The Smell of the Night

by Andrea Camilleri

  “No. Just sick of myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because every now and then I realize what a stupid shit I am to go along with some of your brilliant ideas.”

  This was their only exchange. They didn’t resume speaking until they’d finally arrived, after many aborted attempts, in the waters in front of Punta Pizzillo, facing the headland where Montalbano had been that morning. The white rock face rose straight up out of the sea without a single spur or cavity. Mimi looked at him darkly.

  “We risk crashing into that, you know,” he said.

  “Well, make sure we don’t,” was all the comfort the inspector had to offer as he began to lower himself into the water, scraping his belly against the edge of the dinghy.

  “You don’t look so confident yourself,” said Mimi.

  Montalbano glared at him, unable to bring himself to plunge into the sea. He was torn. The desire to go underwater and check to see if he’d seen right was very strong; but equally strong was the sudden impulse to drop everything. The weather, of course, didn’t help: the sky was so dark that it seemed almost night, and the wind had turned very cold. At last he made up his mind, mostly because he could never allow himself to lose face in front of Augello by giving up. He released his grip.

  Straightaway he found himself in darkness so total, so impenetrable, that he couldn’t tell which way his body was positioned in the water. Was he vertical or horizontal? He remembered the time he’d woken up in the middle of the night, in bed, unable to make out where he was, no longer knowing where to look for the usual markers: the window, the door, the ceiling. He backed into something solid, then moved aside. He touched a viscous mass with his hand. He felt it envelop him. He struggled, and broke free. He then tried frantically to do two things: resist the absurd fear that was coming over him and grab the flashlight he had in his belt. At last he managed to turn it on. To his horror, he saw no beam of light. The thing didn’t work. A strong current began to pull him downward.

  Why am I always trying to pull these kinds of stunts? he asked himself in despair.

  Fear turned into panic. Unable to master it, he rocketed up to the surface, crashing his head into Augello’s face, as his assistant was leaning far out over the edge of the dinghy.

  “You nearly broke my nose!” said Mimi, rubbing his proboscis.

  “So get out of the way,” retorted the inspector, grabbing hold of the dinghy. He still couldn’t see a thing. Could it possibly be night already? He could only hear his own panting.

  “Why are your eyes closed?” Augello asked with concern.

  Only then did the inspector realize that the whole time he’d been underwater he’d kept his eyes shut, stubbornly refusing to accept what he was doing. He opened his eyes. To double-check, he turned on the flashlight, which worked fine. He just sat there a few minutes, cursing himself, and when he felt that his heartbeat had returned to normal, he lowered himself into the water again. He felt calm now. The fright he’d had must have been due to the shock of first contact with the water. A natural reaction.

  He was fifteen feet under. He aimed the light still farther down and gave a start, not believing what he saw. He turned off the flashlight, counted slowly to three, then turned it back on.

  Another ten or twelve feet down, tightly wedged between the wall of marl and a white rock, was the wreck of an automobile. A surge of emotion made him expel the air in his lungs. He hurriedly swam to the surface.

  “Find anything? Groupers? Mackerels?” Mimi asked sarcastically, holding a wet handkerchief to his nose.

  “I hit the goddamn jackpot, Mimi. The car is down there. It either crashed or was pushed off that cliff. I was right, this morning, when I thought I saw tire tracks leading all the way to the edge. I need to go back down to check something, then we’ll go home.”

  Mimi’d had the foresight to bring along a plastic bag with towels and an unopened bottle of whisky inside. Before asking any questions, he waited for the inspector to take off the wet suit, dry off, and get dressed. He waited still longer for his boss to attack the bottle, then attacked it himself. Finally, he asked:

  “So, what’d you see twenty thousand leagues under the sea?”

  “Mimì, you’re being a wise guy because you don’t want to admit that I’ve left your ass in the dust. You took this case lightly, you told me yourself, and now I’ve screwed you. Pass the bottle.”

