“I’m afraid that might take too long. But you needn’t bother. Now that I’ve seen the lock, I know exactly what I need to open it. Unfortunately I don’t have the tool in my pocket. And anyhow, this doesn’t seem to be quite the ideal moment to start making burglarious motions.” He indicated the tag-end of the funeral party, whose easily distracted concentration was now unfairly divided between the goings-on at the graveside where the hearse had halted and the contrastingly lively loveliness of Gina in her outrageously figure-moulding cotton dress. “Let’s pass the time driving back to a shop where I can buy what we need.”
After he had made his purchase, he suggested another swim to cool off again. Caution dictated a nocturnal return to the cemetery, when the risk of attracting unwanted attention would be practically eliminated, and meanwhile he wanted to keep Gina’s mind from dwelling too much on the prospect. But the sun was still a hand’s breadth from setting when she said: “If we don’t go back to the vault now, you’ll have to take me home.”
“I don’t want to go until after dark,” he said. “I thought we might drift along somewhere for an aperitif and maybe an early dinner first.”
“I can’t have dinner with you,” she said. “If I don’t get home before it’s dark, Donna Maria will be exploding. And she’d certainly never let me go out with you again, even if Uncle Alessandro asked her to.”
Simon thought about this for a moment, and was surprisingly undepressed by the further reminder of the problems of romance in the land of Romeo and Juliet. Much as he would have liked to spend more time with Gina, a tomb-tapping excursion would not have been his own choice of an occasion for her companionship.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “And I know you weren’t really looking forward to joining me in a game of ghouls. Get dressed again, and we’ll make sure that Auntie has no reason to disintegrate.”
She was rather silent on the drive back to the manse; but after a while she said: “What shall I tell them I found out about you?”
“Everything I told you at lunch, if you like. But of course nothing about our plan to check up on the vault.”
“Then what shall I say your plans are?”
“Tell ’em you couldn’t find out. Tell ’em I hinted that I’d got some sensational scheme up my sleeve, but I refused to talk about it... Yes, that’s perfect — you can say that you think you could break me down, if you had just a little more time to work on me, and that we made a date for more sightseeing tomorrow. Then you can be sure that they won’t just let you keep it, they’ll beg you to.”
The Bugatti stopped at the forbidding gates; and Simon came around the car and gave her a hand to dismount, and held on to it after the assistance was no longer needed.
“Till tomorrow, then,” she said, with her intense dark eyes lingering on his face as if she wanted to learn it again feature by feature.
But when he bent to kiss her, she drew back with subtle skill, releasing her hand quickly and hurrying to the inset door, from which she turned to throw him another of her intoxicating smiles before she disappeared.
Verily, he thought, the conquest of Gina Destamio could be something like crossing the Alps by a goat trail on a bicycle with hexagonal wheels...
However, both remembrance and anticipation continued to weave her image through his thoughts during the aperitif and the dinner which he had to enjoy alone, and were only relegated to the background at the same time when he decided that the cemetery should have become as deserted and safely set up for violation as it would ever be.
Then he became purely professional. And as far as he was concerned, any similarity of his mission to the themes of gothic novels or horror movies was purely coincidental. To him, the mausoleum was just another crib to be cracked, and a much easier prospect than many that he had tackled.
He drove the Bugatti past the cemetery entrance and around the next corner before he parked it, and came silently back on foot. The moon which had been so helpful the night before was up again, giving perhaps more light than he would have ordered if the specifications had been left to him, but in compensation it made complete concealment almost as difficult for any remotely possible bushwhacker as it was for him. There was, however, most literally no other sign of life in the vicinity, and the only sound was the rustle of leaves in the hesitant breeze.
The wrought-iron gates were closed but not locked, as he had anticipated, and opened with only a slight creak. Crossing to the Destamio mausoleum, he automatically gave a wide berth to the tombs and headstones which were big enough for a man to skulk behind, and probed the shadows behind them with cat eyes as he passed; but that perfunctory precaution seemed to be in fact as unnecessary as the backward glances which he threw over alternate shoulders at brief irregular intervals while he worked on the lock which secured the bronze grille door of the vault. It succumbed to his sensitive manipulations in less than three minutes, and with a last wary look behind him he passed through into the alley between the piled-up ranks of stone caskets; and there for the first time he had to bring out his pocket flashlight to begin deciphering the inscriptions on their ends.
Then there was an instant of intense pain in the back of his head, and a coruscating blackness rose up and swallowed him.
3
A distant throbbing, as of some gargantuan tom-tom pulsating deep in the earth, thudded and swelled. An indefinite time passed before Simon became aware that the hammering drum was in his own head, and that each percussion was accompanied by a red surge of agony. He fought down the pain with his growing consciousness until after an immeasurable battle he had subjugated it enough to be able to receive other impressions.
His face was pressed against something rough and dusty that smelled of goats, and when he tried to move his head and change position he realized that his hands were bound behind his back. It took an additional effort of will to force himself to lie still while a modicum of strength flowed back into his body and the cobwebs cleared sluggishly from his brain.
It was painfully obvious that he had been hit on the head, like any numb-skulled private eye in a bosom-and-bludgeon paperback; and what made it hurt more was the proof that, for such a thing to have happened, he had to have been out-thought. He still fancied himself long past the stage where anyone could sneak up behind and cosh him if he was even minimally on his guard, as he had been at the cemetery. But now it dawned on him belatedly that he had been tricked by the simple fact of having had to pick the lock of the mausoleum grille, which had subconsciously blinded him to the possibility that someone else might have arrived before him and locked the gate again from inside. Someone who could then have crouched in the total darkness atop one of the banks of coffins and waited patiently for him to pass through the passageway below...
After which came the question: how could the ambush have been planned with such accurate expectation of his arrival?
A door opened near by, and heavy footsteps clacked across a tile floor and stopped beside him.
“Al,” said the Saint at a venture, “if you wanted to see me again so badly, why didn’t you just send me an ordinary invitation?”
A familiar rumbling grunt confirmed his guess.
It took a great effort to move, for any motion started the trip-hammers going again inside his cranium, but he forced himself to roll over so that his face was out of the filthy blanket. The scene thus revealed scarcely seemed worth the agony. He was in a small whitewashed room lighted by a single naked bulb, with a single door and a single window covered by a soiled skimpy curtain. There was no furniture except the cot on which he lay. A sizeable part of this dreary setting was obscured by the form of Al Destamio looming over him like a jellied mountain of menace.