Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  And there you have it. Have what? All things considered, that paragraph of information told Montalbano nothing. Or maybe there was something there—something that could be translated into a question: Why, just a few months after losing her husband, would a woman sell everything to go and live abroad, leaving behind all her customs, habits, rituals, relations, and friends?

  That night—surely because of the nearly two pounds of purpi affucati Adelina had made for him, which he had religiously wolfed down though perfectly aware that digesting them was a dangerous affair—he had several nightmares. In one of them he was walking down the road completely naked and wrinkled, skin sagging, leaning on two walking sticks, with a large crowd of women gathered around him, all of them strangely resembling Livia, mocking him and siccing vicious dogs on him. He tried to take refuge in some houses nearby, but all their doors were locked. At last he found one open, went inside, and found himself in a smoky den full of burners with alembics and distillers. A sepulchral female voice said:

  “Come closer. What do you want from Lucrezia Borgia?”

  He went closer and discovered that Lucrezia Borgia was none other than poor Signora Maria Carmela Spagnolo, the widow Siracusa, just deceased.

  He thrashed about in bed until five or so, then fell asleep for four solid hours. When he saw that it was nine o’clock, he cursed the saints and dashed into the bathroom to wash and shave, then got dressed, opened the front door, and found Patre Barbera’s finger, which was about to ring the doorbell, in his eye. Jesus, what a goddamned pain in the ass! The guy had learned how to get to Montalbano’s house and now would never forget it!

  “Is somebody else about to die?” the inspector asked, with calculated gruffness.

  Patre Barbera didn’t take it in.

  “Could you let me in for a minute? I won’t be long.”

  Montalbano let him in, but didn’t tell him to sit down. They both remained standing.

  “I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” said the priest.

  “Did you also eat purpi affucati?”

  “No, I had some broth and a little cheese for supper.”

  He didn’t say anything else. Was it possible he’d raced all the way to Marinella just to tell him last night’s menu?

  “Listen, I’m really in a rush this morning.”

  “I’ve come just to ask you to drop the whole thing. What right did I have to bring to your attention, as a man of the law, something that happened so many years ago—”

  “Shall we say in 1950, to be more precise?”

  Patre Barbera gave a start, taken aback. Montalbano realized he’d been right on the mark.

  “Was it the dear departed who told you?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  “I’m a cop. Go on.”

  “Okay, well, I don’t think I have the right—I don’t think we have the right—to bring back out into the open something that over time had come to a close and been forgotten. It would be reopening old wounds, maybe even stirring up old resentments . . .”

  “Stop right there,” said Montalbano. “You talk of wounds and resentments, which is easy for you because you know more than I do. I’m not in a position to make any such judgment. For me it’s all dense fog.”

  “Well then I take it upon myself to ask you to forget the whole story.”

  “I could, but on one condition.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you presently. But first I have to think about it a little. So, let’s see. Very early in 1950, a certain Cristina asks Signora Maria Carmela—a pharmacist’s wife, or recently widowed—for some poison. For reasons of her own—which it would be hard for us ever to find out—or because she suspected that Cristina wanted the poison to kill someone, she gives her a harmless powder, pretending that it’s poison. She pulls a fast one on her. Cristina administers the poison to the person she wants to kill, but the person remains alive. At the worst, he or she gets a bellyache.”

  The priest was listening to the inspector with his whole body bent forward. He looked like a bow tensed to the maximum.

  “If that’s the way it went,” Montalbano continued, “Signora Maria Carmela did not in the end have such great cause for remorse. It wasn’t poison, and so? But if Signora Maria Carmela turned it into such a cross to bear, carrying it all the way to her deathbed, that means things did not go as Signora Maria Carmela had hoped. Does that make sense?”

  “It makes sense,” said the priest with his eyes fixed on the inspector’s.

  “So we come to the point. Which is that, despite the fact that Cristina was not given any poison, somebody died just the same.”

  It wasn’t sweat but a waterfall that was pouring down Patre Barbera’s forehead.

  “And I should add that the victim—whether a man or a woman, I don’t know—was not killed with a firearm or knife, but with poison.”

  “How can you make such a claim?”

  “The poor old woman told me as she was dying: She carried the anguish around with her for her whole life. What must have happened was that once the murder was committed, she began to wonder whether she’d made a mistake—whether she’d maybe accidentally given Cristina real poison instead of the fake one she’d prepared.”

  The priest didn’t speak or move.

  “I’ll tell you how I intend to deal with this. If whoever committed the murder paid for it, then the matter is of no more interest to me. But if there’s something still unresolved, still to be cleared up, then I’ll carry on.”

  “Fifty years after the fact?”

  “You know something, Patre Barbera? Sometimes I ask myself what proof God had to accuse Cain of murdering Abel. If I could, I swear I’d reopen the case.”

  Patre Barbera gawked, his lower jaw dropping to his chest. He threw up his hands in resignation.

  “Well, if you put it that way . . .”

