I also picture Poldi, who couldn’t sleep that night for various reasons, all of them connected with the truth. Valentino’s truth, Montana’s truth, Valérie’s truth. The truth, Poldi imagined, was like a button holding an expensive dress together at one particular point. It was stupid not to undo it. Enough to drive one crazy. Insufferable. Intolerable. Plain unacceptable. Or so Poldi felt.
That was why she drove to Femminamorta next day with a heart like stone and numerous questions on the tip of her tongue. She couldn’t simply ask Valérie about the phone call, because Montana oughtn’t to have told her about it, so she would have to proceed more subtly. And, to be honest, my Auntie Poldi wasn’t the soul of subtlety.
At the gate with the solitary lion she was stopped by a young man sporting a smart suit and gelled hair.
“I’m sorry, signora, you can’t drive in at present.”
“Why not?”
“They’re shooting a film.”
This was something altogether new. Having been in the trade, though, Poldi didn’t argue.
“But I can go in if I leave the car here, can I?”
“Of course, signora.”
Parked sideways-on in the inner courtyard of the old country house was a brand-new Lamborghini Aventador. As glaringly orange as an overripe mandarin at sunset, it was a squat, sleek, 700 hp nightmare whose manufacturer employed the adjective “merciless” to advertise it.
“Which tells you all you need to know about the drivers of such monstrosities,” Poldi told me later. “Peppe had a friend like that named Toni. I know there’s no comparison, but Toni owned a white Porsche. Special, wickedly expensive mother-of-pearl paintwork – sperm white, we always called it. Peppe was a bit envious until Toni let him drive the thing. And what did Peppe do? He crashed it on the B11 between Garching and Mintraching – but then, Peppe smashed up nearly every car anyone lent him. Understandably, that put paid to their friendship. Anyway, Toni always wore white trousers. White was his colour, and I always used to say, ‘White Porsche and white pants equal no brains and a limp dick.’ I didn’t need to study psychology; one look was enough, and where Lamborghini drivers are concerned, my maxim applies in spades. On the other hand, this one was only rented.”
Valérie was nowhere to be seen. A young woman in a strapless wedding gown was lolling on the rented Lamborghini while two young men took stills and videoed her. Italians get married with a vengeance, and staging weddings has become an entire branch of industry in itself. One absolute essential is grandiose photographic and video documentation. For this purpose, bride and bridegroom are carted off to picturesque locations where they have to pose for hours, walk up and down a beach, gaze into each other’s eyes, exchange a kiss, and then pace the beach again. Sports cars or powerful motorbikes are standard props, and wedding photography is a recession-proof profession for which no cripplingly long apprenticeship is necessary.
The photographer circled the Lamborghini like a hyena hovering around a pride of lions at their picnic, panned and swooped with his camera till Poldi became dizzy just watching him, and told the young woman to follow his every movement and keep looking into the lens. Not an easy task. The young woman was no photographic model; Poldi could tell that from the desperate way she tried to reproduce the erotic poses struck by pin-ups on car calendars. She was a real-life bride wearing far too much cream silk, lace and tulle. The gown seemed to flow from her upper body and melt on the Lamborghini’s orange paintwork like vanilla ice cream. Her legs were completely hidden, so she looked like a mermaid whom some fortunate fisherman had hauled out of the Gulf of Catania and was now putting on public display.
The fortunate fisherman himself was standing a little to one side with a handful of friends and relations, his expression a mixture of pride and embarrassment.
Then came his turn. He had to join his bride on the bonnet and look cool, which was something he signally failed to do. The bridal pair seemed more irritated than amused by the palaver going on around them.
“Mon Dieu.”
Poldi heard Valérie’s voice coming from the garden, then her laugh.
“Hearty congratulations, all the best and lots of children,” Poldi called to the bridal pair before disappearing behind the house, where she found Valérie chatting with Russo and Mimì Pastorella. Russo, who was wearing a pale blue suit with a flower in the buttonhole, clearly belonged to the wedding party. Despite the heat, Mimì had donned a dark, ancient three-piece which some tailor seemed to have moulded out of a solid bale of cloth a century earlier. Hölderlin had curled up at his master’s feet, stumpy tail twitching occasionally, and was chewing a small plastic lion. All in all, not a sight to gladden my aunt’s heart. She would rather have spoken with Valérie alone. Conversation ceased as soon as the trio caught sight of her.
“Donna Isolde!” Mimì cried out delightedly.
“Poldi. Mon Dieu, I was just talking about you.”
With a sigh, Poldi subsided on to a plastic chair. “In what connection?”
Valérie offered her some coffee. “Mimì and Signor Russo were asking after you, but – mon Dieu – what could I tell them? I haven’t heard from you for days.”
“Well, here I am again.”
