“Well, Mr. Templar! Nice of you to come,” the remembered voice rasped. Destamio put out his hand and drew Simon into the house. “I been wanting to talk to you, and I figured this spot was as good as any, better than most. Right?”
“It could be,” said the Saint guardedly.
He was observing all the corners and interesting angles of the interior without appearing to do so. But there were no other thugs in sight, and the situation looked transparently innocuous so far.
“Come on and let’s sit out on the balcony, nice and cool with a great view, and Lily is gonna bring us some drinks and then she’ll get lost.”
If Lily took offense at this rude dismissal she gave no sign of it. As soon as Destamio and the Saint were settled on either side of a glass and wrought-iron table she wheeled up a bar wagon and left. Simon heard a door close deep inside the house.
“Help yourself,” Destamio said. “And pour me a brandy and ginger ale while you’re there.”
As Simon selected two clean glasses and a bottle, he admired the neat and tactful way in which anxiety about a possibly-doctored drink had been eliminated. Nevertheless, he took the extra precaution of pouring both drinks from the same bottle. The cognac was Jules Robin, he noted approvingly, though he would not normally have chosen to drink it before lunch.
“You by any chance working for those bastards at the Bureau of Internal Revenue these days, Saint?” Destamio asked, with no change in his conversational tone.
He stared fixedly at Simon as he spoke and afterwards, his expression controlledly empty, yet not completely hiding glints of menace deep within the eyes.
The Saint sipped his drink and was externally just as calm — while his brain was whirring like an IBM machine. The mention of the income tax department nudged out a file card that had been waiting for hours to drop into the hopper.
“Gopher,” he said dreamily. “Gopher Destamio — isn’t that what they called you?”
“My friends call me Al,” growled the other. “And that’s what I wanna know about you: whose side you on?”
“Do I have to take sides?” drawled the Saint. “I hate paying taxes as much as anyone, so I can’t help having a sort of sneaking sympathy for anyone who’s had your kind of trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. But tax evasion isn’t the worst crime you’ve been accused of, is it?”
“You heard all about me, then.”
Al “Gopher” Destamio pulled from his pocket a wilted package from which he extracted an object that might be humorously described as a cigar, but in fact resembled nothing so much as a piece of decomposing rope that had been soaked in tar and buried for a number of years. He sawed the thing in two with a pocket-knife and offered the Saint half of it. Simon shook his head politely, and watched in fascination as Destamio pulled a yellowed straw from the interior of one half and applied a lighted match to the truncated end. After warming it thoroughly, he raised the revolting article to his lips and proceeded to puff it to life. Simon moved his chair buck a bit, out of the direct drift of the smoke, having had previous experience of the asphyxiating potency of the infamous Tuscan cheroot.
“Everyone’s heard all about me,” Destamio said, apparently unconscious of the destructive effect of the fumes on throat and lungs. “That’s the trouble. They believe all them lies printed in the papers, and think I got no more right than a mad dog. Me, I’m a peaceful man. I just wanna be let alone.”
“I guess none of the other guys in the Syndicate wants much more than that,” Simon agreed commiseratingly.
“Lies, all lies,” Destamio grumbled without much show of heat.
He went on in a monotone, as if reciting a story that had been told too many times, to reporters, police officers, and the more inquisitive members of the judiciary: “I go from Italy to the States with a few bucks and invest it in the trucking business, and I make a little dough. I make a little more dough because I like playing the ponies, and I’m lucky. So maybe I make a mistake not reporting some of my winnings, and they make out I got more money than I can account for earning. It’s discrimination, that’s what it is. Just because I’m Italian and some guys in the rackets are Italian, they call me a racketeer. I love America, but they give me a dirty deal.”
The record ground to a halt, and Destamio lowered the level of liquid in his glass by a full inch.
Simon recalled the rest of the story now, including some details that Gopher Destamio had neglected to include. The early record was vague, but included two or three arrests on minor charges and a short term spent in jail for assault with a deadly weapon before Destamio had graduated to the upper ranks of the Syndicate. Thereafter his presence had been reported at mysterious assemblies in remote mountain cabins, and his name regularly cropped up in popular magazine articles about the unpunished aristocracy of the underworld. Although, like others similarly mentioned, he exhibited extraordinary restraint in not suing such calumniators for libel, no one seemed able to prove anything positive against him until the accountants of the Justice Department found enough discrepancies in his financial records to build a case around.
The legal duels that followed were expensive both for the Government and for Gopher, and as usual only the lawyers showed a profit. Uncle Sam was able to lay hands on less than a tenth of the amounts claimed for liabilities and penalties, and could only retaliate by depriving Destamio of his newly acquired citizenship and deporting him back to the land of his birth. What Italy thought about this was not reported, and indeed the Italians never seemed to have been asked if they wanted him.
“So you know all about me, Saint,” Destamio said. “And I know a lot about you. What I don’t know is why you get so interested in me all at once. Why?”
The question was thrown in a conversational, almost offhand manner. But Simon knew that this was the bonger, the $64,000 question, the whole and sole reason why he had been brought there with such ambiguous courtesy. Many things might hang upon his reply, among them perhaps the further duration of his own life.
Yet the Saint seemed even more casual and indifferent than his host, and the hand holding his cigarette was so steady that the smoke rose in an unwavering column through the still air. He answered truthfully as well, having decided a little while ago that that would be the most uncomplicated and productive policy. Also he wanted Destamio’s reaction when a certain name was mentioned again.
“I’m still wondering,” he said, “what happened to Dino Cartelli.”
II
How Alessandro Destamio made a bid,
and Marco Ponti told stories
1
If the Saint had expected some pyrotechnically dramatic response, he would have been disappointed. Either the name meant nothing to Destamio, or he had been waiting for the question and knew in advance how he would field it. The racketeer only grunted and shook his head.
“Cartelli? Don’t know him. Why ask me? What makes you so nosey about me, anyhow? All the time I get reports how you’re asking questions about me. A man in my position don’t like that. Lotta people would like to see me in trouble, and I gotta take precautions.”
“Like having my clothes cut up?” Simon inquired icily.
Destamio grunted again — a porcine reflex that seemed to be his opening gambit to all conversation.
“Maybe. Somg guys get too nosey, they get worse than that cut up. You ain’t answered my question: why should I know about this Cartelli?”
“Because that’s what a man called you at the Arcate the other night. He seemed certain that you were Dino Cartelli. I heard him.”
Simon waited for the grunt, and it was more explosive than ever.