Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  Before the trial, however, many strange things happened. A few days after Cristina’s arrest, the prosecutor’s office ordered the autopsy that had been the reason for Cristina’s confession. A number of body parts were removed from the corpse and put in eight containers that were sent to the Investigative Magistrate of Palermo, who then passed them on to Professor Vincenzo Agnello, toxicologist at the University of Palermo, and to Professor Filiberto Trupìa, who taught pathological anatomy. The two were also sent the vomit-stained sheets of the dying man as well as the underwear he had on. At this point Cristina made two statements to the investigating judge. In the first she claimed she killed her husband to spare him further suffering. A kind of euthanasia. In the second she said she wasn’t sure she was guilty of murder because the amount of poison she’d given her husband was too small. Almost nothing, in fact, an invisible pinch between her thumb and forefinger.

  A few months later, after intense discussions with her lawyer, Nicolosi, Cristina made a third declaration in which she retracted everything. She never gave her husband any poison. If she’d told the carabinieri and the judge she had, it was because she was terrified by the death threats her brother-in-law, Stefano, the one from Switzerland, had made to her. She’d been hoping that in jail she would be safe and out of his reach. And she was keen to emphasize that what she’d said to Dr. Friscia was true: that she hadn’t been able to administer the prescribed medications to her husband because he’d died before she could intervene. She concluded by saying that the analyses of the two illustrious Palermo professors had proved her right. And indeed, shortly afterwards, a veritable bomb exploded, making a great deal of noise. In their findings, Drs. Agnello and Trupìa stated that although they’d conducted and reconducted test after test, they had found no trace of strychnine or other poison in the bodily remains and fabrics they’d examined. Ferlito had died from acute nicotine poisoning, which had provoked a fatal attack of angina pectoris. Cristina was innocent. Stefano Ferlito, however, would not admit defeat and went on the counterattack. Don’t you know, he said to everyone left and right, that the two distinguished professors owe their careers in part to Cuffaro the notary, with whom they were inextricably linked? What else could you expect? Nicolosi had Cristina make that last statement when he was already certain of the favorable results of the tests. And many people took Stefano’s side. So the public prosecutor of Palermo had a brilliant idea. Take all the material that the two Palermo professors had used for the report and send it to Florence, where their toxicological experts were known the world over. When the carabinieri went to pick up the eight jars with the mortal remains of the dead lawyer, they found very little inside them. One part had gone bad, another part had been lost during the testing. But, at any rate, the sealed parcel officially left for Florence on the first of July. In early September, however, a letter from a Florentine judge arrived in Palermo asking why they’d never received any package. So where had it gone? After endless searches high and low, the package was at last found in the Palazzo di Giustizia of Florence, forgotten in the attic. In late October of the same year, no fewer than six big-cheese Florentine professors submitted their report. They’d recovered enough strychnine to cast doubt on the professional integrity, or sanity, of Drs. Agnello and Trupìa, the two Palermo experts who hadn’t found any (or hadn’t wanted to find any). There was no doubt: Emanuele Ferlito died as a result of poisoning; his wife Cristina was guilty.

  “What did we tell you?” Stefano Ferlito and Russomanno the lawyer shouted triumphantly to one and all.

  “I don’t buy it!” Nicolosi the lawyer declared triumphantly. “The parcel arrived so late in Florence, it must have been tampered with!”

  “This is a dirty trick by my political enemies,” Cuffaro the notary clarified. “They want to get at me through my daughter.”

  To be on the safe side, Nicolosi requested an examination of his client’s mental condition, but she passed it with flying colors and was declared perfectly mentally sound.

  To make a long story short, the first trial, which took place almost two years later, ended in a conviction and twenty years for Cristina—who, at a certain point, had said she remembered having given something to her husband that famous night, but it was almost certainly a pinch of bicarbonate of soda.

