The Smell of the Night

by Andrea Camilleri

  “Hi, darling. Did you have a rough day today?”

  “Livia, could you wait just a second?”

  “Sure.”

  He pulled up a chair, sat down, fired up a cigarette, and got comfortable. He was sure this would be a very long phone call.

  “I’m a little tired, but it’s not from working too hard.”

  “So what is it, then?”

  “All told, I did almost eight hours of driving today.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “To Calapiano, darling.”

  Livia must have suddenly found herself short of breath, because the inspector clearly heard a kind of sob. He generously waited for her to get hold of herself, then let her do the talking.

  “Did you go because of François?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he sick?”

  “No.”

  “So why did you go?”

  “Aviva spinno.”

  “Don’t start talking in dialect, Salvo! You know there are times when I just can’t stand it! What did you say?”

  “I said I felt like seeing him. Spinno means ‘wish’ or ‘desire.’ Now that you understand the word, let me ask you. Have you never felt the spinno to go see François?”

  “You’re such a swine, Salvo.”

  “Shall we make a deal? I won’t speak dialect if you won’t insult me. Okay?”

  “Who told you I’d been to see François?”

  “He did himself, when he was showing me what a good horseman he is. The grown-ups played along with you. They respected your agreement and didn’t say a word. Because it’s obvious you begged them not to tell me you’d been there. Whereas to me you said you had a day off and were going to the beach with a friend, and I, like an idiot, swallowed the bait. But tell me something, I’m curious: Did you tell Mimi you were going to Calapiano?”

  He was expecting a violent response, a tiff for the ages. But Livia burst into tears, and long, painful, desperate sobs.

  “Livia, listen ...”

  The call was cut off.

  He stood up calmly, went into the bathroom, undressed, washed, and, before leaving the room, looked at himself in the mirror. For a long time. Then he gathered together all the saliva he had in his mouth and spit at his reflection in the mirror. Then he turned off the lights and went to bed. He got up at once because the telephone was ringing. He picked up the receiver, but the person at the other end said nothing. All he could hear was breathing. Montalbano recognized that breathing.

  He began to speak, and he monologued for nearly an hour, with no crying, no tears, though his words were as sorrowful as Livia’s sobs. And he told her things he’d never wanted to admit to himself, how he wounded others so as not to be wounded, how for some time now he’d discovered that his solitude was no longer a strength but a weakness, and what a bitter experience it had been for him to realize the very simple and natural fact that he was aging. In the end, Livia said simply:

  “I love you.”

  Before hanging up, she added:

  “I haven’t canceled my vacation time yet. I’ll stay here another day and then come to Vigàta. Free yourself of all commitments; I want you all to myself.”

  Montalbano went back to bed. He barely had time to crawl under the covers before he closed his eyes and fell asleep. He entered the country of sleep with the light step of a little kid.

  It was eleven o’clock when Fazio came into Montalbano’s office.

  “Chief, you want to hear the latest? Pellegrino bought a ticket for Lisbon at the Intertour Travel Agency of Montelusa. The flight left at three-thirty in the afternoon on the thirty-first. I called Punta Raisi, and it turns out Pellegrino got on that plane.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because he probably sold his seat to somebody on the waiting list. But mostly because he came back to the office here, in Vigàta. That much is certain. At five o’clock he was at the King Midas agency. Therefore he couldn’t have been on a flight for Lisbon.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “It means that Pellegrino is a fool who thinks he’s clever but is only a fool. Do something for me. Ask around at all the hotels, guesthouses, and bed-and-breakfasts in Vigàta and Montelusa whether Pellegrino spent the night of the thirtieth at one of their establishments.”

  “Right away”

  “One more thing: Inquire at all the car rental agencies whether Pellegrino rented any cars around the same time.”

  “But why were we looking for Gargano before, and now we’re looking for Pellegrino?” asked Fazio, looking doubtful.

  “Because I’ve become convinced that as soon as we find one we’ll know exactly where to find the other. You want to bet on it?”

  “No, sir. I would never bet against you,” said Fazio, going out.

  Yet had he accepted the bet, he would have won.

  The inspector felt his customary wolflike hunger come over him, perhaps because he’d slept better than he had in a long time. Unburdening himself to Livia had made him feel lighter and brought him back within himself. He felt like joking around. When Calogero came to recite the brief litany of the menu, he interrupted him at once.

  “Today I feel like Wiener schnitzel,” he said.

  “Really?” said Calogero, dumbfounded and leaning on the table to keep from falling over.

  “And do you really think I’d ask you for a Wiener schnitzel? It’d be like asking a Buddhist monk to recite the Mass. What’ve you got today?”

  “Spaghetti in squid ink.”

  “Bring me some. And for the second course?”

  “Baby octopus dumplings.”

  “Bring me a dozen of those, too.”

  At six o’clock that evening, Fazio reported back to him.

  “Chief, it looks like he didn’t sleep anywhere that night. He did, on the other hand, rent a car in Montelusa on the morning of the thirty-first. He returned it that same afternoon, at four. The receptionist there, who’s a smart girl, told me the mileage would correspond to a trip to Palermo and back.”

