IM03 - The Snack Thief

by Andrea Camilleri

  Embarrassed, the woman led the way. When they were in the bathroom, Signora Antonietta, looking at the floor, asked:

  “Do I have to do everything?”

  “Of course not. You were dressed when you came out of the bathroom, correct?”

  “Yes, fully dressed, that’s how I always do it.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I went into the dining room.”

  Having learned her lesson by now, she walked towards the dining room, followed by the inspector.

  “I picked up my purse, which I’d prepared on this couch the night before, then I opened the door and went out on the landing.”

  “Are you sure you locked the door behind you when you went out?”

  “Absolutely certain. I called the elevator—”

  “That’ll be enough, thank you. What time was it, do you remember?”

  “Six twenty-five. I was late, actually, so late that I started running.”

  “What was the snag?”

  The woman gave him a questioning look.

  “For what reason were you running late? Let me put it another way. If someone knows he has to go somewhere the next morning, he usually sets the alarm clock, calculating the amount of time it will take to—”

  Signora Antonietta smiled.

  “A callus on my foot was hurting,” she said. “I put on some ointment, wrapped it up, and lost some time I hadn’t figured on.”

  “Thanks again, and sorry for the disturbance. Good-bye.”

  “Wait! Where are you going? Are you leaving?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. You had something to tell me.”

  “Sit down a minute.”

  Montalbano did as she said. In any case, he’d found out what he wanted to know: that is, the widow Lapècora had not entered the study, where Karima almost certainly had been hiding.

  “As you can see,” the woman began, “I’m getting ready to leave. As soon as I can give Arelio a proper funeral, I’m going away.”

  “Where will you go, signora?”

  “To stay with my sister. She has a big house, and she’s sick, as you know. I’ll never set foot in Vigàta again, even after I’m dead.”

  “Why not go live with your son?”

  “I don’t want to inconvenience him. And I don’t get along with his wife, who spends money like water while my poor son is always complaining that he can’t make ends meet. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you was that, when I was going through some old stuff I don’t need anymore and want to throw away, I found the envelope the first anonymous letter came in. I thought I’d burned it, but I must have destroyed only the letter. And since you seemed particularly interested . . .”

  The address had been typed.

  “May I keep this?”

  “Of course. Well, that’s all.”

  She stood up, as did the inspector, but then she went over to the sideboard, picked up a letter that was lying on it, and shook it at Montalbano.

  “Look at this, Inspector. Arelio’s been dead barely two days and already I have to start paying the debts he ran up with his filthy little arrangements. Just yesterday I received—apparently the post office already knows he was killed—I received two bills from the office. One for electricity: two hundred twenty thousand lire! And one for the phone: three hundred eighty thousand! But he wasn’t the one using the phone, you know. Who would he ever call anyway? It was that Tunisian whore who was phoning, that’s for sure, probably calling her family in Tunisia. Then this morning, this came. God only knows what kinds of ideas that dirty slut put into my idiot husband’s head!”

  So compassionate, the widow Antonietta Lapècora, née Palmisano. The envelope had no stamp on it; it had been hand-delivered. Montalbano decided not to show too much curiosity, only as much as was necessary.

  “When was this brought here?”

  “This morning, as I said. A bill for one hundred seventy-seven thousand lire, from the Mulone printing works. Incidentally, Inspector, could you give me back the keys to the office?”

  “Do you need them right away?”

  “Right this instant, I guess not. But I’d like to start showing it to people who might be interested in buying it. I want to sell the apartment too. I’ve already figured that the funeral alone is going to cost me over five million lire between one thing and the next.”

  Like mother, like son.

  “With the proceeds from the office and the apartment,” said Montalbano in a fit of malice, “you could pay for twenty funerals.”

  Empedocle Mulone, owner of the print shop, said yes, the late Mr. Lapècora had indeed ordered some stationery with slightly different letterhead from the old one. Signor Arelio had been coming to him for twenty years, and they were friends.

  “How was it different?”

  “It said ‘Import-Export’ instead of ‘Importazione-Esportazione. ’ But I advised him against it.”

  “He shouldn’t have made the change?”

  “I didn’t mean the letterhead, but the idea of restarting the business. He’d already been retired about five years, but things are different now. Businesses are failing. It’s a bad time. And you know what he did, instead of thanking me for the advice? He got pissed off. He said he read the newspapers and watched TV, and so he knew what the situation was.”

  “Did you send the package with the printed matter to his home or his office?”

  “He asked me to send it to the office, and that’s what I did, on one of the weekdays when he was there. I don’t remember the exact date, but if you want—”

  “Never mind.”

  “The bill, on the other hand, I sent to the missus, since I guess Mr. Lapècora can’t very well make it to the office now, can he?”

  And he laughed.

  “Here’s your espresso, Inspector,” said the barman at the Caffè Albanese.

  “Totò, listen. Did Mr. Lapècora sometimes come here with his friends?”

  “Sure! Every Tuesday. They’d talk and play cards. Always the same group.”

  “Give me their names.”

  “All right. Let’s see: Pandolfo, the accountant—”

  “Wait. Give me the phone book.”