  The most notable development of the second trial, which took place almost two years after the first, was the detailed counter-report presented by Aurelio Consolo, who claimed that his Florentine counterparts had been so careless and incompetent that they had used the wrong reagent in their testing, and this was why they had found traces of strychnine. At this point Nicolosi said they needed to have further expert testing done that would override all the others. The request was denied, but the judges amended Cristina’s sentence, reducing it from twenty to sixteen years in prison.

  In 1957 the Supreme Court rejected a motion of appeal and upheld the conviction.

  From prison Cristina kept issuing requests for a pardon. Finally, three years later the Minister of Pardons and Justice, forgetting the second title of his office, and succumbing to pressures put on him by a number of influential members of his party—which was the same one that the uncowed Cuffaro the notary belonged to—took the necessary measures to grant the woman her longed-for pardon. And Cristina could return home. The game was over, once and for all.

  5

  It was past five o’clock in the morning. He’d just come out of the bathroom—where he’d let the water run over his head a long time trying to lessen the numbness he felt from having been shut up in a small room all that time with the bellowing Signora Ciccina—and was on his way to bed, feeling more confused than anything else by all those names of lawyers, experts, relatives of the deceased, and relatives of the murderess, which Ciccina Adorna remembered with maniacal, deadly precision, when the telephone rang. It could only have been Livia, probably worried at not having found him at home earlier.

  “Hello, darling . . .”

  “Again? I’m sorry, Inspector, it’s Ciccina Adorno.”

  Montalbano felt the numbness in his head returning and held the receiver a safe distance away from his ear.

  “What is it, signora?”

  “I forgot to tell you something concerning the first scientific analysis, the one conducted in Palermo by Dr. Agnello and Dr. Trupìa.”

  Montalbano pricked up his ears. This was a delicate point.

  “Tell me, signora.”

  “When the experts from Florence said that their colleagues in Palermo were either incompetent or insane because they hadn’t found any strychnine, Nicolosi called Professor Aurelio Giummara to testify. And this professor said that Professor Agnello, under whom he’d worked as an assistant, had died before signing the report that found no poison. And so the court told him to sign it himself. Which Professor Giummara did, but only after doing the tests all over again, because he was a conscientious man. And you know what? He said he’d used the same reagent as his colleagues in Florence. There wasn’t any strychnine.”

  “Thank you, signora. Do you remember the name of the judge presiding over the second trial?”

  “Of course. Manfredi Catalfamo was his name. Whereas the judge in the first trial was named Giuseppe Indelicato, and the appeals judge was—”

  “Thank you, signora, that’s quite enough. Have a good trip.”

  Naturally, he didn’t give a shit about Catalfamo and Indelicato. He’d asked her just so he could marvel again at the power of Ciccina Adorno’s memory, a sort of living supercomputer.

  Lying on the bed, with the sound of a moderately rough sea in his ears, he thought about what he’d just learned. If what Maria Carmela Spagnolo told him just before she died was true, the Palermo experts hadn’t found any strychnine because there simply wasn’t any. Cristina had thought she was poisoning her husband, but all she’d given him was an innocuous little powder. So why had the Florentine experts found strychnine?
Perhaps Cuffaro was right: The long, mysterious disappearance of the parcel had allowed his political enemies to get their hands on it and inject the body parts with a ton of strychnine. But this was hardly cause for scandal. Italian criminal justice was studded with cases of evidence disappearing and reappearing in due time. It was on old, cherished custom, practically a ritual.

  Cristina was therefore convicted not for actually having poisoned her husband, but essentially for having intended to poison him. How could she ever have imagined that her bosom friend Maria Carmela had deceived her? And why indeed had Maria Carmela deceived her? Probably because she was aware of her friend’s passion for her husband’s young nephew Attilio, and because she knew that Cristina had lately been talking about wanting to kill her husband. Of course, it’s one thing to open your mouth and spout nonsense and another thing to speak seriously. At any rate, just to prevent Cristina from one day doing something extremely stupid, Maria Carmela gave her a little powder, telling her it was rat poison. So far, so good. Maria Carmela was acting in Cristina’s best interests. Then why, when speaking to the lieutenant of the carabinieri, and later at court, didn’t she reveal the truth? All she had to do to exonerate her friend was to say to the lieutenant something like: “Look, Cristina can’t have killed her husband with the powder I gave her, because it wasn’t poison.”

