A Beam of Light

by Andrea Camilleri

  Mimì’s words came back to him, when he said that Rosario would be hard to catch because he had the Cuffaros’ protection. Except that the Cuffaros didn’t know the truth yet. Still . . . there was in fact a way to let them discover it.

  Montalbano smiled at the thought. He looked at his watch. It was twenty past midnight. Too early. He should call at one at the very earliest. He shuffled about the house a little, then decided to take a shower and get ready for bed.

  When he picked up the phone it was ten past one. He dialed the number.

  “Hello? Who is this?” a sleepy male voice asked in irritation.

  “Am I speaking with Guttadauro the lawyer?”

  “Yes, but who is this?”

  “Montalbano.”

  Guttadauro’s tone of voice immediately changed.

  “Good Inspector! To what do I owe—”

  “Forgive me for calling at this hour—I’m sure I woke you up—but since I’m about to leave, I decided that calling you at the crack of dawn would be worse.”

  “Not at all, there’s no excuse necessary. You were right to call!”

  The lawyer was clearly dying of curiosity to know why the inspector had called, but he didn’t want to take the initiative.

  Montalbano decided to tweak him a little.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine, fine. And you?”

  “Not too bad, but for the past few days I’ve had a rather bothersome itch.”

  Guttadauro politely refrained from asking where he had the itch.

  “You said you were about to leave,” he said instead. “Going anywhere interesting?”

  “I’m taking a few days off, now that the Savastano case has been closed.”

  “Closed? What do you mean?” asked a confused Guttadauro. “If di Marta remains under investigation despite being released, that means the case hasn’t—”

  “I’m surprised at you, counsel! With all your experience . . . Rest assured, if I say the case has been closed, it’s been closed.”

  “Then who was the killer?”

  “Now, now, counsel, that has to remain a secret!”

  “But couldn’t you—”

  “Are you joking, sir?”

  “All right, I won’t insist. But then . . .”

  “Then what?”

  Guttadauro was at the breaking point.

  “No, I meant . . .”

  “Go ahead, I’m listening.”

  Montalbano was having a ball. Guttadauro finally broke.

  “Then why did you call me?”

  “Ah, yes. I almost forgot.”

  The inspector started laughing.

  “Why are you laughing?” asked Guttadauro, getting upset.

  “Do remember the little story you told me the other day? The one about the lion hunter? Well, just this evening I heard it again, but with some notable variants.”

  “What kind of variants?”

  “Well, for one thing, these lion hunters were in an area in which lion hunting was prohibited.”

  “And what does that imply?”

  “It implies that a very young hunter, a novice, from Montereale, who’d just joined the club—and not just any native, as in your version—killed a lion on his own, without telling the other hunters, and then arranged things so that the killing would be blamed on his comrades and not on him. Is that clear?”

  Guttadauro paused before answering. He was trying to grasp the meaning of the inspector’s words. At last he did. He said only:

  “Ah.”

  “Is that clear?” Montalbano repeated.

  “Perfectly,” Guttadauro said curtly.

  “Then all that’s left for me to do is to wish you a good, refreshing sleep.”

  It was done. Guttadauro was surely already on the telephone, informing the Cuffaros that Rosario had strayed. The kid’s fate was sealed.

  If he didn’t turn himself in to the police, he would be murdered by his former playmates.

  The inspector went to bed and fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.

  The ringing of the telephone brought him up from the depths of a veritable abyss. He turned on the light: It was six a.m.

  “Montalbano? This is Sposìto.”

  He balked. What could Sposìto want from him at that hour?

  “What is it?”

  “Can you be ready in half an hour?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ll be there at six-thirty to pick you up.”

  And he hung up. Montalbano lay there bewildered, receiver in hand. What had happened? No point in wondering, for now. The only thing to do was to get ready, and fast. He opened the window and looked out at the sky.

  The weather promised to be variable and capricious that morning. And therefore, by contagion, the inspector’s behavior would likewise be unstable at the very least.

  He went and got into the shower. At six-thirty he was ready. A minute later there was a knock at the door. He opened it. There was a uniformed cop, who greeted him. Montalbano went out and locked the door behind him. Sposìto had him sit in the back beside him. The policeman sat down at the wheel and drove off.

  “What’s going on?” asked Montalbano.

  “I’d rather not say anything until we get there,” said Sposìto.

  Was it something to do with the Tunisians they said were arrested the day before? And if so, why was Sposìto dragging him into the thick of it, after he’d done everything in his power to keep him out of it?

  They turned off the main road and drove along dirt paths fit for tanks and little country roads less wide than the car itself. The sky had gone from a pale pink to gray, and then from gray had turned a faded blue before settling momentarily on a foggy whitishness that blurred outlines and muddled one’s vision. Montalbano now knew where they were going; he’d figured it out a ways back.

  “Are we going to the Casuzza district?” he asked.

  “Do you know the place?” Sposìto inquired.

  “Yes.”

  He’d been there twice, the first time in a dream, to go and see a coffin, and the second in reality, to go and see a charred car with a murdered man inside. What would Sposìto have him see this time?

  The moment they arrived, Montalbano’s blood ran cold.

  In the exact same spot where there had been a coffin in the dream, there now was a real one, an exact replica of the one he’d dreamt. A coffin for third-class cadavers, the poorest of the poor, of rough-hewn wood without so much as a coat of varnish.

  A corner of white linen stuck out from under the lid, which had been laid down crooked.

  A short distance away was another police car with three cops inside, and a black hearse. The two attendants paced about beside the car, smoking.

  There was total silence. Montalbano clenched his teeth. He was living a sort of nightmare. He looked questioningly at Sposìto, at which point the latter put his arm around the inspector affectionately and pulled him aside.