  He took a long swig and handed the bottle to Augello, who did the same. But it was obvious that after what Montalbano had said, he didn’t enjoy it quite as much.

  “So what’d you see?” Mimi asked again, sheepishly.

  “There’s a corpse inside the car. I can’t tell whose it is, he’s in too bad a shape. The doors probably opened on impact, so there may be another body in the area. The trunk was also open. And you know what was in there? A motorbike. And there you have it.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “It’s not our case. So we’ll inform the people in charge.”

  The two men who stepped out of the dinghy were undoubtedly Inspector Salvo Montalbano and Assistant Inspector Domenico “Mimi” Augello, two well-known guardians of the law. But all those who saw them were rather taken aback. Arm in arm, the two policemen staggered as they walked, softly singing to themselves “La donna e mobile.”

  “Huddo? Id Guannodda dare?” asked the inspector, speaking as if he had a very bad cold.

  “Inspector Guarnotta, you mean?”

  “Yed.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “General Jaruselski.”

  “I’ll put him on at once,” said the operator, impressed.

  “Hello? This is Guarnotta. I didn’t quite get who this is.”

  “Listen, Idpector, listen clodely and don’t athk eddy quedshons.”

  It was a long and tortuous conversation, but in the end Inspector Guarnotta of Montelusa Central Police understood that he’d received some very important information from an unknown Pole.

  It was seven in the evening, and at the station no one had seen hide or hair of Fazio. Montalbano rang up his newsman friend Nicolò Zito at the Free Channel studios.

  “You ever going to pick up the video Annalisa made for you?” said Zito.

  “What video?”

  “The one with the pieces on Gargano.”

  He’d forgotten completely about it, but pretended that that was the reason he’d called.

  “If I drop by in half an hour, will you be there?”

  When he got to the Free Channel, Zito’s office door was open. The newsman was waiting for him inside, videocassette in hand.

  “Come on, I’m in a hurry. I have to prepare the evening report.”

  “Thanks, Nicolò. I’ve got something to tell you: from this moment on, keep an eye on Guarnotta. Then, if you can, fill me in.”

  Nicolò’s haste suddenly vanished. The reporter pricked up his ears, knowing that one word from Montalbano was worth more than a three-hour lecture.

  “Why, is something up?”

  “Yes.”

  “About Gargano?”

  “I’d say so.”

  At the Trattoria San Calogero, the inspector had such an appetite that even the owner, who was used to seeing him eat, was astonished:

  “What happened, Inspector, did the bottom drop out of your belly?”

  He went home to Marinella, basking in genuine happiness. Not because he’d found the car. At the moment he didn’t give a damn about that. But because he felt proud to know he could still engage in such demanding feats as diving without equipment.

  “I’d like to see how many young guys can do what I just did!”

  Old, right! How could such a gloomy thought have ever entered his head? It was too early for that!

  As he was trying to insert the videocassette into the VCR, it fell to the floor. Bending down to retrieve it, he froze, unable to move, seized by a lacerating back spasm.

  Old age had reared its ignoble head again.


  12

  It was the telephone he was hearing, not the violin of Maestro Cataldo Barbera, who’d just told him in a dream:

  “Listen to this concertino.”

  Opening his eyes, he looked at the clock. Five to eight in the morning.

  Very rarely did he wake up so late. Getting out of bed, he was pleased to note that the back pains were gone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s Nicolò. I’m doing a live, on-site broadcast on the eight o’clock news. Watch it.”

  He turned on the TV and tuned in to the Free Channel. After the opening credits, Nicolò’s face appeared. In a few words he said that he was at Punta Pizzillo, thanks to a telephone tip that Montelusa Police had received from a Polish admiral concerning a car that had fallen into the sea. Inspector Guarnotta had had the brilliant intuition that it might be the Alfa 166 of the missing financier Emanuele Gargano. He therefore wasted no time arranging to have the vehicle dredged from the water, an operation that had not yet been completed. Here there was a cut. The camera, zooming vertiginously down from above, showed a small stretch of sea at the bottom of the cliff.