  He headed for the door, but before leaving, he added:

  “Michele Spagnolo has arrived. He’s at the Hotel Pirandello.”

  He was late to the meeting at Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi’s office. His boss limited himself to glaring at him scornfully, then waited in silence—as if to emphasize the rudeness—for the inspector to sit down as he apologized left and right to his colleagues.

  The commissioner resumed speaking on the topic of the meeting, which was “What can the police do to regain the citizens’ trust?” One person proposed a competition, replete with prizes; another said that the best thing would be to organize a dance with sumptuous prizes and a cotillion; a third added that they could invite the press to help.

  “In what sense?” asked the commissioner.

  “In the sense that they look the other way when we make a mistake or are unable to—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” the commissioner cut him off impatiently. “Any other suggestions?”

  The index and middle fingers of Montalbano’s right hand raised themselves of their own accord, without his brain having ordered them to do so. Indeed he looked at his two raised fingers with some surprise. The commissioner sighed.

  “What is it, Montalbano?”

  “And what if the police simply did its duty, always and no matter what, without provoking or prevaricating?”

  The meeting ended in an arctic chill.

  To return to Vigàta, he had to pass by the Hotel Pirandello. He didn’t expect Michele Spagnolo to be in, but it was worth a try.

  “Yes, Inspector, he’s in his room. Shall I get him on the phone for you?”

  “Hello? Inspector Montalbano here.”

  “Inspector? Of what?”

  “Police.”

  “And what do you want from me?”

  Engineer Spagnolo seemed truly confused.

  “To talk to you.”

  “About what?” />
  “Your aunt.”

  The engineer’s voice came out of his gullet sounding exactly like that of a strangled chicken.

  “My aunt?!”

  “Listen, Mr. Spagnolo, I’m here at your hotel. If you’d be so kind as to come downstairs to the lobby, we can speak a little more comfortably.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  The engineer was a bit over sixty, rather diminutive in stature, with a face like fired clay, sunburnt from combing the desert in search of petroleum. He was a bundle of nerves who moved in fits and starts. He sat down, stood up, sat back down after Montalbano sat down, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, adjusted the knot on his tie, brushed some invisible dust from his jacket with his hands.

  “I don’t understand why the police—”

  “No need to be alarmed, sir.”

  “I’m not the least bit alarmed.”

  One could only imagine how he acted when he was nervous.

  “Okay, well, your aunt, as she was dying, wanted to tell me a secret that I wasn’t fully able to understand, some story about poison that wasn’t poison . . .”

  “Poison? My aunt?!”

  Up from the chair, down again, legs crossed, uncrossed, tie knot, jacket brushing. On top of that, this time he took off his glasses, breathed on the lenses, rubbed them with his handkerchief, and put them back on.

  If he carries on like this, before ten minutes are up I’ll go insane, thought the inspector. Better cut things short.

  “What can you tell me about your aunt?”

  “She was a good woman. Like a mother to me.”

  “Why did she move to Vigàta five years ago?”

  Up from the chair, down again, legs crossed, uncrossed, tie knot, brushing, eyeglasses, breathe, rub, glasses back on. Plus: nose toot.

  “Because after I retired I got married. And my aunt didn’t get along with my wife.”

  “Do you know anything about what happened to your aunt during the first six months of 1950?”

  “Not a thing. But what in God’s name is this all about?”

  Up from chair, down again, crossing, uncrossing . . . But the inspector was already outside the hotel.

  3

  As he was driving back to Vigàta he remembered something he’d read by a Shakespeare scholar about Hamlet. The scholar claimed that the ghost of the father—the late king murdered by his brother with the connivance of Gertrude, the widow who became the lover of the murderer and brother-in-law—in commanding his son, Hamlet, to avenge him by killing his uncle while nevertheless sparing his mother, was assigning him a task more fit for a melodrama than a tragedy. As is well known to one and all, while patricide and matricide are matters for tragedy, uncle-cide or auntie-cide are at best the stuff of third-rate melodrama or comedies of manners verging on farce. And thus the young prince of Denmark, in carrying out the task assigned him, goes through such a song and dance, such machinations, that he succeeds in promoting himself to the status of tragic character. And what a tragedy it is! Taking into account the differences of proportion between himself and Hamlet, and considering that Signora Maria Carmela Spagnolo hadn’t mentioned any ghosts—though she wasn’t far from becoming one—and that the poor woman hadn’t explicitly assigned him any tasks, and considering, finally, that if there was anyone assigning him a task, it was Patre Barbera, a character who could easily be cut out (since there are no priests in Shakespeare’s tragedy), why would he want, by investigating, to turn a serial novel into a detective novel? Because that was all he could aspire to: a good mystery—and never, ever one of those “dense, profound” novels that everyone buys and nobody reads even though the reviewers all swear that they’ve never come across such a book in all their days.

  And so, as he entered the station he made the firm decision not to get involved in the story of the poison that wasn’t poison, not even if he were dragged into it by the bridle, as one does with recalcitrant donkeys.

