Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  “And where do they keep their already finished products when they’re away?”

  “In a large warehouse behind the house. With an ironclad door. They’ve never been robbed.”

  The inspector sat there in silence. Then he spoke.

  “Could you do me a favor, Marshal? Could you call one of the Marcuzzos and ask him on what day last year he made a delivery to a certain market vendor just before he closed for August? The vendor’s name is Giuseppe Tarantino; he says he’s a client of theirs.”

  Pennisi had to stay on the line for about ten minutes after making the request. Apparently they had to leaf through old registers. At last the marshal thanked them and hung up.

  “The last delivery to Tarantino was made on the afternoon of July the thirty-first. After their vacation, they made other deliveries to him, one on the—”

  “Thank you, Marshal. That’s all I need.”

  Therefore the note was slipped into the bùmmolo after it was already in Tarantino’s possession—and stored in a place unprotected and accessible to everyone. Montalbano grew discouraged.

  Turning the whole affair over and over in his head during the drive back to Vigàta, he became convinced he would never get to the bottom of it. The realization put him in a bad mood. He took it out on Gallo, who hadn’t done something he’d told him to do. The telephone rang. It was Catarella calling from the switchboard.

  “Chief? Iss a Signor Dimastrissi wants a talk t’yiz poissonally in poisson.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dunno, Chief. I’ll ax ’im where ’e is.”

  “No, Cat. I just want to know whether he’s here at the station or on the telephone.”

  “’E’s onna tiliphone, Chief.”

  “Put him through . . . Hello?”

  “Inspector Montalbano? This is De Magistris, you know, the clerk at the—”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, sorry for asking, really, but . . . did you, by any chance, go to see Tarantino, the pottery vendor, saying you were me?”

  “Er, yes. But, you see . . .”

  “No problem, Inspector, that’s all I wanted to know. Thank you.”

  “Wait a second, if you don’t mind. How did you find out?”

  “I got a call, at city hall, from a young woman who said she was this Tarantino’s wife. She wanted to know the real reason why I went to their house at lunchtime. I was so taken aback, she must have realized she’d made a mistake, and she immediately hung up. I just wanted to let you know.”

  Why had she been so worried about the surprise visit? Or was it her husband who’d put her up to making that call, to find out more? Whatever the case, her phone call cast the whole thing into doubt again. The game was starting over. The piece of paper with Tarantino’s phone number was on the desk. He didn’t want to waste any more time. The wife answered.

  “Signora Tarantino? This is De Magistris.”

  “No, you’re not De Magistris. You have a different voice.”

  “All right, signora. I’m Inspector Montalbano of Vigàta Police. Let me speak with your husband.”

  “He’s not here. He left for the market at Capofelice just after lunch. He’ll be back in two days.”

  “Signora, I need to talk to you. I’m going to get in the car now and come.”

  “No! For heaven’s sake! Don’t let anyone in town see you in the daytime!”

  “What time do you want me to come and see you?”

  “Tonight. After midnight. When there’s nobody around on the street anymore. And, please, park your car a long way from my house. And don’t let anyone see you when you come to my place. Please.”

  “Don’t worry, signora. I’ll be invisible.”

  Before hanging up, he heard her sob.

  The door was ajar, the house in darkness. He slipped in quickly, like a lover, then closed the door behind him.

  “Can I turn the light on?”

  “Yes.”

  He fumbled around for the switch. The light revealed a humble living room: a small sofa, a little coffee table, two armchairs, two chairs, a set of shelves. She was sitting on the sofa, face buried in her hands, elbows on her knees. She was trembling.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Montalbano, standing motionless by the door. “If you prefer, I’ll go back to where I came from.”

  “No.”

  Montalbano took two steps and sat down in an armchair. The girl then sat up and looked him straight in the eye.

  “Sara’s my name.”

  She might not even have been twenty yet. She was tiny, delicate, with a frightened look in her eyes, like a little girl waiting to be punished.

  “What do you want from my husband?”

  Odds or evens? Heads or tails? How should he approach this? Beat around the bush or get straight to the point? Naturally, he did neither—though not, of course, out of any clever stratagem on his part, but simply because he suddenly found himself saying:

  “Why are you so scared, Sara? What are you afraid of? Why did you want me to take all those precautions before coming to see you? Nobody knows me in this town. They don’t know who I am or what I do.”

  “But you’re a man. And Pepè, my husband, is jealous. He can get crazy with jealousy. An’ if he ever finds out that a man came in here, he gon’ kill me.”

  That was exactly the way she said it: he gon’ kill me. And Montalbano thought: So you also wrote: Halp! He sighed, stretched his legs, and leaned back in the armchair, getting comfortable. So that was it. No kidnapping, nobody threatened with murder. So much the better.

  “Why did you write that note and put it in the bùmmolo?”

  “He’d beat the shit outta me an’ then tied me to the bed with rope from the well. An’ kep’ me like that for two days an’ two nights.”

  “What had you done?”

  “Nuthin’. Some guy come by, sellin’ stuff, knocked at the door, an’ I opened an’ was tellin’ ’im I didn’t want nuthin’ when Pepè come back, seein’ me talkin’ to this man. It was like he went crazy.”

