Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  They sat down. And Montalbano noticed, as if through the eyes of another, that he and the sergeant were now in the same positions, on the same stools, as the two peasants who had come to demand justice from Borruso. Except that the perspective had changed. Until proved otherwise, it was he and the sergeant who represented justice. And Borruso, if not a defendant, was at least a suspect. But Gaetano Borruso simply sat there on his stool, with the ease, as well as the authority, of a natural-born judge.

  “Would you like a little wine?” Borruso asked, holding out the flask.

  Billè accepted and took a sip. Montalbano politely declined with a gesture.

  “It wasn’t me who killed Casio Alletto,” Borruso said slowly and calmly. “If I had, I would have already turned myself in.”

  Every word that is ever spoken vibrates in its own, peculiar way; and truthful words have a different vibration from all the others.

  “Why do you think it was me?” he continued.

  “Because everyone knows that it was Alletto who stole your goats,” said Montalbano.

  “I would never raise a hand even against the man who stole every goat I own.”

  “And then there’s the matter of the hobnailed boots. Like the ones you’re wearing right now.”

  Gaetano looked at his boots as if he were seeing them for the first time.

  “I’ve been wearing these for the past five years,” he said. “They’re solid shoes, good shoes. They say the ones the army gave our soldiers in Russia during the last war had soles made of cardboard. Well, these have leather soles, no doubt about it. In the years my father had remaining after he took them from the warehouse, he wore out only one pair. He was wearing them when he died in the field, turning the soil. And when I dressed him for the funeral, I gave him a new pair. That left me with forty-eight.”

  “And how many do you have now?”

  Gaetano Borruso half-closed his deep blue eyes.

  “This is my second pair, and I’ve been wearing them for the past year. That would leave forty-six, except that I gave away five pairs to people who really needed them, poor things.”

  He noticed something in Montalbano’s expression.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea, dottore. The people I gave them to are alive and well and have nothing to do with your murder case. If you want you can always check. I’m not going to put the blame on anybody else.”

  “So you have forty-one pairs left.”

  “That’s how many there should be, but I can only find forty.”

  “So one pair’s missing.”

  “Yessir. When I heard this story about Casio having nail marks on his face, I went and checked, ’cause I got a little worried.”

  “About what?”

  “That someone might’ve stolen a pair of my shoes and used them the way they did to make it look like I done the deed. Come with me.”

  They all got up and went into the only room in the house. A little cot with a nightstand to the left, a table with four chairs in the middle, and a large chest of drawers against the wall opposite the entrance. On the wall to the right were two doors, through one of which a toilet could be seen. Borruso turned the knob on the other, opened it, and turned on the light. They found themselves in a large storeroom transformed into a pantry and closet.

  “The shoes are there,” said Borruso, pointing to a rusty-looking set of shelves.

  Montalbano could scarcely contain a feeling of nausea. From the moment he entered the little dispensary, a violent stench of rot had assailed his nostrils.

  The shoes were lined up on four shelves, with each pair wrapped in newspaper. Borruso picked up one pair, unwrapped it, and showed the shoes to Montalbano. And the inspector finally understood where the sickening smell was coming from: On every shoe was a layer of fat half an inch thick.

  “I covered them in fat a couple of weeks ago,” said Borruso, “so they would stay like new.”

  The sergeant started counting the pairs, and Montalbano took the opportunity to look at dates on the pages of newspaper. None of them were recent. There was a stack of about twenty on an empty part of one of the shelves.

  “I got the newspapers from the tobacconist in Castro,” Borruso explained, realizing what Montalbano was thinking.

  “. . . and that makes forty,” said the Sergeant. “I’ve counted them twice, there’s no mistake.”

  “Let’s go outside,” said Montalbano.

  The fresh air immediately dispelled his nausea. He breathed deeply and sneezed.

  “Bless you.”

  They sat back down under the pergola.

  “In your opinion, how did the thief manage to enter your house when you weren’t there?”

  “Through the door,” Borruso replied with an ever-so-slight hint of irony. Then he added: “I always leave everything open. I never lock the door.”

  The first thing Montalbano did when he got back to Villalta was to call the coroner, a polite little old man.

  “Please excuse me, Doctor, but I need some information about the body of Casio Alletto.”

  “I haven’t drawn up the report yet, but go ahead.”

  “Aside from hobnail imprints, were there any traces of dubbin on the man’s face?”

  “Traces?” said the doctor. “There was half a ton!”

  The following morning Montalbano got to Castro rather late. He’d had a flat and was not only incapable of changing a tire, but didn’t even know where to look for the jack. When he finally walked into the police station, a smiling Sergeant Billè came up to him.

  “I really don’t think Borruso had anything to do with the murder,” said Montalbano. “Things seem to have gone the way he told us. Somebody stole his shoes to make it look like he had some motive to kill Casio Alletto. We have to start all over.”

  Billè kept on smiling.

  “Well? What is it?” Montalbano asked.

