Simon settled on those conclusions while he showered and dressed, and when he walked out into the furnace blast of Neapolitan heat it was not for a sightseeing stroll.
It was still too early for lunch, a meal which in Italy never begins before one o’clock and when combined with a necessary nap to aid digestion of the pasta and vino can extend into the late afternoon. But at Le Arcate some torpid waiters were sweeping and dusting and setting out arrays of silver and napery in readiness for the activity to come. Without too much prompting, one of them was persuaded to retire to the gloomy back quarters in search of the head waiter.
In a soiled collarless shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and still in need of his first shave, this was a much less august personage than he appeared on duty, but he accepted the off-hour summons with professionally reserved aplomb. He shook hands easily when Simon extended his, and there was no change of expression when he felt the folded bill in his palm. The paper vanished with the dexterity of many such passings, and he tilted his head with grave attention to learn what small service had been purchased.
“If you remember, I had lunch here yesterday,” Simon began.
“Sissignore. I remember.”
“At the same time, there was a man here named Dino Cartelli.”
“The man who sat down with you for a few minutes? I thought he was English.”
“He was. I’m talking about another customer.”
The head waiter’s forehead wrinkled above a perfectly blank face.
“Cartelli? I do not know that name.”
Unless the man was a consummate actor, he must have been telling the truth; and the Saint would usually back his own judgment against any modern electronic substitute. If it was not letting him down, then, Cartelli had not merely been reluctant to be recognized: he had a new name now and did not even want to be reminded of the old.
“An Italian,” Simon said. “In a light gray suit. Heavy, almost bald, with a deep rough voice. He was sitting with a younger man at that table there.”
This time he had even less need of a lie detector, as the man’s eyes swivelled in the direction of the pointing finger and swivelled back again to focus on the Saint with a pronounced diminution of cordiality.
“I do not remember such a man, signore. You realize, Napoli is a big city, and this is a busy restaurant. It is impossible to know everyone. Mi rincresce molto.”
He escorted Simon to the door, multiplying his protestations of regret, but not saddened enough by his inability to help to be moved to refund the money that had already settled in his pocket.
He would need absolution for perjury before he partook of another Mass, but Simon realized that it would have been a waste of time to discuss this with him.
Outside, the doorman, not yet gorgeous in his coat of office, was stolidly sweeping the night’s debris from the stretch of sidewalk over which he reigned. The Saint approached him and said: “Do you remember a man who was here for lunch yesterday — rather stout, bald, with a grating voice, in a gray suit?”
Folding money between Simon’s fingertips promised gratitude in advance, and the doorman’s hand started an automatic move towards it before the full import of the question drilled into his head. With comprehension came reaction, and his fingers jerked back as if from the touch of a hot iron. He glanced apprehensively over his shoulder, and a drowned-fish expression washed over his face.
“Non mi ricordo,” he gabbled. “We have so many customers, I forget all of them.”
He returned to his sweeping with far more industrious concentration than he had shown before.
Simon looked where the doorman’s eyes had swerved, and saw the head waiter still lurking in the doorway. With a shrug of resignation, he turned and strode away.
The visual impression that he had given up lasted only until he rounded the next corner. Then immediately his stride lengthened and quickened as he circled the block to approach the restaurant from the opposite side. This was somewhat easier begun than accomplished, for there are few such things- as “blocks” in the American sense in any Italian city — there are only chunks and gobbets of buildings of all ages and stages of decrepitude, intersected by a completely haphazard network of streets and stairways that would seem to have been laid out by a jigsaw puzzle fan rather than a cartographer. Calling upon his sense of direction for a prodigious effort, the Saint managed to achieve his purpose with an accuracy which, in the Africa of H. Rider Haggard, might have earned him the cognomen of Lord of the Labyrinths, or He-Who-Finds-All-Crooked-Paths. In a surprisingly short time he had completed the meandering detour and was leaning against the wall of the adjacent building, out of sight of anyone who did not step all the way out of the restaurant, as the doorman pushed his broom towards that side with the normal apathy which it had not taken long to restore.
“Amico,” said the Saint softly, “would you like to try your memory again?”
His voice froze the pavement sanitizer into immobility. Then, with painful slowness, the man’s eyes travelled all the way up the Saint’s figure from the shoes to the smiling face.
“Now don’t go and have a stroke,” Simon urged him kindly. “Nobody inside can see me, and they need never know I came back. Just prod those brain cells and try to make them give out the name of the gentleman I was asking about.”
“Non capisco,” said the doorman hoarsely, and resumed a pretense of sweeping that would scarcely have convinced a five-year-old microcephalic.
The axiom that money talks has its exceptions, but something told the Saint that he had found one individual who would not be permanently deaf to sufficient shouting. This time it was a 10,000-lire note that he produced and unfolded to the size of a small bedsheet; it shone goldenly in the sun. He refolded it to a small wad and let it drop. The doorman’s eyes followed it covetously as it fell, until Simon’s foot covered it.
“Do you understand that?” Simon asked. “It would be so easy for you to sweep it up.”
“No!” was the mechanical answer, but the emphasis was dwindling.
“At least you might tell me somewhere else to ask. The hotel where he stays, perhaps. The driver of the taxi they took from here might have told me that, if I found the right driver. No one will know it was you.”
Beads of sweat broke out on the man’s swarthy face as fear fought with avarice. Simon took out a second 10,000-lire bill and folded it carefully like the first.
“Excelsior!” gasped the doorman huskily.
Simon gazed at him for a long moment, and, when the man failed to unfurl a banner with a strange device and head for the nearest mountain, it became clear that the speaker was not planning to emulate the eccentric youth in the poem but was simply uttering the name of the plushest hotel in Naples.
“Grazie,” said the Saint, releasing the second bill, and turned away without waiting to watch it and its predecessor being raked briskly into the little pile of jetsam that the portinaio had been maneuvering towards the frontage of the establishment next door.
To some investors it might have seemed inadequate yield for the outlay, since it would not have taken any Sherlock Holmes to deduce that a citizen dressed and bedecked like Cartelli would not be likely to bunk in some obscure pensione; but to the Saint it was worth it for the time that could be saved from canvassing alternative palazzi — not to mention eliminating the possibility that he resided in an apartment or house of his own. Now, provided the information was true, Simon could make a more positive move.