“Why?”
“Because it’s too expensive for my budget. It consumes almost as much gas as an airplane. You know, when Angelo gave it to me, I accepted it on one condition: that every month he would reimburse me for the cost of fuel and the garage. He’d already paid for the insurance.”
“And did he do as you asked?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me something. How did he reimburse you? By check?”
“No, cash.”
Damn. A lost opportunity to find out if Angelo had any other bank accounts.
“Listen, Inspector, I’m going to go make coffee and change clothes. In the meantime, if you want to freshen up…”
She led him into a small guest bathroom right beside the dining room.
He took his time, removing his jacket and shirt and sticking his head under the faucet. When he returned to the living room, she still wasn’t back. She arrived five minutes later with the coffee. She’d taken a quick shower and put on a big sort of housecoat that came halfway down her thigh. And nothing else. She was barefoot. Stretching out from under the red housecoat, her legs, which were naturally long, looked endless. They were sinewy, lively legs, like a dancer’s or an athlete’s. And the best of it—as was immediately clear to Montalbano—was that there was no intent, no attempt to seduce him on Elena’s part. She saw nothing improper in appearing this way in front of a man she barely knew. As though reading his mind, Elena said:
“I feel comfortable with you. At ease. Even though that shouldn’t be the case.”
“Right,” said the inspector.
He felt comfortable himself. Too comfortable. Which wasn’t good. Again it was Elena who came back to the matter at hand.
“So, about those questions…”
“Aside from the car, did Angelo give you any other gifts?”
“Yes, and rather expensive ones, too. Jewelry. If you want, I can go get them and show them to you.”
“There’s no need, thanks. Did your husband know?”
“About the gifts? Yes. Anyway, something like a ring I could easily hide, but a car like that—”
“Why?”
She understood at once. She was dangerously intelligent.
“You’ve never given presents to a lady friend?”
Montalbano felt annoyed. Livia was never, not even by accident, supposed to enter into the tawdry, sordid stories he investigated.
“You’re leaving out one detail.”
“What?”
He deliberately wanted to be offensive.
“That those presents were a way of paying you for your services.”
He was prepared for every possible reaction on Elena’s part, except for her to start laughing.
“Maybe Angelo overestimated my ‘services,’ as you call them. I assure you I’m hardly in a class of my own.”
“Then let me ask you again: Why?”
“Inspector, the explanation is very simple. Angelo gave me these gifts over the last three months, starting with the car. I think I’ve already told you that he had lately been overcome by…well, in short, he’d fallen in love with me. He didn’t want to lose me.”
“And how did you feel about it?”
“I think I already told you. The more possessive he became, the more I grew distant. I can’t stand being harnessed, among other things.”
Wasn’t there an ancient Greek poet who wrote a love poem to a young Thracian filly that couldn’t stand being harnessed? But this wasn’t the time for poetry.
Almost against his will, the inspector slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and extracted the three letters he’d brought with him. He set them down on the table.
Elena looked at them, recognized them, and didn’t seem the least bit troubled. She left them right where they were.
“Did you find them in Angelo’s apartment?”
“No.”
“Where, then?”
“Hidden in the trunk of his Mercedes.”
Suddenly three wrinkles: one on her forehead, two at the corners of her mouth. For the first time, she seemed genuinely baffled.
“Why hidden?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know. But I could venture a guess. Maybe Angelo didn’t want his sister to read them. Certain details might have proved embarrassing to him, as you can imagine.”
“What are you saying, Inspector? There were no secrets between those two!”
“Listen, let’s forget about the whys and wherefores. I found these letters inside a linen envelope hidden under the rug in the trunk. Those are the facts. But I have another question, and you know what it is.”
“Inspector, those letters were practically dictated to me.”
“By whom?”
“By Angelo.”
What did this woman think? That she could make him swallow the first bullshit that came into her head? He stood up abruptly, enraged.
“I’ll expect you at the station at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Elena also stood up. She’d turned pale, her forehead shiny with sweat. Montalbano noticed she was trembling slightly.
“No, please, not the police station.”
She kept her head down, her fists clenched, arms extended at her sides, a little girl grown up too fast, scared of being punished.
“We’re not going to eat you at the station, you know.”
“No, no, please, I beg you.”
A thin, frail voice that turned into little sobs. Would this girl ever be done astonishing him? What was so terrible about having to go to the station? As one does with small children, he put a hand under her chin and raised her head. Elena kept her eyes closed, but her face was bathed in tears.
“Okay, no police station, but don’t tell silly stories.”
He sat back down. She remained standing but drew close to Montalbano until she was right in front of him, her legs touching his knees. What was she expecting? For him to ask her for something in exchange for not forcing her to go to the police station? All at once the smell of her skin reached his nostrils, leaving him slightly dazed. He became afraid of himself.
“Go back to your place,” he said sternly, feeling as if he’d suddenly become a school principal.
