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.”
“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.”