Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  “The bathroom’s in there,” she said. “I’m sorry if it’s a little messy.”

  Montalbano went in, closing the door behind him. The bathroom was still warm with steam; so the woman really had been taking a shower. On the glass shelf over the sink, alongside the bottles of perfume and jars of cream, he noticed a razor and a can of shaving cream. He peed, pushed the button to flush, washed his hands, and opened the door.

  “Signora, could you come here for a minute?”

  Signora Giulia came into the bathroom. Without saying a word, Montalbano showed her the razor and shaving cream.

  “So?” asked Giulia.

  “Do those look like women’s things?”

  Giulia Tarantino gave a brief, full-throated laugh, sounding like a dove.

  “I guess you’ve never lived with a woman, Inspector. That’s all mine, for hair removal.”

  By now it was late, and so he went directly home to Marinella. Once there, he went and sat out on the veranda, which faced the sea. First he read the newspaper, then a few pages of a book he liked a great deal, Petersburg Tales by Nikolai Gogol. Before going to bed, he phoned Livia. As they were saying good night, it occurred to him to ask her a question.

  “Tell me something. To remove body hair, do you use a razor and shaving cream?”

  “What a question, Salvo! You’ve seen me do it a thousand times!”

  “No, no, I just wanted to know—”

  “And I’m not going to tell you!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t believe you can be in an intimate relationship with a woman for years and not know what she does to remove body hair!”

  He hung up feeling angry. Then he rang Mimì Augello.

  “Mimì, how does a woman normally remove body hair?”

  “Is this some erotic fantasy of yours?”

  “Come on, don’t be a pain in the ass.”

  “I dunno, they use creams, plasters, body wax . . .”

  “How about razors and shaving cream?”

  “Razors, sure, and maybe even shaving cream. But I’ve never seen it. Normally I don’t frequent bearded women.”

  Come to think of it, Livia didn’t use razors either. But, then again, was it really so important?

  The following morning, as soon as he got to the office he called Fazio.

  “Do you know what Giovanni Tarantino’s house is like?”

  “Sure, I went there once with Inspector Augello.”

  “It’s at 35 Via Giovanni Verga and it doesn’t have a back door. Right? The back of the house faces Vicolo Capuana, which is very narrow. Do you know the name of the street after that, the one parallel to Via Verga and Vicolo Capuano?

  “Yes, it’s another narrow alleyway. It’s called Vicolo De Roberto.”

  Made sense.

  “Listen. As soon as you’re free, I want you to go to Vicolo De Roberto, survey the whole street, and then give me a detailed list of every house.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Fazio.

  “I want you to tell me who lives at number one, who at number two, and so on. But try not to call any attention to yourself, don’t go up and down the street. You’re very good at that sort of thing.”

  “Why, am I not any good at other things?”

  After Fazio left, Montalbano called Augello.

  “You know what, Mimì? Last night I paid a call on your friend, Giulia Tarantino.”

  “Did she fuck with your head the way she did with me?”

  “No,” Montalbano said firmly, “not with me, she didn’t.”

  “Were you able to figure out how the husband gets into the house? The only entrance is the front door. The Fugitives Brigade have lost many nights of sleep over it. They’ve never managed to see him. And yet I would bet the family jewels that every now and then he goes and sees her.”

  “I think so too. But now you have to tell me everything you know about the husband. Not his scams and bad checks, I don’t give a damn about that. I want to know about his obsessions, his tics, what he was like when he lived in town.”

  “Well, first of all, he’s extremely jealous. I’m convinced that whenever I go and search the house, he probably goes crazy, imagining that his wife is taking advantage of the situation to cheat on him. Then there’s the fact that, being a violent man despite appearances, and being a fan of Milan’s Inter, he was always getting in fights on Sunday evenings, or whenever his team would play. Another thing about him is . . .”

  Mimì went on for a good while, describing Giovanni Tarantino’s life from the cradle to the present. By now he seemed to know the man better than himself.

  Montalbano then wanted to know in minute detail how Tarantino’s house had been searched.

  “The usual way,” said Mimì. “Since we were looking for a man, I and the guys from the brigade looked everywhere a man could hide: the attic, under the staircase, places like that. We even searched the floors for some kind of trapdoor. But everywhere we knocked, it rang solid, not hollow.”

  “Did you try looking in the mirror?”

  “But the big mirror is screwed to the wall!”

  “I didn’t ask if you looked behind the mirror, but in the mirror. You do that by opening the front door and looking at its reflection in the mirror.”

  “Have you gone crazy?”

  “Or else you do as Alice did: You imagine the glass is a kind of gauze.”

  “Seriously, Salvo, are you okay? Who’s this Alice?”

  “Haven’t you ever read Lewis Carroll?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Never mind, Mimì. Listen, tomorrow morning, using whatever excuse you can think of, go and pay a visit to Signora Tarantino. Make sure she invites you into the living room, and then you must tell me whether or not she does a certain thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  Montalbano told him.

  After receiving Fazio’s report on Wednesday, the inspector gave him until the following day to gather further details concerning the other houses on Vicolo De Roberto. On Thursday evening, before going to visit Signora Tarantino, Montalbano went into the Farmacia Bevilacqua, which was the one open that day. There was a flu bug going around, and the pharmacy was full of people.

