Paper Moon

by Andrea Camilleri

  Montalbano heaved a sigh of satisfaction. Michela had all the time in the world to take care of business before reporting her brother missing. And on the night he let her stay in the apartment, she probably slept soundly and happily, since she’d already done everything she needed to do. It was still a colossal boner on his part, but without any immediate consequences.

  Yet why was Michela so sure that Angelo was up to something shady? The answer was simple. When she learned that her brother was giving extremely expensive presents to Elena, and then later found out that the money had not been taken from their joint account, she became convinced that Angelo held a secret account somewhere with a great deal of money in it, too much for him to have earned honestly. The story Michela told him, Montalbano, about sales bonuses and providing for the family was a lie. The woman was too smart not to have smelled a rat.

  But why had she taken away the strongbox? There was an answer to this, too: because she hadn’t managed to find where the second key was hidden, the one found by Fazio stuck to bottom of the drawer. And then, if you really consider…

  The consideration began and ended there. Montalbano’s eyes suddenly started to flutter, and his head dropped. The only thing to be taken into serious consideration was the bed.

  He had the misfortune of waking up a few minutes before the alarm rang. He realized that Angelo Pardo’s funeral was that morning. The word “funeral” conjured up thoughts of death…He leapt out of bed, raced into the shower, washed, shaved, had a coffee, and got dressed, all with the frenetic rhythm of a Larry Semon silent film—at one point he could even hear the jaunty chords of a piano accompaniment—then went out of the house and finally regained his normal rhythm as soon as he got in the car and began his drive to Vigata.

  Fazio wasn’t at the station, Mimi, summoned by Liguori, had gone to Montelusa, and Catarella was mute, not having yet recovered from the blow dealt him the day before by Pardo’s computer, when all the passwords had suddenly vanished and he had been left standing there gazing at a monitor as empty as the fabled Tartar desert. A morgue, in short.

  Around midmorning the first phone call came in. “My dear Inspector, the family all well?” “Excellent, Dr. Lattes.”

  “Let’s thank the Blessed Virgin! I wanted to tell you that unfortunately the commissioner can’t see you today. Shall we make it the same time tomorrow?”

  “Let’s do indeed, Doctor.”

  With thanks to the Blessed Virgin, he’d been spared the sight of Mr. Commissioner’s face for yet another day. Meanwhile, however, he’d become curious to know what his boss wanted to see him about. Certainly nothing important, if he kept postponing with such ease.

  Let’s hope he manages to tell me before I retire or he’s transferred,Montalbano thought.

  The second call came right after the first. “It’s Lagana, Inspector. My friend Melluso, the one I gave those pages to decipher, Remember?.’

  “Of course I remember. Has he succeeded in figuring out how the code works?”

  “Not yet. But meanwhile he’s made a discovery that I thought could be important to your investigation.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, but I’d like to tell you about it in person.” “How about if I come by around five-thirty this afternoon?” “Fine.”

  The third call came at half past noon. “Montalbano? Tommaseo here.” “What is it?”

  “Elena Sclafani came in to see me at nine o’clock this morning … My God!”

  He’d suddenly lost his breath. Montalbano got worried. “What’s wrong, sir?”

  “That woman is so…beautiful,she’s a creature of…of… “

  Tommaseo was beside himself. He not only couldn’t breathe, he also couldn’t speak. “How did it go?”

  “Splendidly!” the prosecutor said enthusiastically. “Couldn’t have gone any better!

  Logically speaking, when a prosecutor declares himself satisfied and content with an interrogation, it means the accused got the worse end of things.

  “Did you find any incriminating elements?”

  “You must be kidding!”

  So much for logic. The prosecutor was clearly leaning in Elena’s favor.

  “The lady showed up with Traina, the lawyer, who brought along a service-station attendant, a certain Luigi Diotisalvi.”

  “The lady’s alibi.”