  That would have sufficed. But she didn’t say it. Actually, she put on a scene, crying in despair and saying she’d always been in the dark about Cristina’s intention to commit murder. And, just for good measure, she hammered a few extra nails in her friend’s coffin at the trial. She would wait another fifty years to say those words, when facing death, to ease her conscience.

  Why? By not saying those words, Maria Carmela knew she was allowing an innocent person—even if only relatively innocent—to be convicted. It was an attitude that implied deep hatred; there was no other way to put it. What he was looking at was almost certainly a cold, lucid vendetta.

  By now it was broad daylight. Montalbano got up, went and lit a burner under the espresso pot, then stepped out onto the veranda. The wind had dropped, and the sea, in withdrawing, had left the sand wet and littered with plastic bottles, algae, empty cans, and dead fish. Flotsam and jetsam. He shivered and went back inside. He drank three cups of coffee in a row, put on a heavy jacket, and went back out on the veranda and sat down. The chilly morning air cooled his brain. For the first time in his life he reproached himself for never taking notes. Something Signora Ciccina had told him was swirling around in his head and he couldn’t make it hold still long enough to grasp it. He knew it was something important, but he couldn’t bring it into focus. He’d always had an ironclad memory. Why was it starting to fail him? At this rate getting older would no doubt mean going around with a notebook and a pencil in his pocket, like British detectives did. The horror of this thought jogged his memory better than any medicine, and he suddenly remembered everything. In the deposition she gave at the carabinieri station, Signora Maria Carmela stated that Cristina had asked her for the poison in mid-November. And therefore until that date Maria Carmela cared so much for her friend that she protected her from any sudden brilliant ideas she might have by giving her a harmless powder. But less than two months later her feelings towards Cristina had changed completely; now she cared little for her—in fact, she hated her. And so she didn’t belie her former friend’s confession. This meant that something, in that short period of time, had happened between the two women. But not just any normal sort of quarrel of the kind that can come between even the closest of friends. No, it was something serious enough to inflict a deep, irreparable wound. Wait a second. Ciccina Adorno had also said that the two women had met over Christmas—at least that was what Maria Carmela had told the lieutenant. And there was no doubt that the meeting actually did take place. And it hadn’t been a formal encounter, a polite but formal exchange of best wishes—no, the two women had chatted quietly and calmly as was their custom . . . This could only mean one of two things: Either Maria Carmela started hating Cristina after or during their Christmas encounter, or her hatred began a few days after she gave Cristina the fake poison. If the latter hypothesis was true, then during the Christmas encounter Maria Carmela must have pretended to be the same old friend she’d always been, concealing skillfully what she was feeling for Cristina, waiting patiently for her friend sooner or later to pull the trigger. Yes indeed, because that fake poison was exactly the same as a revolver loaded with blanks. No matter how things turned out, the shot would ruin Cristina’s life forever. And of the two hypotheses, the second was surely the one closer to the truth, if Maria Carmela had been able to carry that secret inside her for all the years she had left to live.

  Treacherously, the image of the dying woman appeared before his eyes—the tiny, featherless sparrow head sunken deep into the pillow, the clean white sheets, the bedside table . . . Then the image froze, and his memory sort of zoomed in on the scene. What was on the bedside table? A bottle of mineral water, a glass, a spoon, and, half-hidden by the green bottle, a crucifix about six or seven inches tall on a square wooden base. And suddenly the crucifix came into perfect focus: The Jesus nailed to the cross was not white. He was black. It had to have been a sacred object she’d bought in some far-off African country when she was following her nephew the engineer around the world.