  “No need to call him on the phone. He’s the elderly gentleman sitting at that table over there, eating an ice.”

  Montalbano took his demitasse and went over to the accountant.

  “May I sit down?”

  “Absolutely, Inspector.”

  “Thanks. Do we know each other?”

  “You don’t know me, sir, but I know you.”

  “Mr. Pandolfo, did you play cards with the deceased very often?”

  “Often? We played every Tuesday. Because, you see, every Monday, Wednesday, and—”

  “—Friday he was at the office,” said Montalbano, completing the now familiar refrain.

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Why did Mr. Lapècora decide to go back into business?”

  Pandolfo looked sincerely surprised.

  “Go back into business? When did he ever do that? He never talked about it with us. But we all knew he went to the office out of habit, just to pass the time.”

  “Did he ever mention the maid, a certain Karima, who used to come and clean the office?”

  There was a darting of the eyes, an imperceptible hesitation that would have gone unnoticed had Montalbano not been keeping the man squarely in his sights.

  “The man had no reason to tell me about his cleaning woman.”

  “Did you know Lapècora well?”

  “Whom can you say you know well? Some thirty years ago when I lived in Montelusa, I had a friend, a smart man, bright, witty, sharp, sensible. He had it all. And he was generous, too, a real angel. If anyone was in need, they could have anything he owned. Then one evening his sister left her baby boy with him, not six months old. He was supposed to look after him for two hours or so, maximum. As soon as the sister left, the guy picked up a knife, chopped the baby up and boiled him
in a pot with a sprig of parsley and a clove of garlic. I’m not kidding, you know. I’d been with the man that same day, and he’d been the same as always, smart, polite. So, to get back to poor old Lapècora, yeah, I knew him, all right, enough to see that he’d really changed over the last two years.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, he became nervous, never laughed. In fact, he’d pick a fight and make a big to-do over the smallest things.”

  “Any idea what might have been the cause?”

  “One day I asked him about it. It was a health problem, he said. The first stages of arteriosclerosis, that’s what his doctor told him.”

  The first thing he did in Lapècora’s office was sit down at the typewriter. He opened the drawer to the little secretarial table and found some stationery printed with the old letterhead and yellowed with age. He took out a sheet, reached into his coat pocket, and removed the envelope that Signora Antonietta had given him. He copied its address on the typewriter. A foolproof test if there ever was one. The r’s jumped above the line, the a’s dropped below, and the o was a little black ball. The address on the anonymous letter’s envelope had been written by this same typewriter.

  He looked outside. Signora Vasile Cozzo’s housekeeper, standing on a stepladder, was cleaning the windows. He opened the window and called out.

  “Hello! Is the signora there?”

  “Wait,” said the girl, giving him a dirty look. Clearly she wasn’t very fond of the inspector.

  She stepped down from the ladder, disappeared, and a short while later Signora Clementina’s head appeared just above the sill. There was no need for them to raise their voices so much, as they were less than ten yards away from each other.

  “Excuse me, signora, but if I’m not mistaken, you told me that, sometimes, the young man, do you remember . . . ?”

  “Yes, the young man.”

  “You said he used to type sometimes. Is that right?”

  “Yes, but he didn’t use the office typewriter. He would bring his own portable.”

  “Are you sure? Might it have been a computer?”

  “No, it was a portable typewriter.”

  What kind of cockamamie way to conduct an investigation was this? He suddenly realized the two of them must look like a couple of old housewives gossiping across their balconies.

  After saying good-bye to Clementina, to regain some semblance of dignity in his own eyes he began a detailed search of the office like a true professional, looking for the package the printer had sent. But he never found it; nor did he find a single envelope or sheet of paper with the new letterhead in English.

  They’d removed everything.

  As for the portable typewriter Lapècora’s bogus nephew used to bring along instead of using the office machine, he thought he’d come up with a plausible explanation for this. The young man had no use for the keyboard of the old Olivetti. Apparently, he needed one with a different alphabet.

  8

  He left the office, got in his car, and drove to Montelusa. At Customs Police headquarters, he asked for Captain Aliotta, who was his friend. They let him in immediately.

  “It’s been so long since we spent an evening together! I’m not blaming you. It’s my fault, too,” said Aliotta, embracing Montalbano.

  “Let’s forgive each other and try to rectify the situation soon.”

  “Okay. What can I do for you?”

  “I need the name of that sergeant of yours I spoke to on the phone last year, the one who gave me that precious information about the supermarket in Vigàta. The case of the weapons traffic, remember?”

  “Of course. His name’s Laganà.”

  “Could I speak with him?”

  “What’s it about?”

  “He would have to come to Vigàta for half a day at the most, I think. I’d like him to examine the files of a business owned by that guy who was murdered in an elevator.”

  “I’ll call him for you.”

  Sergeant Laganà was a burly fifty-year-old with a crew cut and gold-rimmed glasses. Montalbano took an immediate liking to him.

  He explained in great detail what he wanted from him and gave him the keys to Lapècora’s office. The sergeant looked at his watch.