  “I’ve just arrested the killer, barely fifteen minutes ago. He’s already confessed. I tried calling the commissariat to let you know, but you were already on your way here.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Cocò Sampietro, someone from Casio’s band, a half-wit.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “At the market this morning, some guy came in from the countryside selling fava beans. He was riding a mule. When I saw his shoes, I nearly fainted. But I didn’t let on. I just took him aside and asked where he’d bought them. He told me straightforwardly that Cocò Sampietro had sold them to him the night before. So we staked out Cocò, and the moment he stepped out of his house, we slapped the handcuffs on him. He cracked almost immediately. He said the whole gang had rebelled against Casio because he never kept his word.”

  “But if this guy’s a half-wit, as you say, how could he have thought of a way to make it look like Borruso was the culprit?”

  “He didn’t. He told us the whole thing was organized by Stefano Botta, who was Casio’s right-hand man.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks, Inspector. Want to come with us? We’ve still got another five people to arrest.”

  Montalbano thought about this for a moment.

  “No,” he said, “you go on ahead. I’m going to go pay a call on the shepherd king. He’ll be pleased to know that the whole thing is over.”

  NECK AND NECK

  When Montalbano arrived fresh to his appointed post as Chief Inspector of Vigàta Police, his predecessor, when turning over the case files, informed him, among other things, that the territory of Vigàta and environs was a bone of contention between two Mafia families, the Cuffaros and the Sinagras, who, in their eagerness to put an end to their age-old dispute, resorted not to stamped sheets of paper but to murderous blasts of the lupara.

  “What? They’re still using the lupara?” Montalbano wondered aloud, since the method seemed, well
, archaic, in an age when automatic weapons and Kalashnikovs could be had at three for a dime at the local open-air markets.

  “The rival bosses are traditionalists,” his colleague explained. “Don Sisino Cuffaro is over eighty, and Don Balduccio Sinagra just sailed past eighty-five. They’re very attached, you see, to their childhood memories, which include the lupara. But Don Sisino’s son, Don Lillino Cuffaro, who’s over sixty now, and Don Balduccio’s fifty-year-old boy, Don Masino Sinagra, are champing at the bit. They’re anxious to take over for their fathers and would like to modernize, but they’re afraid to because their parents are still liable to slap them around in public.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Not at all. The two old men—Don Sisino and Don Balduccio, that is—are very sensible. And they’re always trying to keep up with each other. If someone from the Sinagra family kills someone from the Cuffaro family, you can bet your last lira that in less than a week’s time, one of the Cuffaros will kill one of the Sinagras. But only one, mind you.”

  “So what’s the score at present?” Montalbano asked sportingly.

  “Six-six,” his colleague said in all seriousness. “The next penalty kick goes to the Sinagras.”

  By the end of the inspector’s second year on the job, the score was momentarily stalled at eight-eight. And since the Sinagras had the ball again, it so happened that on the fifteenth of December, following a phone tip from someone unwilling to identify himself, the dead body of one Titillo Bonpensiero was found in the district of Zagarella. Bonpensiero had apparently had the bad idea—despite his name—of going for a solitary morning walk along a desolate spur of sorghum, rocks, and sheer drops. A perfect setting in which to get killed.

  Doubly bound to the Cuffaro family, Titillo was thirty years old, officially made his living as a real estate agent, and had been married for two years to Mariuccia Di Stefano. The Di Stefanos, naturally, were hand in glove with the Cuffaros, since, in Vigàta, the story of Romeo and Juliet was taken for what it is, a pure and simple fairy tale. The joining of one of the Cuffaros in marriage to one of the Sinagras (or vice versa) was unimaginable, the stuff of science fiction.

  During his first year as Chief Inspector of Vigàta Police, Salvo Montalbano did not subscribe to the school of thought of his predecessor, which was: “Don’t get involved. Just let them kill each other off—so much the better for us and for the honest people in town.” Instead, he dived headlong into these Mafia murder cases, only to come up empty-handed.

  Nobody had seen anything, nobody had heard anything, nobody suspected anything, nobody imagined anything, nobody knew anyone.

  “No wonder Ulysses, right here in Sicily, told the Cyclops his name was Nobody!” the inspector raved one day in the face of the pea soup his investigations had become.

  This was why, when informed that someone of the Cuffaro gang had turned up dead in the Zagarella district, he sent his second-in-command, Mimì Augello, in his stead.

  Meanwhile, everyone in town began to wait for the next, inevitable murder of someone from the Sinagra family.

  And indeed, on the twenty-second of December, Cosimo Zaccaria, whose passion was fishing, went out with rod and worms to the tip of the western jetty before seven o’clock in the morning. After fishing for half an hour with reasonable luck, he must surely have been pissed off when a noisy motorboat out on the water began to approach the port at great speed. It was aiming not so much at the entrance between the two jetties, but directly at the tip of the western jetty, determined, to all appearances, to kick up such a row as to chase away all the fish Cosimo was waiting for. Ten meters before crashing into the breakwater, the motorboat put about and sped back out to the open sea, but by then Cosimo Zaccaria lay indecorously wedged facedown between two rocks, his chest blown apart by a lupara.

