Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  The moment Signora Clementina Vasile-Cozzo’s housekeeper opened the door for him, he realized, from the look she gave him, that the woman still harbored a profound albeit inexplicable antipathy towards him. Montalbano partly forgave her for this, because she knew what to do in the kitchen.

  “How time flies, eh?” the housekeeper said to him, snatching the tray of cannoli rudely out of his hand.

  What was that supposed to mean? That in less than a year he’d turned into an old man? And to top it off, upon seeing his inquiring, concerned expression, the villainess smiled.

  In the living room, spilling out from an armchair beside Signora Clementina’s wheelchair, was a very fat woman of about fifty who the moment she opened her mouth revealed herself to be vucciriusa—which meant that instead of speaking she projected a voice exactly like an opera singer’s full-chested C note.

  “This is my cousin, Ciccina Adorno,” said Signora Clementina in a tone beseeching the inspector to understand.

  “Oh my God! It’s such a pleasure to meet you!” said the cousin.

  More than anything else it was a cross between the wail of a foghorn and the howl of a wolf that hadn’t had anything in its belly for a month. In the fifteen minutes or so that it took before they could sit down at the table, Montalbano—whose ears were starting to hurt inside—learned that Signora Adorno née Adorno was also the widow Adorno (“I married my cousin”), and she was not fifty but seventy years old. He was also treated to a lengthy, thorough explanation of why and how the lady had been obliged to travel from Fela to Vigàta because of a dispute with a man to whom she had rented a small house she owned and who no longer wanted to pay the rent because there was a broken gutter on the roof that leaked straight into the living room when it rained. Whose responsibility was it—she asked the inspector, who was a man of the law—to pay for repairing the gutter? Luckily at that moment the housekeeper came in to say that lunch was ready.

  Head numb from all the yelling, Montalbano was unable to enjoy the pasta ’ncasciata, which must have been just slightly below the very highest level, beyond which there is only God. To make up for it, Signora Ciccina had moved on to the subject of greatest interest to her, which was to know, in the most minute detail, all the particulars of all the cases Montalbano had solved in his career. She remembered minutiae that the inspector had long forgotten all about.

  When the fish arrived, Clementina Vasile-Cozzo made a final effort to rescue the inspector from that cyclone of questions.

  “Ciccina, do you think the Empress of Japan will give birth to a son or a daughter?”

  And while Montalbano was reeling from the sudden shift to the Empire of the Rising Sun, or whatever it was, Signor Clementina explained to him that her cousin knew everything about all the ruling houses in creation. But Signora Ciccina didn’t take the bait.

  “You want me to talk about things like that when we have our inspector here with us in person?” And without so much as pausing to take a breath, she continued: “And what do you think of the Notarbartolo case?”

  “What Notarbartolo case?”

  “Are you kidding? Don’t you remember Notarbartolo, the one from the Banco di Sicilia?”

  This was something that had taken place in the early twentieth century (or was it the late nineteenth?), but Signora Ciccina started talking about it as though it had happened yesterday.

  “Because I know everything about every violent crime that has occurred in Sicily from the unification of Italy to the present day.”

  When she’d finished expatiating on the Notarbartolo case, she launched into the Mangiaracina case (1912–14), which was such a tortuous and complicated affair that when the coffee arrived they still didn’t know who the killer was. At this point Montalbano, fearing that his eardrums were seriously damaged, glanced at his watch, got up from the table, pretended he was suddenly in a hurry, thanked Signora Clementina, and said good-bye. He was accompanied to the door by Ciccina Adorno.

  “Excuse me, signora,” said the inspector, unaware of what he was saying. “Do you remember a certain Maria Carmela Spagnolo?”

  “No,” was the firm reply of Signora Adorno, she who knew everything about every violent crime in Sicily.

