The Paper Moon - Inspector Montalban 09

by Andrea Camilleri

  "Yes. I wanted to be sure, absolutely certain, that Elena would be charged with the crime. Because she did it. When those other people arrived, Angelo was already dead."

  "We'll see about that later. They may have lied to you, you know. For now, tell me: Do you know who it was that called you to tell you your brother was dead?"

  "Yes."

  "Tell me his name."

  Michela stood up slowly. She spread her arms as though stretching.

  "I'll be right back," she said, "I need a drink of water."

  She left the room and headed towards the kitchen, her shoulders more hunched than ever, feet dragging on the floor.

  Montalbano didn't know how or why, but all at once he got up and ran into the kitchen. Michela wasn't there. He went out on the open balcony. A small light illuminated the area in front of the garage, but its dim glow was enough to reveal a kind of black sack, immobile, on the ground. Michela had thrown herself down below, without a word, without a cry. And the inspector realized that tragedy, when acted out in front of others, strikes poses and speaks in a loud voice, but when it is deep and true, it speaks softly and makes humble gestures. There: the humility of tragedy.

  He made a snap decision. He'd never gone to Angelo's apartment that evening. When the woman's body was discovered, they would think she killed herself because she couldn't get over the loss of her brother. And that was how it should be.

  He closed the door to the apartment softly, terrified that His Majesty might catch him in the act. He descended the lifeless stairs, went outside, got in his car, and drove home to Marinella.

  18

  The moment he entered his house, he felt very tired. Great was the desire to lie down, pull the covers up over his head, and stay that way, eyes closed, trying to blot out the world.

  It was eleven P.M. As he was taking off his jacket, tie, and shirt, he managed, like a magician, to dial Augello's number.

  "Salvo, are you crazy?"

  "Why?"

  "Calling at this hour? You'll wake up the baby!"

  "Did I wake him up?"

  "No."

  "So why are you being such a pain in the ass? I have something important to tell you. Come right away, to my place."

  "But, Salvo—"

  He hung up. Then he called Livia, but there was no answer. Maybe she'd gone to the movies. He undressed completely, went into the shower, used up all the water in his first tank, cursed the saints, was about to open the reserve tank but stopped. If they didn't deliver any water during the night, how was he going to wash in the morning? Better play it safe.

  Waiting for Mimi, he decided to busy himself cutting his toenails and fingernails. Just when he'd finished, the doorbell rang and he went to open the door, still naked.

  "But I'm married!" said Mimi, scandalized. "You didn't by any chance invite me over to see your butterfly collection, did you?"

  Montalbano turned his back to him and went to put on a pair of underpants and a shirt.

  "Will this take long?" asked Mimi.

  "Fairly."

  "Then give me a whisky."

  They sat down on the veranda. Before drinking, Montalbano raised his glass:

  "Congratulations, Mimi." "What for?"

  "For solving the case of the wholesale dealer. Tomorrow you can strut your stuff for Liguori." "Is this some kind of joke?"

  "Not at all. It's too bad they killed him, but he betrayed the trust of the Sinagra family." "Who?" "Angelo Pardo." Augello's jaw dropped.

  "The guy who was found shot with his dick hanging out?"

  "The very one."

  "I was convinced it was a crime of passion. Women problems."

  "That's what they wanted us to think."

  Augello twisted up his mouth.

  "Are you sure of what you're saying, Salvo? Do you have proof?"

  "The proof is in a strongbox that you'll find inside Angelo Pardo's coffin. Go get authorization, open it up, grab the strongbox, open that, too—with the key that I'll give you in a second—and inside you'll find not only cocaine, but also the other stuff that turned it into poison."

  "Excuse me, Salvo, but who put the strongbox in the coffin?"

  "His sister, Michela."

  "So she's an accomplice!"

  "You're mistaken. She had no idea what her brother was up to. She thought the box—which she didn't have the key to—contained personal items of Angelo's, and so she put it in his coffin."

  "Why?"

  "So that every now and then, in the afterlife, he could open it up, look at the things inside, and remember the good old days when he was alive."

  "Am I supposed to believe that?"

