Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  “Find anything?” Augello asked.

  “Nah,” said Montalbano. “Listen, Mimì, you take care of everything. I’ve got stuff to do. Give my best to the judge, when he gets here.”

  “Do sit down and make yourself comfortable,” said Signorina Angela Clemenza, clearly pleased to see him again. “Come over here. The house has become too big for me, ever since my brother, the general, died. I’ve kept just three rooms for myself on the ground floor, to save myself the trouble of going up and down the stairs.”

  Nine-thirty in the morning, and Signorina Angela looked impeccable. Next to her, the inspector felt dirty and unkempt.

  “May I get you a coffee?”

  “Please don’t bother. I only need to ask you some questions. Did you know Corrado Militello, the teacher?”

  “I’ve known him since 1935, Inspector. I was seventeen at the time, and he one year older.”

  Montalbano looked her straight in the eye. Nothing, no emotion, eyes a lake high in the mountains, without a ripple.

  “I’m very sorry, really, but I have some bad news for you.”

  “But I already know, Inspector! I shot him myself!”

  The ground opened up under Montalbano’s feet, exactly the same way it had felt to him during the earthquake at Belice. He collapsed into a chair that luckily was behind him. Signorina Clemenza also sat down, perfectly composed.

  “Why . . . did you do that?” the inspector managed to articulate.

  “It’s an old story, old as the hills . . . It would only bore you.”

  “I assure you it wouldn’t.”

  “You see, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, for reasons I don’t know and have never wanted to know, my family and Corrado’s family had always hated each other. There were deaths, duels, injuries. Like the Capulets and the Montagues, remember? Whereas the two of us, instead of hating each other, we fell in love. Just like Romeo and Juliet, in fact. Our families managed to separate us, and for that one time they were allied. I was sent to live in a convent, and he was packed off to a boarding school. My mother, on her deathbed, made me swear I would never marry Corrado. Either him or nobody, I said to myself. And Corrado did the same. For years and years we wrote to each other, phoned each other, did everything we could to find ways to meet. By the time the two of us were the only ones left, the sole survivors of our families, I was sixty-two years old and he was sixty-three. We both agreed that it would have been ridiculous to get married at that age.”

  “All right, then, but why . . . ?”

  “Six months ago, Corrado phoned me and we had a very long talk. He said he couldn’t stand living alone any longer. He wanted to marry a widow, a distant relative of his. And I asked: How can that be? You thought it ridiculous at sixty, and now at eighty you don’t?”

  “I understand. And is that why you . . . ?”

  “Are you joking? As far as I was concerned, he could have married a hundred times over! As a matter of fact, he called me up again the next day. He said he hadn’t slept a wink all night. He confessed he’d lied to me. He wasn’t marrying because he was afraid to be alone, but because he had actually fallen in love with that woman. So, you see, that changed things.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’d made an agreement. We had a pact.”

  She stood up, went over to small, low table, opened the same little purse she’d had the night before, extracted a tiny, yellowed piece of paper, and handed it to the inspector.

  We, the undersigned, Angela Clemenza and Corrado Militello, swear in the eyes of God the following: that should either one of us fall in love with a third person, he or she shall pay for this betrayal with his life. In witness whereof,

  Angela Clemenza, Corrado Militello

  VIGÀTA, JANUARY 10, 1936

  “Did you read it? All on the up-and-up, no?”

  “But he’d probably forgotten about it!” said Montalbano, nearly yelling.

  “I certainly hadn’t,” said the lady, her eyes turning a dangerous violet color. “And yesterday morning, you see, I phoned him to make sure. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. ‘I’m burning your letters,’ he said. And so I went and reread our pact.”

  Montalbano felt something like an iron ring squeezing his head. He was sweating.

  “Did you get rid of the weapon?”

  “No.”

  She opened her little purse, extracted a huge, hundred-year-old Smith & Wesson, and handed it to Montalbano.

  “I had a little trouble hitting him, you know. I’d never shot a gun before. Poor Corrado, he got so scared!”

  What was he supposed to do now? Stand up and declare her under arrest?

  He sat there looking at the revolver, undecided.

  “Do you like it?” Signorina Angela Clemenza asked him, smiling. “You can have it. I don’t need it anymore.”

  MORTALLY WOUNDED

  1

  The blame for the sleep he was losing, tossing and thrashing in bed almost to the point of strangling himself with the sheet, could hardly be laid on his dinner that night, since he’d eaten only light stuff. No, the fault lay probably with the book he’d brought to bed with him and the irritation he’d felt upon reading the insipid, humdrum pages of a novel that reviewers had praised to the skies as one of the loftiest pinnacles attained in world literature over the past fifty years. The discovery of the latest pinnacle usually occurred every six months or so, and the cries of ecstasy always came from a somewhat snobbish newspaper which all the other dailies fell in with immediately. If you added it all up, the panorama of world literature over the past fifty years looked a great deal like the Himalaya mountain chain shot from a satellite camera. But, the inspector reasoned, it wasn’t really the book’s fault. Once he’d had enough, he could very easily have shut it, thrown it on the floor, turned off the light, and good night. But he had a defective personality, one aspect of which was that once he started reading something—whether an article, an essay, a novel—he was utterly incapable of breaking off halfway; he had to continue all the way to the end.

