Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  When he returned to his superior’s office, Augello had a gloomy look on his face, while the inspector appeared a bit more serene.

  “So?”

  “So I’m an asshole,” Mimì admitted.

  “That’s something we can both agree on.”

  Mimì Augello didn’t react.

  “Pasquano,” said Montalbano, “had the strong suspicion that, given the very small amount of blood found at the scene, Bonpensiero was killed somewhere else and then brought to the rocky spur in the Zingarella district to be shot after he’d already been dead for a few hours. With a lupara blast between chest and chin, almost point blank. A sham, in short, a put-on. Why? Because, again according to Pasquano, Bonpensiero was strangled in his sleep, and the wound of the shotgun blast didn’t quite manage to obliterate all trace of the strangulation, as it was intended to do. And so, Mimì, what’s your opinion, now that you’ve finally deigned to have a peek at the report?”

  “Well, if that’s how it went, then this homicide doesn’t follow the standard procedure.”

  Montalbano shot an admiring glance at him, feigning astonishment.

  “You know, Mimì, sometimes your intelligence frightens me! Is that all? It doesn’t follow the standard procedure, period?”

  “Maybe . . .” Mimì ventured, then stopped, mouth agape, as if himself astonished by the thought that had just occurred to him.

  “Go on, speak. I won’t eat you.”

  “Maybe the Sinagras have nothing whatsoever to do with the killing of Bonpensiero.”

  Montalbano stood up, went up to Mimì, took his cheeks in his hands, and kissed him on the forehead.

  “You see? If someone tickles your bottom with a sprig of parsley, you can go caca!”

  “Inspector, when you sent word that you wanted to talk to me one of these days, I didn’t come running, but it wasn’t because I have anything to fear from the law. It was because of the high esteem in which both my father and I hold you.”

  Don Lillino Cuffaro—thickset, hairy, with one eye half shut, and dressed in a haphazard manner—had, despite his unassuming appearance, a sort of secret charisma about him. He was a man of authority, of power, and didn’t manage to hide it very well.

  Montalbano made no sign of acknowledgment, as if he hadn’t heard the compliment.

  “Signor Cuffaro, I know you’re a very busy man, and so I won’t waste your time. How is Signora Mariuccia doing?”

  “Who?!”

  “Signora Mariuccia, the daughter of your friend Di Stefano, the widow of Titillo Bonpensiero.”

  Don Lillino Cuffaro opened his mouth as if to say something, but then closed it again. He was flustered. He hadn’t expected an attack from that side. But then he pulled himself together.

  “How do you think she’s doing, poor woman? Married barely two years, only to have her husband killed like that . . .”

  “Like what?” Montalbano asked, looking as innocent as a lamb at Easter time.

  “But I . . . I was told he was shot,” said Don Lillino, hesitating. He realized he was walking in a minefield. Montalbano was impassive as a statue.

  “Wasn’t he?” asked Don Lillino Cuffaro.

  The inspector raised his right index finger and moved it back and forth from right to left and vice versa. Again he said nothing.

  “Well, then, how was he killed?”

  This time Montalbano deigned to reply.

  “Strangled.”

  “Who are you trying to kid?” Don Lillino protested.

  It was clear, however, that he wasn’t a very good actor.

  “If I say so, you must believe me,” said the inspector, dead serious, even though he was having a ball.

  Silence descended. Montalbano stared at the ballpoint pen in his hand as if it were some mysterious object he was looking at for the first time in his life.

  “But Cosimo Zaccaria made a big mistake, a very big mistake,” the inspector resumed after a spell. He set the pen down on the desk, giving up once and for all any hope of understanding it.

  “And what’s Cosimo Zaccaria got to do with it, rest his soul?”

  “A lot. A lot.”

  Don Lillino squirmed in his chair.

  “And what, in your opinion, was his mistake, just for the sake of conversation?”

  “For the sake of conversation, his mistake was trying to pin the murder he committed on the Sinagras. But the Sinagras made it known to those concerned that they had nothing to do with the whole story. And so the people on the other side, convinced that the Sinagras had no part in it, decide to conduct their own in-house investigation. And they discover something which, if it were to be made public, would have covered them in shame. Please correct me if I’m wrong, Signor Cuffaro . . .”

