Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions

by Mario Giordano

  Poldi gazed at him all the time while drinking, and the commissario never even blinked in embarrassment.

  “I’d had a pretty good career in the state police,” he went on. “During the eighties I spent some time with a special anti-Mafia unit in Rome. Then I went back to homicide in Milan.”

  “That sounds excellent. So what happened?”

  “There was a murder in the red-light district, and I leant rather too heavily on a politician, a senator from a very long-established dynasty of North Italian industrialists with links to the Roman Curia. Bingo. Five years from retirement I suddenly became the Sicilian scoundrel again. I was denounced, defamed, denigrated and harassed until I became completely ostracized at work.”

  “Did they have any solid evidence against you?”

  Montana put his fingertips together in the age-old Italian gesture of impotence. “Oh, you know. After so many years in the force there were bound to be a few things; it was quite inevitable. A little favour here, a less than kosher deal there – the little compromises without which no detective can find his way through a morass of lies, corruption and secrecy. I’m not trying to gloss over anything – of course I occasionally got my hands dirty – but I usually got my perp in the end.”

  Poldi thought of her father, Georg Oberreiter, who had never made a mistake or got his hands dirty in forty-plus years’ service, but he had very seldom spoken about his work and it suddenly occurred to her that she knew very little about him.

  “I quite understand.”

  “No, I doubt if you do. I’m not trying to justify myself, but my problem with the aforesaid senator was that I don’t take bribes. Well, when you’re isolated, everything happens very fast. He pulled a few strings, did the signor senator, and before I knew it I’d been transferred to Sicily, to Acireale, and neutralized in the arsehole of the world. Know what that meant?”

  Poldi shook her head.

  “It was the maximum sentence. They could have retired me early, but no, they transferred me. It wasn’t just that they sentenced me to the provincial claustrophobia I’d been happy to escape from four decades earlier; it was worse than that. I’m the foreigner again. The outsider from the north. The Sicilian who thought he was too good for Sicily and came unstuck. Neither one thing nor the other. The reject. The loser. Someone to be distrusted. Someone fighting a losing battle. My colleagues cold-shoulder me. I can’t expect any assistance in the Valentino case, and I’m making very little progress. Whenever I interview witnesses I come up against a wall of silence. It doesn’t surprise me much – I’m Sicilian, I know the score – but it gets on my nerves. It makes me mad; it drives me insane.”

  Montana told Poldi all this without a moment’s hesitation, valiantly endeavouring to look into her eyes and not at her cleavage.

  Poldi cleared away the plates and brought the gelato. Pistachio and chocolate. Innocent though that sounds, it is a typically Sicilian confection as baroque and magnificent as the whole of Sicily’s cuisine. A cuisine like the whole island, a superabundance of aromas, marvels, sensations. A spectacular odyssey for the palate, even in a dish as commonplace as Pasta alla Norma, in which the sweetness of the tomato sauce blends with the salty ricotta and the slightly bitter note of the grilled aubergines. Sweet, salt, bitter, piquant – Sicilian cuisine is all-embracing and pleasurably involves all the senses in a single dish. A gelato must also be like this. Sweet as a whispered promise, the pistachio ice cream salty as sea air, the chocolate ice cream faintly bitter and a little tart like a lover’s goodbye the next morning.

  Perfect for my Auntie Poldi, in other words, and while she allowed a concentrated dose of Sicily to dissolve on her tongue, she conceived of Montana, too, as a baroque dessert of that kind. Sweet, salty and bitter, cool and melting.

  “And then a German woman meddles in my inquiries and makes me look stupid,” he went on. “I’m almost tempted to chuck the case and let those idiots in the Carabinieri bust a gut instead, but I don’t give up easily – that’s my trouble.”

  Poldi nodded sympathetically. She was growing steadily fonder of Montana in a way she’d believed was no longer possible. And although I can report only what my aunt told me, of course, I feel sure her emotions were ablaze. I can picture them sitting there together, my Auntie Poldi and Vito Montana, in the house at No. 29 Via Baronessa, stirring their melting pistachio and chocolate gelato and sipping the rest of the wine just to avoid having to say any more, because the ice cream was melting away and they didn’t know where the evening would lead, so it might be better if it led nowhere. Or so I imagine.