  When the phone rang, it was like a liberation. He hurled the book against the wall and looked at the clock. It was three.

  “Hello?”

  “Halloo?”

  “Cat!”

  “Chief!”

  “What is it?”

  “Summon got shat!”

  “Who got shot?”

  “Some guy.”

  “Dead?”

  “Dead.”

  A splendid dialogue, worthy of Alfieri.

  “The dississed ginnelman, ’oo wint by the name o’ Gerlando Piccolo, was shat in ’is own ’ome, which’d be the one belongin’ to ’im,” Catarella continued prosaically.

  “Gimme the address,”

  “Iss not so easy t’ fine, Chief, this place. Y’oughter come ’ere foist, cuz Gallo’s waitin’ f’yiz an’ ’e awriddy knows the way.”

  “Have you informed Inspector Augello?”

  “I tried, but ’e wasn’t home.”

  “Fazio?”

  “’E’s awriddy on ’is way to the scene o’ the crime.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right over.”

  The darkness outside was so dense you could cut it with a knife. As far as he could gather, the home of the dississed, as Catarella called him, must have been totally isolated, in the open country. As he and Gallo pulled up at the house, their headlights lit up the squad car parked right outside the front door, which was wide open. He went inside, with Gallo following behind, and entered a large salon that was at once a living room and dining room. All clean, orderly, and dignified. Out of one of the three doors leading into the salon came Galluzzo with a glass of water in his hand. The inspector briefly glimpsed a kitchen behind him.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  Galluzzo pointed
to the door in front of him.

  “Into the niece’s room. Poor thing! I laid her down on the bed.”

  “Where’s Fazio?”

  Galluzzo gestured towards the staircase leading to the floor above.

  “You stay here,” Montalbano said to Gallo.

  “An’ what am I supposed to do?”

  “You can review your multiplication tables.”

  The bedroom in which the murder had taken place was in a post-earthquake state of disorder. Open drawers, clothes and underwear scattered across the floor, both doors of the armoire flung open. Jarring with the whole scene were two small paintings that had once hung on the walls but had been removed and smashed in with a heel, and the remains of a small statue of the Blessed Virgin that had been thrown violently against the wall. What did such vandalism have to do with a burglary? The late Gerlando Piccolo, who until now had been a ruddy, stocky man of about sixty, lay on a double bed with his upper body resting against the headboard, a large red stain in the middle of his chest. Apparently he’d managed just in time to sit up in bed before the killer’s bullet laid him out once and for all. His eyes were open—not gaping wide, but a little more open than normal—in an expression of shock. But there wasn’t much to speculate about. When you see death standing before you, you’re either stunned or frightened; there is no third way. Despite the fact that it was rather cold in the bedroom, the man had gone to bed bare chested, without so much as a tank top or T-shirt on. Fazio, who was standing beside the bed looking like a traveling salesman displaying his merchandise, intercepted the inspector’s gaze.

  “He’s completely naked. Isn’t even wearing underpants.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I stuck my hand under the covers and poked around. What should I do, call Forensics and inform the prosecutor?”

  “Wait.”

  Something didn’t add up. Montalbano bent down to look under the bed on the side where the body lay, and saw that the underpants and tank top had ended up there. When getting back up, he froze as though he’d thrown his back out. On the floor, between the nightstand and the foot of the bed, lay a revolver.

  “Fazio. Did you see that?”

  “Yeah, Chief.”

  “The killer must have left it there.”

  “No, Chief. It was in the drawer of the nightstand. It was the niece who took it out and shot it. She told me herself.”

  “Who’d she shoot at?”

  “The killer.”

  “I’m not understanding a goddamn thing here. Maybe I’d better go and talk to this niece.”

  “Maybe you’d better,” Fazio said enigmatically.

  The niece was a seventeen-year-old girl, with dark skin, big black eyes reddened with tears, and a great mass of black hair. She was reed thin, and the way she looked at the inspector and leapt straight out of the bed on which she’d been not lying, but sitting, revealed something wild, something animal about her. She was wearing a sort of light dressing gown and was trembling from the cold and shock.

  “Go and make something hot for her to drink,” the inspector said to Galluzzo.

  “There’s some chamomile in the kitchen,” the girl said.

  “And make me some coffee while you’re at it,” Montalbano ordered.

  “With cream? Or corretto?” Galluzzo asked ironically as he walked out.

  “We need to talk,” the inspector said to the girl. “But you can’t go on like that. Tell you what: I’ll go in the other room for five minutes, and in the meantime you get dressed. Okay?”

