Paper Moon

by Andrea Camilleri

  “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 happened. 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 anything 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 elbows 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?”

  While telling her story, the pout of her lips had increased, and her eyes turned a dark, almost gloomy blue.

  “So, to conclude your story, it was Tumminello who killed Angelo.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Montalbano leapt out of his armchair. What was going through Elena’s head? Wasn’t it to her advantage to fall in with public opinion and blame the mafioso? Of course it was. So why was she casting doubt on the whole affair? What was compelling her to speak? Apparently she couldn’t restrain her own nature.

  “I don’t think it was him,” she reiterated.

  “So who was it?”

  “Michela. Don’t you realize, Inspector, the kind of relationship those two had? They were in love, at least until Angelo fell in love with me. When I left the room, I thought I saw something move in the darkness on the terrace. A shadow moving very fast. I think it was Michela. She didn’t get Angelo’s phone call and had come to see him. And she’d heard him weeping and saying those terrible things about her… I think she went down to the apartment, grabbed the revolver, and waited for me to leave.”

  “We didn’t find any weapons in Angelo’s place.”

  “So what? She probably took it away with her and got rid of it. But Angelo did own a revolver, which he kept in the drawer of his nightstand. He showed it to me once, saying he’d found it by accident, after his father’s death. Anyway, why do you think Michela killed herself?”

  Montalbano suddenly remembered the sheet of stamped paper declaring that a firearm had been found. He’d seen it in a drawer of Angelo’s desk and thought it to be of no importance. And yet it was indeed important, because it corroborated exactly what Elena had just told him and showed that the moon was no longer made of paper. The girl was now telling him the truth.

  “So is the interrogation over? Shall I make you that coffee?” she asked.

  He looked at her. She looked back. The color of her irises had now turned light blue, and her lips opened into a smile. Her eyes were a sky in early summer, a clear, open sky reflecting the changes of the day. Now and then a little white cloud would pass, ever so small, but the slightest breeze sufficed to make it vanish at once.

  “Why not?” said Montalbano

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is the usual disclaimer that by now I’m getting tired of writing: I made this whole story up. And therefore all the characters (along with their names and surnames), and the situations they find themselves in, belong to the realm of fantasy. Any resemblance to real people and situations is purely coincidental.

  AC

  A. NOTES

  5 “You’s a doctor, but not o’ the medical variety”: To rise to Montalbano’s rank of commissario, one must have a university degree, which in Italy makes one a dottore.

  33 a truly distinguished corpse: In Italian journalistic jargon, when a prominent figure, especially political, is found dead in suspicious circumstances, he or she is called a cadavere eccellente, or “distinguished corpse.”

  33 the old Christian Democratic Party: The Democrazia

  Cristiana was the ruling party of Italy from the post—World War II era until its fall from grace and eventual disbandment in the wake of the Mani Pulite scandal in the 1990s.

  33 “Clean Hands”: English for Mani Pulite, a nationwide judicial and police investigation in the early 1990s into the endemic corruption in the Italian political system as well as the vast web of collusion between certain politicians, business leaders, intelligence organizations, organized crime, and extremist right-wing groups. After a rash of indictments of political and business leaders, and even a few suicides, Mani Pulite ultimately led to the demise and dissolution of the Christian Democratic Party, which had governed Italy since the end of the Second World War. The Italian Socialist and Social Democratic parties were also dissolved due to the scandal, before being reconsti
tuted in other formations.

  33 Milanese real-estate speculator-cum-owner of the top three private nationwide television stations-cum-parlia-mentary deputy, head of his own personal political party, and finally prime minister: A reference to Silvio Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia Party not only reversed many of the legal reforms instituted during the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) scandal, but also resuscitated and recuperated many disgraced politicians formerly of the Christian Democratic Party.

  70 “Let’s drop the Campanile dialogue”: A reference to Achille Campanile (1899—1977), a popular journalist, comic playwright, and humorist famous for his surreal dialogues and wordplay.

  72 cornuto: Italian for “cuckold,” cornuto is a common insult throughout the country, but a special favorite among southerners, Sicilians in particular.

  92 Everyone knew, of course, that the last Savoys were

  notoriously trigger-happy: In 1978, when his rubber dinghy was accidentally taken from the docks after a violent storm off of Corsica, Vittorio Emanuele IV, banished heir to the throne of Italy and son of the monarch here parodied, carelessly shot at a man on the yacht onto which the dinghy had been attached. He missed his target but mortally wounded Dirk Hamer, a young German who had been sleeping below decks.

  103 a short story by an Italian author that told of a country where making love in public not only caused no scandal but was actually the most natural thing in the world:

  The author is Luciano Bianciardi (1922—1971).

  107 an ancient Greek poet who wrote a love poem to a young Thracian filly: Anacreon (c. 570—c. 485 BC).

  113 wasn’t a guy named Luigi Pirandello from around there?: Luigi Pirandello (1867—1936), the celebrated Italian playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and 1934 Nobel laureate, was from the Sicilian town of Agrigento, Camilleri’s model for the fictional town of Montelusa.

  127 others will accuse us of acting like the judges in Milan, all Communists seeking to destroy the system: A common tactic used by Silvio Berlusconi and other politicians of his stripe to turn the public against the judges seeking to clean up the corruption endemic to the Italian political class was to accuse the prosecuting magistrates of being Communists motivated by ideological fervor, an accusation with no basis in fact.