  “Exactly, Montalbano. All we can do at this point is envy Mr. Diotisalvi and open up our own service station in the hope that sooner or later she’ll need refueling, heh, heh, heh.”

  He laughed, still stunned by Elena’s appearance.

  “The lady was adamant in her wish that her husband should not under any circumstances learn of her alibi,” the inspector reminded him.

  “Of course. I made every effort to reassure the lady. The upshot, however, is that we’re back at sea. What are we going to do, Montalbano?”

  “Swim, sir.”

  At a quarter to one, Fazio returned from the funeral. “Were there a lot of people?” “Enough.” “Wreaths?”

  “Nine. And only one pillow, from the mother and sister.”

  “Did you take down the names on the ribbons?” “Yessir. Six were unknown persons, but three were known.”

  His eyes started to glisten, a sign that he was about to drop a bomb. “Go on.”

  “One wreath was from Senator Nicotra’s family.”

  “Nothing strange about that. You yourself know they were friends. The senator defended him—”

  “Another was from the Di Cristoforo family.”

  Fazio was expecting the inspector to be surprised. He was disappointed.

  “I was already aware they knew each other. It was MP Di Cristoforo who introduced Pardo to the manager of the bank in Fanara.”

  “And the third wreath was from the Sinagra family. The same Sinagras we know so well,” fired Fazio.

  This time Montalbano was speechless.

  “Holy shit!” he said.

  For the Sinagras to have come this far out in the open, Angelo Pardo must have been a dear friend indeed. Was it Senator Nicotra who introduced Pardo to the Sinagras? And was Di Cristoforo therefore part of the same clique? Di Cristoforo—Nicotra—Pardo: a triangle whose area equaled the Sinagra family?

  “Did you also go to the cemetery?”

  “Yessir. But they weren’t able to bury him. They put him on ice for a few days.” “Why?”

  “The Pardos have a family tomb, Chief, but when it came time to put the coffin in the vault, it wouldn’t fit. The lid of the coffin was too high, so they’re going to have to enlarge the hole.”

  Montalbano sat there pensive.

  “Do you remember how Angelo Pardo was built?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Chief. About five foot ten, a hundred and seventy-five pounds.”

  “Perfectly normal. Do you think a body that size needs a supersize coffin?”

  “No, Chief.”

  “Tell me something, Fazio. “Where did the funeral procession begin?”

  “At Pardo’s mother’s place.”

  “Which means they’d already brought him back to Vigata from Montelusa.”

  “Yessir, they did that last night.”

  “Listen, can you find me the name of the funeral home?”

  “I already know it, Chief. Angelo Sorrentino and Sons.” Montalbano stared at him, his eyes like slits. “Why do you already know it?”

  “Because the whole thing didn’t make any sense to me. You’re not the only cop around here, Chief.”

  “Okay, I want you to call up this Sorrentino and have him tell you the names of the people directly involved in transferring the body from Montelusa to here and then to the funeral. Then summon them to my office for three o’clock this afternoon.”

  At Enzo’s he kept to light dishes, since he wouldn’t have time for his customary digestive-meditative walk along the jetty to the lighthouse. “While eating he further reflected on the coincidence that there were wreaths from the Nicotra and Di Cr
istoforo families, who had also been recently bereft, at Pardo’s funeral. Three people who were in some way linked by friendship had died in less than a week.Wait a minute,he said to himself. It was known high and low that Senator Nicotra was a friend of Pardo’s, but were Nicotra and Di Cristoforo friends with each other? The more one thought about it, the more it seemed that this was perhaps not the case.

  After the havoc of “Clean Hands,” Nicotra had gone over to the party of the Milanese real-estate magnate and continued his political career, still supported, however, by the Sinagra family. Di Cristoforo, a former Socialist, had gone over to a centrist party opposed to Nicotra’s. And on several occasions, he had more or less openly attacked Nicotra for his relations with the Sinagras. Thus you had Di Cristoforo on one side and Nicotra and the Sinagras on the other, and their only point in common was Angelo Pardo. It wasn’t the triangle he had at first imagined. So what did Angelo Pardo represent for Nicotra, and what did he represent for Di Cristoforo? Theoretically speaking, if he was a friend of Nicotra’s, he couldn’t also be the same for Di Cristoforo. And vice versa. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. Un-less he does something that suits friends and enemies alike.