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Grazia Giangrasso. I’m the daughter of one of Zio Gerlando’s sisters.”

  He went into the living room. Gallo was sunk deep in one of the armchairs.

  “What’s seven times seven?” he asked the inspector.

  “Forty-nine,” Montalbano replied automatically. “Why do you ask?”

  “Didn’t you tell me to review my multiplication tables?”

  How very witty his men were that morning! He went back upstairs. Fazio had changed position in the master bedroom. Now he was looking all around, with his back against the closed window.

  “Find anything?”

  “Some things don’t make any sense to me.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Gerlando Piccolo’s wife died two years ago.”

  “Oh, really? I didn’t know.”

  “So what I’m wondering is—”

  “—who was sleeping in the bed with him when the killer came in?”

  Fazio looked at him in astonishment.

  “So you also noticed that both sides of the bed had been used? Look at the pillow, the placement of the sheet and blanket on the other side . . .”

  “Fazio, just because you notice something, does that mean I’m not supposed to notice it too, at a glance? Keep looking around, then you can talk to me.”

  Fazio frowned, as though offended.

  “Shall I call Forensics?” he asked frostily.

  “Set your watch for ten minutes from now. Then you can call them without me telling you to.”

  Next to the dead man’s bedroom was another bedroom, unused. A pair of bare mattresses lay on the bed frame, and a film of dust covered all the furnishings. Then there was a locked door. Montalbano tried to force it open, thrusting his shoulder into it, but it resisted. Opposite the locked door was a bathroom in fairly decent order. Another door gave onto a tiny room used for storage.

  He went downstairs.

  “Coffee’s ready,” Galluzzo called from the kitchen.

  Before going, he knocked on Grazia’s door. There was no answer.

  “She went into the bathroom,” said Gallo, still slouching deep in the armchair.

  Montalbano went into the kitchen and was drinking his coffee when the girl came in.

  She had washed and dressed and had regained a little color. Galluzzo handed her a cup of chamomile. She started drinking it standing up.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Montalbano asked amicably.

  She sat down. But on the edge of the chair. Ready to jump up and run away. She definitely gave the impression of a hunted animal. One could easily imagine the muscles tensed under her clothes—the blouse, the light red shawl around her shoulders, the broad skirt, all low-quality stuff. Then Galluzzo did something unexpected.

  “There’s a good girl, let’s calm down now,” he said, patting the girl’s head as though she were indeed an animal to be tranquilized and tamed.

  And Grazia reacted just like an animal, heaving a deep sigh.

  “Before we start talking, I have to ask you what’s in that locked room upstairs,” Montalbano began.

  “That’s . . . that was Zio Gerlando’s office.”

  “His office?”

  “Well, it was where he would receive people.”

  “What people?”

  “The people that came to see him.”

  “And what did they come to see him for?”

  “To borrow money.”

  A loan shark! What good news! It meant a hundred potential murder suspects among Piccolo’s clients.

  “Did he receive a lot of people?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t pass through here.”

  “Where did they come in, then?”

  “There’s a staircase outside the house in back. The office has a French door.”

  “And where’s the key?”

  “My uncle always kept it in his pocket.”

  The victim’s clothes were on a chair in the bedroom.

  “Galluzzo, go upstairs and get the key, then have a look around his office with Fazio. When you’re done, put everything back in place.”

  After Galluzzo left, the girl looked at Montalbano.
/>   “Where should we go?”

  “To talk, you mean? Does it get any better than this?” Montalbano replied, gesturing broadly with his arm to mean the kitchen.

  “I’m always in here anyway,” the girl said, shrugging.

  The inspector noticed that her voice sounded more self-assured. She probably felt less insecure having the questioning take place in her most familiar environment. He poured himself another cup of coffee and sat down.

  “How long have you been living here with your uncle?”

  He was purposely giving her a wide berth. He didn’t want to broach the subject of the murder until the girl was in a condition to talk about it without breaking into hysterics.

  And so he learned that Grazia was the only child of Gerlando Piccolo’s sister Ignazia, who had married a small-time grain merchant by the name of Calogero Giangrasso. At the age of five Grazia became an orphan after her parents both died in a car accident. She was also in that car, which collided with a truck, and had broken her head pretty badly, but they’d set it right again at the hospital. And thus Zio Gerlando and his wife, Titina, having no children of their own, took her in.

  “Did they love you?”

  “They needed a maid.”

  She said it plainly, with no hint of rancor or contempt. A simple statement.

  “Did they send you to school?”

  “No. They always needed me at home. I don’ know how to read or write.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Me?!”

  “Okay, go on.”

  Then, when she was fifteen, her Zia Titina died.

  “What did she die of?”

  “The doctor said it was her heart. She had a bad heart.”

  But after that, things got better.

  “Did your aunt mistreat you?”

  “All the time. An’ she was conceited.”