  “It fits,” the inspector commented.

  “Oh, and the girl also said Pellegrino specified he wanted a car with a spacious trunk.”

  “I’m sure he did. He needed room for the two suitcases.

  They both sat in silence for a moment.

  “But where did the damned guy sleep?” Fazio wondered aloud.

  The effect his words had on the inspector gave him a scare. Indeed, Montalbano looked at him goggle-eyed and then slapped himself hard on the forehead.

  “What an idiot!”

  “What’d you say?” asked Fazio, ready to apologize.

  Montalbano stood up, took something from a drawer, and put it in his pocket.

  “Let’s go.”

  10

  In the car, Montalbano began racing in the direction of Montelusa as if he were being tailed. When he turned onto the road that led to Pellegrino’s recently constructed villa, Fazio’s face turned to stone; he stared straight ahead and didn’t open his mouth. Pulling up in front of the locked gate, the inspector stopped and they got out. The broken windowpanes had not been replaced, but someone had affixed plastic wrap over them with pushpins. The word “ASSHOLE” in green on the four walls had not been removed.

  “There might be somebody inside, maybe the uncle,” said Fazio.

  “Let’s play it safe,” said the inspector. “Call the station and get the phone number of Giacomo Pellegrino, the one who filed the report. Then call him and tell him you came here to make an inspection, and ask him if it was him that put the plastic over the windows. Also ask him if he has any news of his nephew. If there’s no answer, we’ll decide what to do.”

  As Fazio was making his phone calls, Montalbano headed towards the felled olive tree. It had since lost the better part of its leaves, which now lay scattered and yellow on the ground. Clearly it wouldn’t be long before it changed from a living tree to inert wood. The
inspector then did something strange, or, rather, childlike: He went up to a spot around the middle of the tree and put his ear against it, as one might do to a dying man to listen if his heart is still beating. He stayed there a few minutes. What was he doing, trying see if he could hear the flow of the sap? He started laughing. This was the stuff of Baron von Münchhausen, where one needed only put one’s ear to the ground to hear the grass grow. He hadn’t noticed that Fazio, from afar, had witnessed his whole routine and was now approaching.

  “Chief, I talked with the uncle. It was him that covered the windows, because his nephew had left him the key to the front gate, but not to the house. And he has no news of him from Germany, but he says he should be back soon.” Then he looked at the olive tree and shook his head.

  “Look at this massacre!” said Montalbano.

  “Asshole,” said Fazio, intentionally using the same word the inspector had written on the walls.

  “Now do you understand why I had such a fit?”

  “You don’t owe me any explanation,” said Fazio. “So what do we do now?”

  “Now we go inside,” said Montalbano, pulling out the little sack he’d taken from a drawer in his desk, which contained a rich assortment of picklocks and skeleton keys given him by a burglar friend. “You watch out and make sure no one’s coming.”

  He fiddled with the lock on the gate and opened it fairly easily. The front door to the house was more difficult, but in the end he succeeded. He called Fazio.

  They went inside. A big, entirely empty living room spread out before them. Also devoid of the slightest object were the kitchen and bathroom. In the living room a staircase of stone and wood led upstairs. Here there were two spacious bedrooms, unfurnished. In the second of these, however, laid out on the floor, was a kind of thick, brand-new blanket, barely used, with the company label still attached. The shelf under the bathroom mirror contained a variety of aerosol shaving cans and five disposable razors. Two had been used.

  “Giacomo did the most logical thing there was to do. When he left his rental apartment, he came here. He slept on this blanket. But where are the two suitcases he brought with him?” said Montalbano.

  They looked in the attic, and in a closet under the staircase. Nothing. They closed the door to this and then, just to be sure, circled round the outside of the house. In the back there was a little iron door, the upper half of which consisted of an open grid to allow air to circulate. Montalbano opened it. There was a kind of crawl space for tools. In the middle of it were two big suitcases.

  They dragged them out, as the space was too small. The suitcases weren’t locked. Montalbano took one, Fazio the other. They didn’t know what they were looking for, but they looked anyway. Socks, underpants, shirts, handkerchiefs, a suit, a raincoat. They looked at each other, then shoved everything roughly back into the suitcases without exchanging a word. Fazio couldn’t get his shut.

  “Just leave it like that,” the inspector ordered.

  They put them back inside the crawl space, relocked the door and then the front gate, and left.

  “Chief, none of this makes any sense to me,” said Fazio as they were approaching Vigàta. “If this Giacomo Pellegrino went on a long trip to Germany, why didn’t he bring along even a single change of underwear? It seems unlikely he bought all new things.”

  “And there’s another thing that doesn’t make sense,” said Montalbano. “Does it seem logical to you that we didn’t find a single sheet or scrap of paper, a single letter or notebook or agenda?”

  Once in Vigata, the inspector turned down a narrow street that led away from the station.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going to see Giacomo’s former landlady. I want you to drive my car back to the station. I can walk there when I’m done, it’s not very far.”

  “What’s the problem?” asked Signora Catarina from behind the door, sounding like an asthmatic whale.

  “It’s Montalbano.”