Elena obeyed. Now seated, she tugged at the housecoat with both hands, in a vain attempt to cover her thighs a little. But as soon as she let go of the cloth, it climbed back up, worse than before.
“So, what’s this unbelievable story about Angelo himself dictating the letters to you?”
“I never followed him in my car. Among other things, when we started seeing each other, it had been a year since I had a car. I’d had a bad accident that left my car a total wreck. And I didn’t have enough money to buy another, not even a used one. The first of those three letters, the one where I say I followed him to Fanara, dates from four months ago—you can check the date—when Angelo hadn’t given me the new car yet. But just to make the story more believable, Angelo told me to write that he’d gone to a certain house—I no longer remember the address—and that I’d become suspicious.”
“Did he tell you who lived there?”
“Yes, an aunt of his, his mother’s sister, I think.”
She’d recovered her nerve and was now herself again. But why had the inspector’s idea so frightened her?
“Let’s suppose for a minute that Angelo actually did get you to write those letters.”
“But it’s true!”
“And for the moment I’ll believe that. Apparently he had you write them so that someone else would read them. Who?”
“His sister, Michela.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because he told me himself. He would arrange for her somehow to come across them, as if by accident. That’s why I was so surprised when you said he was keeping them hidden in the trunk of the Mercedes. It’s unlikely Michela would ever find them there.”
“What was Angelo trying to get out of Michela by having her read the letters? What, in the end, was th
e purpose? Did you ask him?”
“Of course.”
“And what was his explanation?”
“He gave me an extremely stupid explanation. He said they were supposed to prove to Michela that I was madly in love with him, as opposed to what she claimed. And I pretended to be satisfied with this explanation, because deep down I didn’t give a damn about the whole thing.”
“You think in fact there was different reason?”
“Yes. To get some breathing room.”
“Could you explain?”
“I’ll try. You see, Inspector, Michela and Angelo were very close. From what I was able to find out, when their mother was all right, Michela would very often sleep at her brother’s place. She would go out with him, and she knew at all times where he was. She controlled him. At some point Angelo must have got tired of this, or at least he needed more freedom of movement. And so my phony but over-leaping jealousy became a good alibi. It allowed him to get around without always having his sister in tow. He had me write the other two letters before going away on a couple of trips, one to Holland, the other to Switzerland. They were probably pretexts for preventing his sister from going along with him.”
Did this explanation for writing the letters hold water? In its twisted, contorted way, like a mad alchemist’s alembic, it did. Elena’s conjecture as to the real purpose proved convincing.
“Let’s set aside the letters for a moment. Since, in our investigation, we have to cast a wide net, we’ve—”
“May I?” she interrupted him, gesturing towards the letters on the coffee table.
“Of course.”
“Go on, I’m listening,” said Elena, taking a letter out of the envelope and beginning to read it.
“We’ve found out a few things about your husband.”
“You mean what happened during his first marriage?” she said, continuing to read.
Let alone the rug. This girl was pulling the ground out from under him.
Without warning, she threw her head backwards and started laughing.
“What do you find so amusing?”
“The tric-troc! What must you have thought?”
“I didn’t think anything,” said Montalbano, blushing slightly.
“It’s that I have a very sensitive belly button, and so…”
Montalbano turned fire red. Ah, so she liked to have her belly button kissed and tongued! Was she insane? Didn’t she realize those letters could send her to jail for thirty years! Tric-troc indeed!
“To get back to your husband…”
“Emilio told me everything,” said Elena, setting down the letter. “He lost his head over a former pupil of his, Maria Coxa, and married her, hoping for a miracle.”
“What sort of miracle, if I may ask?”
“Inspector, Emilio has always been impotent.”
The girl’s frankness was as brutal to the inspector as a stone dropped from the sky straight onto his head. Montalbano opened and closed his mouth without managing to speak.
“Emilio hadn’t told Maria anything. But after a while he couldn’t find any more excuses for covering up his unfortunate condition. And so they made an agreement.”
“Stop just a minute, please. Couldn’t the wife have asked for an annulment or a divorce? Everyone would have said she was right!”
“Inspector, Maria was extremely poor. Her family had gone hungry to put her through school. The agreement was better than a divorce.”
“What did it entail?”
“Emilio agreed to find her a man she could go to bed with. So he introduced her to a colleague of his, the gym teacher, with whom he’d already spoken.”
Montalbano goggled. No matter how much he’d seen and heard in all his years with the police, these intricate matters of sex and infidelity never stopped astonishing him.
“So, in a word, he offered him his wife?”
“Yes, but on one condition: that he be informed beforehand of the meetings between Maria and his colleague.”
“Good God! Why?”
“Because that way it wouldn’t seem to him like a betrayal.”
Of course. From a certain point of view, Emilio Sclafani’s reasoning made perfect sense. After all, wasn’t a guy named Luigi Pirandello from around there?