  Sitting on the flat rock under the lighthouse, he engaged in a kind of self-analysis. No doubt about it, Ciccina Adorno’s negative reply had disappointed him. Which led to the question: Did he really want to continue this investigation? Yes or no? He should make up his mind once and for all! A little initiative was all it would take. Such as going and introducing himself to Colajanni the lawyer and asking him to tell him, even at the risk of coming to blows, what he knew about Maria Carmela Spagnolo. Because there was no doubt that the lawyer had known her, given the way he’d reacted to reading the obituary at the barbershop. Or perhaps going to the public library, requesting the collection of every day’s edition of the island’s major newspaper for 1950, and then patiently trying to find what happened in Fela during the first six months of that year. Or else assign to Catarella the task of looking for news of that sort on the Internet.

  So why wasn’t he doing it? All it would take was a little goodwill for him to find out what there was to find out, and that would be the end of it. Was it perhaps because he didn’t feel like supplementing therapeutic tenacity (endlessly talked about by doctors, priests, moralists, and TV hosts) and judicial tenacity (endlessly talked about by judges and politicians) with an investigative tenacity that nobody whatsoever would talk about? Or was it because—and this seemed to him the right answer—he preferred to remain passive about the whole thing? Which meant being like a coastline on which the remains of past shipwrecks occasionally washed ashore, some of which were swallowed back up by the sea, while others remained on the sand to cook in the sunlight. If so, the best thing was to wait for the waves to toss some new wreckage ashore.

  He was on his way to bed, shortly after one a.m., when the telephone rang. Surely it was Livia.

  “Hello, darling,” he said into the receiver.

  There was silence at the other end, then a sort of world-ending thunderclap that left his ears ringing. Holding the receiver away from his head, he realized it was laughter. And the laughter could not have belonged to anyone but Ciccina Adorno, who apparently was not only vucciriusa but also an insomniac.

  “I’m sorry, Inspector, but I’m not your darling. You gave me the wrong information!”

  “I did? About what, signora?”

  “About Maria Carmela Spagnolo. You didn’t tell me her married name, Siracusa. Her husband was a pharmacist, and I’ve been up all night trying to figure it out.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Of course I knew her! Even personally. But there hasn’t been any news of her for many years.”

  “She died here in Vigàta just the other day.”

  “Really?”

  “Listen, signora, can we meet tomorrow morning?”

  “I leave for Fela at eight o’clock.”

  “Could you—”

  “If you’re not too tired, why don’t you come over right now?”

  “But what about Signora Clementina . . . ?”

  “She’s okay with it. We’ll wait for you.”

  Before leaving home he stuck a wad of cotton in each ear.

  After Signora Ciccina had been talking for an hour, the neighbors upstairs started banging over their heads. Soon thereafter the downstairs neighbors did the same at their feet. Then others started banging on the walls. At this point Signora Clementina opened a large closet and sat the inspector and her cousin down inside it.

  Montalbano finally left the place after three hours of discussion, six cups of coffee, and a whole pack of cigarettes. Despite the protective cotton, his ears hurt. This time the waves had washed not some scattered flotsam ashore, but a whole, intact galleon.

  4

  At exactly nin
e p.m. on the first of January, 1950, attorney at law Emanuele (Nenè to friends) Ferlito sat down at the lansquenet table at the Patriots’ Club, which everyone in Fela knew was often an illegal gambling den. And if it was one on normal weekdays, one could only imagine what it became on holidays, especially the holidays that went from Christmas to the Epiphany, when the tradition in the towns was to gamble everything down to one’s underpants. Nenè Ferlito, who was rich and basically idle, since he rarely practiced his profession and almost always only as a favor to friends, was about fifty and had been around the block a few times. Aside from being capable of sitting at the gambling table for forty-eight hours straight without getting up even to go to the bathroom, he had women in Fela and the nearby towns, and it was known that in Palermo (where he often went—or so, at least, he told his wife, Cristina—to argue lawsuits) he kept two more, a ballerina and a seamstress. He could down half a bottle of French cognac and more in a single evening. His daily consumption of unfiltered cigarettes was about 110 to 120. At around eleven p.m. on that same New Year’s Day, he was overcome by a sudden, severe malaise, just like the year before. That is, he turned as stiff as a salted cod (no pun intended), started shaking violently and vomiting, and could barely breathe with great effort.