  “Ciao, Salvo. You know something?”

  “No, Mimì, I don’t, at least not until you tell me. But if you tell me, then when you ask me if I know it, you’ll have the satisfaction of hearing me say: ‘Yes, I know something.’”

  “Man, are you surly today! I just wanted to say, about that lady who died—what was her name? Ah yes, Maria Carmela Spagnolo, the one you’re involved with—”

  “No.”

  Mimì Augello got flustered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean: ‘No’?”

  “It means exactly the opposite of ‘yes.’”

  “Speak more clearly. Do you not want to know what I wanted to tell you, or are you no longer involved in the case?”

  “The second thing.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because I’m not Hamlet.”

  Augello balked.

  “The ‘to be or not to be’ guy? What’s he got to do with it?”

  “A lot. How’s your investigation of the armed robbery going?”

  “Great. I’m definitely gonna catch ’em.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Mimì told him in detail how he’d come to identify two of the three robbers. If he was waiting for the inspector to express his approval, he was disappointed. Montalbano wasn’t even looking at him—he was lost in thought, head hanging down on his chest. After five minutes of silence, Augello stood up.

  “Well, I’m going.”

  “Wait.” The inspector had trouble getting the words out of his mouth. “What were you saying a . . . about the dead lady?”

  “That I found something out. But I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you said you were no longer interested in the case. And because you didn’t deign to utter a single word of approval of how I’ve been carrying on the investigation of the robbery.”

  This was a police department? It was a kindergarten that ran on little acts of spite and resentment! You can’t have my seashell because you wouldn’t give me a bite of your snack . . .

  “You want me to say you’ve been great?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mimì, you’ve been pretty good.”

  “Salvo, you are a goddamned sonofabitch! But since I’m a generous man, I’ll tell you what I found out. This morning at the barbershop, I saw Colajanni, the lawyer, reading the obituaries in the paper the way old folks do.”

  Montalbano flew off the handle.

  “What do you mean ‘the way old folks do’? Am I old or something? When I open the newspaper, the first thing I do is read the obituaries. And then the news.”

  “Okay, okay. Anyway, at one point the lawyer calls out: ‘Well, what do you know! Maria Carmela Spagnolo! I didn’t know she was still alive!’ That’s all.”

  “And so?”

  “Salvo, this means there are still people around who remember her. And that the business of the poison must have made some noise. You therefore have an open road ahead of you: Go and see Colajanni the lawyer and ask him for information.”

  “Did you read the obituary yourself?”

  “Yes, it was quite simple. It said that the grieving nephew Michele announced the passing of his beloved et cetera . . . So what are you going to do? Are you going to talk to the lawyer?”

  “But do you know Colajanni? The guy’s completely lost his mind in old age! You say the slightest wrong thing and he’ll break a chair over your head. To talk to the guy you have to put on riot gear. Anyway, I’ve already made my decision: I don’t want to get involved any further in this matter.”

  “Hello, Inspector Montalbano? This is Clementina Vasile-Cozzo. What happened? Did we quarrel or something the last time we got together? We never see each other anymore. How are you?”

  Montalbano felt himself blush. It had been quite a while since he last got in touch with the paralyzed former schoolt
eacher, whom he was very fond of.

  “I’m fine, signora. What a pleasure to hear your voice!”

  “There’s a selfish reason for this call, Inspector. A cousin of mine from Fela phoned me to tell me she’ll be in Vigàta tomorrow. Since she’s been badgering me for a long time to introduce you to her, I was wondering if you’d be so kind as to come to my place for lunch tomorrow? That way I’ll get her off my back.”

  He accepted, but for no apparent reason, he felt slightly alarmed. The hunter’s instinct had reawakened in him, and it warned him of danger nearby, a trap in the ground covered by leaves into which, if he wasn’t careful, he might fall. Bullshit, he said to himself. What danger could there be in a lunch invitation from Signora Clementina?

  “Just for curiosity’s sake, purely for curiosity’s sake,” the inspector reminded himself as he pulled up in the parking area behind the Casa del Sacro Cuore at half-past eight the following morning. He’d guessed right. Outside the rear gate was a hearse gleaming with gilded angels. Not far away, a taxi whose driver was pacing back and forth outside the car. There were also three motor scooters. Clinics, hospices, and hospitals always have a back door that is used for quick, guarded funerals, which usually take place in the morning. Apparently they do this so as not to frighten the patients—who all hope to leave the place on their own two feet through the main entrance—with the sight of coffins and weeping relatives. A nasty wind was blowing, tousling some yellowish clouds. Four men came out carrying a casket, followed by the nephew of the late Signora Maria Carmela. And that was all. Montalbano put the car in gear and drove off, feeling melancholy and angry with himself for the brilliant idea he’d had. Why the hell had he gone to a funeral so dismal and depressing as to be almost offensive? Curiosity? To find out what new and imaginative tics Michele Spagnolo would come up with?