  One of the two female employees noticed Montalbano and asked him out loud:

  “What can I do for you, Inspector?”

  “I can wait,” said Montalbano.

  Hearing the inspector’s voice, Bevilacqua the pharmacist raised his head, looked over at him, and saw that he seemed embarrassed. Dispatching the customer he was attending to, he went over to a shelf, grabbed a small box, came out from behind the counter, and with a conspiratorial air put it in the inspector’s hands.

  “What’s in here?” Montalbano asked in bewilderment.

  “Condoms,” the pharmacist said in a low voice. “You asked for them, didn’t you?”

  “No,” said Montalbano, handing the little box back to him. “I want the pill.”

  The pharmacist looked around and lowered his voice to a breathy whisper.

  “Viagra?”

  “No,” said Montalbano, starting to get nervous. “The one that women take. The most common one.”

  Out on the street, he opened the packet the pharmacist had given him, threw the birth-control pills into a rubbish bin, and kept only the piece of paper with the instructions for use.

  Except for the fact that this time Giulia Tarantino hadn’t just come out of the shower, everything happened the same way as the previous Sunday. The inspector sat down on the sofa, Signora Tarantino in an armchair, and the receiver of the old-fashioned phone was taken off the hook.

  “What is it this time?” she asked, a hint of resignation in her voice.

  “First of all, I wanted to inform you that I’ve taken th
e case away from my second-in-command, Inspector Augello, who came to see you a few mornings ago and whom you know quite well.”

  He’d stressed the word quite, and the woman had given a start.

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “You see, when relations between the investigator and the person being investigated become, as in your case, rather close, it’s always better . . . In short, starting today, I’ll be handling your husband’s case personally, myself.”

  “As far as I’m concerned . . .”

  “. . . It makes no difference? Ah, but it does, my friend, and how. I’m better, a lot better.”

  He’d managed to give the last part of the statement an obscenely insinuating suggestiveness. He didn’t know whether to congratulate himself or spit in his own face.

  Giulia Tarantino had turned a little pale.

  “Inspector, I . . .”

  “Let me do the talking for you, Giulia. Last Sunday, when we went first into the bedroom downstairs, and then into the bathroom . . .”

  The woman turned paler than ever, raising a hand as if to make the inspector stop talking, but Montalbano continued.

  “I found this little piece of paper on the floor. It came with Securigen, which it says are birth-control pills. Now, if you haven’t seen your husband for two years, what could you need them for? I can make a few conjectures. My second-in-command—”

  “Please!” cried Giulia Tarantino.

  And she did what the inspector was hoping she would do: She picked up the receiver and put it back in its forks.

  “You know what?” said Montalbano. “I’ve known from the start that that phone’s a fake. Whereas the one on the nightstand in the bedroom is real. This one only lets your husband listen to what people say in this room. I have a very keen sense of hearing. When you pick up the receiver, I should be able to hear a dial tone, but I don’t. Your telephone is silent.”

  The woman said nothing. She looked as if she might faint at any moment, but she resisted with all her might, taut as a wire, as though expecting something terrible to happen.

  “I also found out,” the inspector resumed, “that your husband owns a small garage in Vicolo De Roberto, less than thirty feet away from here, as the crow flies. He dug a tunnel that almost certainly comes out behind the mirror downstairs. Which the police never look behind when they search the place. They always think there’s nothing behind a mirror.”

  Realizing that she’d lost, Giulia Tarantino recovered her air of detachment. She looked straight into the inspector’s eyes.

  “Tell me something. Don’t you ever feel ashamed of what you do and how you do it?”

  “Yes, now and then I do,” Montalbano confessed.

  At that moment they heard a loud crash of broken glass downstairs, and a furious voice cried out:

  “Where are you, you filthy slut?”

  Giovanni Tarantino then started climbing the stairs in a rush.

  “And here’s the idiot himself,” sighed his wife, resigned.

  THE PACT

  Dressed all in black, wearing high heels and an outmoded little hat, with a small, patent-leather purse hanging from her right arm, the lady (since it was immediately clear she was a lady of ancient class) advanced in small but decisive steps at the side of the road, looking down all the while, oblivious to the infrequent cars grazing past her.

  Even in daytime the woman would have attracted Inspector Montalbano’s attention for her old-fashioned distinction and elegance; all the more so at two-thirty in the morning, on a road outside of town. Montalbano was on his way home to Marinella after a long day at the station. He was tired but driving slowly. Through the open car windows came the scents of a mid-May night, gusts of jasmine from the gardens of the houses on his right, wafts of brine from the sea to his left. After driving behind the woman for a brief stretch, the inspector pulled up beside her and, leaning over the passenger’s seat, asked her:

  “Need any help, signora?”

  The woman didn’t even look up. She just continued on her way, making no gesture at all.