  “I can be in Vigàta at three o’clock this afternoon, if the captain has no objection.”

  Just to be thorough, once the inspector had finished chatting with Aliotta, he asked if he could use his phone and called headquarters, where he hadn’t shown his face since the previous evening.

  “Chief, is that really you yourself?”

  “Cat, it’s really me myself. Been any calls?”

  “Yessir, Chief. Two for Inspector Augello, one for—”

  “Cat, I don’t give a fuck about other people’s phone calls!”

  “But you asked me yourself just now!”

  “All right, Cat: have there been any phone calls personally for me myself?”

  By making the necessary linguistic adjustments, maybe he would get a sane answer.

  “Yessir, Chief. There was one. But it didn’t make sense.”

  “What do you mean, it didn’t make sense?”

  “I couldn’t understand anything. But I think they were relatives.”

  “Whose relatives?”

  “Yours, Chief. They called you by your first name: Salvo, Salvo.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then they sounded like they were in pain, or sneezing or something. They said: ‘Aiee . . . sha! Aiee . . . sha!’ ”

  “Wait, who was ‘they’? Was it a man or a woman?”

  “An old woman, Chief.”

  Aisha! He dashed out the door, forgetting to say good-bye to Aliotta.

  Aisha was sitting in front of her house, upset and weeping. No, Karima and François had not shown up; she’d called him for another reason. She stood up and led him inside. The room had been turned upside down; they’d even gutted the mattress. Want to bet they’d taken the bank book? No, that they didn’t find, Aisha said reassuringly.

  Upstairs, where Karima lived, it was even worse. Some flagstones had been torn out of the floor; one of François’s toys, a little plastic truck, was in pieces. The photographs were all gone, including the ones advertising Karima’s charms. A good thing I took a few myself, the inspector thought. But they must have made a tremendous racket. Where had Aisha run off to in the meantime? She hadn’t run off, the old woman explained. The previous day she’d gone to see a friend in Montelusa. It got late, and so she slept over. A stroke of luck: if they’d found her at home, they would certainly have cut her throat. They must have had keys; neither of the doors, in fact, had been forced. Surely they’d come for the photos; they wanted to erase the very memory of what Karima looked like.

  Montalbano told the old woman to gather her things together. He was going to take her himself to her friend’s house in Montelusa. She would have to remain there for a few days, just to be safe. Aisha glumly agreed to go. The inspector explained that while she was getting ready, he was going out to the nearest tobacco shop and would be back in ten minutes at most.

  A short distance before the tobacco shop, in front of the Villaseta elementary school, there was a noisy gathering of gesticulating mothers and weepy children. They were laying siege to two municipal policemen from Vigàta who’d been detached to Villaseta and whom Montalbano knew. He drove on, bought his cigarettes, but on the way back, curiosity got the better of him. He pushed through the crowd, invoking his authority, deafened by the shouting.

  “They bothered you about this bullshit too?” asked one of the policemen in amazement.

  “No, I just happened to be passing by. What’s going on?”

  The mothers, who heard his question, answered all at once, with the result that the inspector understood nothing.

  “Quiet!” he yelled.

  The mothers fell silent, but the children, now terrified, started wailing even louder.

  “The whole thing’s ridiculous, Inspector,” said th
e same policeman as before. “Apparently, since yesterday morning, there’s been some little kid attacking the other kids on their way to school. He steals their food and then runs away. He did the same thing this morning.”

  “Looka here, looka here,” one mother butted in, showing Montalbano a little boy with puffy eyes from being punched. “My son din’t wanna give ’im ’is omelette, and so ’e ’it ’im! An’ ’e really ’urt ’im!”

  The inspector bent down and stroked the little boy’s head.

  “What’s your name?”

  “’Ntonio,” said the little boy, proud to have been the one chosen from the crowd.

  “Do you know this boy who stole your omelette?”

  “No sir.”

  “Is there anyone here who recognized him?” the inspector asked in a loud voice. There was a chorus of “No.”

  Montalbano leaned back down to ’Ntonio.

  “What did he say to you? How did you know he wanted your omelette?”

  “He spoke foreign. I din’t unnastand. So he pulled off my backpack and opened it. I tried to take it back, but he punched me, twice, and he grabbed my omelette sandwich and ran away.”

  “Continue the investigation,” Montalbano ordered the two police officers, managing by some miracle to keep a straight face.

  At the time of the Muslim domination of Sicily, when Montelusa was called Kerkent, the Arabs built a district, on the outskirts of town, where they lived amongst themselves. When the Muslims later fled in defeat, the Montelusians moved into their homes and the name of the district was Sicilianized into Rabàtu. In the second half of the twentieth century, a tremendous landslide swallowed it up. The few houses left standing were damaged and lopsided, remaining upright by absurd feats of equilibrium. When they returned, this time as paupers, the Arabs moved back into that part of town, replacing the roof tiles with sheet metal and using partitions of heavy cardboard for walls.

  It was to this quarter that Montalbano accompanied Aisha with her paltry bundle of belongings. The old woman, still calling him “uncle,” wanted to kiss and embrace him.