  "You mean the story of the dead guy opening the strongbox now and then?"

  "I mean the bit about his sister being unaware of her brother's dealings."

  "No. Not you. But everyone else, yes. They are supposed to believe it."

  "And what if Liguori interrogates her and she ends up contradicting herself?"

  "Don't worry, Mimi. She won't be interrogated." "How can you be so sure?" "I just am."

  "Then tell me everything, from the beginning."

  He told him almost everything, but sang only half the Mass. He didn't tell him that Michela was neck-deep in that shit, only knee-deep; he explained that Angelo's need for money came from his gambling addiction, thus leaving Elena discreetly in the shadows; and he informed him that Customs Police Marshal Lagana and a colleague of his could provide him and Liguori with a host of useful information.

  "But how did Pardo come to know the Sinagra family?"

  "Pardo's father was a big political supporter of Senator Nicotra. And the senator had introduced Angelo to some of the Sinagras. When the Sinagras found out that Pardo was hard up for cash, they got him to work for them. Angelo betrayed their trust, so they had him killed."

  "I thought I heard that some threads of women's panties were f—"

  "Just for show, Mimi, to muddy the waters."

  They talked a little while longer. Montalbano gave him Angelo's keys, and as Mimi was saying good-bye, the telephone rang.

  "Livia, darling?" the inspector asked.

  "Sorry to disappoint you, Chief."

  It was Fazio.

  "I just learned that Michela Pardo's been found dead. A suicide. Threw herself off the balcony at her brother's place.

  I'm at the station, but I have to go over there. Do you have the keys to the apartment?"

  "Yes. I'll send them over with Inspector Augello, who happens to be here with me."

  He hung up.

  "Michela Pardo committed suicide." "Poor thing! What'll we say? That she couldn't get over the grief?" asked Augello.

  "That's what we'll say," said Montalbano.

  In the four days that followed, nothing whatsoever hap-pened. Mr. Commissioner postponed his meeting with Montalbano to a date as yet to be determined. Elena never called either.

  And this displeased him, in a way. He thought the girl had him in her sights and had put off the attack until the investigation was over. "To avoid any misunderstandings," as she'd said. Or something similar.

  And she was right. If she'd put her powers of seduction to work at the time, Montalbano might have thought she was doing it to gain his friendship and make him an accomplice. But now that even Tommaseo had exonerated her, there was no more possibility of misunderstanding. And so?

  Want to bet the cheetah had been eyeing a different prey? And it was he who had misunderstood? He was like a rabbit that sees a cheetah coming after it and starts running away in terror. All at once the rabbit no longer senses the ferocious beast behind it. It turns and sees the cheetah pursuing a fawn.

  The question was this: Why, instead of feeling happy, did the rabbit feel a wee bit disappointed?

  On the fifth day, Mimi arrested Gaetano Tumminello, a man from the Sinagra family suspected of four other homicides, for the murder of Angelo Pardo.

  For twenty-four hours, Tumminello insisted he had never set
foot in Angelo Pardo's apartment. Indeed he swore he didn't even know where he lived. The alleged murderer's photograph appeared on television. Then Commendator Ernesto Laudadio, alias HM Victor Emmanuel III, showed up at the station to report that on that Monday evening he hadn't been able to enter his garage because there'd been a car he'd never seen before parked right in front, whose license-plate number he'd taken down. He'd started honking his horn, and after a brief spell the owner had appeared— none other than, you guessed it, the man shown in the photo on television, there was no mistaking him—whereupon said man, without so much as saying good night, had got back in his car and left.

  As a result Tumminello had to change his story. He said he'd gone to Pardo's to talk business, but had found him already dead. He knew nothing about the panties stuck in Pardo's mouth. He also stated quite specifically that when he'd seen him, the zipper of Pardo's jeans was closed. So that when he heard that Pardo had been found in an obscene pose (that's exactly how he put it: "an obscene pose"), he, Tumminello, was shocked.