  “My name is Filippu Zocco.”

  “And mine is Nicola Paparella.”

  “Were you the ones who brought Angelo Pardo’s body from the Montelusa morgue to Vigata?”

  “Yessir,” they said in unison.

  The two fiftyish undertakers were wearing a sort of uniform: black double-breasted jacket, black tie, black hat. They looked like a couple of stereotyped gangsters out of an American movie.

  “Why wouldn’t the coffin fit into the vault?”

  “Should I talk or should you talk?” Paparella asked Zocco.

  “You talk.”

  “Mrs. Pardo called our boss, Mr. Sorrentino, over to her place, and they decided on the coffin and the time. Then, at sevenP.M.yesterday, we went to the morgue, boxed up the body, and brought ‘im here, to the home of this Mrs. Pardo.”

  “Is that your normal procedure?”

  “No, sir, Inspector. It happens sometimes, but it’s not normal procedure.”

  “What is the normal procedure?”

  “We go get the body from the morgue and then take it directly to the church where the funeral’s gonna be held.” “Go on.”

  “When we got there, the lady said the coffin looked too low. She wanted it higher.” “And was it in fact low?”

  “No, sir, Inspector. But sometimes dead people’s relatives get fixated on dumb things. So we took the body outta the first coffin and put him in another one. But the lady didn’t want it covered. She said she wanted to sit up all night, but not in front of a sealed coffin. She told us to come back next morning round seven to put the lid on. So that’s what we did. We came back this morning and put the lid on. Then at the cemetery—”

  “I know what happened at the cemetery. When you went to close the coffin this morning, did you notice anything strange?”

  “There was something strange that wasn’t strange, Inspector.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sometimes relatives put things inside the coffin, things the dead person was fond of when he was alive.” “And in this particular case?”

  “In this particular case it was almost like the dead man was sitting up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The lady put something big under his head and shoulders. Something wrapped up in a sheet. It was kind of like she put a pillow under him.”

  “One last question. Would the dead man have fit inside the first coffin in this position?”

  “No,” Zocco and Paparella said, again in unison.

  17

  “Ah, Inspector! So punctual! Make yourself comfortable,” said Lagana.

  As Montalbano was sitting down, the marshal dialed a number.

  “Can you come over?” he said into the receiver.

  “Well, Marshal, what have you discovered?”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather my colleague told you, since he deserves the credit.”

  There was a knock at the door. Vittorio Melluso was the spit and image of William Faulkner around the time the writer received the Nobel Prize. The same southern gentleman’s elegance, the same polite, distant smile.

  “The code based on that song collection is so hard to understand precisely because it’s rather elementary in conception and created for personal use.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘for personal use.’ “

  “Inspector, normally a code is used by two or three people to communicate with one another so that they needn’t fear anyone else understanding what they say. Right?”

  “Of course.”

  “And so they make as many copies of the code as they will need for the people who need to exchange information. Clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think the code you found is the only copy in existence. It was only used by the person who conceived it, to encrypt certain names, the ones that appear in the two lists that Lagana gave me.”

  “Did you manage to understand any of it?”

  “Well, I think I’ve figured two things out. The first is that every surname corresponds to a number, the one in the left-hand column. Each number has six digits, whereas the names are of varying length and therefore have varying numbers of letters. This means that each digit does not correspond to a letter. There are probably some dummy digits within each number.”

  “Which means?”

  “Digits that serve no purpose, other than to throw people off. In other words, it’s a code within a code.” “I see. And what was the second thing?” Lagana and Melluso exchanged a very quick glance. “You want to tell him?” “The credit is all yours,” said Lagana.