  “I know what you mean, Vito,” Poldi said at length in a husky voice, laying her hand on his arm. “I know something about falling between two stools.”

  Montana produced his cigarettes. “May I?”

  “But of course, Vito.”

  Poldi watched him light a cigarette with his usual air of concentration, saw him inhale the first few lungfuls of smoke in silence and look at her searchingly. She realized that he still regarded her as part of his case. It was high time to introduce phase two.

  “Have you managed to establish the identity of the red-haired man at the funeral?”

  Montana shook his head. “The taxi driver was no great help. The man flagged him down outside the cathedral in Acireale and had himself driven back there. He clearly didn’t speak much, but the cabby is sure he was a foreigner – an American, he suspects, because he tipped him so generously.”

  “And I suspect Valentino’s family didn’t have a clue who he was or what he was doing at the funeral. Although he did bring some flowers with him.”

  Montana nodded. “However, there is some news from the lab.”

  Poldi sat up, galvanized. “Really?”

  “Those idiots in Messina took a hell of a time, ostensibly because half the staff are on leave, but Valentino was obviously drugged before his death.”

  “No.”

  Montana remained quite calm. “The evidence isn’t a hundred per cent, but the lab in Messina found traces of flunitrazepam in Valentino’s urine. That’s a strong sedative.”

  “Knockout drops,” Poldi said in hushed tones.

  “Also available as tablets, which are known as roofies or flunies. They work very quickly and last for up to seven hours.”

  “So the murderer drugged Valentino first and then shot him?”

  Montana stubbed out his cigarette. She noticed that he never smoked more than half.

  “Well, Poldi, what have you got for me?”

  Poldi was well prepared. She reached into the drawer beneath the table, pulled out the photograph and put it down in front of him.

  Montana stared at the print without touching it. “When was this taken?” All at once, his voice sounded as brittle as splintering slates.

  “The Wednesday before Valentino died.”

  “And you never said a word to me about it all this time?”

  “Good God, Vito, it wasn’t until yesterday that I noticed the two of them were in the photo.”

  He gave her a puzzled look. “But you took the damned thing.”

  She rolled her eyes. “My God, I snapped the Vigile. I didn’t notice that Valentino and Mr X were there until last night.”

  “The Vigile? Why him?”

  “Oh, Vito, it’s a long story, and certainly no grounds for jealousy. So what do you say?”

  The commissario said nothing. He picked up the photo at last, though only with his fingertips, and studied it closely.

  “It’s the truth, Vito,” Poldi insisted. “I didn’t notice the two of them at the time. But look at the startled expression on their faces. What if I accidentally photographed Valentino’s murderer?”

  Montana looked up at her. “What then?”

  “Then I could be in danger.”

  “Is that why you invited me here tonight?”

  Salty, bitter, sharp – his tone of voice suddenly combined them all, and Poldi thoroughly disliked that fact.

  “I
could offer myself as bait.” It was supposed to sound jocular, but it didn’t. It sounded despairing.

  Montana thought for a moment. Then he rose and pocketed the photo.

  “Thanks for dinner. I’ll call you.”

  That put paid to phase three. The commissario hurried to the door before Poldi could even get to her feet. She tottered after him with legs like mozzarella and got there just in time. “Vito, wait. This is ridiculous.”

  He looked at her. “Ridiculous, you say?”

  “No. Yes. I mean —”

  She got no further, for Montana, halfway out into the street, which smelt of jasmine and cat’s piss, suddenly bent forwards, drew my Auntie Poldi to him, and kissed her. He kissed her as desperately and greedily as a drowning man and as gently as summer rain. Or so Poldi felt. It was a lingering kiss, and she didn’t hesitate to respond with all her might. She could smell him, feel his breath, feel his hands around her neck and on her hips, feel his chest against hers – and more.

  There it was. Poldi found it undeniably sweet, and for the first time for ages she felt complete again, entirely herself and alive. When she tried to pull him back into the house, however, he gently released himself.

  “Goodnight,” he said in a low, hoarse voice.

  And went.

  My Auntie Poldi was beside herself.

  “Perhaps he was just… well, shy,” I hazarded when she told me about it on my next visit in September.

