The Sicilian Method

by Andrea Camilleri

  * * *

  —

  From the depths of sleep’s ocean Montalbano rose with effort to the surface, having heard a bothersome sound, which continued to bother him immensely.

  He was trying to unstick his eyelids when he realized he was hearing the telephone ring.

  Feeling around, he turned on the light and looked at the clock.

  A little past two.

  He got up, crashed into the chair at the foot of the bed, crashed into the doorjamb of the bedroom, crashed into the doorjamb of the dining room, crashed into another chair, crashed into the coffee table, and finally, still feeling around, found the telephone and picked up the receiver.

  “Clo,” he said.

  “Open up, Salvo, open the door! It’s me, Mimì! Open the door!”

  What could have happened to him?

  Before opening the door, the inspector went into the kitchen, put his head in the sink, turned on the faucet, then set about making himself some coffee when a large boom made him jump into the air.

  A bomb! he thought.

  He ran into the hallway and opened the door.

  Mimì had braked too late, and the nose of his car had crashed into the door like a ram’s head.

  “Back up or you won’t be able to come in,” the inspector said to him.

  But Mimì didn’t even hear him. He got out of the car, jumped over the hood, and after another jump found himself inside the house, shoving Montalbano aside with one hand and dashing into the dining room. As the inspector was going back into the kitchen, he noticed Mimì guzzling whisky straight out of the bottle. When the coffee was ready, Montalbano poured it into his customary mug, and at that moment Mimì came in and collapsed into a chair.

  5

  “And so?” Montalbano asked, sitting down in front of him with his steaming mug of espresso.

  Augello gestured with his hand to tell him to wait a minute. He had to catch his breath.

  The inspector started sipping his coffee, then, seeing that Mimì still remained silent, repeated loudly: “And so?”

  Mimì stammered a few words in reply.

  Montalbano didn’t understand a thing. “Would you like to try speaking a little more clearly, please?”

  “There . . . there . . . there wasn’t anyone there,” Mimì stuttered.

  “What? You mean Genoveffa didn’t show up?”

  “No, not Genoveffa! Geneviève is still waiting for me with open arms . . .”

  “And so?”

  “And so he wasn’t there.”

  “He who?”

  “Salvo, our cadaver was gone from the bed.”

  “So where was he?”

  “He wasn’t anywhere, for Christ’s sake! He’s disappeared!”

  “Somebody took him away?”

  “Of course! It’s not like he could have walked away on his own two feet!”

  Montalbano ran a hand over his forehead.

  “Wait a second. Wait just one second. Are you sure he was dead when you first saw him?”

  “I touched him! He was stiff as a board! What, don’t you remember I stained my shirt with his blood?”

  “But did you look in the other rooms?”

  “I looked, I looked! There was nothing, Salvo! Our cadaver is no longer there.”

  “So, in short, and in conclusion, this cadaver—which I would like to remind you is yours and yours alone—was parked for a while on that bed, then somebody came to get him and took him away, God only knows where. But this does solve one problem for us.”

  “Which?”

  “It’s no longer up to us to discover the corpse. It’s sure to turn up somewhere else, whereupon we will be duly notified.”

  “So all we have to do is wait?”

  “Yes, and while waiting, I bid you good-bye. I’m going back to bed. Don’t forget to get the nose of your car out of my front door.”

  He got up and went out of the room, leaving Mimì sitting there with his head in his hands.

  * * *

  —

  When he got to the station house, he was immediately, and literally, assailed by Catarella.

  “Ahh, Chief, Chief! ’Ere’d happen a be a jinnelman ’at wants a talk t’yiz poissonally in poisson an’ ’is name is Rosario Rosario.”

  “Is he on the line?”

  “Nossir, ’e’s onna premisses.”

  “Okay, send him in to me in five minutes, and send me Fazio as well.”

  “I’m incapacitated to sen’ ’im t’yiz in so much as ’e aint onna premisses, ’cuz ’e ’adda bistake hisself to Montelusa haspitol.”

  Montalbano got worried.

  “Why, did something happen to him?”

  “Nat to hisself poissonally in possion, Chief, but ’iss mornin’ when ’ey shot—”

  “Who shot? Why am I only hearing about this now?”

  “Chief, ya got no ideer ’ow many times I tried a call yiz at home on yer lann line. It jess rang an’ rang, but nobody answered. An’ yer sill phone was toined off . . .”

  Only then did Montalbano remember that while he was sleeping in a cataleptic state he thought he’d heard a concert of bells.

  “Okay, go on. Who’d they shoot?”

  “They shat a dilicate kid, an’ so Fazio went to the haspitol to go an’ see this dilicate kid.”

  “Did you see him, too?”

  “Did I see who?”

  “Well, if you’re telling me this kid was delicate, it must mean you saw him, no?”

  “Nah, Chief, I din’t see ’im. ’Is family’s dilicate.”

