“The shipper will no doubt be here to pick this up tomorrow,” said Inclima. “What else did you want to know?”
“Do you have the keys to the trunk?”
“Let’s go and see whether we still have them or they were already turned over to the nephew.”
They’d already been given to the nephew.
He ate listlessly, with no appetite.
“You haven’t done right by me today,” Calogero, the owner of the trattoria, reproached him. “When a customer like you eats that way, I don’t feel like cooking anymore.”
The inspector apologized and reassured him that it was because he had too many worries on his mind and hadn’t been able to block them out enough to enjoy the wonderful langouste that had been laid before him. Truth be told, he had only one worry, but it tormented him as much as ten. And, for lack of a better solution, he had to settle for the only course of action possible in the short time remaining before the trunk headed off to Milan: Orazio Genco. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and at that hour Orazio, a seventy-something house burglar who had never committed an act of violence and was an honest man except for that one little vice of burgling people’s apartments, was surely at home sleeping, making up for the sleep he’d lost during the night. He and Orazio were fond of each other, and the burglar had once given the inspector the precious gift of a set of picklocks and skeleton keys.
Gnetta, Orazio’s wife, came to the door.
“Inspector? What happened? Is something wrong?”
“No, it’s nothing, Gnetta. I just came to see your husband.”
“Come in,” said the woman, reassured. “Orazio’s sick. He’s in bed.”
“What’s he got?”
“Romatic pains. Doctor says he oughtn’t to go out at night when it’s humid. But how’s the good man gonna work otherwise?”
Orazio was half-asleep, but upon seeing the inspector he sat up in bed.
“Inspector! What a nice surprise!”
“How’s it going, Orà?”
“So-so, Inspector.”
“Would you like a little coffee?” asked Gnetta.
“I’d love some.”
Taking advantage of the fact that Gnetta had left the room, Orazio was anxious to set things straight.
“Look, Inspector, I haven’t worked for over a month, so if there was anything—”
“That’s not why I’m here. I had a little job for you, but I see you’re unable to move for the moment.”
“No, Inspector, I’m sorry. You’re gonna have to go it alone. Don’t you know how it’s done? Didn’t I teach you?”
“You did, but this is a trunk that has to be opened and then closed so that nobody knows. You know what I mean?”
“I sure do. But now let’s have a quiet cup of coffee and we can talk about it after.”
6
Fazio checked back in at around seven that evening, looking pleased. He sat down comfortably in the chair in front of the inspector’s desk, pulled a sheet of paper folded in four out of his jacket pocket, and started reading.
“Siracusa, Alfredo, son of Giovanni Siracusa and Emilia née Scarcella, born in Fela on the—”
“You want to fight?” Montalbano interrupted him.
Fazio grinned.
“Just kidding, Chief.”
He folded up the page and put it back in his pocket.
“I got lucky, Chief.”
“How’s that?”
“I was able to talk to the pharmacist Arturo De Gregorio.”
“And who’s he?”
“The current owner of the pharmacy that used to belong to Alfredo Siracusa. See, Chief, this De Gregorio, as soon as he graduated in 1947, went and did his training at the Siracusa pharmacy. Siracusa was a guy who spent his whole day either playing cards or chasing women. On the thirtieth of September, 1949, as he was driving back from Palermo, Dr. Siracusa got in an accident and died on the spot.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Well, it looks like he fell asleep at the wheel. He’d probably been up all night gambling or with a woman. Anyway, he was alone in the car. And to make a long story short, less than a week later, Dr. De Gregorio told his widow that, if she agreed to it, he would like to take over the pharmacy. The lady stalled a little, and then, towards the end of November, she said okay and they agreed on a price.”
“So why the hell should I care about this story, Fazio?”
“Just be patient, Chief, I’m getting to the point. So, De Gregorio starts taking inventory. Aside from the back room of the pharmacy, which was used for storage, there was a small room off to the side with a desk that Dr. Siracusa used for paperwork, accounts, correspondence, purchase orders. But one of the drawers was locked and the key was nowhere to be found. So De Gregorio asks the widow. She rounds up all her husband’s keys, goes to the pharmacy, tries one after the other, finally hits on the right one, and opens the drawer. De Gregorio sees that it’s full of papers and photographs, but then he hears the automatic entrance bell ring and goes to attend to the customer, who is followed immediately by another customer. Finally the pharmacist is free to return to the little office. He finds Signora Maria Carmela lying on the floor, unconscious. De Gregorio revives her, and she tells him she fainted. Some of the papers and photos are on the desk, others are on the floor. Dr. De Gregorio bends down to pick them up, and the widow springs like a viper.
“‘Don’t touch anything! Leave them alone!’
“He’d never seen her act that way, De Gregorio told me. The lady was known for being polite and affable, but just then she’d seemed possessed by the devil.
“‘Go away! Get out of here!’
“The pharmacist went back out to serve some more customers. Half an hour later the signora reappeared holding two large bags.