  “Shy? Montana? Are you mad?”

  “Or perhaps he simply wasn’t that far along.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Relationship-wise, I mean. He wouldn’t be the first. Perhaps it was all happening too fast for him. I mean, perhaps he felt you’d somehow, well —”

  “Felt I’d somehow what?”

  “Well, rushed him. Emotionally, I mean.”

  She stared at me with her mouth open.

  “You know why you haven’t got a girlfriend, don’t you? Because you don’t know the first thing about a woman’s emotions. Rushed him? What bullshit. He pounced on me. He was overwhelmed by his own passion. I felt it, that fire, that magma rising in his volcano; I’m an expert on these things. The frigid way he simply cleared off, that was thoroughly calculated. He was jealous on account of the Vigile’s photo.”

  “Passionate and calculated?” I was bold enough to ask. “How do you reconcile the two?”

  “Why, yin and yang, id and superego, get it? Heart and brain. The man is a detective chief inspector, and a detective chief inspector is the supreme alpha male, a perfect synthesis of emotion and reason.”

  “If you say so.”

  “No need to say ‘If you say so’ in that oh-so-clever way. I know precisely what I’m talking about. You can’t imagine how furious I was. Fancy leaving me standing in the doorway, the heartless block of ice. I’d have taken him on a magic carpet ride that night, introduced him to a host of erotic marvels and adventures.”

  This was rather too much information for me. I gave a sheepish cough.

  “And now you’re embarrassed, aren’t you? That’s just why you’re getting so constipated with that novel of yours: because you always look away when it hurts. You’re scared of emotion.”

  “Yes, well, it’s getting late. Goodnight, Poldi.”

  “Stay where you are and look at me. What do you see?”

  I sighed.

  “Go on, what do you see?”

  “You, Poldi.”

  “No, under the surface.”

  I looked at my Auntie Poldi in her ethnic caftan, with her wig slightly askew and her make-up reminiscent of an Egyptian pop singer. She was holding a nearly empty glass of whisky in her hand but had stopped drinking.

  “Disappointment?”

  She shook her head. “Deeper.”

  “Pain,” I said. “Love. Longing.”

  “And the reason?”

  I drew a deep breath. “In second place: Montana.”

  She knit her brow. “Aha. And in first place?”

  “Sicily. The pain of feeling that Sicily doesn’t return your love as enthusiastically as you thought it would. And the hankering to finally feel at home here. That’s what I know something about.”

  Poldi drained her glass and continued to look at me intently. Her expression conveyed that I wasn’t, after all, a totally forlorn hope. Or so I told myself.

  “Sleep well.”

  Then, mustering her strength, she heaved herself off the sofa and tottered bedroomwards.

  My Auntie Poldi was definitely feeling hurt, and no wonder, especially as Montana failed to call her the next day. The other aunts, filled with Latin solidarity, were unstinting in their condemnation of the commissario’s foul play. Their unanimous opinion: there must be another woman in Montana’s life. He wasn’t worth it, of course, not after toying with Poldi’s emotions like that, but if she were to bring herself to give him another chance despite this, she would be bound to succeed in the long run. That was a copper-bottomed certainty.

  “Forza Poldi,” cried Aunt Luisa. “What other woman could hold a candle to you?”

  “A younger one?” Poldi croaked darkly.

  “Nonsense,” cried Caterina. “You’ve got good skin, a firm backside, and you’re fun.”

  “I’m old and fat.”

  “You’re an armful of a woman in her prime.”

  Poldi cast her eyes up at the ceiling.

  Aunt Teresa summoned Uncle Martino. “Amore, tell Poldi what she is.”

  “The loveliest of all Isoldes.”

  “Bravo. There you have it.”

  But Poldi didn’t find genuine consolation until she flung herself into the arms of Signor Bacardi. They did it together sour, on the rocks, with Coke and with tonic. Sweet and sour, salty and bitter. Even on the way downhill she made Sicily another defiant declaration of love, but alcohol is a perfidious plank in the ocean of self-pity. “It keeps you afloat for a while, saves you from drowning and infects you with optimism, but then it drags you down – glug-glug-glug – into the depths.” Poldi knew what she was talking about.

