“I would like to call Capri,” said the Saint.
“It is not easy at night, signore. If you would wait until morning—”
“It would be too late. I want the call now.”
“Sissignore,” sibilated the clerk, in a tone of injured dignity.
There followed a series of rasping sounds, not unlike a coarse file caressing the edge of a pane of glass, followed by a voiceless silence. Far in the distance could be heard the dim rush of an electronic waterfall, and Simon shouted into it until another voice spiralled up from the depths. It was the night operator in Palermo, who was no more enthused about trying to establish a telephonic connection at that uncivilized hour than the hotel clerk had been. Too late Simon realized the magnitude of the task he had undertaken, but he was not going to back out now.
With grim politeness he acceded to obstructive demands for an infinitude of irrelevant information, of which the name and location of residence of the person he was calling and his own home address and passport number were merely a beginning, until the operator tired first and consented to essay the impossible.
The line remained open while the call progressed somewhat less precipitately than Hannibal’s elephants had crossed the Alps.
A first hazard seemed to be the water surrounding the island of Sicily. It could only have been in his imagination, but Simon had a vivid sensation of listening to hissing foam and crashing waves as the connection forced its way through a waterlogged cable, struggling with blind persistence to reach the mainland. The impression was affirmed when a mainland operator was finally reached and the watery noises died away to a frustrated background susurration.
For a few minutes the Palermo operator and this new link in the chain exchanged formalities and incidental gossip, and at last reluctantly came to the subject of Simon’s call. A mutual agreement was reached that, though the gamble was sure to fail, the sporting thing would be at least to try whether the call could be pushed any further. Both operators laughed hollowly at the thought, but switches must have been thrown, because a hideous grumbling roar like a landslide swallowing an acre of greenhouses rose up and drowned their voices.
Simon lighted his remaining cigarette, crumpled the empty pack, and made himself as comfortable as possible. The phone was beginning to numb his ear, and he changed to the other side.
There was more of the ominous crunching, periodically varying in timbre and volume, and after a long while the second operator’s voice struggled back to the surface.
“I am sorry, I have not been able to reach Naples. Would you like to cancel the call?”
“I would not like to cancel the call,” Simon said relentlessly. “I can think of no reason why you should not reach Naples. It was there this morning, and it must be there now, unless there has been another eruption of Mount Vesuvius.”
“I do not know about that. But all the lines to Naples are engaged.”
“Try again,” said the Saint encouragingly. “While we are talking someone may have hung up or dropped dead. Persevere.”
The operator mumbled something indistinguishable, which Simon felt he was probably better off for not hearing, and the background of crashings and inhuman groanings returned again. But after another interminable wait, persistence was rewarded by a new voice saying “Napoli.”
Reaching Capri from Naples was no worse than anything that had gone before, and it was with a justifiable thrill of achievement that Simon at last heard the ringing of Destamio’s phone through the overtones of din. Eventually someone answered it, and Simon shouted his quarry’s name at the top of his voice.
“Il Signore is busy,” came the answer. “He cannot be disturbed. You must call again in the morning.”
After all he had been through, the Saint was not going to be stopped there.
“I do not care how busy he is,” he said coldly. “You will tell him that this call is from Sicily, and I have news that he will want to hear.”
There was an explosive crackle as if the entire instrument at the other end had been shattered on a marble slab, and for a while Simon thought the servant had summarily disposed of the problem by hanging up; but he held on, and presently another voice spoke, with grating tones that even the telephone’s distortions could not completely disguise.
“Parla, ascolto!”
The Saint stubbed out the remains of his last cigarette and finally relaxed.
“Alessandro, my dear old chum, I knew you’d be glad to hear from me, even at this hour.”
“Who’s-a dat?”
“This is Simon Templar, Al, you fat gob of overcooked macaroni. Just calling to tell you that your comic-opera assassins have flunked again — and that I don’t want them trying any more. I want you to call them off, chum.”
“I dunno what ya talkin’ about, Saint.” There was a growing note of distress in the harsh voice as it assimilated the identity of the caller. “Maybe you drink too much wine tonight. Where you calling from?”
“From my hotel in Palermo, which I’m sure you can easily find. But don’t send any more of your stooges here to annoy me. The firework they planted in my car while Donna Maria was being so hospitable didn’t go off. But I found out a lot of interesting things during my visit, to add on to what I knew before. And I wanted to tell you that I’ve just put all this information on paper and deposited it in a place from which it will be forwarded to a much less accommodating quarter than your tame maresciallo here, if anything happens to me. So tell your goons to lay off, Al.”
“I don’t understand! Are you nuts?” blustered Destamio, almost hysterically. “What you tryin’ to do to me?”
“You’ll find out,” said the Saint helpfully. “And I hope your bank account can stand it. Meanwhile, pleasant dreams...”
He replaced the receiver delicately in its bracket, and then dropped the entire contraption into the wastebasket, where it whirred and buzzed furiously and finally expired.
As if on cue, there followed a light tapping on the door.
The Saint took his precautions about opening it. There was still the possibility that some of Destamio’s henchmen might be working on general instructions to scrub him — it would certainly take time for countermanding orders to circulate, even if the Mafia had also penetrated the telephone service. Until the word had had time to get around, he was playing it safe.
Marco Ponti entered, and eyed with mild surprise the gun that was levelled at his abdomen. Then he calmly kicked the door shut behind him.
“That is a little inhospitable,” he remarked. “And illegal too, unless you have an Italian license for that weapon.”
“I was going to ask you how to get one, the next time I saw you,” said the Saint innocently, and caused the weapon to vanish and be forgotten. “But I was not expecting you to call at such an hour as this, amico.”
“I am not being social. I wanted to hear how your visit turned out. And I have learned something that may be of value to you.”
“I would like one of your cigarettes while you give me your news. It may have some bearing on what I can tell you.”
“I hardly expect that,” Ponti said, throwing his pack of Nazionali on the table. “It is only that you gave me a name, and like a good policeman I have checked the records. Though you may sneer — and I sometimes sneer myself at the middenheaps of records we keep — occasionally we find a nugget in the slag. I searched for the name you gave me, the murdered bank clerk, Dino Cartelli. I found nothing about him except the facts of his death. But I also found the record of another Cartelli, his elder brother, Ernesto, who was killed by the Fascisti.”