“‘How are you, signora? Do you want me to take you home?’
“‘Leave me alone!’
“As of that day, Maria Carmela was never the same again, according to the pharmacist. She never set foot in the pharmacy again. And with De Gregorio she continued to be rude and hostile. Then the whole affair of Ferlito’s death broke out, and people in town started saying that she was an accomplice of Cristina, the lawyer’s murdering wife. And so the widow Siracusa sold her properties and went to live abroad. Of all the things De Gregorio told me, the fact that she fainted in that office seemed the most interesting.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Come on, Chief, it’s plain as day! And you know better than I do! In that drawer, the just-widowed Signora Maria Carmela found something she’d never dreamed she’d find.”
Around midnight, he’d run out of strategies for making the time pass. Unable to concentrate, he couldn’t read: He would finish one page and then have to start all over again because he’d forgotten what he’d just read. The only solution was TV, but he’d already listened to a political debate moderated by two journalists who looked like Laurel and Hardy, one thin as a rail and the other fat as an elephant, over the resignation of an undersecretary with a reptilian head who was a lawyer by trade and had tried to have the judges presiding over the cases he’d lost arrested. Defending the undersecretary and sitting beside him was a minister who looked like a death’s head and spoke in such a way that you couldn’t understand a goddamned thing.
The inspector bravely turned the TV back on. The debate was still raging. Then he found a channel broadcasting a documentary on the lives of crocodiles and stopped there.
He must have fallen asleep, because it was suddenly two o’clock. He went and washed his face, left the house, and got in his car. Twenty minutes later he drove past the closed gate of the Casa del Sacro Cuore, took the first right turn, and pulled up in the area behind the villa as he’d done before when he went to watch the funeral. He got out of the car and noticed that many windows were il
luminated by dim lights. He realized why: the insomnia of old age, the kind that condemns you to spend every night awake, in bed or in an armchair, reviewing your life minute by minute, enduring every episode again, passing from one to the next like beads on a rosary. And so you end up wishing for death because it’s an absolute void, a nothingness, free of the damnation and persecution of memory.
He clambered over the small gate without any problem, as the moonlight sufficed to let him see where to put his feet. Once inside the park, however, he froze. There was a dog pointing straight at him, one of those terrible, murderous dogs that don’t bark—that don’t do anything, in fact, but the instant you move they tear your throat out. He felt his shirt suddenly wet with sweat and sticking to his skin. He remained perfectly still, and so did the dog.
Tomorrow morning they’re going to find us still like this, he thought, with me eyeing the dog and the dog eyeing me.
With one difference between them, however: The dog was in his own territory, whereas he had entered it illegally.
The dog’s in the right, he thought, repeating the famous line of Eduardo De Filippo.
He absolutely had to make up his mind and do something. But luck took care of things and lent him a hand. A pine cone, or dry fruit, fell from a tree and onto the animal’s back, making to his great surprise a ping! sound.
The dog was fake, put there just to frighten idiots like him. He opened the warehouse door in no time at all. Closing the door behind him, he turned on the large flashlight he’d brought with him and, following Orazio the burglar’s instructions, he easily opened the trunk-armoire. Ten or so dresses hung from coat hangers; the shelf below them was crammed full of objects: a tiny Eiffel Tower, a papier-mâché lion, a wooden mask, and other mementos. The inside part of the trunk was actually a chest of drawers. There were panties, bras, handkerchiefs, scarves, woolen socks. Two large, other drawers were located under the shelf full of objects. The first contained shoes. The second, a cardboard box and a large envelope. Montalbano opened the envelope. Photos. On the back of each, Maria Carmela had diligently written the date, place, and names of those portrayed. There were Maria Carmela’s father and mother, her brother, nephew, sister-in-law, a French girlfriend, a black housemaid, a number of different landscapes . . . No photos of her wedding, however. And there wasn’t a picture of her husband to be found for love or money. As if the signora had wanted to forget what he looked like. And there weren’t any of Cristina, either, her former bosom friend. He put the photos back into the envelope and opened the box. Letters. All sorted in orderly fashion and put into different envelopes according to whom they were from. “Letters from Mamma and Papa”; “Letters from my brother”; “Letters from my nephew”; “Letters from Jeanne” . . . The last envelope had nothing written on it. Inside were three letters. He needed only to read the first to realize that he’d found what he was looking for. He slipped the three letters into his jacket pocket, closed the trunk and locked it, also locked the warehouse door, patted the fake dog on the head, clambered back over the gate, got in his car, and drove back to Marinella.