  So what saved her from the nadir of self-pity? Love? Joie de vivre? Wrong. Her hunting instinct. Her forensic urge. The photograph of Valentino with Mr X.

  Hung-over, thirsty, devoid of appetite and ill-tempered, the first thing she did on the morning after her fall from grace was check her answerphone. Still no word from Montana, just worried messages from Valérie and the aunts.

  Montana didn’t call for the next few days either, but Poldi had her pride. She was now eager to solve this murder, if only to show him up and make him look foolish – make him look one big figuraccia.

  Pale and still a bit under the weather, she showed the photo on her mobile around town. To Bussacca at the tabacchi, to the sad signora, to the neighbours, but nobody seemed to recognize the red-haired man.

  “There was this police psychologist on Channel Five’s Faces of Crime,” Signora Anzalone volunteered in her habitually conspiratorial whisper. “He said murderers always return to the scene of the crime; they can’t help themselves. They’re driven there by their feelings of guilt, their curiosity and arrogance.”

  Spot on, thought Poldi, puzzled that the same idea hadn’t occurred to her long ago. She thought it improbable that Mr X would show up on the beach at Praiola, however. It was likelier, especially as he didn’t seem to avoid crowds of people, that she would bump into him in Taormina. He might even live there. Poldi promptly called Teresa, because she naturally knew that proper surveillance, whether of a person or a thing, is always maintained by two people. Two pairs of eyes see better than one, and one member of the team can always take a break. Besides, it can become a terribly boring business, and experience had taught Poldi that boredom and hard liquor go hand in hand.

  “Keep watch on the whole of Taormina? How do you propose to do that?”

  “Mainly the Corso, but other hotspots as well.”

  “Around the clock?”

 
; “Of course not. I’ll split us up into three shifts of four hours. That makes twelve. We can’t manage more.”

  “How about recruiting Martino?”

  “This kind of surveillance wouldn’t suit someone who can’t sit still for ten minutes at a time. Besides —”

  “Yes, I know. But how will you stick it for twelve hours?”

  “My time’s my own.”

  “But Luisa’s isn’t; she has to work.”

  “Only half-days. She can take over the evening shift. She might even meet someone.”

  “Stop it. You know how jealous Franco gets. And who’ll look after Caterina’s dogs and collect little Carmela from nursery school?”

  “Martino?”

  “You must be joking.”

  Poldi could hear her sister-in-law breathing heavily as she ran the whole idea through her mind again.

  “Perfect. If we solve the case, the Terranovas will eat their plastic flowers with envy.”

  It was unnecessary to ask the other two sisters, because, as I’ve already mentioned, Aunt Teresa called the shots and all the aunts were fans of police procedurals.

  Picturesquely situated overlooking the sea, Taormina is one of Sicily’s favourite tourist haunts. Goethe visited there, as did Oscar Wilde and Thomas Mann, followed by film stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor. In the middle of the town is a Roman amphitheatre – misleadingly called the Teatro Greco – at which top-class film festivals, concerts and ballets take place during the summer. Mind you, there is always a risk that some international star will be upstaged by a volcanic eruption, for a gap in the middle of the stage affords a splendid view of Etna. In the nineteenth century a German photographer named Wilhelm von Gloeden, who landed up in Taormina because of lung disease, photographed local youths striking lascivious poses in front of ancient columns, well made-up and naked save for a loincloth or a laurel wreath. Prints of those photographs can be bought on every street corner in Taormina, and they helped to establish the liberal reputation of the town, which is still a favourite domicile of the gay community.

  Poldi and Caterina, who had taken over the early shift, seated themselves outside the Mocambo Bar the very next morning. Not too conspicuously far forward and not too far back, sometimes in the shade, sometimes wearing sunglasses, with a good view of the piazza and the Corso. Still a little tense for the first hour, Poldi drank one coffee after another in her determination not to miss a single man who walked past. After an hour she was worn out and had cramp in her neck. It surprised her to note that Caterina, on the other hand, was sitting there quite relaxed in her stylish sunglasses, legs elegantly crossed. She turned her head smoothly and serenely to and fro like a radar dish, seemingly uninterested, yet no one escaped her attention.