Vendetta for the Saint. Read Online Free PDF Page B

by any chance working for those bastards at the Bureau of Internal
Revenue these days, Saint?”
Destamio asked, with no change in his con versational tone.
    He stared fixedly at Simon as he spoke and
after wards, 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 de partment nudged out a
file card that had been wait ing 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
any one who’s had your kind of
trouble with the In ternal
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 thor oughly, 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 ef fect 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
low ered the level
of liquid in his glass by a full inch.
    Simon recalled the rest of the story now,
includ ing some
details that Gopher Destamio had ne glected 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 re mote
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
ex hibited 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 dis crepancies
in his financial records to