Three long letters, the first dated February 4, 1947, and the last, July 30 of the same year. Three letters ardently testifying to a torrid love affair that had blazed like burning straw and fizzled out just as fast. Letters to the pharmacist Alfredo Siracusa and signed by Cristina Ferlito, always starting the same way: “My beloved Alfredo, blood of my life”; and ending with: “Yours in everything and every way, Cristina.” Letters which the woman had sent to her lover, the husband of her best friend, and which the husband carelessly kept in a locked drawer of his desk in the pharmacy—the one Maria Carmela opened at the request of Dr. De Gregorio. Upon reading them that day, Maria Carmela must surely have felt mortally wounded and offended, even more by the words her friend wrote about her than by the twofold betrayal of her husband and best friend. For they were words of scorn and mockery: Alfredo, how can you stand living with such a prissy goody-two-shoes? . . . When you wake up in the morning with her beside you, how do you keep from getting sick to your stomach? . . . You know what Maria Carmela told me in confidence the other day? That ever since your wedding night, making love to you has always been an ordeal for her. Then why is it for me so great a pleasure as to have no equal in life except, perhaps, for the release of death?
Here Montalbano couldn’t help but imagine another pleasure, one far more wicked and refined: that of the pharmacist enjoying the wife of his closest gambling and skirt-chasing companion, with him none the wiser. And who knew how much longer it might have lasted if her husband’s good-looking nephew Attilio hadn’t come into the picture?
So, upon finding the letters, Maria Carmela decides to take revenge. She’d already given Cristina the fake poison before discovering the betrayal, and she certainly must have regretted having grasped her friend’s murderous intentions in time. Had she already known about the affair, she would have given her real poison, so her husband would die by her own hand. But all she can do now is wait for her former friend to make a false move. And when Cristina does, Maria Carmela is ready to grab the chance on the fly, doing her best to help send Cristina to jail though she knows she couldn’t have killed her husband with the powder she gave her. If she’d told the lieutenant of the carabinieri the truth, things would have turned out much better for her former friend. But that is exactly what she doesn’t want. And only at the moment of death, when her palate had become insensitive to all tastes, even the sweetness of revenge, did she decide to reveal her misdeed. But why did she hang on to those letters? Why didn’t she throw them away with the photos of her husband and their wedding? Because Maria Carmela was a smart woman. She knew that one day the anger that drove her to do what she did would start to lessen, the memory of the offense would fade, and she might end up telling someone what really happened. And Cristina might very well be set free . . . Whereas all she had to do was to pick up one of those letters, and the motives for her vendetta would be revived and as ferocious as on the first day.
The following morning he went out early, after barely sleeping a wink. When he entered the church, Patre Barbera had just finished saying Mass. He followed the priest into the sacristy. Patre Barbera took off his vestments with the help of the sacristan.
“Please leave us now, and don’t let anyone in.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sacristan, going out.
One look at Montalbano and the priest knew that the inspector now knew what Maria Carmela Spagnolo had told him in the confessional. But he wanted to be sure.
“Did you figure everything out?”
“Yes, everything.”
“How did you do it?”
“I’m a cop. It was kind of a bet with myself, more than anything else. But now it’s over.”
“Are you sure?” asked the priest.
“Of course. Who do you think is going to care about a fifty-year-old case? Maria Carmela Spagnolo is dead, Cristina Ferlito too—”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody, I just assumed . . .”
“You’re wrong.”
Montalbano looked at him in astonishment.
“You mean she’s still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In Catania. She lives with her daughter Agata, who forgave her when she got out of prison. Agata married a bank clerk, a good man named Giulio La Rosa. They have a small house at 32 Via Gomez.”
“Why are you telling me that?” asked the inspector, but he already knew the answer.
“So that you will go and do what I, as a priest, cannot. You are in a position to bring peace of mind to a woman at the very moment when she no longer expects anything from life. To illuminate, with the light of truth, the last dark passage of that woman’s existence. Go and do your duty, do not wait any longer. Too much has already been lost.”
And he practically pushed Montalbano towar
ds the door, hands on his shoulders. In a daze, the inspector took a few steps, then stopped dead in his tracks. A sort of flash had lit up his brain. He turned around.
“You had a precise plan that morning when you first came to me! You machinated the whole thing! You used me and I fell for it like a fucking idiot! And you even put on that little act of trying to talk me out of it, knowing I would never let it drop. You knew from the very start that we would get to this point, and that we would say these words to each other. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes, it is,” said Patre Barbera.
He drove in a nervous rage, ready to fight with any motorist who happened to cross his path. He’d let himself be tricked like a babe in arms. But how? How could he have gone so long without realizing that Patre Barbera had set him up? Never trust a priest! The Sicilian proverb said it all: Monaci e parrini / sènticci la Missa / e stòccacci li rini. Listen to the monks and priests when they say the Mass, but when they’re done, give ’em a good hiding! Ah, folk wisdom, gone forever!
Driving through the traffic in Catania, he had no lack of opportunities to give the finger to motorists and yell obscenities left and right. Finally, after endlessly circling round and round, he pulled up in front of a little house in Via Gomez. A rather young woman was watching over two small children playing in the tiny garden.
“Are you Signora Agata La Rosa?”
“No, she’s not in. I’m just looking after the kids.”
“Are they Signora Agata’s children?”
“Are you kidding?! They’re her grandchildren!”
Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories Page 53
