Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  “I’m sorry, but after my poor Ninetta was killed, I believe they tried to pull off another assault.”

  “I’ve already complimented you once on your plan. That was the final flourish, the artist’s touch intended to divert all possible suspicion away from you forever. But you forgot about your wife’s love of her cat Dudù and her goldfinch. And that was a mistake.”

  “Would you please explain this idiotic reasoning to me?”

  “It’s not really so idiotic, sir. You see, I conducted an investigation. A careful one. When I came to see you in the hospital after your accident and your wife’s murder, you told me that, when you spoke to your wife over the phone, you’d insisted that she stay in Vigàta and not come to see you in the hospital. Is that true?”

  “Of course it’s true!”

  “You see, right after the accident, you were hospitalized and put in a room with two beds. The other patient was separated from you by a screen. You, shaken up by your fake accident, which nevertheless injured you, then called your wife. You were later moved into a single room. But the other patient had heard your phone call. And he’s ready to testify. You begged your wife to come to Palermo to see you; you said you felt very bad. Whereas you told me, and just now repeated, that you’d insisted that your wife stay at home, in Vigàta.”

  “How can you expect me to remember, after an accident that—”

  “Let me finish. There’s more. Your wife, extremely upset by what you told her over the phone, decided to leave at once for Palermo. But there was the problem of the cat and the goldfinch; she didn’t know how long she’d be away from home. And so she woke up the woman next door, who’s a friend of hers, and told her what you told her, that you were practically on death’s doorstep. So she had to leave at once. She left her cat and bird in her neighbor’s care and went out into the street, where the killer was waiting for her, ready to bring your ingenious plan to a climax.”

  Giuseppe Joppolo, the handsome lawyer, lost his cool.

  “You don’t have a shred of evidence, you fucking asshole.”

  “Perhaps you’re unaware that your accomplice had his hand broken by the final victim, who smashed a bottle of wine over it. And he went to have it taken care of at Montelusa hospital, no less. We’ve arrested him, and my men are putting the screws to him. It’s just a matter of hours now before he confesses.”

  “Oh my God!” said Joppolo the lawyer, collapsing into the nearest chair. There wasn’t an iota of truth in the story of the arrested accomplice; it was all a big lie, a bluff, a booby trap. But the lawyer had been unable to avoid stepping right into it, falling inside with all his clothes on.

  MONTALBANO SAYS NO

  The late April night was exactly as it had once seemed to Giacomo Leopardi as the poet sat and enjoyed it: sweet and clear, without a breath of wind. Inspector Montalbano was driving his car very slowly, relishing the cool as he headed back to his home in Marinella. He squirmed in fatigue the way you squirm in a dirty, sweaty suit, knowing that in a short while, after you shower, you’ll be able to change into a clean, fragrant one. He had been at the office since before eight o’clock that morning, and now his watch said twelve midnight on the dot.

  He’d spent the whole day trying to extract a confession from a nasty old lout who had molested a nine-year-old girl and then attempted to kill her with a stone to the head. The child was now in a coma at Montelusa hospital and thus in no condition to identify her attacker. After a few hours of interrogation, the inspector had little doubt that the culprit was the man he had arrested. But the dirty old codger had shielded himself in an ironclad denial that revealed no chinks. Montalbano had tried to fool him with ruses, deceptions, and trick questions, but the guy would have none of it and merely repeated the same refrain:

  “It wasn’t me, and you have no proof.”

  Of course he would have plenty of proof after the DNA tests of the sperm came back. But it takes too much time and too much straw for the sorb to ripen, as the peasants say.

  Around five o’clock in the afternoon, after exhausting the entire repertoire of police tactics, Montalbano began to feel like a walking corpse. Getting Fazio to replace him, he went into the bathroom, took off all his clothes, washed himself from head to toe, and got dressed again. When he returned to the interrogation room to resume questioning, he heard the old man say:

  “It wathn’t me, ant you haff no proof.”

  Had the guy suddenly turned German? He looked at the suspect: A string of blood was trickling out of his mouth and one of his eyes was swollen shut.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, Chief,” Fazio replied with an angelic face that was missing only the halo. “He sort of fainted and hit his head against the corner of the table. He may have broken a tooth, nothing serious.”

  The old man said nothing, and the inspector resumed hammering away with the same questions. At ten o’clock that evening, not having managed to eat so much as a sandwich, Montalbano saw Mimì Augello come in, fresh as a rose. He immediately had his assistant replace him and dashed out straight to the Trattoria San Calogero. His hunger had gone so long unsated that with every step he felt he might collapse to the ground like a wasted horse. He ordered a seafood antipasto and could already taste it in his mind when Gallo burst into the restaurant.

  “Chief, you gotta come, the old man wants to talk. He suddenly cracked and admits that he was the one who smashed the little girl’s head with a stone after raping her.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I dunno, Chief, it was Inspector Augello who persuaded him.”

  Montalbano darkened, and it certainly wasn’t because of the seafood antipasto that he wouldn’t get the chance to eat. What? He’d spent all day sweating blood with the old pig, and now Mimì gets him to confess in the twinkling of an eye?

