“So when he talked to you on the phone late last night or early this morning and told you he was afraid I meant him some harm, and asked you to use our date to find out all that you could about me and what I was cooking, you felt it was your duty to take on the job.”
For a moment her eyes flashed with the instinctive threat of another and even more indignant denial; and then the fire was quenched in a traitorous upwelling of moisture that she could not voluntarily control. Her lip trembled, and she dropped her face suddenly in her hands.
Simon patted her sympathetically on the shoulder.
“Don’t take it so hard,” he said. “You just haven’t had much experience with the Mata Hari bit.”
“You’re a beast,” she sobbed.
“No, I’m not. I’m a nice friendly bloke who hates to refuse a beautiful girl anything. To prove it, I’ll answer all your questions anyhow.”
The soft satin under his hand shook with another muted tremor which was somehow distractingly exciting, but he made himself go on single-mindedly:
“No, I am not a policeman. No, I am not working for the FBI, or any agency of any Government. Yes, I have the worst intentions towards your Uncle Alessandro. I think he’s a very evil man and that he may be guilty of a number of murders besides lesser crimes; but there’s one murder I’m morally certain he’s responsible for, which I’m going to see that he pays for in one way or another. Unless he succeeds in having me murdered first, which he’s already tried a couple of times.”
She sat up abruptly, and he reflected that only the very very young could still look lovely with reddened eyes and tear-stained cheeks.
“That’s enough,” she said. “You’d better take me home now.”
“Not until after lunch. Could you live with the knowledge that you’d sentenced one of those lobsters to die for nothing?”
“I expect you can eat them both.”
“Why should I risk indigestion because you don’t like to hear the truth?”
“I can’t listen to you! It would be too disloyal. It’s my family you’re talking about, calling Uncle Alessandro a murderer. I want to go home.”
“Then wouldn’t you feel better,” said the Saint deliberately, “if Al Destamio wasn’t really your uncle after all?”
The shot scored, more violently even than he had hoped. Gina’s reaction ran the gamut of all the conventional symptoms of shock, from staring eyes and sagging jaw to the cataleptic rigidity in which all her responses were frozen. After such a visible impact, there could be no return to pretense or hauteur.
“So — you know,” she breathed finally.
“I can’t go quite that far,” he said candidly. “I suspect. I can’t prove it — yet. But I think I shall. I need help. And I think you could give it. Now you’ve as good as told me, haven’t you, that you’ve suspected the same thing.”
His blue eyes held her steadily, like magic crystals defying her to try to deceive them; but this time she made no attempt to escape their penetration.
“Yes,” she said. “For a long time. But I was afraid to believe it, because I knew how much I hoped it was true. And that seemed awful, somehow.”
“But if it turned out we were right,” he continued — and the subtle assimilation of their interests into the inclusive “we” was so smooth that she probably never even noticed it, “it’d be rather like the start of a new life for you.”
“Yes, it would.”
“Then what’s your problem? Al is asking you to get involved in what you’re afraid is more dirty business. You’ve got suspicions which you can’t take to the police, because you’re afraid of being wrong, or of what it might mean to your family name. I’m not the police, but I have a corny bee in my bonnet about justice. I think I’m your obvious answer, sent directly from heaven.”
“I think you’re wonderful,” she said, and leaned over and kissed him with impulsive warmth.
Simon Templar recorded a vivid impression that her stretch in a convent had effected no irremedial inhibitions on her Mediterranean instincts.
“La pasta e pronta,” said the too-helpful waiter, with impeccable timing.
2
The dining room was nothing more than a verandah shaded with cane matting, overlooking the beach and the sea, with the kitchen and other working quarters in the stucco building that backed it up. The substitute for a cellar appeared to be an immense glass-fronted refrigerator from which the wine came mountain-cold, as it should be in such a climate, especially when of the sturdy Sicilian type. The meal itself made a commendable effort to live up to its advance billing, and would have justified interrupting almost anything except what it had actually cut short. But at least it gave the Saint an opportunity to hear the rest of Gina’s confession from a slightly less disturbing distance.
“It’s just... well, a feeling that’s been growing through the years. At first it seemed so fantastic that I tried to laugh it off. But the small things added up to a big thing that I couldn’t put out of my mind. Now I look back, it must have all begun about the time Uncle Alessandro was so sick in Rome. I told you that I only remember that part vaguely, because I was very small. I know he had cancer, and I thought they said it was incurable; but now Donna Maria says I’m wrong, it wasn’t cancer at all, and he got better. Is that possible?”
“It’s not impossible. Doctors have been mistaken. And there have been what you might call spontaneous remissions, which means that the doctors don’t know why the patient was cured, but he was.”
“But not very often?”
“Not very often after the case has been called incurable, that have lasted as long as since you were a little girl, and with the patient looking as hearty as Al did the other day.”
“Then I happened to notice that there weren’t any pictures of Uncle Alessandro in any of the family albums, when he was younger. When I asked Donna Maria, she said that when he was younger he was superstitious about being photographed and would never let himself be taken.”
“Perhaps he had a premonition about when he would have his picture taken with a number under it,” Simon remarked.
“And then a girl whom I used to be taken out with, because her mother was an old friend of Donna Maria, who always finds the nastiest things to say about everyone and yet you usually have to admit they’re true, once said that Uncle Alessandro’s cure must have been more in his mind than his body, if he did so well in business in America, when all he ever did here in Italy was to throw away most of the family fortune.”
“Is that what he did?”
“Oh, yes. Even Lo Zio, when it wasn’t so hard for him to talk, told me how foolish he was and some of the crazy schemes he threw money away on. And I couldn’t believe he had become such a different man.”
Simon nodded.
“Unless he is a different man.”
“But how could he be? Unless Lo Zio—”
“Who, let’s face it, isn’t so very bright these days—”
“And Donna Maria—”
“Yes, she would have to be in on it.” The Saint held her eyes remorselessly. “And don’t try to tell me you can’t possibly imagine such a dear sweet old lady being involved in anything dishonest.”
She made no attempt to evade the challenge; it was as if she had grown up, in one way, very suddenly. She only asked: “But why?”
“When we know that,” he said, “we’ll have a lot of answers.”
After a while she said: “You want me to trust you, but you still haven’t told me much about yourself, only the things you’re not. If you aren’t a detective, how did you get so interested in Uncle Alessandro?”