“It’s funny there should be such a difference between her and her brother. Al is such a big-hearted guy.”
“That’s true! Do you know, he takes care of the whole family and pays all the bills. He sent me to school and everything. If it hadn’t been for him I don’t know what would have happened to us all. When my parents were killed in a car accident they didn’t have any insurance, and there was hardly any money in the bank. I was only seven at the time, but I remember people looking at the house and talk about selling it. Even Uncle Al was very sick just then and everyone thought he was going to die. But he got better and went to America, and soon he began sending back money. He’s been looking after us ever since. And yet he hardly ever comes near us. Aunt Maria says it may be because he feels we’d be embarrassed by remembering how much we owe him.”
The Saint lounged in his chair with long legs outstretched, sipping his drink perfunctorily and listening with the appearance of only casual interest; but under that camouflage his mind was ticking over like a computer, registering every word, correlating it with previous information, and reaching on towards what hypotheses might be derived from their multiple combinations. He had an extrasensory feeling that the answer to the Cartelli-Destamio riddle was close at hand, if he could only grasp it, or if one more link would bring it within reach...
And then the fragments that were starting to fit together were rudely pushed apart again by the voice that spoke behind him.
“Signore, it is getting late for you to return to the city.” Donna Maria was returning from her errand. “It would not be well-bred to send a friend of Alessandro’s away at such an hour. You will stay for dinner?”
Even more devastating than the astonishing reversal of her attitude was the expression that accompanied it. A ripple of life passed across her inflexible cheeks, and her bloodless lips curled back to expose a fearsome row of yellow fangs. For a moment Simon wondered if she was preparing to leap on him and rend him like a werewolf, or whether she was merely suffering the rictus of some kind of epileptic seizure. It was a second or two before it dawned on him what was really happening.
Donna Maria was trying to smile.
3
“Thank you. You are very kind,” said the Saint, making a heroic effort to overcome the shock of that horrendous sight.
Gina was more openly dumbfounded by the switch, and took a moment longer to recover.
“Well — I must get changed. Excuse me.”
She ran into the house.
“And I must give some orders to the servants.” Donna Maria’s face was positively haggard with the strain of being gracious. “Please make yourself comfortable for a few minutes. And help yourself to another drink.”
She withdrew again, leaving the Saint alone to digest the startling reversal of his reception.
And in another moment the maid reappeared, bearing a bottle of Lloyd’s gin which she added to the selection on the tray.
“Donna Maria thought you might prefer this,” she said, and retired again.
Simon lighted a cigarette and examined the bottle. It was new and unopened, to every appearance, and there had certainly not been time since Donna Maria’s change of attitude for it to have been doped or poisoned and cunningly re-sealed; so unless bottles of pre-hoked liquor were a standard item in stock at the Destamio hacienda there could be no risk in accepting it. In moderation... The Saint gratefully emptied the glass he had been nursing into a flower-pot and proceeded to concoct himself a very dry martini, feeling much like a prodigal son for whom the best barrel had been rolled out.
But deep inside him he felt an intangible hollowness which came from the tightening of nerves which were not nervous but only sharpening their sensitivity and readiness to whatever call might be suddenly made on them.
He could not cherish the beautiful illusion that after a life-time of notorious malevolence Donna Maria had chosen that evening to be struck as by lightning with remorse for her churlishness, and after a brief absence to commune with her soul had returned radiant and reformed to make amends for all her past unpleasantnesses. Or that his own handsome face and charming manners had broken through an obsidian crust to the soft heart that it encased. Some very practical reason had to be responsible for the alteration, and he could not make himself generous enough to believe that it was without ulterior motive.
The question remained: what motive?
The sun had descended behind the western hills, and purple shadows reached into the courtyard, deepening the dusty gray-green of the olive trees, and the first cool breeze drifted in from the sea. With the dusk, the house was not softened, but seemed to become even more stark and sinister. Somewhere in its depths a clock chimed with deep reverberant notes that made one think of the tolling of funeral bells.
As the hour struck, a door opened under the balcony at the far end of the terrace, and a wheelchair appeared with the promptitude of a cuckoo called forth by some horlogic mechanism. Simon watched in fascination as the maid wheeled it to the table opposite him and vanished again without a word. The occupant of the chair matched the building in senescence; in fact, he looked old enough to have built it himself.
“A lovely evening,” Simon ventured at last, when it became clear that any conversational initiative would have to come from him.
“Ah,” said the ancient.
It extended a withered and tremulous claw, not to shake hands, but towards the glasses on the table.
“What can I get you?” Simon asked.
“Ah.”
Simon made what he felt was an inspired compromise by pouring a half-and-half mixture of sweet and dry vermouths and preferring it.
“Ah,” said the venerable mummy, and, after taking a small sip, carefully spilled the rest on the ground.
“What did you think of Dante’s latest book?” Simon tried again.
“Ah,” said the patriarch wisely, and sat back to enjoy a slow chomping of toothless gums while he examined the Saint from the blinking moist caverns of his eyes.
The possibilities of small talk seemed to have been exhausted, and Simon was wondering whether to try making faces at his vis-a-vis and see whether that would evoke any livelier response, when he was saved from that decision by the return of Gina, now wearing something thin and simple that clung provocatively to the curves that he could reconstruct in clinical detail from memory.
“Has Uncle been bothering you?” she asked.
“Not at all,” said the Saint. “I just haven’t been able to find anything to talk about that he’s interested in. Or maybe my accent baffles him.”
“Povero Zio,” Gina said, smiling and patting the ancient’s hand. “I can’t even remember a time when he wasn’t old, but he was nice to me when I was a little girl. He used to tell me wonderful stories about how he marched with Garibaldi in his last campaign, and I’d forget to be worried about when we were going to be kicked out of our house.”
“Ah... ah,” said the old man, straightening up a little as if the words had sparked some long-forgotten memory; but it was a transient stimulus and he slumped back down again without producing his scintillating comment.
“Uncle — you can’t mean that he’s Alessandro’s brother?” Simon said.
“Oh, no. He’s really Uncle Alessandro’s uncle — and Donna Maria’s.”