  “Inside that box is one of the three Tunisians. I’ve been ordered to send the body to Tunisia. But before I do, I wanted you to see it. The man inside was not an arms smuggler, but a patriot. He died of complications from the wound he suffered during the entirely involuntary exchange of fire with my men. I’d been following him for a while. I knew everything about him, even his private life, but he remained elusive. When you see him you’ll understand why I wanted to keep you out of this. It was he who recognized you that day when he was hiding out in the hayloft. He was watching you through a pair of binoculars.”

  The beam of light that had struck him square in the eyes.

  In confused fashion, Montalbano began to understand but refused to accept it. He couldn’t move. Sposìto nudged him gently towards the coffin.

  “Be brave,” he said.


  The inspector bent down, gripped the linen between his thumb and index finger, and pulled it out a little further. Now he could see the letters F and M intertwined.

  His legs began to give out; he fell to his knees.

  F.M.: François Moussa. He’d had those initials embroidered himself on six shirts he’d given to François as a present for his twenty-first birthday. It was the last time he’d embraced him.

  “Would you like to see him?” Sposìto asked softly, whispering in his ear.

  “No.”

  He would rather his last contact with François remain the beam of light that had brought them together again for a fraction of a second.

  And if he wanted every now and then to remember him, he would content himself with the time when, as a little boy of ten, François had run away from the house in Marinella, and Livia, who by that point considered him her own son, sounded the alarm and he ran after the boy along the beach, catching up with him and finally stopping him. They had a talk. François said he wanted his mother Karima, who was dead, and so Montalbano told him how he, too, had lost his mother when he was even younger than François. In fact he told him things he’d never revealed to anyone, not even Livia. And from that moment on, they’d understood each other.

  Then, as the years went by, distance and detachment had settled in . . .

  He had nothing more to do or say in front of the coffin. He stood up and leaned on Sposìto’s arm.

  “Could you have someone give me a ride back?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Listen, has Pasquano already been here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he able to determine the time of death?”

  “Approximately around six p.m. yesterday.”

  “Thanks for everything,” said Montalbano, getting into a car.

  Six p.m. Then, around six o’clock this evening, the anguish suddenly vanished, and a sort of resignation took its place, as if there was nothing more to be done about anything . . .

  Without knowing it, Livia had suffered François’s agony and death in her own body and soul, as if he’d been a son, of her own flesh and blood. A son which he, Montalbano, out of selfishness and a fear of responsibility, hadn’t wanted them to adopt. Livia had taken it very hard. But he’d remained firm in his refusal.

  Now he knew what he had to do. Through his death, François bound him to Livia and Livia to him even more than if they were married.

  When he got home he phoned the commissioner’s office and asked for a ten-day leave. He had a great backlog of vacation days, and they were happy to grant him the time. He reserved a seat on the first flight for Genoa, which was at two o’clock in the afternoon. Lastly he called Fazio, told him Livia wasn’t doing well, and that he was going to spend a few days with her.

  He sat down on the veranda and smoked a few cigarettes, thinking of François. Then he stood up, wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve, and went and started leisurely packing.

  That same evening at nine o’clock, Marian knocked a long time at his front door, which she didn’t know would never be open for her again.

  Author’s Note

  This novel is completely made up. It follows that all the characters, names, and situations do not and cannot refer to any real people or situations in which they may have found themselves at one time or another during their lives. Despite this disclaimer, which I am keen to repeat conscientiously at the end of every one of my novels, now and then someone comes out thinking they recognize himself or herself in one of my characters, sometimes going so far as to threaten legal action. Perhaps such people are unsatisfied with their own reality.

  Notes

  a solitary little house, perhaps the one that lent the place its name: In Italian (with a Sicilian diminutive) casuzza means “little house.”

  He was convinced that Catarella had only made his way, barely, through the compulsory years of schooling: School in Italy is compulsory up to age sixteen.

  Back in 1996 they’d had to take a little Tunisian orphan of ten into their home: For the full story of young François, see the third book in the Montalbano series, The Snack Thief (Penguin, 2003), also available in Death in Sicily (Penguin, 2013), an omnibus edition comprising the first three novels of the series.

  Apparently the passengers had wanted to visit the Greek temples: The fictional town of Montelusa is modeled on the real-world city of Agrigento (Girgenti in Sicilian), which boasts of the largest archaeological site in the world, the Valle de’ Templi (Valley of the Temples), a complex of seven Greek temples in the Doric style, most from the fifth century B.C., in varying degrees of conservation. The best preserved is the Temple of Concordia, one of the most intact Greek temples in the world today.

  Don’t the police ever talk to the carabinieri? Or the carabinieri to the police?: The carabinieri are a national police force and officially a branch of the army (like the gendarmes in France and the Guardia Civil in Spain). They have sweeping jurisdictional powers but are often in competition with the Commissariati di Pubblica Sicurezza, the branch of law enforcement that Montalbano is part of. As a result, the two bureaucracies sometimes do not communicate with each other, especially when one fears that the other may gain the upper hand on a given case.

  they rent a little room in the Rabato: The Rabato was the Arab quarter of Agrigento (the model for Camilleri’s fictional Montelusa) during the Middle Ages and in recent times has been favored by the new waves of Arab immigrants to Sicily.

  a municipal cop: In Italy, the municipal police (Vigili Urbani) are a separate jurisdiction from the commissariati (such as Montalbano’s outfit), which handle criminal investigations.

  the Catturandi: The Catturandi are an elite police unit charged with finding and capturing members of the Mafia, particularly longtime fugitives from the law.

  Notes by Stephen Sartarelli

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