The Paper Moon

by Andrea Camilleri

  It was Prosecutor Tommaseo who, without knowing it, had handed him the thread. He’d told him that during the last interrogation, Michela had made a scene straight out of a Greek tragedy, screaming that he, Montalbano, didn’t want to take any action against Elena even though he had in his possession the letters in which Elena had threatened to kill Angelo. And while it was absolutely true that he had those compromising letters, there was a small detail that could not be ignored: Michela should not have known this.

  Because the day before, when Michela asked him if he’d found the letters, he’d said no, just to keep the waters muddy. And he remembered this perfectly clearly—forget about old age and Alzheimer’s (there, that’s what that disease was called!). And Paola the Red had also been present and could testify.

  The only person who knew he’d found the letters was Elena, because he’d shown them to her. But the two women didn’t speak. And so? There was only one answer. Michela had gone to the garage to check if the envelope with the three letters was still in the Mercedes’ trunk, and when she saw it was gone, she’d come to the logical conclusion that the inspector had discovered it and taken it.

  Wait a second, Montalbano. How could Michela have known the letters were lying hidden under the carpet in the trunk of the Mercedes? She said that Angelo kept his letters in one of the desk’s drawers. Angelo had no logical reason to move them out of the house and into the Mercedes in the garage—hiding them, yes, but making sure they weren’t entirely hidden, so that if anyone looked with any care, that person would find them. Therefore Michela must have moved them. But when? The very night Angelo was found dead, when he, Montalbano, had committed the colossal boner of leaving her alone in her brother’s apartment.

  Why had Michela gone to such elaborate lengths?

  Why would someone hide something in such a way that it can be discovered as if by chance? To make the discovery seem more significant, of course. Explain yourself better, Salvo.

  If he opened the desk drawer, found the letters there, and read them, everything would seem normal. Let’s set the value of the words in those letters at ten. But if he found those letters after driving himself crazy looking for them, because they were hidden, it would mean that the letters were not supposed to have been read, and thus the value of their words climbed to fifty. This lent weight and truth to the death threats; they were no longer the generic statements of a jealous lover.

  Compliments to Michela. As an attempt to screw the hated Elena, it was brilliant. But her excessive hatred had betrayed her in front of Tommaseo. It was easy for her to enter the garage, since she had copies of all Angelo’s keys.

  Wait a minute. The other night, after the dream about the bath at Michela’s, something about a key had occurred to him. Whose key?

  Inspector Montalbano, review everything from the start.

  From the very beginning?

  From the very beginning.

  Could I pour myself another whisky first?

  So one fine day, Signora (“excuse me, Signorina”) Michela Pardo appears at the station to tell me she’s had no word of her brother, Angelo, for two days. She says she even went into his apartment, since she has a set of keys, but found everything in order. She comes back the same evening. We go to look at the apartment together. Everything still in order. There’s no trace of any sudden departure. When we’re outside the building, about to say good-bye, it occurs to her that we haven’t checked the room Angelo has on the terrace, having rented both room and terrace. We go back upstairs. The glass door giving onto the terrace is locked. Michela opens it with one of her keys. The door to the little room on the terrace is also locked, but Michela tells me she doesn’t have the key to this one. So I break down the door. And I find…

  Stop right there, Montalbano. There’s the rub, as Hamlet would say. This is the part of the story that doesn’t make sense.

  What sense is there in Michela’s having only the key to the terrace door, which is completely useless if not accompanied by the key to the former laundry room? If she has copies of all her brother’s keys, she must also have the one to the room on the terrace. All the more because Angelo used to go there to read or sunbathe, as Michela herself said. He did not go up there to be with his women. What did this mean?

  Montalbano noticed that his glass was empty again. He refilled it, stepped off the veranda and onto the sand, and, taking a sip of whisky every few steps, arrived at the water’s edge. The night was dark, but it felt good. The lights of the fishing boats on the horizon line looked like low-lying stars.

  He picked up the thread of his argument. If Michela had a key to the little room but told him she didn’t, the lie meant that she wanted him, Montalbano, to break down the door and find Angelo shot dead inside. And this because Michela already knew that her brother’s corpse was in that room. By staging this whole scene, she was trying to make herself appear, to the inspector’s eyes, completely extraneous to the entire event, when in fact she was in it up to her neck.

  He returned to the veranda, sat down, poured another whisky. How could things have gone?

  Michela says that on Monday, Angelo phoned her to tell her that Elena would be coming over to his place that evening. Thus Michela made herself scarce. But what if, on the other hand, Angelo, seeing that Elena wasn’t coming, and realizing that in fact she wasn’t going to come, called his sister back, and Michela went to see him? Maybe Angelo even told her he was going up to the terrace room to get some air. Then, when Michela showed up, she found her brother murdered. She’s convinced it was Elena, who, having arrived late, had a quarrel with Angelo. Especially since Angelo must have wanted to have sex with the girl, which was all too clear. So she decides to play her ace, to prevent Elena from getting away with it. She locks everything up, goes down into the apartment below, spends the night removing everything that might reveal anything about Angelo’s shady dealings, above all the strongbox, and takes the letters down to the garage, as these will serve as evidence against Elena…

  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 Vigàta.

  Fazio wasn’t at the station, Mimì, 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 Laganà, 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 Vigàta 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 Cristoforo 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. Unless 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 Vigàta?”

  “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 seven P.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?”