“Tomorrow at ten, then, Gina,” he said, and stood up. “And I’ll tell Alessandro how nice all of you have been.”
The last remark was principally intended for the reigning tyrant of the establishment, but it scored first on Lo Zio, who must have been feeling some effects from his unaccustomed libations.
“Ah, Alessandro,” he said, as if some cobwebby relay had been tripped. “I told him. I warned him. Told him he should not go to Rome—”
“It is late, Lo Zio, and well past your bed time,” Donna Maria said hastily.
She whipped the wheel-chair around with a suddenness that had the old man’s head bobbing like a balloon on a string. The maid came scurrying in on a barked command, and whisked away the chair and its mumbling contents.
“Buona notte, signore,” Donna Maria said, with one more spasm of her overworked facial muscles, and the impression of it seemed to remain even after she had closed the front door, like the grin of some Sicilian-Cheshire cat.
Simon made the short walk to the driveway gate with his nerves as taut as violin strings, his ears straining, and his eyes darting into every shadow. But there was no warning scuff or stir to herald an onslaught by lurking assailants, no crack of a shot to make belated announcement of a bullet. He opened the inset door, flung it open, and leapt far through it in an eruptively connected series of cat-swift movements calculated to disconcert any ambush that might be waiting outside; but no attack came. An almost-full moon that was rising above the hills showed a road deserted except for his own car where he had left it, and the only sound was the thin shrill rasping of multitudinous nocturnal insects. Feeling a trifle foolish, he turned back and shut the little door, and then walked towards the Bugatti, making a wide swing out into the road around it, just in case someone was skulking on the side from which he would not have been expected to approach. But no one was.
Then he had not been detained in order to gain time to organize a bushwacking, it seemed...
But the instinct of an outlaw who had carried his life in his hands so often that his reflexes had adapted to it as a natural condition was not lulled into somnolence merely because logic seemed to have suspended the immediate need for it. If anything, it was left more on edge than ever, seeking the flaw in conclusions which did not jibe with intuition.
He climbed halfway into the driver’s seat and peered in search of the ignition lock. He located it and inserted the key; but as he raised his head again above the dashboard before switching on, his eye was caught by a blemish on the gleaming expanse of hood which did not belong at all on such a lovingly burnished surface.
Clearly revealed by the moonlight was the print of a greasy hand.
4
Simon very carefully withdrew the key, stepped down to the road again, and went around to examine the hood more closely. But the print seemed to have disappeared. Bending over until his face almost touched the metal, he sighted towards the radiator and found the mark again, a dull slur in the reflected moonlight.
A ghostly breath stirred the hairs on the nape of his neck as he realized how narrowly he might have missed that discovery. If he had come out a few minutes earlier or later, the moon would not have been striking the hood at the precise angle required to show it up. Or if he had not already been keyed to the finest pitch of vigilance, he might still have thought nothing of it. But now he could only remember how affectionately the garage owner had wiped the hood again after showing him the engine, and he knew with certainty that there could have been no such mark on it when he set out. He had not stopped anywhere on the way, to give anyone a chance to approach the machine before he parked it there. Therefore the mark had been made since he arrived, while he was enjoying Donna Maria’s hospitality.
With the utmost delicacy he manipulated the fastenings of the hood and opened it up. The pencil flashlight that he was seldom without revealed that the mammoth engine was still there, but with a new feature added that would have puzzled Signor Bugatti.
A large wad of something that looked like putty had been draped over the rear of the engine block and pressed into shape around it. Into this substance had been pushed a thin metal cylinder, something like a mechanical pencil, from which two slender wires looped over and lost themselves in the general tangle of electrical connections.
With surgically steady fingers the Saint extracted the metal tube, then gently and separately pulled the wires free from their invisible attachments. Deprived of its detonator, the plastic bomb again became as harmless as the putty it so closely resembled.
“This one almost worked, Al,” he whispered softly. “And if it had, I’d have had only myself to blame. I underestimated you. But that won’t happen again...”
There were some excellent fingerprints in the plastic material where the demolition expert had squeezed it into place, doubtless in all confidence that there would be nothing left of them to incriminate him. Taking care not to damage them, Simon peeled the blob off the engine and put it in the trunk, wedging it securely where it could not roll around when he drove.
He cranked up the engine and drove slowly and pensively back to Palermo, the impatient motor growling a basso accompaniment to his thoughts.
It was easy enough now to understand everything that had been puzzling before. Donna Maria’s first absence from the terrace had given her time to telephone Al Destamio on Capri and ask for confirmation of the alleged friendship. Al’s reaction could be readily imagined. He would already have learned of the failure of the first assassination attempt; and the revelation that the Saint had had the effrontery to head straight for the Destamio mansion and blarney his way in, instead of thankfully taking the next plane for some antipodean sanctuary, must have done wondrous things to his adrenalin production. The dinner invitation must have followed on his orders, to keep the Saint there long enough for another hatchet man to be sent there to arrange a more final and effective termination of the nuisance.
And this deduction made Donna Maria’s bit part somewhat more awesome. Throughout the dinner and crocodile congeniality, she had been setting him up like a clay pipe in a shooting gallery. That was why she could afford to give in so readily on the question of granting permission for Gina to go out with him the next day: she had been complacently certain that the Saint would not be around to hold her to the promise. Only one interesting speculation remained — had she known just how violently it had been intended to insure his non-appearance?
Simon tooled the big car in through the garage entrance of the hotel and slipped it into an empty stall. As the thunder of the engine died away, he was aware of an even heightened resentment.
It was bad enough to be continually sniped at himself, the perplexed target of an incomprehensible vendetta. But now these monsters had exposed the utter depths of their depravity by their willingness to destroy that historic treasure of a car merely in the process of putting a bomb under him.
It followed imperatively that no extra effort could be spared to insure that Al Destamio spent the most troubled night that could be organized for him. Even if the effort involved the prodigious hazards of trying to inaugurate a long-distance telephone communication against the obstacles of the hour and the antiquated apparatus available.
The phone in Simon’s room was apparently dead, and only a great deal of bopping on the button and some hearty thumps on the bell box succeeded in restoring it to a simulacrum of life. The resultant thin buzzing was presently interrupted by the yawning voice of the desk clerk, obviously resentful at being disturbed.