  Back at the station, before going to see the nasty old man, he called his assistant aside.

  “How did you do it?”

  “Believe me, Salvo, it was only good luck. You know I shave with a straight razor, right? I really can’t hack those safety razors. Maybe it’s something to do with my skin, what can I say?”

  “Listen, spare me the details about your skin because I don’t give a shit. I want to know how you got the guy to confess.”

  “Well, I’d just bought myself a new razor today, and I had it in my jacket pocket. As I was starting to interrogate the old man he said he needed to take a piss, and so I accompanied him to the bathroom.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno, he couldn’t really stand up too well. Anyway, to make a long story short, as soon as he pulled out his thingy, I opened my razor and gave him a little cut.”

  Montalbano looked at him in dismay.

  “Where did you give him a little cut?”

  “Where do you think? But it was nothing, believe me. Of course, it did bleed a little, but nothing se—”

  “Mimì, have you gone insane?”

  Augello smiled at him condescendingly.

  “Salvo, there’s something you don’t understand. Either the guy talked, or our men weren’t going to let him out of here alive. So I solved the problem. The old man really thought I might cut it off, and so he cracked.”

  The inspector resolved to talk to Mimì and all the men at the station the following morning. He couldn’t stomach the way they’d behaved with the old man. He left the child rapist and murderer to Augello, who in any case no longer needed to use his razor, and went back to the trattoria. His antipasto was waiting for him and washed away half of the worries on his mind. The mullet in tomato sauce banished the other half.

  Outside the restaurant, the street was completely dark. Either someone had broken the streetlamps or they had burnt out. After a few paces his eyes adjusted. Beside the entrance to a building was a man urinating, not against the wall, but onto a large cardboard box. When he ca
me within close range of the man, he noticed that he was relieving himself onto an unfortunate wretch inside the box who was unable to react or speak because he was completely drunk.

  “What is this?” said Montalbano, stopping.

  “What the fuck do you want?” said the other man, closing his zipper.

  “You think that’s right, pissing on a human being?”

  “Human being? That’s a piece of shit. And if you don’t bug off, I’m going to piss on you too.”

  “Sorry to bother you, good night,” said the inspector.

  He turned his back, took half a step, then spun around and dealt the man a powerful kick in the balls. The other collapsed on top of the wretch inside the box, winded. A fitting conclusion to a hard day.

  He was almost home. He veered left, turned the car onto the little road that led to his house, arrived in the parking area, pulled up, got out, opened the front door, closed it behind him, and searched for the light switch. But his hand froze in midair.

  What was it that paralyzed him? A kind of flash, the sudden image of a scene glimpsed in passing just moments before, too quickly for his brain to process the information absorbed. He didn’t turn on the light. The darkness helped him to concentrate, to reconstruct what had registered subliminally in his mind.

  Okay, it was when he had swerved before turning onto the little road: His high beams had momentarily lit up a stage. In front of him, parked in the same direction as he was going, was a Nissan 4x4. On the opposite side of the street, three moving silhouettes. They looked as if they were performing a dance, first coming together as a single body, then breaking apart.

  He closed his eyes and squeezed them tightly. The mere glow of the light left on outside on the veranda bothered him, as it tainted the darkness in which he was trying to immerse himself.

  There were two men and a woman—now he was sure of it—dancing and, from time to time, embracing. No. That was what he thought he had seen. But there was something in the three people’s body language that might lead one to imagine an entirely different situation.

  Bring it better into focus, Salvo. A cop’s eye is always a cop’s eye.

  All at once he had no more doubt. In his mind he zoomed in on a hand clutching the woman’s hair fiercely, violently. The scene assumed its true meaning. A kidnapping, what the fuck! Two men were trying to force the girl into the Nissan.

  He didn’t need to think about it twice. He opened the door, went out, got in his car, and left. How much time had passed? A little over ten minutes, he figured. He drove around for two hours, obstinate, lips pressed tightly together, eyes peering forward and back, combing streets, alleys, lanes, and dirt roads.

  After he had given up hope, he spotted the Nissan parked in front of a house on a hill, a house that had always looked empty and uninhabited the few times he had happened to pass by. No light was visible in the windows in front. He waited a few minutes without moving. Then he got out of his car, leaving the door open and, hunching over, carefully circled round the house. In back, the glow of two lighted rooms, one on the ground floor, the other upstairs, filtered through closed shutters.

  He went back to the front of the house, lightly pushed open the door, which had been left ajar, careful not to let it squeak. He was sweating. He found himself in a dark vestibule and went farther inside. There was a living room and, beside it, a kitchen. In the kitchen were two young guys in jeans with stubbly faces and earrings. Both were bare chested. They were cooking something on two camping burners and checking the level of doneness. One was attending to a small skillet, the other stirring a big pot with a wooden spoon. There was a smell of fried food and sauce in the air.