  “And afterwards? After he untied you?”

  “He kep’ beatin’ me. I couldn’t walk. An’ since he had to leave to go to market, he tol’ me to load the bùmmuli onto the truck. An’ so I grabbed a newspaper an’ ripped off five li’l strips an’ wrote five notes, which I put into five different bùmmuli. Before leavin’, he tied me back to the bed. But that time I managed to get free. It took me two days, an’ I was really weak. Then I stood up, went straight into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and slashed my wrists.”

  “Why didn’t you run away?”

  “Because I love him.”

  Simple as that.

  “When he come back he foun’ me bleedin’ to death and took me to the hospital. I tol’ him I did it ’cuz my mother died the week before, an’ it was true. Three days later they sent me home. Pepè was changed. An’ that night I got pregnant with my son.”

  She was blushing and keeping her eyes lowered.

  “And since then he hasn’t beaten you?”

  “Nossir. Sometime he still gets jealous an’ he smashes everything around him, but he don’t touch me no more. But then I started gettin’ scared o’ somethin’ else, so’s I couldn’t sleep at night.”

  “And what was that?”

  “I’s scared someone was gonna find the notes I left, now that things was all better. Cuz if Pepè ever found out that I was askin’ for help to get away from him, he might . . .”

  “. . . start beating you again?”

  “No, Inspector, sir. He might leave me.”

  Montalbano took this in.

  “I managed to get four of ’em back, cuz they was still inside the bùmmuli. But I never foun’ the fifth. Then you came here, an’ after I talked with the man at city hall an’ realized you u
sed a fake name, I figgered the police ha’ foun’ the note an’ they might call Pepè thinkin’ God knows what . . .”

  “I’m going to go, Sara,” said Montalbano, standing up.

  In the other room, the baby started crying.

  “Could I see him?” asked Montalbano.

  MONTALBANO AFRAID

  He realized at once, the moment they sat down at the restaurant table, that engineer Matteo Castellini was bad news. Castellini’s wife, Stefania, Livia’s bosom friend, a fortyish brunette who spoke at the right moments and said intelligent things, was at least tolerable, if not quite charming. But the engineer, from the very first moment, had raised Montalbano’s hackles. He’d shown up to dinner dressed all in white, a bit like the ice cream man except that his tie tended a little towards ivory. Holding out his hand, Montalbano could hardly refrain from asking him:

  “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”

  Upon finishing his first course, a seafood risotto that had looked good to Montalbano, the engineer dived in.

  “Well, let’s get down to the matter at hand,” he said.

  So there was a matter at hand? Livia hadn’t told him anything about this. He gave her a questioning glance, and she replied with a look so imploring that the inspector promised himself that, no matter what this “matter” turned out to be, he would restrain himself and not let the encounter take a bad turn, even though Livia had practically had to drag him there in chains.

  “You know,” said Castellini, “I’ve been begging Stefania for a long time to arrange a meeting between us. We share a common interest, and I envy you a great deal.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are in a privileged position, with the observatory you have.”

  “I am? What observatory do you mean?”

  “The Vigàta Police station.”

  Montalbano balked. The Vigàta Police station, a privileged observatory? Four ratty rooms inhabited by characters like the raving Catarella and Mimì Augello, who was always chasing after every woman who walked by? He glanced over at Livia, but she was deeply engrossed in conversation with her friend Stefania. The inspector could have sworn she was faking it.

  “Absolutely,” Castellini continued. “I design and build bridges. All over the world, in all modesty. But you can’t find the man in a slab of reinforced concrete.”

  Was he speaking seriously or joking? Montalbano gave him some rope.

  “Well, in our part of the country, we used to do just that, every now and then.”

  This time it was the engineer who balked.

  “Really?”

  “Of course. It was one of the ways the Mafia got rid of—”

  “No, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear,” Castellini interrupted him. “You see, Inspector, I never wanted to become an engineer. I would have preferred to work in analysis.”

  “Chemical analysis?”

  “No, psychoanalysis.”

  Montalbano was finally beginning to understand.

  “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the Vigàta Police isn’t really the best place for . . .”

  Could you imagine Catarella sitting beside a couch, listening to someone who’d robbed a handful of spinach?

  “I know, I know. But still, you’re in an excellent position to probe!” said the engineer, eyes lighting up.

  He’d spoken so loudly that even Livia and Stefania interrupted their conversation to look at him.

  “To probe what?”

  “Why, the human soul, of course! Its depths, its complexity, its tortured nature!”

  Ah, so that was it. The engineer belonged to that category of people who wallowed beatifically in matters beginning in psy-. Psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry . . . Montalbano decided to give him rope.

  “You mean to descend into its abysses?”

  “Yes.”

  “To explore their intricate labyrinths?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Travel their dark meanders? Unravel their tangled webs? Their inscrutable—”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Castellini gasped, a mere step away from orgasm.

  A kick from Livia under the table made Montalbano shut up. Luckily, since his repertoire of clichés and commonplaces was somewhat limited. Livia took advantage of the pause.