  And suddenly he found himself standing up, from the thought that had come to him. Was it possible that that statuette was all that the woman had brought with her from all her journeys? Where were her other possessions, the objects, photographs, and letters we keep so that our memory has something to hang on to, something to bear witness to our lives?

  The minute he got to the office, he rang the Hotel Pirandello. They informed him that Signor Spagnolo had just left for the airport to catch the first plane to Milan.

  “Did he have a lot of baggage?”

  “Spagnolo? No, just a small carry-on.”

  “Did he by any chance ask you to send him any large parcels or big boxes, anything like that?”

  “No, Inspector.”

  So Maria Carmela’s things, if they existed, were still in Vigàta.

  “Fazio!”

  “Here I am, Chief.”

  “Do you have stuff to do this morning?”

  “So-so.”

  “Then drop everything. I want to give you an assignment you’re going to relish. You must head immediately for Fela. It’s now eight-thirty. You should get there by ten. I want you to go to the records office there.”

  Fazio’s eyes sparkled with contentment. He had what Montalbano called a “records office complex”: When investigating someone, he didn’t limit himself to reporting the person’s birth date, birthplace, mother’s and father’s names; he dug up the father’s and mother’s fathers and mothers, grandparents, uncles, cousins, and so on. And if Montalbano didn’t interrupt him, usually in some violent way or another, he was liable, depending on the person’s history, to trace his lineage all the way back to the dawn of humanity.

  “What do you want me to do?” Fazio asked.

  Montalbano explained it to him after telling him the whole story, including the part about Cristina and the trial. Fazio twisted up his mouth.

  “So it doesn’t just involve going to the records office,” he said.

  “No, but you’re a master at this sort of thing.”

  Not five minutes later, the inspector himself went out, got in his car, and headed to the Casa del Sacro Cuore. By now he’d caught the bug—the irresistible desire to know, which was the mainspring of all his investigations. He no longer had any doubts or inner hesitations. Whether it was a serial novel or mystery novel, tragedy or melodrama, he needed to know everything about this story, all the whys and wherefores.

  He introduced himself to the chief administrator of the Casa, Ragionier Inclima, a fat, cordial man of about fifty—who, upon hearing the inspector’s first qu
estion, sat down in front of a computer.

  “You know, Inspector, normally it’s my assistant, Ragionier Cappadona, who handles these sorts of things, but he’s got the flu and didn’t come in today.”

  He fiddled around at the keyboard, pressing a few buttons here and there, but it was clear that computers weren’t his thing. Then he spoke.

  “Yes, according to this, all of Signora Spagnolo’s personal effects are in our storage facility, in a trunk of hers. But I don’t know whether or not it’s already been sent to her nephew in Milan.”

  “And how could we find out?”

  “Please come with me.”

  He opened a drawer and extracted a set of keys. They went out the main door. On the left-hand side of the park there was a low structure, a warehouse with a large entrance over which was the word Storage, in case anyone had any doubts. Parcels, boxes, suitcases, crates, cabinets, and containers of every sort were lined up in orderly fashion along the walls.

  “We take good care of everything and make it all readily available,” said Ragionier Inclima. “As you can imagine, Inspector, all our clients are, er, rather well off. And every now and then they feel like seeing some old dress or cherished object again . . . Okay, here we are: Signora Spagnolo’s trunk is still here.”

  Why, thought Montalbano, don’t the not-so-well-off also feel sometimes like seeing some cherished objects of their own again? Apparently not, because those objects probably aren’t readily available anymore, having all been sold or pawned.

  The trunk wasn’t really a trunk. It was a sort of small armoire that stood straight up like an armoire and was as tall as the inspector. The only place Montalbano had ever seen trunks of this sort before was in films set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And this one was literally covered—without a single centimeter left free—with those pieces of square, round, and rectangular colored paper that hotels used to stick on baggage as a sort of advertisement. A part of this collage of stickers was covered by a white sheet of paper, with the glue on it still fresh, giving the Milanese address of the signora’s nephew.