Vendetta for the Saint. Read Free Page A

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, un til 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 em phasis 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 lit tle pile of jetsam that the portinaio had
been ma neuvering
towards the frontage of the estab lishment next door.
    To some investors it might have seemed inade quate 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,
pro vided the information was
true, Simon could make a
more positive move.
    A green and black cab followed after him
when he turned into the Via A Falcone, while the driver expounded the advantages of his cool
upholstery and dazzling
speed over the dusty travail of walk ing under the noonday sun. Simon succumbed with only token resistance and climbed in; but he
was not so blinded by the shady interior that he failed to notice the 300 lire already
registered on the meter, nor
too proud to draw the driver’s attention to the undoubted oversight. After a brief
verbal brannigan during which certain
special charges were mentioned, so special
indeed that they could not be found in
the quadrilingual list of com plicated
tariffs posted inside the cab, a decision was reached that perhaps the meter should be readjusted ; and the chauffeur launched his
vehicle through the lunatic traffic
with an emotional aban don which
suggested that only homicide or suicide would salve his injured feelings.
    Simon called a premature halt to the ride at
a leather-goods shop which
he spotted within sight of the Hotel Excelsior. There he bought a hand some gold-bound pigskin cigar case, making no