  “I don’t see how I could correct you on something that—”

  “Let me finish. Now, then, Mariuccia Di Stefano and Cosimo Zaccaria had been lovers for a while. In the early going they were so clever that nobody suspected a thing, neither at home nor outside the family. Then—but this is mere conjecture on my part—Titillo Bonpensiero begins to smell a rat and opens his eyes wide and pricks up his ears. Mariuccia becomes alarmed and talks about it with her lover. Together they concoct a plan to get rid of Titillo and have the blame fall on the Sinagras. One night, when the husband is fast asleep, the wife gets up out of bed and opens the door to let Cosimo Zaccaria in—”

  “That’s enough,” Don Lillino said suddenly, raising his hand. He found the story too painful to listen to.

  To his surprise, Montalbano saw a different, changed person in front of him. Shoulders erect, eyes clear and sharp as a knife blade, face hard and decisive: a boss.

  “What do you want from us?”

  “It was you who gave the order for Cosimo Zaccaria to be killed, to restore order in the family.”

  Don Lillino uttered not a syllable.

  “So, I want Cosimo Zaccaria’s killer to turn himself in. And I also want Mariuccia Di Stefano, the accomplice to her husband’s murder.”

  “Of course you have proof of everything you’ve just said.”

  It was one last line of defense, and the inspector quickly demolished it.

  “Yes and no.”

  “So can you tell me why you inconvenienced me?”

  “Only to tell you that I intend to do far worse than produce evidence.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Starting tomorrow I will open an investigation into the murders of Bonpensiero and Zaccaria to the beat of a big bass drum. I’ll have the TV and newspapers following it every step of the way and hold a press conference every other day. I’ll drag your name through the mud. The Sinagras will pee their pants laughing every time you walk down the street. I’ll embarrass you guys so badly, you won’t know where to hide. All I have to do is say what happened, and you’ll lose the respect of everyone. Because I’ll say there is no discipline in your family. I’ll say that anarchy reigns, that whoever feels like it can fuck the first person to come along, whether it’s married women or young girls, that everyone is free to kill anyone they want anytime and any way—”

  “That’s enough for me,” Don Lillino said again. Then he stood up, made a half bow to the inspector, and left.

  Three days later, Vittorio Lopresti, of the Cuffaro family, turned himself in, saying he killed Cosimo Zaccaria because he had behaved badly as his business partner.

  Early the following morning, Mariuccia Di Stefano, dressed all in black, left her home and walked with a hurried step to the tip of the western jetty. She was alone and seen by many. According to eyewitness Pippo Sutera, when she arrived at the foot of the lighthouse, the woman made the sign of the cross and threw herself into the sea. At once Pippo Sutera likewise dived in to save her, but the sea was rough that day.

  They persuaded her to kill herse
lf because she had no other way out, thought Montalbano.

  In town everyone was convinced that Mariuccia Di Stefano committed suicide because she could no longer bear the loss of her beloved husband.

  FELLOW TRAVELER

  When the train pulled into Palermo Station, Inspector Salvo Montalbano was in a dark mood. His gloom arose from the fact that, having learned too late that the airlines as well as sea lines were on strike, the only thing he’d found that would get him to Rome was a bed in a two-person compartment in second class. Which meant, in short, spending a whole night with a stranger in a space so stifling that a solitary-confinement cell, by comparison, seemed like a luxury suite. Montalbano, moreover, had never been able to sleep on trains, not even by popping sleeping pills till they were coming out of his esophagus. To help the hours pass, he normally would enact a ritual that was only possible if he was completely alone. This consisted essentially of lying down, turning out the light, turning it back on barely half an hour later, smoking half a cigarette, reading a page of a book he had brought along, putting out the cigarette, turning off the light, and then, after a five-minute pause, repeating the entire operation until he reached his destination. Therefore, if he was not alone, it was utterly indispensable that his fellow traveler have ironclad nerves or be blessed with a leaden sleep. In the absence of such requisites, the whole thing risked taking a bad turn.