  “You know, Matteo . . .”

  Her sweet tone of voice made Montalbano suspicious. Whenever she spoke that way, it meant she was about to spray black ink like a squid—which was in fact what the waiter was serving them at that moment.

  “. . . what you say is true. Salvo could do that, but he doesn’t go that far. He stops at the evidence.”

  “What do you mean?” said Montalbano, miffed.

  “Exactly what I said. You always stop at a certain level—the one necessary for solving your investigations. Maybe you’re afraid to look beyond it.”

  She was trying to hurt his feelings, clearly. She was getting back at him for scurrilously mocking the engineer. Even Stefania seemed taken aback by her friend’s comment.

  “It’s not my job. I’m not a priest, nor a psychologist or analyst. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  And he dived into the aromas and flavors of the squid, which were cooked just right. After a few moments of silence, the engineer started talking about Crime and Punishment, which he said he’d reread “in the silent darkness of the Yemeni night.” In his opinion, Dostoevsky was quite wanting in matters of psychology . . .

  When it was time to say good-bye, Stefania took a set of keys out of her purse and handed them to Livia.

  “Are you leaving tomorrow?”

  Leaving? Where to? He’d barely been a week on vacation in Boccadasse and had no desire to go anywhere else.

  “What’s this business about leaving?” he asked Livia as she started up the car.

  “Stefania and Matteo were kind enough to lend us their house in the mountains for a few days.”

  Jesus Christ! The mountains! Montalbano was a man of the sea. It was just the way he was, through no fault of his own. The moment he was over fifteen hundred feet above sea level he started to turn surly, ready to have it out at the slightest excuse, and sometimes he succumbed to bouts of melancholy that made him even more taciturn and solitary than he normally was. Of course there was no question the mountains were beautiful, but so was the sea. And what’s more, Livia had unfairly taken him by surprise, worse than Gano di Maganza at the puppet theater.

  “Why didn’t you tell me when I got here that you were planning to drag me off to the mountains?”

  “Drag you off! What a sob story you’re making it into! It’s very simple. I didn’t tell you because we would have spent every day arguing about it.”

  “But what need is there to leave Boccadasse one week before the end of vacation?”

  “Because you come to Boccadasse to spend your vacation, whereas I live there. Got that? This is your vacation, not mine. And I decided that we will spend our vacation where I say so.”

  “Could you at least tell me where this house is?”

  “Above Courmayeur.”

  Above? Amidst the eternal glaciers and the inviolate peaks, as Engineer Castellini would certainly have put it? The inspector shivered.

  The spat was a long one, though Montalbano knew from the start that he’d lost. Then, before going to bed, they made peace. Later still, lying with eyes open, staring at the dim light filtering through the open window and hearing the sleeping Livia’s rhythmical breathing, which blended with that of the sea, Montalbano at last felt at peace, ready to face the polar bears surely thriving across the ice floes above Courmayeur.

  The whole way there, for all those hours, Livia refused to let Montalbano drive. She wouldn’t listen to reason.

  “Come on, let me drive. Why do you want to tire yourself out?”

  “You
said I wanted to drag you off to the mountains. Well, now let yourself be dragged and shut up.”

  Since, between one thing and the next, they’d left Boccadasse rather late in the day and had even encountered traffic, Montalbano, seeing the sun go down, weighed his options and decided that the best thing to do was to take a nap. He was awakened by Livia’s voice.

  “Let’s go, Salvo, we’re here.”

  Getting out of the car, he noticed that, except for the area lit up by the headlights, it was pitch-black all around and that, to judge by his ears and nose, there wasn’t a trace of human life anywhere nearby. The car was parked in a clearing, at one end of which a small path led almost vertically upwards, to some godforsaken place.

  “Come on, don’t just stand there in a daze . . . Grab your backpack and put on a heavy sweater.”

  Livia had lent him the backpack, of course, though the sweater was his own, something he’d left in Boccadasse the previous winter. When the headlights suddenly went off, Montalbano had the unpleasant sensation of being swallowed up by the night. He felt distressed. Livia turned on a flashlight and aimed it in the direction of the path.

  “Follow behind me, and be careful not to slip.”

  “How far away is the house?”

  “About a hundred yards.”

  After the first fifty, the inspector realized that a hundred yards at the seashore is one thing, while a hundred yards up the mountain is another thing altogether. And it was a good thing he was struggling uphill; otherwise the cold would have given him a heart attack in spite of the sweater. First he slipped, then he stumbled.

  “Try to get there alive,” said Livia, who for her part was spry as a goat.

  At last the path ended at a clearing. From the outside, there wasn’t much Montalbano could tell about the house. It looked like thousands of other two-floor Alpine chalets. Inside, however, everything changed. The double door opened onto a vast living room with dark brown wooden country furniture, massive and reassuring, a television, a telephone, and a spacious fireplace in the far wall. Also on the ground floor were a bathroom and a small kitchen with a huge refrigerator so stuffed with food they could have opened a grocery store. Upstairs were two bedrooms whose French doors gave onto a common terrace, as well as another bathroom. The inspector immediately liked the place.