  The inspector turned on the brights, stopped the car, got out, and planted himself in front of her, preventing her from advancing. Only then did the lady, who was not the least bit frightened, decide to look at him. In the glare of the headlights Montalbano saw that she was very old, but her eyes were an intense, almost phosphorescent blue whose well-preserved youth clashed with the rest of her face. She was wearing precious earrings and a fine pearl necklace.

  “I’m Inspector Montalbano,” he said to reassure her, even though the woman gave no sign of being nervous.

  “Pleased to meet you. I am Signorina Angela Clemenza,” she said, stressing the word Signorina. “Can I help you?”

  “No, you can’t,” the inspector snapped at her. “Does it seem normal to you to be out alone in that getup at this time of the night? You’re lucky no one has robbed you and thrown you into a ditch. Please get in the car, I’ll drive you home.”

  “I’m not afraid. And I’m not tired.”

  It was true. Her breathing was regular, and there wasn’t a trace of sweat on her face. Only her shoes, whitened with dust, indicated that the lady had been walking for a long time.

  Montalbano delicately grabbed her arm with two fingers and nudged her towards the car.

  Angela Clemenza kept looking at him for a moment, the blue of her eyes as though mixed with violet. She was clearly angry, but said nothing and got in the car.

  Once inside the car, she laid the little purse on her knees and gently massaged her right forearm. The inspector noticed that the purse was swollen and looked heavy.

  “Where shall I take you?” he asked.

  “Gelso district. I’ll tell you how to get there.”

  The inspector heaved a sigh of relief. Gelso wasn’t very far out of town, in the country only a few kilometers inland from Marinella. He would have liked to ask the lady how she happened to be walking home alone at night, but felt intimidated by her reserve and self-possession.

  For her part, Signorina Clemenza didn’t say a word except to tell him what road he should take. Driving through an open, cast-iron gate and down a perfectly tended lane, Montalbano stopped the car in the parking space in front of a three-story nineteenth-century villa, smart and freshly stuccoed, with a front door and green shutters that looked as if they’d just been freshly painted. They got out of the car.

  “You are so kind,” said the lady. “Thank you ever so much.” And she held out her hand. Surprised at himself, Montalbano bent down and kissed it. Turning her back to him, Signorina Clemenza rummaged through her purse, pulled out a set of keys, opened the door, went inside, and locked the door behind her.

  It wasn’t yet seven o’clock in the morning when a call from Mimì Augello woke him up.

  “Sorry to bother you at this hour, Salvo, but there’s been a murder. I’m already at the scene. I’ve sent a car to pick you up.”

  Montalbano barely had time to shave before the car arrived.

  “Do you know who was killed?” he asked the officer at the wheel.

  “Some retired schoolteacher, Corrado Militello’s the name. He lives past the old train station.”

  The late Master Militello’s house stood just past the old train station, but already in the open country. Before Montalbano got through the doorway, Mimì Augello, who apparently wanted to be first in the class that morning, filled him in.

  “Militello was already over eighty. He lived alone and had never married. He hadn’t even left the house for about ten years. A housekeeper used to come every morning to look after him, the same one for thirty years, and it was she who found him dead and called us. Here’s how the house is laid out: Upstairs there are two large bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a walk-in closet. The ground floor consists of a living room, a small dining room, a bathroom and a study,
which is the room he was killed in. Pasquano’s already at work in there.”

  Seated at the edge of a chair in the anteroom outside the study, weeping in silence and rocking back and forth from the waist up, was the housekeeper. The body of Master Militello lay on its back on the desk in the study. Dr. Pasquano, the coroner, was examining it.

  “The killer,” said Mimì Augello, “had some sadistic desire to terrorize the victim before killing him. Have a look here: He shot at the lamp, the bookcase, and that painting, which looks to me like a reproduction of The Kiss, by Velázquez—”

  “You mean Hayez,” Montalbano wearily corrected him.

  “And he also shot at the window, but left the last bullet for him. A revolver, since there are no shells.”

  “Let’s not get caught up in counting the shots,” Pasquano chimed in. “There were five, I agree, but he also shot at the bust of Wagner, which is made of bronze, and the bullet ricocheted and hit the victim square in the forehead, killing him.”

  Augello said nothing.

  In the fireplace was a mountain of incinerated paper. Montalbano became curious and cast a questioning glance at Augello.

  “The housekeeper said he’d been burning letters and photographs for the last two days,” Mimì replied. “He kept them in this trunk here, which is now empty.”

  Apparently Mimì Augello was having one of those days where, once he started talking, there was no stopping him, not even with cannon fire.

  “The victim must have opened the door for the killer; there’s no trace of forced entry. Clearly he knew him and trusted him. Like family. You know what I say, Salvo? That at some point some little grandson will pop up who’d long been waiting for the inheritance and ran out of patience. Got fed up. The old man was rich, owned houses, land suitable for building, the works.”

  Montalbano had stopped listening, lost in memories of British detective films. That was why he ended up doing something he’d seen in one of these films: He bent down before the fireplace, stuck his fingers into the pile of ashes, and felt around. He was lucky. His fingers found a small, square piece of heavy paper. It was a fragment of a photograph, about the size of a postage stamp. He looked at it and felt a jolt of electricity run through him. Half of a woman’s face, but how could he not recognize those eyes?