“So how do you explain that the gym teacher very nearly lost his life?”
“Emilio was never told about that encounter. It was…well, a secret encounter. And so Emilio reacted like a husband catching his wife committing flagrant adultery.”
The rules of the game. Wasn’t there a play of the same name by the above-mentioned Pirandello?
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure. I don’t feel so prudish with you.”
“Did your husband tell you he was impotent before or after you married him?”
“Before. Me, he told before.”
“And you agreed anyway?”
“Yes. He said I could go with other men if I wanted to. Discreetly, of course, and provided I always informed him of everything.”
“And have you kept your promise?”
“Yes.”
Montalbano had the clear impression that this “Yes” was a lie. But it didn’t seem to be all that important whether Elena met secretly with someone without telling her husband. It was her own business.
“Listen, Elena, I have to be more explicit.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why does a beautiful girl like you, who must have men constantly wooing and desiring her, agree to marry a man who is not rich, much older than her, and can’t even—”
“Inspector, have you ever imagined yourself flailing in the water because your boat has sunk in a storm at sea?”
“I don’t have a very good imagination.”
“Try to make the effort. You’ve been swimming a long time, but you just can’t go any further. You realize you’re going to drown. Then you suddenly find yourself beside some object that might keep you afloat. What do you do? You grab onto it. And it makes no difference to you whether it’s a plank of wood or a life raft with radar.”
9
“Was it really that bad?”
“Yes.”
Clearly she didn’t want to discuss the subject. It was hard for her. But the inspector couldn’t pretend it didn’t matter. He couldn’t let it slide. He needed to know everything past and present about the people associated with the murder victim. It was his job, even though it sometimes made him feel like someone from the Inquisition. And he didn’t like this one bit.
“How did you meet Emilio?”
“After the scandal in Comisini, Emilio went to live for a while in Fela. There, my father, who’s his second cousin, talked to him about me and my situation, and the fact that he was forced to put me in a special home for minors.”
“Drugs?”
“Yes.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Why did you start?”
“You’re asking me a specific question that has no specific answer. It’s hard to explain why I started. Even to myself. It was probably a combination of things…First of all, my mother’s sudden death, when I wasn’t even ten years old. Then my father’s utter inability to care about anyone, including my mother. Then simple curiosity. The opportunity arises at a moment of weakness. Your boyfriend from school, whom you think you’re in love with, pushes you to try…”
“How long did you stay at the home?”
“A whole year, without interruption. Emilio came to see me three times. The first time with my father, so he could meet me. After that he came alone.”
“And then?”
“I ran away. I got on a train and went to Milan. I met a lot of different men. I ended up with one who was forty. I got stopped twice by the police. The first time they sent me home to my father, since I was a minor. But if living with him was dramatic before, this time it became impossible. So I ran away again. I went back to Milan. When they stopped me the
second time…”
She froze, turned pale, started lightly trembling again, and swallowed without speaking.
“That’s enough,” said Montalbano.
“No. I want to explain why…The second time, as the two policemen were taking me to the station in their car, I offered to make a deal with them. You can imagine what. At first they pretended not to be interested. ‘You have to come down to the station,’ they kept repeating. So I kept pleading with them. And when I realized they were getting off on hearing me implore them, since they could do whatever they liked with me, I made a scene, started crying, got down on my knees, right there in the car. Finally they accepted and took me to a secluded place. It was…terrible. They used me for hours, as never before. But the worst of it was their contempt, their sadistic desire to humiliate me…In the end one of them urinated in my face.”
“Please, that’s enough,” Montalbano repeated, in a soft voice.
He felt deeply ashamed for being a man. He knew that the girl was not making up her story. This sort of thing had happened before, unfortunately. But now he understood why, at the mere mention of the words “police station,” Elena had nearly fainted.
“Why did the police arrest you?”
“Prostitution.”
She said it with perfect ease, without shame or embarrassment. It was one thing among so many others she had done.
“When we were hurting for money,” she went on, “my boyfriend used to prostitute me. Discreetly, of course. Not on the streets. But there were some raids, and I was caught twice.”
“How did you meet back up with Emilio?”
She gave a little smile that Montalbano didn’t immediately understand.
“Inspector, at this point the story becomes like a comic book, or some feel-good soap opera. Do you really want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
“I’d come back to Sicily about six months earlier. On the day of my twentieth birthday, I went into a supermarket with the intention of stealing something just to celebrate. But the moment I looked around, my eyes met Emilio’s. He hadn’t seen me since my days at the juvenile home, but he recognized me at once. And, strangely enough, I recognized him. What can I say? He’s been with me ever since. He saw me through detox, had me taken care of. He’s looked after me for five years with a devotion I can’t put into words. Four years ago he asked me to marry him. And that’s the story.”
The Paper Moon Page 9