  “Here we go again!” cried Dr. Jacopo Friscia, who happened to be at the Patriots’ Club that evening.

  Having taken Ferlito into his care after the first such attack, the doctor had forbidden the lawyer above all to smoke, but the injunction had gone into one of Ferlito’s ears and come out the other. A nicotine-triggered relapse was inevitable.

  This time, the matter appeared far more serious than the last. Nenè Ferlito was dying of asphyxia, and to reopen his jaws the doctor and some other people at the club had to resort to using a shoehorn. Finally Ferlito recovered a little, and they were able to carry him home while Dr. Friscia ran off in search of medications. Ferlito’s wife, Cristina, had them lay him down in bed (they slept in separate bedrooms) and then got on the phone to inform their daughter, Agata, eighteen years old, who was spending the holidays in Catania with relatives. The helpers left upon the return of Dr. Friscia, who found the patient in an immobile state. After clearly warning the wife that the patient’s life was in danger, he wrote down on a sheet of paper the medicines she should give him and the times at which they should be administered. Seeing Signora Cristina understandably overwhelmed and as though absent, the doctor repeated that her husband’s life depended on her strictly following his prescriptions. She would have to stay up all night. Cristina said she could manage. Feeling doubtful, the doctor asked her if she wanted him to send a nurse there to take care of everything. Cristina said no, and the doctor left.

  The following morning, shortly after eight o’clock, Dr. Friscia knocked on the door of the Ferlitos’ house. Maria, the housekeeper, who’d just arrived, answered the door and told him that Signora Cristina was shut up in her husband’s bedroom and wanted to be left alone. The doctor, however, managed to persuade her to let him in. There was a horrendous stench of vomit, piss, and shit in the room. Cristina was sitting on a chair beside the bed, body stiff, goggle-eyed. On the bed lay the lawyer, dead. The doctor roused the wife from her state of shock and realized that the medications he’d given her hadn’t even been opened.

  “But why didn’t you make him take them?”

  “There wasn’t time. He died half an hour after you left.”

  The doctor touched the patient’s body. It was still warm. But this was perhaps because there was a lighted wood-burning stove in the room that Ferlito himself had stoked the previous evening before going out, since he didn’t want to be cold when he got home from the club. Signora Cristina would later say that she loaded more wood into the stove fifteen minutes before her dying husband was brought home.

  The funeral had to be postponed for a few days to allow the deceased’s brother, Stefano, who lived in Switzerland, to attend. The day after her father’s death, Agata, his daughter, went to talk to Dr. Friscia, asking him to tell her in detail what her mother told him concerning the medications she hadn’t had time to give her husband. The upshot was that Agata left home, asking some friends to put her up. What was this? How could a girl abandon her mother at the very moment when she should be by her side, sharing her grief? Thus, in town, rumors that had already been communicated through gestures, allusions, and meaningful hints began to circulate openly.

  Cristina Ferlito, when she first married, was a beautiful girl of twenty, daughter of the notary Calogero Cuffaro—at the time the most powerful representative, in Fela and the nearby towns, of the party in power. The local bishop received him almost daily. No public function, government grant, license, contract, or statement got off the ground without Cuffaro’s approval. In a short time Cristina learned what kind of stuff her husband, ten years her senior, was made of. Then they had a child, a little girl. Cristina behaved like a devoted wife; people had only good things to say about her. At least until February 1948, when her husband brought home a distant nephew of twenty-five, Attilio, a fine-looking young man, for whom he’d found work in Fela.

  Having always lived with his parents in Fiacca, Attilio moved into a room in his uncle’s villa. According to gossips, the nephew was always ready to console his Zia Cristina when she suffered over her husband’s unending infidelities. And by dint of daily consolation, Signora Cristina one day found it more convenient to get her consolation in bed. But she ended up falling in love with Attilio and gave the young man no rest. She became extremely jealous and started to make scenes even in front of outsiders. Her husband began to receive anonymous letters that left him indifferent—actually he was pleased that his wife was now busting his nephew’s balls instead of his own. In October of the following year, Attilio—partly because he couldn’t take any more of his mistress’s shenanigans, and partly because he no longer felt like doing wrong by his uncle, to whom he was indebted for even his job—moved into a boarding house. Cristina seemed to lose her mind: She stopped eating, stopped sleeping, sent extremely long letters to her ex-lover using Maria, the housekeeper, as messenger. In some of them she declared her intention—which Attilio didn’t take seriously—to kill her husband so she could be free again and live with him.