  The car, explained Zito, off camera, was down there, some thirty feet beneath the surface, literally trapped between the wall of marl and a large rock. The cameraman then panned back and a huge pontoon with a crane, along with about a dozen motorboats, dinghies, and trawlers, appeared on the screen. The operation would take all day, Zito added, but the divers meanwhile had managed to free a corpse from the wreck and bring it to the surface. Cut. A body lying on the deck of a fishing boat, a man crouching beside it. This was Dr. Pasquano.

  A reporter’s voice: “Excuse me, Doctor, in your opinion, did the man die in the fall or was he murdered beforehand?”

  Pasquano (barely looking up): “Get the [bleep] out of my face—”

  The usual grace and charm.

  “Now let’s hear what the men in charge of the investigation have to say,” said Nicolò.

  They appeared all huddled together as in a family photo taken outside: Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi, Public Prosecutor Tommaseo, Chief of Forensics Arquà, and the head of the investigation, Inspector Guarnotta. All smiling as if at a picnic, all perilously close to the fragile edge of the cliff. Montalbano banished the wicked thought that had come into his head. All the same, seeing the commissioner of Montelusa Police vanish live on camera would certainly have made an unusual spectacle, to say the least.

  The commissioner thanked everyone, from God in Heaven to the bailiff, for the efficiency and dispatch they’d demonstrated in carrying out ... etc. Prosecutor Tommaseo asserted that all possibility of there being any sexual motive for the crime must be ruled out, and therefore he couldn’t care less about the whole affair. Actually, he didn’t really say the last part of that sentence, but he clearly implied it in his facial expression. Vanni Arquà, chief of forensics, let it be known that, at a glance, the car must have been in the water for over a month. The one who spoke most was Guarnotta, but this was only because Zito, like a good reporter, realized that the broadcast was going to the dogs and that it was up to him to ask the right questions to make the best of a bad situation.

  “Inspector Guarnotta, has the body discovered inside the car been identified with any certainty?”

  “No official identification has been made yet, but I think we can say that, in all probability, the body belongs to Giacomo Pellegrino.”

  “Was he alone in the car?”

  “It’s impossible to say. There was only the one body inside, but we can’t rule out that there might have been another person who was thrown out of the car upon the vehicle’s impact with the water. Our divers are actively searching the whole area.”

  “And might this second person have been Emanuele Gargano?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Was Giacomo Pellegrino still alive when the car fell into the sea, or was he murdered beforehand?”

  “That’s what the autopsy will tell us. But, you see, it’s not absolutely certain that we’re dealing with a crime here. It might have just been an unfortunate accident. The land around here, you see, is very—”

  He wasn’t able to finish his sentence. The cameraman, who’d already panned out, managed to capture the scene. Behind the group, a broad strip of land collapsed and fell into the sea. As in a well-choreographed ballet, everyone shouted and leapt forward in unison. Montalbano half jumped from his armchair, as he often did when watching adventure films like Raiders of the Lost Ark. When they were all on safer ground, Zito resumed the interview.

  “Did you find anything else inside the car?”

  “We haven’t had a chance yet to search the whole inside of the car. But very near the car we recovered a motorbike.”

  Montalbano pricked up his ears. But that was the end of the broadcast.

  What could that last statement mean? Very near the car? He’d seen the motorbike in the trunk with his own two eyes. No mistake there. And so? There could only be two explanations: either some diver had removed it from where it was, maybe even without any particular reason for doing so; or Guarnotta was deliberately saying something he knew to be false. But, if the latter, for what purpose? Did Guarnotta have his own idea of things and was trying to make each detail conform to his overall conception?

  The phone rang. It was Zito again.

  “Did you like the broadcast?”

  “Yes, Nicolò.”

  “Thanks for letting me screw the competition.”