  The door opened. A monstrous head appeared, bristling with plastic curlers shaped like little cannoli.

  “I can’t ask you in ’cause I’m in my negligee.”

  “I beg your pardon for the disturbance, Signora Catarina. Just one question: How many suitcases did Giacomo Pellegrino have?”

  “Didn’t I already tell you? Two.”

  “And nothing else?”

  “He also had a briefcase, a small one. He kept his papers in it.”

  “Do you know what kind of papers?”

  “Do I look to you like the kind of person who goes sticking her nose into other people’s things? What do you think I am, some kind of no-good busybody?”

  “Signora Catarina, how could you think I could ever think such a thing? I merely meant that if the briefcase happened to be left open, somebody might get a glimpse of what’s inside, by chance, you know, by accident ...”

  “Actually that did happen, once. But by accident, mind you. And there were all kinds of letters inside, and sheets of paper full of numbers, some agendas, and a few of those black things that look like little disks—”

  “Computer diskettes?”

  “Yeah, things like that.”

  “Did Giacomo have a computer?”

  “He did. And he always carried it around with him, in a special case.”

  “Did he have an Internet connection?”

  “Inspector, I don’t know anything about these things. But I do remember one time when I had to talk to him about a leaky pipe, I tried phoning him and the line was always busy.”

  “Excuse me, signora, but why did you call him instead of just going downstairs?”

  “You think it’s nothing, going down a flight of stairs, but for me, with my weight—”

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Well, I called and called, but the line was always busy. So I gathered up my strength, went downstairs, and knocked on his door. I told Jacuminu he maybe left his phone off the hook. But he told me the line was busy ‘cause he was connected to this Interneck.”

  “I see. So when he left he also took the briefcase and the computer?”

  “Of course. What was he gonna do, leave ‘em with me?”

  Montalbano headed back to the station in a bad mood. It was true that he should have been pleased to learn that Pellegrino’s papers did exist and that he’d probably taken them with him; but the fear of having to deal again with computers, diskettes, CD-ROMs and other such bothers—as he’d had to do in the case that came to be called the “Excursion to Tindari”—made his stomach churn. Good thing there was Catarella to lend him a hand.

  He recounted to Fazio what Signora Catarina had told him in both his first and second meetings with her.

  “Okay,” said Fazio, after thinking things over a little. “Let’s assume Pellegrino escaped to a foreign country. The first question is: Why? He was not involved, in any direct way, in Gargano’s scam. Only some nutcase like the late Mr. Garzullo could have ever held it against him. The second question is: Where did he get the money to build the new house?”

  “There is one conclusion that can be drawn from this business of the house,” said Montalbano.

  “And what’s that?”

  “That Pellegrino wanted to go into hiding for a little while, but that he did want to come back sooner or later, preferably on the sly, and enjoy his little villa in peace. Otherwise why would he have built it? Unless some new and unforeseen development came up, forcing him to flee, maybe forever, and leave the house to the dogs.”

  “And there’s another thing,” Fazio resumed. “It’s logical that he would take his documents, papers, and computer when leaving the country. But I really don’t think he would bring his motorbike to Germany, if he ever went there.”

  “Call the uncle, see if he left it with him.”

  Fazio went out and came back a few minutes later.

  “No, he didn’t leave it with him. He doesn’t know anything about it. Look, Chief, that uncle is starting t
o prick up his ears. He asked me why we’re getting so interested in his nephew. He seemed worried. He’d always bought that story about the business trip to Germany.”

  “And now we’re left high and dry,” the inspector concluded.

  A silence of defeat fell over them.

  “But there’s still something we can do,” the inspector decided after a moment. “You, tomorrow morning, go and make the rounds of the banks in Vigata and try to find out which one of them Pellegrino’s got his money in. It’s certainly not going to be in the same one as Gargano. If you’ve got any friends in the business, see if you can find out how much he’s got, whether he’s been depositing money on top of his salary, that kind of thing. And one last favor: What was the name of that guy who sees flying saucers and three-headed dragons?”

  Before answering, Fazio made a puzzled face.

  “Antonino Tommasino’s his name. But I’m warning you, Chief: the guy’s a raving lunatic, you can’t take what he says seriously.”

  “Fazio, what does a man do when he’s deathly ill and the doctors throw their hands up? To escape death, he’s liable to turn to a wizard, a warlock, a charlatan. And we, my dear friend, at this hour of the night, we are on death’s doorstep as far as this investigation is concerned. Give me the phone number.”

  Fazio went out and returned with a sheet of paper.

  “This is his voluntary deposition. He says he has no phone.”

  “Does he have a home, at least?”

  “Yes he does, Chief. But it’s hard to get to. Want me to make you a map?”

  As he was opening the door to his house, he noticed there was an envelope in the mailbox. Picking it up, he recognized Livia’s handwriting. But there was no letter inside, only a newspaper clipping, an interview with an elderly philosopher who lived in Turin. Overcome with curiosity, he decided to read it at once, even before finding out what Adelina’s niece had left him in the fridge. Talking about his family, the philosopher said at one point: “When you get old, affections count more than concepts.”