Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  “You, of course, did hear Melluso call Cusumano a ‘cornuto,’ did you not?”

  “No.”

  “No? How can that be? The patrolman heard it, and he was much farther away than you!”

  “The patrolman may have heard it, but I did not.”

  “Are you hard of hearing, Mr. Montalbano? Did you suffer from otitis as a child?”

  The inspector did not answer and was immediately dismissed. He was free to leave, but he wanted to hear Torrisi’s harangue. And he was right, because he learned exactly what the youth’s “particular emotional state” was on that fateful day. As it turned out, some three years earlier, young Cusumano had married his beloved fiancée, Mariannina Lo Cascio. Unfortunately, when emerging from the church, right on the parvis, he was handcuffed by two carabinieri for a conviction that had just been upheld. And on the very day of his scuffle with Melluso, Cusumano had just been released from prison and was literally flying into the arms of his bride to consummate the marriage, which, until that moment, had merely been “formal.” Thus, upon hearing himself called a cornuto, the young man, who still had not plucked the flower that Mariannina Lo Cascio had dedicated to him alone, could not help but . . .

  At this point Montalbano, who had been holding back the urge to vomit, could not take any more, and so he bid Zito the journalist a hasty good-bye and left. He was, after all, quite certain that Cusumano was going to get off scot-free and that it would already be a major achievement if old Melluso wasn’t sent to prison in his place.

  Stepping into the corridor that led to the exit, the inspector froze. The girl had moved two steps forward and was talking to a skinny, thick-haired man of about forty dressed higgledy-piggledy, with one of those thin little ties that only lawyers wear. The man shook his head to mean “no” and headed towards the garden. The girl returned to her usual place and her usual immobility. Montalbano walked past her and found himself outside. There was no point worrying about it, racking his brains trying to figure out the whys and wherefores. It was highly unlikely he would ever see the girl again, so he might as well forget about her.

  When he went to start his car to drive back to Vigàta, it refused to cooperate. He tried again and again, but in vain. What to do? Call the station and have someone come and pick him up? No, his court appearance in Montelusa was a private matter. He remembered having seen a mechanic’s garage on the same street as the courthouse. He went there on foot and explained the situation to the shop foreman. The man was quite polite and sent a mechanic back with Montalbano to the car. Checking the engine, the mechanic discovered a failure in the electrical system. The inspector could come by the garage to pick it up later that afternoon, but not before. Montalbano turned the keys over to him.

  “Is there a bus that goes to Vigàta?”

  “Yes. It leaves from the square in front of the station.”

  He headed off on foot. It was a long walk, luckily all downhill, then the whole length of the corso. At the station square he read the board with the arrival and departure times and learned that a bus had just left. The next would leave in an hour.

  He moseyed down a tree-lined avenue from which one could see the entire Valley of the Temples, and, in the background, the line of the sea. Quite another thing than the quasi-Swiss landscapes around Mascalippa. When he got back to the station square, he saw that the next bus had arrived. On its side was a sign that said: MONTELUSA-VIGÀTA.

  Its doors were open. He climbed aboard through the front door and, when on the first step, from which he could see the interior, he froze. What stopped him in his tracks was not the fact that the bus was empty but for one passenger, but that the one passenger was none other than the girl from the courthouse.

  She was sitting in one of the two seats behind the driver, the one next to the window, but she wasn’t looking outside; she was staring into the space in front of her and didn’t even seem to notice the presence of another passenger frozen on the stair. In fact Montalbano was wondering whether it might not be a good idea to do something provocative to shake the girl out of her absence and into the present, such as, for example, to go and sit down right beside her even though there were forty-nine other seats available in the bus.

  But what reason would he have for acting that way? Was she doing anything wrong? No. And so?

  He went and sat down in one of the two places in the same row as that behind the driver. That way he could still see the girl’s face, though only in profile. Still not moving, she was holding her purse on her knees with both hands.

  The driver sat down behind the wheel and started up the bus. At that moment a voice cried out:

  “Stop! Stop!”

  About forty or more Japanese tourists, all wearing glasses, all smiling, all with cameras slung over their shoulders and preceded by an out-of-breath woman who was clearly their guide, boarded the bus and occupied all the empty seats.

  No Japanese tourists, however, sat down beside either Montalbano or the girl. The bus drove off.

  At the first stop, nobody got off and nobody got on. The Japanese were vying for the windows for photo opportunities in a no-holds-barred struggle fought with weapons of lethal courtesy. At the second stop, the driver had to get up from his seat to help a couple of hundred-year-olds get on.

  “Come and sit over here,” the driver ordered Montalbano, pointing to the place next to the girl.

  The inspector obeyed and the elderly couple could thus sit side by side and commiserate with each other.