  “Inspector,” Melluso began, “you gave us two lists. In both of these lists, the numbers on the left, the ones that stand for names, always occur and recur in the same sequence. The numbers on the right, on the other hand, are al-ways different. After studying them closely, I arrived at a conclusion, which is that the figures on the right in the first list indicate sums of money in euros, while the figures on the right in the second list represent quantities. When you com-pare, for instance, the first two numbers on the right-hand side of the two lists, you discover that there’s a precise relationship between the two figures, which corresponds—”

  “To the current market price,” the inspector finished his sentence.

  Lagana, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Montalbano for the past five minutes, started laughing.

  “I told you, Melluso, the inspector was going to get it straightaway!”

  Melluso nodded slightly toward Montalbano in homage.

  “So,” the inspector concluded, “the first list contains the names of the clients and the sum paid by each; the second list indicates the amount provided each time. There was a third list in the computer, but unfortunately it self-destructed.”

  “Do you now have an idea of what it contained?” asked Lagana.

  “Now I do. I’m sure it had the dates and the amount of merchandise the provider—let’s call him the wholesaler— delivered to him.”

  “Shall I keep trying to decode the names?” asked Melluso.

  “Of course. I really appreciate it.”

  He didn’t say, however, that of those fourteen names he already knew two.

  When he got back to the station, it was already growing dark. He picked up the receiver and dialed Michela’s number.

  “Hello? Montalbano here. How are you doing?” “How am I supposed to be doing?”

  The woman’s voice sounded different, as though far away, and weary, as after a long walk. “I need to talk to you.” “Could we put it off till tomorrow?” “No.”

  “All right, then, come over.”

  “Tell you what, Michela: Let’s meet in an hour at your brother’s apartment, since you have the keys. All right?”

  At Michela’s place there were likely
other people—the mother, the aunt from Vigata, the aunt from Fanara, as well as friends come to pay their condolences—and this might make it difficult or even prevent them from talking.

  “Why there of all places?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  He raced home, undressed, slipped into the shower, put on a fresh set of clothes: underwear, shirt, socks, suit. He phoned Livia, told her he loved her, and hung up, probably leaving her befuddled. Then he poured himself a glass of whisky and went out on the veranda to drink it while smoking a cigarette. Now he had to lance the pustule, the foulest part.

  Pulling up in front of Angelo’s apartment house, he parked the car, got out, and looked up at the balcony and windows on the top floor. It was pitch dark now, and he saw light in two of the windows. Michela must have already arrived. Thus instead of using his keys, he rang the intercom, but no voice replied. Only the click of the front door, as it opened. He climbed the lifeless stairs of the dead building, and when he reached the landing on the top floor, he saw Michela waiting for him outside the door.

  He got scared. For an ever so brief moment, it seemed as if the woman he was looking at was not Michela but her mother. What had happened to her?

  Naturally her brother’s death had been a terrible blow, but until the day before, she had seemed to Montalbano to take it well, carrying herself intelligently and accusing forcefully. Perhaps the lugubrious funeral ceremony had finally made her aware of the definitive, irrevocable loss of Angelo. She was wearing one of her usual broad, shapeless dresses, which looked like something she’d bought at a used-clothing stand where they only had sizes too large for her. The dress was black, for mourning. Likewise black were the stockings and the canvas shoes, which were without heels and had a button in the middle, like nuns’ shoes. She’d gathered her hair inside a big scarf—also black, of course. She stood with her shoulders hunched, leaning against the door. She kept her eyes lowered.

  “Please come in.”

  Montalbano entered, stopping inside the doorway. “Where should we go?” he asked.

  “Wherever you like,” replied Michela, closing the door. The inspector chose the living room. They sat down in two armchairs facing one another. Neither spoke for a spell. It was as though the inspector had come to pay his respects and stay the proper amount of time, sitting in awkward silence.