  The station was so mobbed with travelers that it looked like the first of August. And this darkened the inspector’s mood even further. There wasn’t the slightest chance the other bed would be unoccupied.

  Standing in front of Montalbano’s coach was a man dressed in dirty blue overalls with a little nameplate pinned to his chest. The inspector took him to be a porter, an endangered species. Normally all you get nowadays are the sorts of carts that make you lose an hour before you find one that works.

  “Give me your ticket,” the man in the overalls ordered him threateningly.

  “Why?” the inspector asked defiantly.

  “Because the regular employees are on strike and I was told to do their job. I’m authorized to prepare your bed, but I’ll warn you now, in the morning I can’t make you coffee or bring you the newspaper.”

  Montalbano’s gloom increased. No problem about the newspaper, but without coffee, he was lost. He couldn’t have imagined a less auspicious start.

  He went into his compartment. His travel companion hadn’t arrived yet; there was no baggage to be seen anywhere. He barely had time to put away his own suitcase and open the mystery novel he had bought, mostly for its length, when the train started moving. Perhaps the other had changed his mind and wouldn’t be traveling after all? The thought cheered him up. After they’d been rolling for a while, the man in overalls appeared with two bottles of mineral water and two paper cups.

  “Do you know where the other passenger will be getting on?”

  “They told me he’s reserved from Messina.”

  The inspector took comfort in this. At least he could sit for three hours in peace, since that was how long it took to go from Palermo to Messina by train. He closed the door and started to read. The mystery story so absorbed him that, when he happened to look at his watch, he realized there was only an hour left before they got to Messina. He called for the man in the overalls, had his bed made up—his was the one on top—and, once the attendant had finished, he undressed, lay down, and resumed reading. As the train pulled into Messina station, he closed the book and turned off the light. He would pretend to be asleep when his travel companion entered the compartment. That way there would be no need to make polite conversation.

  Inexplicably, however, even after the train was finally loaded onto the ferry following an endless series of back-and-forth maneuvers, the lower bunk remained empty. And, as the ferryboat at last moored at the dock with a jolt, Montalbano’s mood was starting to turn to contentment. But then the door to the compartment opened, and the traveler made his dreaded entry. For a split second, in the faint light of the corridor outside, the inspector caught a glimpse of a short man with a crew cut bundled up in a broad, heavy overcoat and carrying a briefcase. The passenger smelled of the cold. Apparently he had in fact boarded at Messina but had preferred to stay outside on the ship’s deck while crossing the strait.

  The new arrival sat down on the lower bunk and stopped moving. Indeed he didn’t budge at all, not even to turn on the little light that allows one to see without bothering the others in the cabin. And for an hour he remained that way, immobile. If not for the fact that he was breathing heavily, as though winded after a long run, Montalbano might have thought the bed below his was still vacant. To put the stranger at ease, the inspector pretended to sleep and even started snoring lightly, eyes closed but not really, like a cat that looks asleep but is actually counting the stars in the sky.

  But then, all at once, without realizing it, he fell asleep in earnest, as he had never done before.

  He woke up with a cold shiver. The train was stopped in a station: “Paola,” a helpful masculine voice called out over the loudspeaker. The compartment window was completely open, the station’s yellow lights gently illuminating the cabin.

  Montalbano’s fellow traveler was now sitting at the foot of his bunk, still wrapped in his overcoat, the open briefcase lying on the lid over the washbasin. He was reading a letter, lips moving with the words as he read them. Once he’d finished, he ripped it up very carefully and placed the little scraps next to the briefcase. Taking a better look, the inspector noticed that the pile of scraps was quite high and must have consisted of several shredded letters. This had therefore been going on for a while, and he must have been asleep for two hours, or almost.

  The train began to move, gained speed, and when they were out of the station the man stood up wearily, gathered some scraps of paper into his cupped hands, and let them fly out the window. He repeated the gesture with the remaining half, and then, after a moment of indecision, he grabbed the briefcase, which still contained many letters to be read and shredded, and hurled it out the window. From the way the man was sniffling, Montalbano realized he was crying. A moment later, in fact, the stranger rubbed his eyes with his coat sleeve to dry his tears. The man then unbuttoned the heavy overcoat, pulled a dark object out of the back pocket of his trousers, and flung it forcefully out of the train.