  “Did you manage to get any sense of what Guarnotta’s thinking?”

  “That was no problem, because Guarnotta doesn’t hide what he’s thinking. He speaks clearly. But only off the record. He thinks it’s too early to make any public statements. In his opinion, Gargano stepped on some toes in the Mafia. Either directly—that is, by pocketing some mafioso’s cash—or indirectly—by taking over some turf he should never have sowed or plowed.”

  “But where does that poor kid Pellegrino come in?”

  “Pellegrino had the bad luck to be with Gargano at the wrong moment. This is still Guarnotta’s theory, mind you. And so they killed them both, stuck ’em back in the car, and plunked them into the sea. Afterwards—or even before, it makes no difference—they threw the motorbike into the water as well. It’s only a matter of hours, supposedly, before we find Gargano’s body around the car, unless the currents have dragged it further away.”

  “You buy that story?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Can you tell me what Pellegrino and Gargano were doing in that godforsaken place at that time of the night? People only go there to fuck. And as far as I know, Gargano and Pellegrino were not—”

  “Well, as far as you know isn’t far enough.”

  Nicolò made a kind of sucking sound, his breath cut short.

  “Do you mean to tell me—?”

  “For further details, please come to the Vigàta Police Station at eleven A.M.,” said Montalbano, faking the voice of a department store PA system.

  As he was hanging up, something came to mind that forced him to get dressed and go out before he’d had a chance to wash and shave. He got to Vigata in just a few minutes, and when in front of the office of King Midas, he finally felt a little calmer, as it was still closed. He parked the car and waited. Then, in his rearview mirror, he saw a yellow Fiat 500, a collector’s item, come up behind him. The car found a parking spot a short distance ahead of him. Out of it demurely stepped Miss Mariastella Cosentino, who went and opened the front door of King Midas Associates. The inspector let a few minutes pass, then went in. Mariastella was already at her post, motionless, a statue, right hand on the telephone, awaiting a call, the one call that would never come. She was unwilling to give up. As she had no television, and possibly no friends, either, it was likely she still didn’t know that Pellegrino’s body and Gargano’s car had been found.

  “Good morning, signorina, how are you today?”

  “I’m all right, thank
you.”

  From her tone of voice the inspector could tell she was still in the dark as to recent developments. Now he had to play the card in his hand very carefully, shrewdly, otherwise Mariastella might withdraw even more than usual.

  “Have you heard the news?” he began.

  What? You resolve to broach the subject carefully and shrewdly, and then come out with an opening statement more brutal, direct, and banal than even Catarella could ever think up? At this rate, might as well go at it guns blazing and get it over with all at once. The only sign Mariastella gave of having heard him was to focus her gaze on the inspector. But she didn’t open her mouth, didn’t ask anything.

  “They found Giacomo Pellegrino’s body.”

  Jesus Christ, could we have some kind of reaction?

  At last Mariastella did something to promote her from the realm of inanimate objects to the human race. She stirred, slowly removed her right hand from the telephone receiver, and joined it to her left in a gesture of prayer. Mariastella’s eyes opened wide, questioning, questioning. Montalbano felt sorry for her and gave her the answer.

  “He wasn’t there.”

  Mariastella’s eyes returned to normal. As though independent of the rest of her still motionless body, her right hand moved again and slowly came to rest on the telephone. She could resume her wait.

  Montalbano felt a blind rage come over him. Sticking his head inside the teller’s window, he found himself face-to-face with the woman.

  “You know damn well he’s never going to call,” he hissed.

  He felt like one of those dangerous snakes, the kind whose head you’re supposed to crush. He bolted out of the office in a fury.

  The moment he entered the station he rang up Dr. Pasquano in Montelusa.

  “What do you want, Montalbano? Why are you bothering me? There haven’t been any murders in your neck of the woods, far as I know,” said Pasquano, with the courtesy for which he was famous.

  “So Pellegrino wasn’t murdered, then.”