  “What the hell are you saying, Cat?” Montalbano said in despair, turning away and heading for his office.

  As he sat down, he heard a light knock at the door and then a voice.

  “May I come in?”

  “Yes, come in.”

  In the doorway appeared a man of about forty, thin as a rail, with black hair combed straight back and a mustache that looked like a pair of rats’ tails.

  He was visibly upset.

  “Good morning. My name is Rosario Lo Savio. I’m an engineer.”

  Montalbano stood up, they shook hands, and the engineer sat down in front of the desk.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I heard yesterday that Carmelo Catalanotti died. He was a friend of mine.”

  At this point the man’s voice broke. Two tears rolled down his face, and he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped them away.

  “I’m sorry. I came here because I think I was the last person to see him alive.”

  Montalbano corrected him.

  “The last person to see him alive was surely his killer, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, of course. So I was the next to last,” the man said.

  “Tell me your story.”

  Before answering, Lo Savio took a deep breath.

  “I’m a member of Trinacriarte, the most important amateur theater company in our province, and Carmelo was, too. The day before yesterday we ended our rehearsal around midnight, and when I got in my car, it wouldn’t start. So Carmelo kindly offered to give me a lift and drove me home.”

  “How was he, do you remember? Was he upset, or any different from his usual self?”

  “No, he was perfectly normal and calm.”

  “Did you have any impression he might have had an appointment?”

  “I don’t think so. He wasn’t in any hurry, and I remember that when we reached my place, we even lingered awhile, talking about the play we’re planning to put on. I mean, that we were planning to put on.”

  Another pair of tears.

  “Tell me something about your theater company. Where do you work? How many—”

  “Trinacriarte,” said Lo Savio, interrupting him and puffing up
his chest with pride, “was founded in 1857 by the now unfortunately forgotten Vigatese playwright Emmanuele Gaudioso, then disbanded for three years after the unification of Italy, because of—”

  As the prospect of having to listen to more than a hundred years of the company’s history didn’t exactly appeal to Montalbano, he couldn’t restrain himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, interrupting him, “this is all very interesting, but please come to the present day. Actually, let me ask the questions.”

  “All right.”

  “How many people are there in your company?”

  “Well, we have eighteen members, ten men and eight women.”

  “Is there a director or manager?”

  “We have a directorate with three members, one of whom was poor Catalanotti.”

  “And who are the other two?”

  “One is Elena Saponaro, a bank manager, and the other is Antonio Scimè, a lawyer.”

  At this point Lo Savio made a sort of grimace. He was about to say something but held back. Montalbano didn’t let the opportunity slip by.

  “Tell me about this Scimè,” he said.

  “No, actually, he’s a fine fellow, but also a pain in the neck.”

  “How?”

  “When he was young, he attended the National Academy of Dramatic Arts and got a degree in acting. Apparently—though we’ve never had any direct confirmation of this—he had his debut in a play starring Vittorio Gassman and never really got over it. Every five minutes he finds ways to remind us, and himself, of his Roman days living la dolce vita.”

  “Aside from being part of the directorate, what else did Catalanotti do? Did he act? Did he direct the plays?”

  “Aside from being Trinacriarte’s primary subsidizer, he was also an excellent character actor and a very serious stage director, always extremely well prepared and having his own particular idea of the theater.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “For him, the theater was the written text. Everything had to arise from the text. Even the costumes, the sets, the lights, they all had to come from the written drama. And his work with the actors was the foundation.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s a bit complicated to explain, but I’ll try. Carmelo wanted for every actor, in interpreting his or her role, to start from something deeply personal in his or her own life. Some trauma or moment in one’s life, say, a love gone wrong, some private, profound, intimate experience that could be used to serve what the text requires.”

  “Let me get this straight. So, if there’s a widow in the play, he wanted a real widow to play her?”

  “No, Inspector. He wasn’t so literal as that. He would start to dig into the actor’s intimate life, in search, for example, of the equivalent of a feeling of absence similar to what a widow might feel, and he was very good at it, very skilled. He was able to knock down the defenses of the person he was dealing with until he could draw out something similar to the feeling he was seeking: a recent death, a divorce, or sometimes something as simple as moving into a new house—a traumatic experience, in short, that had something to do with what was needed—in this case, something to do with loss, with the void that one feels in those situations.”

  “I see. So he was sort of a cross between a psychoanalyst and a confessor.”

  “No, I would call him instead a sort of corrected Stanislavsky, revised and updated.”

  “I’m sorry, but did all the actors consent to being subjected to this sort of psychological investigation?”

  “No, not all of them. A few rebelled, and so Carmelo didn’t pick them for the part.”

  “Did these sessions take place in front of the whole troupe?”

  “No, only afterwards. First there was a long preparatory phase that Carmelo always wanted to do tête-à-tête.”