  The girl hadn’t budged, however, and so Montalbano, to take his place, couldn’t help but press up against her leg. But she didn’t react to the contact and left her leg right where it was. Embarrassed, Montalbano oriented his body towards the aisle.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw her firm breasts under her cotton dress rise and fall to the rhythm of her breathing, and he attuned his hearing to that movement. It was a trick that Inspector Sanfilippo had taught him: increasing your auditory perception by linking your hearing with your sight. And in fact, little by little, he began to hear the girl’s breathing more and more distinctly above the buzz of the Japanese voices and the sound of the engine. It was slow and regular, as when someone is asleep. But how to reconcile that breathing with the desperate plea that he saw in her eyes? Her hands holding the purse firmly on her knees had long, tapered, elegant fingers, but the skin was rough and chafed from heavy farm labor; the fingernails were broken in spots but still bore traces of red polish. It was clear the girl had been neglecting herself for a while. Another thing the inspector noticed contradicting her apparent composure was that the thumb of her right hand started trembling every so often, without her realizing.

  At the stop for the temples, the Japanese cohort got off noisily. The inspector could have changed places for greater comfort, but didn’t move. Shortly after they passed the road sign indicating they’d entered the Vigàta municipal area, the girl stood up.

  She remained slightly hunched to avoid hitting her head against the luggage rack. Apparently she was about to get off, but just stood there, staring at Montalbano and not asking if she could pass, not saying a word. The inspector had the feeling the girl was looking at him not as a man but as an object, an undefined obstacle. What could be going through her head?

  “Would you like to get by?”

  The girl didn’t answer. And so Montalbano got up and went into the aisle to let her out. She got as far as the stairs and then stopped, one hand holding her purse, the other gripping the metal bar in front of the two seats in which the elderly couple were sitting.

  After a short distance more, the driver stopped the bus, opened the automatic door, and the girl got off.

  “Just a minute!” Montalbano said in a voice so shrill that the driver turned around in surprise to look at him. “Don’t shut the door, I have to get off.”

  He’d made the decision out of the blue. What the
hell was he doing? Why was he so fixated on that girl? He looked around. He was on the older outskirts of town, where there were no new buildings or high-rises but only houses in ruins or still standing only with the support of truss beams, houses inhabited by people who scraped by not by working at the port or doing business in town but by still farming the meager land of the outlying municipality.

  The girl was a short distance ahead of him. She walked slowly, almost as if she didn’t want to go home. She hung her head, as though carefully studying the ground on which she trod. But did she really see the ground she was looking at? What did her eyes actually see?

  The girl turned right, onto a narrow little street that at night would have made an ideal setting for a horror film. On one side, a series of warehouses without doors and with caved-in roofs; on the other, a string of uninhabited, dying little houses. There was literally nobody about, not even a dog.

  “What on earth am I doing here?” the inspector asked himself, as if waking up from a bad dream.

  He was about to turn back, except that at that moment the girl staggered, seeming to lose her balance, then dropped her purse and was forced to lean against the wall of a house to keep from falling. At first Montalbano didn’t know what to do, but then it seemed clear to him that the girl must have had a dizzy spell or something similar, since she hadn’t stumbled or tripped over a rock. At any rate she needed help, and he was more than justified now in intervening. He went up to her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  The earsplitting scream the girl let out at the sound of his voice was so sudden and shrill that Montalbano, taken by surprise, leapt backwards in fear. The girl hadn’t heard him approach and his words had suddenly brought her back to reality. She was now looking at Montalbano with bulging eyes and seeing him for what he was, a man, a stranger who had just said something to her.

  “Are you all right?” he repeated.

  The girl didn’t answer. She began to fall forward, as if in slow motion, arm extended and hand open to pick the purse up off the ground.

  But Montalbano was quicker than her and grabbed the purse first. Since it was an automatic gesture of courtesy on his part, he was stunned by the girl’s reaction, as she suddenly grabbed the bag with both hands and tried to wrest it away from him.

  He instinctively tightened his grip on it. When their eyes met, he read in hers an utterly wild desperation. And for a moment they engaged in an absurd, ridiculous tug of war. Then, as might be expected, a lateral seam of the purse broke open and everything inside fell to the ground. A rather heavy object struck the big toe on the inspector’s left foot, and he looked down and saw a large revolver. But the girl, who meanwhile had become very quick in her movements, grabbed it first. Montalbano seized her wrist and twisted it, but the girl held fast to the gun. Then he pushed her with all his body weight against the wall and pinned her there so that her hand holding the gun and his hand holding her wrist were both squeezed between the wall and the girl’s back. The girl reacted with her free hand, scratching Montalbano’s face. He seized the wrist of that hand as well, holding it high and pinning it against the wall. They were both panting like two lovers making love. With his lower body between the girl’s spread legs, Montalbano pressed hard against her belly and breasts, and the slightly sour smell of her sweat was not at all unpleasant, even in that situation, which seemed without solution.

  All at once the inspector heard a sound of screeching brakes behind him, then a voice that shouted:

  “Stop, you pig! Police! Let the girl go!”

  And he realized that the policeman thought he was witnessing a rape. An understandable mistake. Turning his head around, he recognized one of his men, Officer Galluzzo, who also recognized him and froze.

  “Mo-Mo-Mo . . . ” he stammered.

  He was trying to say “Montalbano,” but what came out sounded like the intro to an old doo-wop song.

  “Help me, she’s got a gun!” Montalbano gasped.