  At the funeral the whole town was able to see Cristina being shunned by her daughter, her brother-in-law, Stefano, who’d come from Switzerland, and by her mother-in-law, who accused her, in no uncertain terms, right in front of the casket, of having murdered her son. At this point Cristina’s father, Calogero Cuffaro the notary, ran to comfort the poor woman, letting it be known to one and all that she was out of her mind with grief. But that same evening, at the Patriots’ Club, Stefano from Switzerland announced to everyone present that he intended to demand that the authorities have his brother’s body autopsied, and then withdrew with Russomanno the lawyer, who was of the same political party as Cuffaro the notary, though head of the opposing faction. Their intense, animated discussion, in a small consultation room at the club, lasted three hours. Just long enough for Stefano, on his way home, to be assaulted by two unknown men who beat him viciously, telling him repeatedly to “Go back to Swisserland, Swisser!”

  Despite a black eye and a gimpy leg, Stefano Ferlito, summoned by Cuffaro the notary, who said he was owed a “proper explanation,” went to the home of the deceased in the company of Russomanno the lawyer. Of the widow Cristina, not a trace. To make up for this, there was the honorable Sestilio Nicolosi, the court’s top attorney, at the notary’s side. At about ten o’clock, after a small crowd had gathered around the villa to hear the loud shouts being exchanged by the lawyers Russomanno and Nicolosi as they quarreled, a sudden silence descended. What happened? What happened was that the door to the living room had opened without warning and Cristina appeared. Pale but firm and decisive, she said:

  “Enough of this. I can’t stand it any longer. I killed Nenè. With poison.”

  Her father tr
ied one last line of defense, saying she was delirious and raving, but it was no use. Twenty minutes later, the small crowd outside saw the front door open, and out came first Cristina, then her father the notary and Nicolosi the lawyer, followed by Stefano Ferlito and Russomanno the lawyer. The crowd fell in behind them and followed them all the way to the carabinieri station, where Cristina turned herself in. Interrogated by a certain Lieutenant Frangipane, Cristina said that after Dr. Friscia had left and she was alone with her husband, instead of giving him the medications the doctor had prescribed, she gave him a glass of water in which she’d dissolved some strychnine-based rat poison.

  “Where did you buy it?”

  “I didn’t buy it. I asked my friend, Maria Carmela Siracusa, the pharmacist’s widow, for it. She got it from the pharmacy and gave it to me. I’d told her I needed some because we had rats in the house.”

  “Why did you kill your husband?”

  “Because I couldn’t stand his infidelities any longer.”

  The following day, summoned by Lieutenant Frangipane, a weeping Maria Carmela Spagnolo confirmed that she’d given her friend the poison in mid-November, but never in the world could she have imagined that Cristina might use it to kill her husband. They’d seen each other at Christmas and talked for a long time. Cristina had seemed the same as usual . . . Around town, Maria Carmela, who was the same age as Cristina, had a reputation for being a woman of solid character. Her late husband, the pharmacist, had also been a skirt chaser, but she’d never taken a lover the way Cristina had done. The lieutenant therefore had no reason to think Maria Carmela had been aware of Cristina’s homicidal intentions. And so he took her deposition and sent her home. Some people in town, however, started whispering that the pharmacist’s widow was perfectly aware of Cristina’s intentions. Thus many began to see Maria Carmela as an accomplice. Indignant, the woman sold her properties and moved abroad, to live with her brother the diplomat. She would return for a few days in 1953, to testify at the first trial, where she confirmed her initial testimony. Afterwards she left immediately for France, never to return to Fela.