  The inspector was certain the man had just got rid of a firearm.

  Buttoning his coat back up, the stranger closed the window and drew the curtain, then collapsed onto his bunk with a thud. He began sobbing uncontrollably. Embarrassed, Montalbano turned up the volume of his phony snoring. It was quite a performance.

  Little by little, the sobbing subsided. Fatigue, or whatever it was, got the upper hand, and the man fell into a troubled sleep.

  When he realized they would soon be pulling into Naples, the inspector climbed down the little ladder, fumbled about for the coat hanger with his clothes, then started carefully to get dressed. The stranger, still in his overcoat, was turned away from him, but from the way he was breathing, Montalbano had the impression he was awake but didn’t want him to know, a bit the same way the inspector had done during the first part of their journey.

  When bending down to tie his shoes, Montalbano noticed a white paper rectangle on the floor. He picked it up, opened the cabin door, and immediately went out into the corridor, closing the door behind him. In his hand he had a postcard, which had an image of a red heart surrounded by white doves in flight against a blue sky. It was addressed to Ragionier Mario Urso, Via della Libertà 22, Patti (Messina prov.). It had only seven words on it: “I think of you always with love,” and was signed “Anna.”

  The train hadn’t yet come to a stop under the station canopy before the inspector was already running along the platform, desperately in search of someone selling coffee. Finding nobody, he was forced to go all the way to the main hall, where he scorched his mouth with two
demitasses in a row, then raced to the kiosk to buy a newspaper.

  He had to break into a run to get back on the train, which had already started moving. Standing in the corridor for a few moments to catch his breath, he started reading, beginning with the national news, as he always did. And at once his eyes fell upon a news item from Patti (Messina province). Only a few lines, as many as the story required.

  A well-respected ragioniere of fifty, Mario Urso, had surprised his young wife, Anna Foti, in a compromising situation with a certain R.M., aged thirty and with a criminal record, and killed the wife with three pistol shots. R.M., the lover, who had publicly mocked the betrayed husband on several occasions, had been spared, but was nevertheless hospitalized and in a state of shock. The police and carabinieri were still looking for the killer.

  The inspector did not go back into his compartment, but remained in the corridor, smoking one cigarette after another. Then, after the train had already slowed to a crawl and went under the canopy of Roma Termini station, he decided to open the door.

  Still bundled up, the man was sitting on his bunk, arms wrapped around himself, body shaking with the shivers. He neither saw nor heard anything around him.

  The inspector plucked up his courage and entered that dense atmosphere of palpable desolation and visible despair, which filled the compartment with a rotten yellow smell. He grabbed his suitcase and then delicately laid the postcard on his fellow traveler’s knees.

  “Good luck, ragioniere,” he whispered.

  And he fell in line behind the other passengers queuing up to get off the train.

  DRESS REHEARSAL

  It was a really nasty night, with gusts of angry wind alternating with fast-moving, ill-intentioned sheets of water that seemed they would slice right through the rooftops. Montalbano had come home just a short while before, weary from a day of hard work that was especially trying on the brain. He opened the French door that gave onto the veranda. No, it was out of the question. The only thing to do was to take a shower and get into bed with a good book. Fine, but which? Choosing a book with which to spend the night, sharing his bed and last thoughts with it, could easily cost him a good hour. First he had to select a genre, the one that best fit the mood of the evening. A historical essay on the events of the past century? Careful: With all the revisionism currently in fashion, he might end up with a book that would tell him that Hitler was in fact someone paid by the Jews to make them into victims just to win sympathy the world over. And he would get upset and then not sleep a wink. How about a mystery, then? Fine, but what kind? Perhaps most appropriate for the occasion was one of those English mysteries, preferably written by a woman, consisting entirely of interwoven states of mind—which, however, after three pages begin to get boring. He reached out to grab one he hadn’t read yet, and at that moment the telephone rang. Christ! He’d forgotten to call Livia. That must be her calling, worried. He picked up the receiver.