  Nobody believed him, of course. Not only had he killed Pardo for having put lethal cocaine into circulation, risking a massacre, but he'd also tried to mislead the investigation. The Sinagras cut him loose, and Tumminello, in keeping with tradition, got the Sinagras off the hook. He claimed that the idea for getting into drugs was his and his alone, just like the idea to enlist the help of Angelo Pardo, who he knew was short on cash; and that of course the Family that had honored him by taking him in like a devoted and respectful son was entirely in the dark about all this. He repeated, however, that when he'd gone to talk to Pardo about the huge fuckup he'd made by cutting the cocaine, he'd found him already dead.

  "Isn't saying you 'went to talk to him' a polite euphemism for saying you'd gone to see Pardo to kill him?" the prosecutor had asked him.

  Tumminello did not answer.

  Meanwhile Marshal Melluso, Lagana's colleague, had managed to decipher Angelo's code, and the nine people on his list found themselves in a pretty pickle. Actually there were fourteen names, not nine, but the other five (including the engineer Fasulo, Senator Nicotra, and the Honorable Di Cristoforo) belonged to people who, thanks to Angelo Pardo's modest talents in chemistry, could no longer be prosecuted.

  A week later Livia came to spend three days in Vigata. They didn't quarrel even once. On Monday morning, at the crack of dawn, Montalbano drove her to Punta Raisi Airport and, after watching her leave, got in the car to drive back to Vigata. Since he had nothing else to do, he decided to take a back road the whole way, one in pretty bad shape, yes, but which allowed him to enjoy for a few kilometers the landscape he loved, the parched terrain and little white houses. He rolled along for three hours, head emptied of thoughts. All at once he realized he was on the road leading from Giardina to Vigata, meaning that he was only a few kilometers from home. Giardina? Wasn't this the road with the service station where Elena, that Monday evening, had made love to that attendant—what was his name, ah, yes, Luigi?

  "Let's go meet this Luigi," he said to himself.

  He drove even more slowly than before, looking left and right. At last he found the station. A little platform roof, half crowned by lighted fluorescent tubes under which stood three pumps. That was all. He pulled in under the roof and stopped. The attendant's shelter was made of brick and almost entirely hidden by the trunk of a thousand-year-old Saracen olive tree. It was almost impossible to spot it from the road. The door was closed. He honked, but nobody came out. What was the problem? He got out of the car and went and knocked at the door of the shelter. Nothing. Silence. Turning around to go back to the car, he noticed, at the very edge of the space at the side of the road, the back of a metal rectangle supported by an iron bar. A sign. He went around to the front but couldn't read it because three-fourths of it was covered by a clump of weeds, which he proceeded to beat down with his feet. The sign had long lost its paint and was half spotted with rust, but the words were still clear:

  CLOSED MONDAYS

  Once, when he was a kid, his father, just to tease him, had told him the moon was made of paper. And since he never doubted what his father told him, he believed it. Now, as a mature, experienced man with brains and intuition, he had once again, like a little kid, believed what two women, one dead and the other alive, had said when they told him the moon was made out of paper.

  The rage so clouded his vision that first he nearly ran over a little old lady and then he barely escaped colliding with a truck. When he pulled up in front of Elena's place, it was past one o'clock. He rang the intercom and she answered.

  She was waiting for him in the doorway, wearing gym clothes and smiling.

  "Salvo, what a pleasant surprise! Come on in and make yourself at home."

  She went in ahead. From behind, Montalbano noticed that her gait was no longer springy and taut but soft and relaxed. Even the way she sat down in the armchair was almost languid, nonchalant. The cheetah apparently had recently had her fill of fresh flesh and for the moment presented no danger. It was better this way.

  "You didn't forewarn me, so I haven't made coffee. But it'll only take a second."

  "No, thanks. I need to talk to you."

  Still the wild animal, she bared all her sharp, white teeth in a cross between a smile and a feline hiss. "About us?"

  She was clearly trying to provoke him, but only in jest, without serious intent.

  "No, about the investigation." "Still?"

  "Yes. I need to talk to you about your phony alibi." "Phony? Why phony?"

  Only curiosity, almost as though amused. No embarrassment, surprise, fear.

  "Because on that fateful Monday evening, you could not have met your Luigi."