  But where was the girl? Could she have managed to escape her assailants, or had they simply set her free? Or had he been wrong about the whole thing? Maybe his mental reconstruction of the scene could be interpreted in an entirely different manner?

  Something, however, deep in the core of his instincts, told him not to trust what he saw: two young guys making dinner. It was the very normality of the scene that disturbed him.

  Cautious as a cat, Montalbano started climbing the masonry steps that led upstairs. Halfway up the stairs, which were made of unjointed little bricks, he nearly slipped. A dark, dense liquid covered the staircase. He bent down, touched it with his index finger and smelled it. He was too experienced not to recognize it as blood. Clearly he had arrived too late to find the girl still alive.

  He climbed the last two steps as if with great effort, weighed down already by what he imagined he would see, and which he in fact saw.

  In the single lighted room upstairs, the girl, or what remained of her, was lying on the floor, completely naked. Still cautious, but partly reassured by the sounds of the voices of the two men downstairs, he approached the body. They had skillfully cut her up with a knife after raping her, using even a broom handle, which lay covered in blood beside her, for the latter purpose. They had gouged out her eyes, cleanly cut away the entire calf of the left leg, and amputated her right hand. They had even started opening up her belly, but then had abandoned the idea.

  After crouching down to look more closely, the inspector was having trouble standing back up. Not because he’d gone weak in the knees, but for the opposite reason. That is, he felt that if he started to rise to his feet, the bundle of nerves he’d become might make him shoot straight up to the ceiling like a jack-in-the-box. So he stayed down long enough to calm himself and repress the blind fury that had invaded his body. He must not make any mistakes; at two against one, they would quickly get the better of him.

  He descended the stairs with a light step and clearly heard the two men’s voices again.

  “The eyes are fried just right. You want one?”

  “Sure, if you’ll taste a piece of calf.”

  The inspector went out of the house but didn’t make it back to his car before he had to stop and vomit. He tried hard not to make any noise, which created sharp pangs in his stomach as he suppressed the retching reflex. When he got to his car, he opened the trunk, took out a tin of gasoline, which he always carried with him, went back to the house, and emptied it just inside the entrance. He was certain the two men would not smell the odor, as it would surely be covered up by the much stronger smells of two fried eyes and a calf boiled or simmered in sauce or whatever it was.

  His plan was simple: set fire to the fuel and force the killers to jump out the kitchen window in back. He would be waiting for them there.

  He returned to his car, opened the glove compartment, grabbed his pistol, and loaded it. And then he stopped.

  He put the pistol back into the glove compartment, stuck his hand inside his jacket pocket, and pulled out his wallet. Yes, there was a phone card. When driving through the neighborhood earlier, he had noticed a phone booth a hundred or so yards before the house. Leaving the car where it was parked, he walked to the booth after lighting a cigarette. Miraculously, the phone worked. He stuck in the card and dialed a number.

  A seventyish man striking the keys of a typewriter in the Roman night rose at once to his feet and went over to the phone looking worried. Who could it be at that hour?

  “Hello! Who is this?”

  “Montalbano here. What are you doing?”

  “You don’t know what I’m doing? I’m writing a story with you as the protagonist. I’m at the point where you’re inside your car and have just loaded your gun. Where are you calling from?”

  “A phone booth.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Why did you call me?”

  “Because I don’t like this story. I don’t want to go back into it. It’s not me. This business of the fried eyes and stewed calf is totally ridiculous. Absolute bullshit, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Salvo, I agree with you.”

  “S
o why are you writing it?”

  “Try to understand, son. Some people write that I am just a feel-good writer who tells only sugary, cozy stories; others say that the success I’ve enjoyed thanks to you hasn’t been good for me and that I’ve become repetitive and care only about royalties . . . They claim I’m a facile writer, even if they break their heads trying to understand the way I write. I’m just trying to bring myself up to date, Salvo. A little blood on the page never hurt anyone. What, do you want to start splitting hairs? And let me ask you, since you’re a true gourmet: Have you ever actually tasted a pair of fried human eyes, perhaps with a little sauté of onions on top?”

  “Don’t be a wise guy. And listen. I’m going to tell you something once and I’m not going to repeat it. To me, a story like this just isn’t right. You’re absolutely free to write others like it, but then you’ll have to find another protagonist. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly. But meanwhile, how am I going to end this one?”

  “Like this,” said the inspector.

  And he hung up.

  A KIDNAPPING

  He was a true peasant, but he looked like a puppet in a crèche, with his beret squashed down on his head even inside the police station, his shapeless fustian suit, his hobnailed boots of a kind that hadn’t been seen around since the end of the Second World War. Seventy years old and gaunt, slightly hunched from a lifetime of working the mattock, one of the last remaining specimens of a vanishing breed, he had a pair of blue eyes that pleased Montalbano.

  “You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Please sit down,” said the inspector, gesturing towards a chair in front of his desk.

  “Nossir. Iss no’ gonna take very long.”

  That was a relief. He must have been a man of few words, which was only proper for a genuine peasant.

  “Consolato Damiano’s my name,” he said.