  No other specific questions to ask came into Montalbano’s mind other than the usual bureaucratic ones, to which Lo Savio was unable to give any answers, since Catalanotti apparently never confided in anyone. He still didn’t know, therefore, whether the man had any enemies, or women with grudges, or treacherous family relations.

  As he was saying good-bye to him, extending his hand across the desk, Montalbano asked Lo Savio: “What are you rehearsing at the moment?”

  “Shakespeare’s The Tempest.”

  “And was Catalanotti part of it?”

  “No, he was preparing another mise-en-scène. But he didn’t miss a single rehearsal.”

  “What play did he want to put on?”

  “A play by a modern British playwright. But I’m not familiar with it.”

  There was a pause, then Montalbano asked: “I’d like to see a few of these rehearsals. Where are you based?”

  “One of the actors has made a former timber warehouse available to us. It’s at number 15, Via Lombardo.”

  As he was writing this down on a scrap of paper, Montalbano asked: “Do I need to call ahead?”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’re there every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 9:30 p.m. until late.”

  When Lo Savio left, Montalbano started thinking about something the man had just said, that is, that the troupe got together on every other day of the workweek.

  He picked up the telephone.

  “Cat, I want you to call Bruno Ammazzalorso at Via La Marmora for me.”

  He could tell that Catarella was completely flummoxed.

  “Cat! You still there?”

  “Yeah, Chief.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “I dunno ’ow to do it.”

  “To do what?”

  “To call a Mazzalorsamamamora.”

  Montalbano felt lost. He took a breath and tried a different approach.

  “Find me the phone number for the doorman of the building where the murder happened.”

  “Ah, okay, okay, Chief. Iss a lot easier ’at way.”

  Indeed, five minutes later he had the number.

  “Signor Ammazzalorso? Inspector Montalbano here.”

  “What can I do for you, Inspector?”

  “I need some clarification. You told me Signor Catalanotti went out every evening. Is that right?”

  “Yessir, that’s right. Every evening.”

  “You mean every single evening?”

  “As far as I know, sir, every single evening.”

  He thanked him and hung up. The question arose by itself: So where did Catalanotti go on the evenings he didn’t devote to the theater?

  At that moment Fazio came back.

  “Tell me everything,” said the inspector.

  “The kid who was shot in the leg is named Nico Dilicata. He’s twenty-eight years old, got a degree in literature but is presently unemployed like almost half the kids around here. He’s made all kinds of job requests, entered competitions, taken training courses, but so far nothing. And so every morning he goes out looking for any kind of job he can find.”

  Montalbano remembered the news item about unemployment he’d read in the paper that had flown in his face the day before on the beach.

  “So,” he said, “in short, a good kid who had the misfortune to be born here!”

  “An excellent kid, and from a good family. They’re all there at the hospital at his bedside, but nobody has any idea why anyone would want to shoot him.”

  “But how did it happen?”

  “This morning, right as he was coming out of his house on his way to the port, somebody shot him in the left leg.”

  “Were there any witnesses?”

  “No, around here you can never find witnesses for love or money. The best part is that Nico maintains he never heard the sound of the gunshot. He says it must have been an accident, that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “And do you believe h
im?”

  Fazio grimaced.

  “Chief, I could be wrong, but, at first guess, my gut feeling is that it doesn’t really make sense.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that it seemed to me that this Nico Dilicata was singing only half the Mass to me.”

  “Wha’d you say his name was?”

  “Domenico Dilicata, known to friends and family as Nico. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m under the impression I’ve heard that name before.”

  “That may be, but this kid’s never had any run-ins with the police.”

  “Well, okay, I’ll see about that. But now I want you to listen to a nice little story.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “You remember Augello’s cadaver?”

  “Hell, yes! Which we need to discover.”

  “Good. Now the situation’s become even more complicated.”

  “How so?”

  “The cadaver can no longer be located.”

  As Fazio’s chin dropped down to his chest, he simultaneously almost fell out of his chair.

  Having trouble speaking, he finally managed to ask: “What does that mean?”

  “It means that when Mimì Augello went back into the apartment on Via Biancamano, his cadaver was gone.”

  “So somebody removed it. That means there’s somebody who has the keys to that apartment.”

  “Elementary, my dear Watson!” said Montalbano. And he continued: “Try to find out as much as you can about this Nico, but also you absolutely have to call the guy from the agency and find out if there’s a copy of the keys to Augello’s cadaver’s apartment floating around.”

  “I’ll call him straightaway,” said Fazio, running out of the room.

  One minute later Mimì Augello came in, wearing a face fit for the Day of the Dead.

  “Greetings!” said the inspector, looking at his watch. “Do you know what time it is?”

  Mimì got the message.

  “The fact is, I didn’t get any sleep last night.”

  “So the thought of your vanished cadaver wouldn’t let you sleep?”