The Wings of the Sphinx

by Andrea Camilleri

  “How come there’s nobody here?”

  “Inspector, first of all, today’s Monday, our day off, though you forgot. And secondly, it’d be a little early anyway, since it’s not even twelve-thirty.”

  “Then I guess I’ll go.”

  “Not a chance! Sit down!”

  If it wasn’t even twelve-thirty, why was he so ravenously hungry? Then he remembered he hadn’t eaten the night before.

  Because of a long and belligerent phone call from Livia, who had got it in her head to draw up a bankrupt balance sheet of their life together, interspersed with mutual accusations and apologies, he had completely forgotten about the skillet that Adelina had set on the stove for him to reheat what she had prepared for him. Afterwards, in his agitation over the phone call he no longer even felt like sating himself with the tumazzo cheese and olives he would certainly have found in the refrigerator.

  “I got some langoustes, Inspector, that are a sight to behold.”

  “Big or small?”

  “However you like.”

  “Bring me a big one. But only boiled, with nothing on it. And for a first course, if it’s not too much trouble, bring me a generous portion of spaghetti with clam sauce, white, that is.”

  That way, with no strong flavor of sauces in his mouth, he could better savor the langouste, dressed only with olive oil and lemon.

  As he was about to set to the langouste, images of the illegal dump appeared on the television screen. The cameraman framed the body, covered by a white sheet, from the clearing above.

  “A horrific crime . . . ,” began a voice off-camera.

  “Turn that off at once!” the inspector yelled.

  Enzo turned off the television and looked at him in astonishment.

  “What’s wrong, Inspector?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Montalbano. “It’s just that . . .”

  How quickly people had become cannibals!

  Ever since television had entered the home, everyone had grown accustomed to eating bread and corpses. From noon to one o’clock, and from seven to eight-thirty in the evening—that is, when people were at table—there wasn’t a single television station that wasn’t broadcasting images of bodies torn apart, mangled, burnt, or tortured, men, women, old folks, and little children, imaginatively and ingeniously slaughtered in one part of the world or another.

  Not a day went by without there being, in one part of the world or another, a war to broadcast to one and all. And so one saw people dying of hunger, who haven’t got a cent to buy a loaf of bread, shooting at other people likewise dying of hunger, with bazookas, Kalashnikovs, missiles, bombs, all ultramodern weapons costing far more than medicine and food for everyone would have cost.

  He imagined a dialogue between a husband sitting down to eat and his wife.

  What’d you make today, Catarina?

  For the first course, pasta with a sauce of children disemboweled by bombs.

  Good. And for the main course?

  Veal with a dressing of marketplace blown up by a suicide bomber.

  Gee, Cata, I’m already licking my fingers!

  Trying to preserve the taste of the langouste as long as possible between his tongue and palate, he set out on his customary stroll to the end of the jetty.

  At the halfway point there was, without fail, the usual fisherman with his line. They greeted one another, and the angler warned him:

  “Inspector, you oughta know that tomorrow is gonna be cold with heavy rain. An’ iss gonna stay that way for a whole week.”

  The man had never been wrong in his predictions.

  Montalbano’s dark mood, which the langouste had managed to bring up to a tolerable level, became worse than before.

  Was it possible the weather itself had gone crazy? How could it be that one week you were dying from heat at the equator and the following week you were freezing to death at the North Pole? O siccu o saccu? Was it all or nothing? Was there no longer a reasonable middle path?

  He sat down on his favorite rock, the flat one, fired up a cigarette. And he started thinking.

  Why had the killer gone and thrown the girl’s body into the dump?

  Certainly not to prevent it from being found or to hide it.

  The killer knew perfectly well that the corpse was sure to be discovered a few hours later. On the other hand, he had done everything he could to delay the girl’s identification as long as possible. Thus he had brought her to the dump merely to get rid of her.

  But if he’d been able to keep her in the place where he’d killed her for a whole day without anyone discovering the body, why hadn’t he left her there?

  Maybe it wasn’t a safe place.

  How wasn’t it safe?

  And if the murderer had been able to kill the girl and hold on to the body for a long time without anyone noticing, why would he do something so dangerous as to take it to the dump? There could only be one reason: necessity. He had to move the body. But why?

  The answer came to him from the langouste. Or, more precisely, from an aftertaste of langouste that resurfaced from the far reaches of his tongue. Enzo’s trattoria had been closed when he got there because it was Monday. And since it was Monday, this meant that the girl had been killed Saturday, kept in the same place for all of Sunday, and then taken to the dump during the night between Sunday and Monday. Or, more likely, very early Monday morning, when there were no more cars of whores or johns in the clearing above the dump.

  What did it mean?

  It meant, he told himself proudly, that the place where the girl was killed must be a location that was closed on Saturday afternoons and all of Sunday, but reopened to the public on Monday morning.