  When word got around, the whole town, including Inspector Montalbano, was flummoxed.

  What? Wasn’t Cosimo Zaccaria one of the Cuffaro family, just like Titillo Bonpensiero? Why had the Sinagras killed two Cuffaros in a row? Perhaps they’d got the score wrong? And if it wasn’t a mistake, how come the Sinagras had decided to stop playing by the rules?

  Now the score was ten to eight, and there was no doubt that the Cuffaros would waste little or no time tying it back up. The month of January promised to be cold and rainy, with two Sinagras as good as dead for all intents and purposes. But it would have to wait until after the obligatory Christmas holidays, since from the twenty-fourth of December to the sixth of January there had always been an unofficial truce. Play would resume after the Epiphany.

  The referee’s whistle, heard not by the people of Vigàta but only by the members of the two teams, must have been blown on the evening of January 7. Indeed, the following morning Michele Zummo, owner of a model chicken farm in the Ciavolotta district, was barely discernible, in his capacity as a corpse, from the thousand or more eggs either shattered by the spray of the lupara or crushed by the weight of Zummo’s own body as it crashed to the ground in their midst.

  Mimì Augello reported to his superior that the blood, brains, yolks, and whites were so perfectly blended together that one could have made an omelet for three hundred people without anyone’s being able to distinguish between Zummo and the eggs.

  Ten to nine. Things were returning to normal, and the town began to feel reassured. Michele Zummo was a Sinagra, and killed by a lupara, in keeping with tradition.

  Now it was still the turn of someone from the Sinagra team to go down, after which the families would once again be neck and neck.

  On the bitter, short second day of February, Pasqualino Fichèra, a fish wholesaler, took a glancing shot from a lupara as he was returning home at one o’clock in the morning. He fell to the ground, wounded, and would have escaped with his life had he pretended he was dead instead of yelling:

  “Hey, boys! There’s been a mistake! It’s not my turn yet!”

  People in neighboring houses heard him, but nobody budged. Hit straight-on by a second shot, Pasqualino Fichèra departed, as they say, for his eternal reward with the cruel suspicion that there’d been a misunderstanding. Indeed, he belonged to the Cuffaro family. Order and tradition dictated that, to even things up, a Sinagra should have been killed. That was what he’d meant to say when lying there wounded. Now the Sinagras had taken a sizable advantage: eleven to nine.

  The town lost its head.

  But this most recent murder, and Pasqualino Fichèra’s last words, had the opposite effect on Montalbano, which was to fasten his head more securely to his neck. He got to thinking about things, based on a conviction that was, however, merely instinctive: that nobody, on either side, had gotten the score wrong.

  One morning, as he was thinking, he became convinced that he needed to chat for a good hour or so with Dr. Pasquano, the coroner, whose office was in Montelusa. The doctor was moody, impolite, and getting on in years, but Montalbano got along well with him, and so Pasquano managed to free up an hour for him that same afternoon.

  “Titillo Bonpensiero, Cosimo Zaccaria, Michele Zummo, Pasqualino Fichèra,” the inspector said, rattling off the names of the murder victims.

  “So?”

  “Did you know that three of them were from the same gang, and only one from the enemy gang?”

  “No, I didn’t. And I should add that I absolutely do not give a shit. Political leanings, religious beliefs, professional affiliations are not yet considered things to look for during an autopsy.”

  “Why did you say ‘not yet’?”

  “Because I have no doubt that before long they’ll develop equipment so sophisticated that they’ll be able to tell what a corpse’s political ideas were. But get to the point, what do you want?”

  “When you were examining those four bodies, did you find any anomalies, such as, I don’t know—”

  “What, you think I only have eyes and hands for your dead bodies?
I’ve got the whole province of Montelusa on my shoulders! Did you know that the undertakers around here are building mansions in the Maldives?”

  He opened a big metal file cabinet, pulled out four sheets of paper, read them carefully, put three of them back, and handed the fourth to Montalbano.

  “Mind you, I sent an exact copy of this file, at the proper time, to your office in Vigàta.”

  Which meant: Why don’t you read the things I send you instead of coming all the way to Montelusa to bust my chops?

  “Thanks. I’m sorry to have bothered you,” the inspector said after a quick glance at the report.

  As he was driving back to Vigàta, Montalbano’s anger at looking like a fool in the doctor’s eyes had his nostrils fuming like those of an enraged bull.

  “I want Mimì Augello in my office at once!” he shouted as soon as he entered the station.

  “What is it?” Augello asked five minutes later, going on the defensive the moment he saw the expression on the inspector’s face.

  “Tell me something, Mimì. What do you do with the reports Dr. Pasquano sends you? Do you use them to wrap fresh mullets from the market or to wipe your ass?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Do you at least read them?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then explain to me why you didn’t tell me anything about what the doctor wrote about the dead body of Titillo Bonpensiero.”

  “Why, what did he write?” Mimì inquired, a seraphic look on his face.

  “Listen, tell you what. You go back into your office now, find the report, read it, then come back to me. I, meanwhile, will try to calm down, because otherwise this is going to end badly between you and me.”