  That "your" he tossed in had escaped him. Apparently he still felt a twinge of jealousy. She understood and threw fuel on the fire.

  "I assure you I did meet him, and we rather enjoyed ourselves."

  "I don't doubt that, but it wasn't on a Monday, because that filling station is closed on Mondays."

  Elena folded her hands, raised her arms over her head, and stretched.

  "When did you find out?"

  "A few hours ago."

  "Luigi and I could have sworn it would never occur to anyone to check."

  "It occurred to me."

  A lie. Said not to boast, but just to avoid looking like a complete nincompoop in her eyes.

  "A bit late, however, Inspector. Anyway, what difference does this great discovery make?"

  "It means you don't have an alibi."

  "Ouf! Didn't I already tell you I had no alibi? Have you forgotten? I didn't try to make anything up. But you kept insisting: 'Careful, if you don't have an alibi, you're going to be arrested!' "What do you want from me? So in the end I got my alibi, just like you wanted."

  Shrewd, alert, intelligent, beautiful. Stray just one millimeter and she'll take advantage. So now it was his fault that she lied to Tommaseo!

  "How did you persuade Luigi? By promising to sleep with him?"

  He couldn't control himself. The thorn of jealousy was making him say the wrong things. The rabbit couldn't accept being refused by the cheetah.

  "Wrong, Inspector. Everything that I said happened to me on Monday actually happened to me the day before, on Sunday. It didn't take much to persuade Luigi to move our first encounter up one day when he talked to Tommaseo. And I can tell you that if you want to interrogate him, he'll continue to swear up and down that we met for the first time that goddamned Monday evening. He would do any-thing for me."

  What was it that made his ears perk? Some small detail, perhaps, some unexpected change in her tone when she said

  "that goddamned Monday evening" had suddenly, in a flash, brought something to mind—an idea, an illumination that nearly frightened him.

  "You, that evening, went to Angelo's," the inspector's mouth said before the idea had fully taken concrete form in his head.

  Not a question but a clear assertion. She shifted position, rested her elbo
ws on her knees, put her head in her hands, and eyed Montalbano long and hard. She was studying him. Beneath that stare, which was weighing his value as a man, brains and balls included, the inspector felt the same unease as when he'd undergone his army physical, standing naked in front of the committee as the doctor measured and manhandled him. Then she made up her mind. Perhaps he'd passed the test.

  "You realize I could stick to my story and nobody could ever prove it was false."

  "That's what you think. The sign is still there."

  "Yes, but getting rid of it would have made things worse. That's what Luigi and I decided. He'll just say he forgot a book in the booth and went back to get it that Monday evening. He's studying for exams at the university. I saw him at the station and mistakenly thought he was closing up. You know the rest. Does it work?"

  Damned woman! It worked, all right!

  "Yes," he said reluctantly.

  "So I can go on. You're right, Inspector. That Monday evening, after driving around in the car for about an hour, I went to Angelo's place, very late for our appointment."

  "Why?"

  "I'd decided to tell him once and for all that it was over between us. What had happened the day before with Luigi convinced me that I no longer felt anything for Angelo. So I went to see him."

  "How did you get in?"

  "I rang the intercom. There's an intercom in the terrace room, too. He answered, buzzed me in, and told me to come upstairs. When I got there, he kept dialing and dialing a number on his cell phone. He explained that when he thought I wasn't coming anymore, he'd called Michela and told her to come see him. Now he wanted to warn her that I was there and that it was therefore better if she didn't show up. But he couldn't get hold of her. Maybe Michela had turned off her cell phone. Then he said, 'Shall we go down-stairs?' He wanted to make love, Michela or no Michela. I answered no and said I'd come to break up with him. That triggered a big, long scene, with him crying and begging. He even got down on his knees and implored me. At one point he suggested we go away and live together, screaming he couldn't take any more of Michela and her jealousy. He said she was a leech, a parasite. Then he tried to embrace me. I pushed him away, and he fell into the armchair. I took advantage of this and left. I couldn't stand it any longer. And that was the last time I saw Angelo. Satisfied?"