  His sudden enthusiasm over the conclusion he’d arrived at quickly waned when he realized just how many establishments were closed Saturday afternoons and Sundays: schools, government offices, private offices, doctors’ offices, factories, notaries’ offices, workshops, wholesale and retail stores, dentists’ offices, warehouses, stores, tobacco shops . . . Which amounted to slightly less than all of Vigàta. Actually, if he really thought about it, it was even worse than that. Because the murder could have been committed in any private home whatsoever, by a husband who had sent his wife and children off to the country for the weekend. In short, an hour of reflection for nothing.

  When he returned to the station, he found an envelope from Forensics with the photos, two copies of each. The inspector didn’t like Arquà; the very sight of him sent his cojones into a spin, but he honestly had to admit that the man did his job well.

  Together with the photos was a memo. With no “dear” or greeting of any sort. But he himself would have done the same.

  Montalbano,

  The girl was definitely killed by a high-caliber firearm. Whether it was a revolver or a pistol is, for the moment, utterly irrelevant. The shot was fired from relatively close range, fifteen to twenty feet, and thus had devastating results. The bullet entered through the left jawbone and exited just below the right temple, following an upward trajectory, rendering the victim’s facial features completely unrecognizable. I think the conclusions Dr. Pasquano draws from this will be very useful to you.

  Arquà

  When alive, the girl must have been a real beauty. One didn’t have to be a connoisseur like Mimì Augello to realize this.

  At a glance, she looked to be about five-foot-eleven. Blond. In her fall, her long hair, which must certainly have been gathered on her head in some kind of bun when she was killed, had come partly undone and covered the face that was no longer there. She had endless legs, like a dancer or athlete.

  Montalbano took another look at the full-figure shots, then paused to dwell on those highlighting the tattoo. It was a decent enlargement of the image of the butterfly.

  He put one of these in his jacket pocket, along with another one of the girl’s back in which the tattooed shoulder blade was clearly visible.

  “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” he said to Cata
rella as he passed in front of him before going out.

  He parked his car in front of the Free Channel’s television studios, but before going in, he fired up a cigarette. Smoking was not allowed inside. And he always conformed—perhaps with a curse—whenever he saw a “No Smoking” sign.

  On the other hand, where on earth was a poor bastard allowed to smoke these days? Not even in the toilets. The person who came in after you would smell the smoke and give you a dirty look. Because, in the twinkling of an eye, whole legions of fanatical smoke-haters had formed. Once, when he happened to be passing through a park with a cigarette in his mouth, he had intervened to separate two distinguished-looking eighty-year-old men who, for no apparent reason, had taken to clubbing each other on the head. Unable to break up the fight, so enraged were they, he had identified himself as a police inspector. And so the two elderly gentlemen immediately allied themselves against him.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

  “You’re smoking!”

  “And you call yourself an officer of the law!”

  “When in fact you’re a smoker.”

  He had walked away, letting the two geezers resume breaking each other’s head with their canes.

  3

  “Good morning, Inspector,” said the girl at the entrance the moment she saw him walk in.

  “Good morning. Is my friend in?”

  At the Free Channel, Montalbano was one of the family.

  “Yes, he’s in his office.”

  He walked the length of the corridor, reached the last door, and knocked.

  “Come in!”

  He went in. Nicolò Zito looked up from a sheet of paper he was reading, recognized Montalbano, and stood up smiling.

  “Salvo! What a nice surprise!”

  They embraced.

  “How are Taninè and Francesco?” asked the inspector, sitting down on a chair in front of the desk.

  Taninè was Nicolò’s wife, who cooked like an angel when she felt like it. Francesco was their only son.

  “They’re fine, thanks. Francesco’s going to be taking his graduation exams this year.”

  Montalbano balked. Wasn’t it just yesterday he had played cops and robbers with Francesco? And wasn’t it just yesterday that Nicolò had red hair, whereas now it was suddenly all white?

  “And how’s your Livia doing?”

  “She’s fine, in good health.”

  Nicolò was too hip and wise to the facts of Montalbano’s life to be satisfied by his diplomatic reply.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Well, let’s say we’re going through a period of crisis.”

  “At age fifty-six, you’re having crises, Montalbà?” said his friend Zito, half ironic, half amused. “Don’t make me laugh! By the time one reaches our age, there’s no turning back.”

  The inspector decided it was best to get immediately to the point.

  “I came—”

  “—to talk about that girl who was killed, I figured that out right away, the moment you entered. What can I do for you?”

  “You need to give me a hand.”

  “I’m at your service, as usual.”

  Montalbano pulled the two photographs out of his pocket and handed them to him.

  “Nobody told us this morning that the girl had this tattoo,” said Nicolò.

  “Now you know. And you’re the only journalist who does.”

  “It’s a very artistic tattoo; the colors of the wings are beautiful,” Zito commented. Then he asked, “You still haven’t identified her?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I want you to air these photos on the evening news and broadcast them again during the evening update and on the late-night edition. We want to know anyone who knew a girl slightly over twenty with this kind of tattoo. You can say that anonymous phone calls are also welcome. Naturally you should give out the telephone number for here.”

  “And why not the police station’s?”

  “Have you any idea of the kind of mess Catarella might create?”

  “Can I say at least that you’re handling the investigation?”

  “Yes, at least until the commissioner takes it away from me.”

