“Do you mean he died from overwork?”
“No, no. He was murdered.”
“Would you mind telling me exactly what happened?” Simon asked patiently.
The manager lowered his head for a moment of silence.
“No one will ever know exactly. He was dead when I found him in the morning, with ghastly wounds on his hands and face. I shall never forget the sight. And the vault was blown open, and everything of value gone. The way the police reconstructed it, he must have been surprised by the thieves. He knew the combination to the vault, but he did not give it to them. Instead, he must have tried to grab their gun — a shotgun — and that was when his hands were blown to shreds. But even that didn’t stop poor Dino. He must have gone on struggling with them, until they shot him in the face and he died.”
“And how much did they get?”
“New and used lira notes, to the value of about a hundred thousand pounds, as well as some negotiable bonds and other things. Some of it has turned up since then, but most of it was never traced. And the criminals have never been caught.”
Simon asked a few more questions, but elicited nothing more that was important or relevant. As soon as he found that he had exhausted all the useful information that that source could give him, he thanked the manager and excused himself.
“Please give Euston my regards,” the manager said. “I’m afraid he will be shocked to hear the story. He and Dino were quite good friends.”
“If Dino hasn’t told him already,” said the Saint, “I wouldn’t quite know how to get the news to him.”
The manager looked painfully blank.
“Euston is dead too,” Simon explained. “He got himself murdered in Naples the other night.”
“Dear me!” The manager was stunned. “What a tragic coincidence — there couldn’t be any connection, of course?”
“Of course,” said the Saint, who saw no point in wasting time discussing his nebulous suspicions with this interlocutor.
Outside, the heat of the day was already filling the street, but Simon hardly noticed it. His brain was too busy with the new thread that had been added to the tangled web.
At least one detail had been confirmed: the large parcel of boodle about which he had theorized had now become a historical fact and could be identified as the proceeds of the bank robbery. The question remained whether it had been dispersed or whether it was still hidden somewhere. But in exchange, another part of the puzzle became more obscure: if Destamio was not Cartelli, how did he fit into the picture?
“Scusi, signore — ha un fiammifero?”
A thin man stopped him at the mouth of a narrow passageway leading off the main street, holding up an unlit cigarette in one hand. The other hand was inside his jacket as he gave a small polite bow. The everyday bustle of the street flowed around them as Simon took out his lighter.
“Will this do?”
He flicked the lighter into flame and held it, almost unthinkingly, his mind still occupied with other things. The man bent forward with his cigarette, and at the same time brought his other hand out and plunged a knife straight into Simon’s midriff.
Or rather, that was his intention, and anyone but the Saint would have been dying with six inches of steel in his stomach. But Simon had not been unthinking for quite long enough, and the significance of the thin man’s concealed hand sparked his lightning reflexes in the nick of time to twist aside from the slashing blade. Even so, it was so close that the point caught in his coat and tore a long gash.
Simon Templar would not often have gone berserk over a little damage to a garment, but it must be remembered what had so recently happened to the rest of his wardrobe. Now he was wearing his only remaining suit, and this too had been wrecked, leaving him with literally nothing but rags to his name. Combined with a natural resentment towards strangers who took advantage of his kindly instincts to try to stick daggers into his digestive apparatus, it was the last straw.
But instead of blinding him, anger only made his actions more precise. He grasped the wrist of the knife hand as it went by, and pivoted, locking the thin man’s arm under his own. He held that position with cold calculation, just long enough to make sure that an adequate quorum of witnesses had stopped and stared and thoroughly registered the fact of which one was holding the knife; and then he made another swift sharp movement that resulted in a crack of breaking bone and a short scream from his victim. The stiletto fell to the pavement.
Without releasing his grip on the thin man’s wrist, Simon freed his other hand, carefully adjusted the position of his target, and put all his weight into a piston stroke that planted his left fist squarely in the center of the other’s face. Under the impact, nose and face gave way with a most satisfying crunch, but the man went down without another vocal sound, and lay still. All things considered, Simon decided, as his fury subsided as quickly as it had flared, it had been only a humane anesthetic for a fractured ulna.
The whole incident had taken only a few seconds. Looking around warily for any possible second assault wave, he saw a small Fiat standing at the other end of the alley where it connected with the next parallel street. The door on the near side was open, and a blue-chinned bandit sat at the wheel, staring towards the Saint with his jaw still sagging. Then he suddenly came to life, slammed the door, and stepped frantically on the gas.
Simon picked up the fallen stiletto, ignoring the gathering crowd which gesticulated and jabbered around him but kept a safe distance. It was perfectly balanced, the blade honed to a shaving edge, a deadly tool in the hands of an expert. The Saint was not sorry to think that at least one such virtuoso would not be working for some time.
A policeman finally came pushing through the mob, one hand on his holstered pistol, and Simon coolly tendered him the hilt of the souvenir.
3
“This is what I was attacked with,” he said, taking none of the risks of undue diffidence. “All these people saw me disarm him. I shall be happy to help you take him to the police station and sign the charges against him.”
The policeman swivelled a coldly professional eye over the crowd, whose members immediately began a circulatory movement as the spectators in front were stirred by a sudden desire to be in the rear. Simon saw his witnesses rapidly evaporating; but before the last law-shy personality could melt away the polizie, inured to coping with the evasiveness inspired by his vocation, had stepped forward and collared two of them — a pimply youth with an acute case of strabismus, and a portly matron bedizened with bangles like an animated junk stall. The only things they had in common were their observation of the knifing attempt and a profound reluctance to admit this to the constabulary. Nevertheless, the policeman quarried from them a grudging admission that they had seen some of the events which had occurred; though the ocular abnormality of the younger one might have cast doubts on the value of his testimony. He then appropriated their identity cards, which they could redeem only by appearing at the police station to make depositions. Dismissed, they retired gratefully into the background; and the policeman brought his functionally jaundiced scrutiny back to the Saint.
“Why did you kill him?” he asked, looking gloomily from the knife in his hand to the recumbent figure on the sidewalk.
“I didn’t kill him,” Simon insisted patiently. “He tried to murder me, but I didn’t feel like letting him. So I disarmed him and knocked him out. The knife you’re holding is his, not mine.”