  Galluzzo was a man of quick decisions. Without a peep, he dealt the girl a swift punch to the chin. Her eyes closed at once and she slid down the wall to the ground, unconscious. Montalbano delicately untangled himself from her, but had trouble taking hold of the revolver. The girl’s fingers refused to release the weapon.

  5

  Her identity card, which had fallen to the ground with the other contents of her purse, declared beyond the shadow of a doubt that Rosanna Monaco, daughter of Gerlando Monaco and Concetta Marullo, living at 37 Via Fornace in Vigàta, had become a legal adult just a few months earlier. The card was brand-new, which meant that the girl had had it made upon coming of age. In the eyes of the law she was therefore fully answerable for her actions. She was sitting in a chair in front of the inspector’s desk, head down and staring at the floor, arms dangling. For two hours Montalbano had been unable to get a single word out of her.

  “Can you tell me who the revolver belongs to?”

  “Were you carrying it for self-defense?”

  “Who did you want to defend yourself against?”

  “Did you plan to shoot someone with it?”

  “Who did you want to shoot?”

  “What were you doing in the entrance hall of the courthouse?”

  “Were you waiting for someone?”

  Nothing. After the strength, agility, and quickness she’d suddenly mustered during that silent scuffle that at moments had seemed to Montalbano like an intense sexual encounter, she had now returned to that sort of tormented impassivity that had aroused the inspector’s curiosity from the moment he’d first seen her. Montalbano was, of course, well aware that “tormented impassivity” was a stupid oxymoron, but he couldn’t think of any other way to define what Rosanna’s attitude evoked for him.

  He made up his mind. They could not go on this way.

  “Lock her up,” he ordered Galluzzo, who was at the typewriter to transcribe the interrogation but had so far written only the date. “And get her something to eat and drink.” Then, raising his voice: “I’m going to go and talk to her parents.”

  He had purposely stated his intentions out loud, but the girl seemed not even to have heard him. Before leaving the station, he had Fazio explain to him where Via Fornace was, gave him some things to do, went out, got in his car, and drove off.

  The street was the second on the right after the street in which they’d struggled over the gun. It was unpaved and looked already like a country road. Number 37 was a two-story house with a small storage building no larger than a kennel beside it, but it was less run-down than the others. The front door was open, and as Montalbano approached he heard some incoherent yelling. Standing in the doorway, he felt as if he was looking at a cross between a kindergarten and an elementary school. Inside were half a dozen little children, ranging in age from one to seven years.

  A woman of indeterminate age holding a newborn in one arm was working over a wood-fired cooker. There seemed to be no telephone, or refrigerator, or television. But it wasn’t a case of poverty, since the children were all well dressed and there were cheeses and salamis hanging from the ceiling. It had to be more a case of backwardness, of a lifestyle entrenched in ignorance.

  “Whattya want?” the woman asked.

  “Montalbano’s the name, I’m a police inspector. Is your husband here?”

  “Whattya want from my husband?”

  “Is he here or not?”

  “Nossir, he’s not. He’s in the fields working with the bigger kids, out in the country.”

  “When will he return?”

  “This evening when it gets dark.”

  “Are you Signora Concetta Marullo?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Do you have a daughter named Rosanna?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Listen, we’ve taken your daughter into custody because—”

  “I do
n’ give a shit.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then I’ll repeat it: I don’ give a shit. You can arrest ’er, put ’er in jail, you can hang ’er for all I care . . .”

  “Does she live here with you?”

  “No sir, I threw ’er out three years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause she’s a slut.”

  “Why do you say that? What did she do?”

  “She did wha’ she did.”

  “And where does she live now?”

  “Here nex’ door. My ’usband, who’s a good-hearted man, let ’er ’ave the piggery to sleep in. An’ she likes it there, ’cause a piggery’s where she belongs.”

  “Could I see it?”

  “The piggery? Sure. The door’s unlocked.”

  “Listen, do you know if your daughter harbors any ill will towards anyone?”

  “How the hell should I know? I tol’ you I ain’t talk to her for years. I don’t know nothin’.”

  “One last question. Does your husband own a firearm?”

  “Wha’ kinda arm?”

  “A revolver.”

  “You kiddin’? My ’usband only got a knife for cuttin’ ’is bread.”

  “As soon as he gets home, tell your husband to come to the central police station.”

  “’E comes home late and tired, you know.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’ll be waiting for him.”

  He left feeling a headache coming on. The whole conversation had taken place at high volume in order to be heard above the racket of the kindergarten.

  Rosanna had cleaned up the pig house rather nicely and someone had given the walls a new whitewash. There was barely enough room to fit a cot, a small table, and two chairs. Looking at it from another perspective, it could have been the cell of a Franciscan monk. The kitchen consisted of a single hollow-brick burner. To wash, Rosanna must have used the small basin on the table, getting the water from a well nearby, which Montalbano had seen on arrival. A cord stretching across the room served as a wardrobe, with two dresses and an inside-out overcoat hanging from it. Some underwear lay on a chair. It all spoke of extreme poverty but was very clean. Not a single photo anywhere, no newspapers or magazines. He looked around in vain for a letter or piece of paper, something written.