  As he was heading back down to Vigàta, he noticed the beginnings of what promised to be one of those sunsets so beautiful as to seem fake or from a picture postcard.

  It seemed best to head home to Marinella and enjoy it from the veranda, rather than to go back to the office. And hadn’t the angler predicted that it would rain for a week? He therefore had to take advantage of this last offering of the season.

  But perhaps it was better to pass by headquarters, stick his head in to inform Catarella, and then cut out. It proved to be the utterly wrong decision.

  “Ah Chief Chief! Iss Signora Picarella!”

  “On the phone?”

  “The phone? She’s right here, Chief! She’s waiting for you!”

  “Tell her I just called and I’m not coming in to the office.”

  “I already tol’ ’er that, Chief, all by m’self, but she said she’s gonna stay here all night if she has to, till you decide to come back!”

  Ugh, what a pain in the ass and then some!

  “Okay, tell you what. I’m going to go into my office. Wait five minutes, then send her in.”

  The case of Arturo Picarella’s kidnapping had begun a week earlier. A rich, fifty-year-old wholesaler in wood, Picarella had built himself a beautiful villa just outside of town, where he lived with his wife Ciccina, who was famous all over town for throwing furious fits of jealousy, even in public, at her husband, who was equally well-known for his insatiable hunger for women. Their only son, who was married, worked as a bank teller in Canicattì and kept his distance, coming to Vigàta barely once a month to visit.

  One night, around one o’clock, husband and wife were woken up by some noise on the ground floor. At first they heard footsteps, and then a chair being knocked over. Surely some burglars had broken in.

  Then, after ordering his wife not to get out of bed and getting all dressed up, sport coat and shoes included, Picarella armed himself with the revolver he kept in the drawer of his bedside table, went downstairs, and immediately started firing blindly, feeling perhaps empowered to do so by the recent law on self-defense.

  Shortly thereafter, a terrified Signora Ciccina heard the front open and close again. At that point she got up, ran to the window, and saw her husband, hands in the air, being forced into his own car by a masked man pointing a gun at him.

  The car drove off, and Arturo Picarella had been missing ever since.

  Such were the facts as recounted by an agitated Signora Ciccina.

  It should be added that, along with Picarella, some five hundred thousand euros had also disappeared, withdrawn by the wood merchant from his bank the very day before, supposedly to close a deal about which nobody knew anything.

  Ever since that moment, not a morning or evening went by without Signora Picarella coming to the station to ask, each time more angrily, if they had any news of her husband. The kidnapper had never come forth to demand a ransom, and Picarella’s car had not been found.

  Once Mimì Augello and Fazio were assigned the case, however, they immediately formed a precise and very different opinion of how the kidnapping had gone.

  It took them one glance to ascertain that Picarella had made sure to empty the entire cartridge into the ceiling, which looked worse than a colander. Meanwhile the burglar, apparently unarmed since he hadn’t returned fire, didn’t flee, but somehow managed to react and take possession of the firearm.

  The front door, moreover, turned out not to have been forced, nor had the safe that was hidden behind a big photograph of Great-Grandfather Filippo Picarella, founder of the dynasty.

  And why hadn’t the thief taken the three thousand euros that Signora Ciccina had left out on a side table, which her husband had given her that evening to pay a supplier the
following day? And why hadn’t he grabbed the solid-gold snuff-box that had belonged to the great-grandfather and lay right there, for all to see, on top of the three thousand euros, holding them down?

  And why, also, did Arturo Picarella—who, according to his wife’s statements, had been sleeping in T-shirt and underpants—get all dressed up very quickly before going downstairs to confront the burglar? By now, with their longstanding experience, Augello and Fazio took for granted that anyone who is woken up in the middle of the night by burglars normally gets straight out of bed and goes to confront the thieves however he may happen to be dressed, in pajamas, underwear, or naked. The wholesaler’s manner of behavior was at the very least extremely odd, if not downright suspicious.

  Augello and Fazio had submitted a report to their superior which came to a conclusion that could in no way be revealed to Signora Ciccina. A conclusion supported, moreover, by ru mors circulating around town, according to which Arturo Picarella had lost his head over a stewardess he had met while flying back from Sweden, where he had gone to buy wood.

  In short, the way Augello and Fazio saw it, Mr. Picarella, with the complicity of a friend, had staged a little scene, pretending to be kidnapped but in fact heading off for a few months to the Bahamas or the Maldives in the company of his lovely stewardess. Another detail not to be ignored: The passport of Arturo Picarella happened to be in the pocket of the sport coat he put on that fateful night.

  “Inspector,” Signora Ciccina began after she’d been shown in, clearly restraining herself from yelling. “I’m telling you this only to ease my conscience: You should know that I’ve filed a statement with the minister.”

  Montalbano understood not a thing.

  “A statement with the minister?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  “About me? Why?”

  “Because you are taking the disappearance of my poor husband very lightly!”

  It took him a good hour to persuade her to return home. He swore to a pack of lies, saying that whole squads of policemen, some of them coming from afar, were scouring the countryside looking for Mr. Picarella.