It is not very far. Arriverderci.”
“Ciao,” said the Saint, and backed the great car around and gunned it away.
It was in fact less than ten minutes to the coast highway, and it was with a heartfelt sigh of relief that he greeted its firm paving and comparatively easy curves. In spite of his steel-wire stamina, the accumulated exertions and shortage of sleep of the last few days had taken their inevitable toll, and he was beginning to fight a conscious battle with fatigue. Now it was less of a strain to make speed, and in the next miles he broke all the speed limits and most of the traffic laws; but fortunately it was still too early for any police cars or motorcycles to be abroad.
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:
VIII
How Dino Cartelli dug it,
and the Saint made a deal
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.