Mimì promptly seized the opportunity to grasp her hand and quote some Hölderlin in his habitual whisper. The Dobermann at his feet pricked its ears.
Poldi made no comment, either on the quotation or its sequel, a kiss on the hand. She turned to Russo. “Who’s getting married?”
“My eldest daughter.”
“Oh?” Poldi had genuinely thought Russo younger than he was. “I mean, how wonderful. You must be very proud.”
Russo’s smile was noncommittal. “The man’s an idiot. A dentist from Florence, and like all Tuscans he hates us Sicilians. But what the hell: Stella loves him.”
“There’s going to be a big party tonight,” said Valérie, turning to Poldi. “Would you like to come?”
“No thanks, not if it’s a family occasion.”
Valérie gave Russo a meaningful look.
“It isn’t as family as all that,” he said. “I’d be delighted if you could make it, Signora Poldi. You’re warmly invited.”
“I shall keep a place beside me free for you, Donna Isolde,” whispered Mimì.
“God Almighty,” Poldi exclaimed when she told me about the episode a month later. “I was in a real bind. If I refused, Russo would be offended. Why? Because – get this – you can decline any invitation except a wedding invitation. But if I accepted, I’d be landed with Mimì the whole evening. Plus Hölderlin. And anyway, how was I to get through a wedding party sober? On the other hand, I told myself, this might be my one chance to penetrate the inner circle of the organization, if you know what I mean?”
“It would also,” Russo added, “be a good opportunity to bury the memory of our unpleasant former encounters once and for all.”
“In that case,” Poldi said graciously, “I’d love to come.”
Having received a signal that the photographer was through, Russo took his leave of Valérie with a friendly kiss on both cheeks.
Poldi waited for Mimì to leave too, but it didn’t even seem to cross his mind. Unwilling to depart without settling the matter of the phone call, she broached the subject with her usual subtlety.
“Tell me, Valérie, where were you the evening before Valentino was murdered?”
Mimì, who was patting Hölderlin, did not appear to be listening.
Valérie didn’t even blink. She merely gave a little sigh.
“Your boyfriend the commissario asked me the same question yesterday.”
“He isn’t my boyfriend.”
“Mon Dieu, Poldi, what is all this? I didn’t call Valentino – I already told the commissario that.”
“It’s true, Donna Isolde,” Mimì chimed in. “I was here the whole time.”
“It was the day after the dinner at Mimì’s,” Valérie added. “I wanted to invite you over, but I couldn�
��t get hold of you.”
“Yes, I was a bit below par that day,” muttered Poldi, remembering her fall from grace after the ghastly Hölderlin evening. “Who else was with you?”
“Russo dropped in with Patanè in tow to make me an offer.”
“What sort of offer?”
Valérie exchanged a glance with Mimì. “He’s after the house and grounds, of course. He offered me a million.”
“You don’t say.”
Valérie laughed and made a dismissive gesture. “He could offer me ten million and I wouldn’t sell. The two of them soon left. I told the commissario all this as well. Mon Dieu, Poldi, you don’t seriously think I murdered Valentino?”
Now it was Poldi’s turn to sigh. “Who knows? Perhaps you were jealous of Herr Tannenberger.”
“Who’s that, and why should I have been jealous of him?”
“Or Valentino tried to sell your lion back to you, and you didn’t want to pay.”
“Aha. So I naturally took my lupara, shot him in cold blood and dragged him down to the beach. All by myself, and all because of a stone figure. Mon Dieu.”
Mimì said nothing, just continued to fondle his Dobermann and contemplate Poldi’s perplexity. He might have been looking at a cute but bedraggled mongrel puppy he couldn’t help. Or wouldn’t.
Poldi knew from Montana that it had only been a short phone call, barely two minutes. She also knew Valérie’s phone, which she was forever misplacing somewhere in the house, an antiquated model with big keys and an asthmatic battery that kept running out. This didn’t worry Valérie, because she generally used her mobile for making calls. Poldi had persuaded Montana to disclose that Valérie’s mobile number had not appeared in Valentino’s list of calls.
It was quite possible, therefore, that someone in the house had spoken with Valentino unobserved, especially as the doors were usually left unlocked. Even when they weren’t, most people knew there was a spare key beneath the little plaster Madonna in the votive niche beside the front door. Valérie wasn’t afraid of burglars. She had once told Poldi that Femminamorta was a place charged with positive energy. My aunt, who knew a thing or two about positive energy, had needed no convincing of that.
“All the same,” she told me several weeks later, when explaining her train of thought, “I couldn’t help wondering why anyone else would have used Valérie’s phone. Explanation A: he or she didn’t want to use their own mobile because they already planned to kill Valentino. Explanation B: he or she doesn’t own a mobile. Are you with me?”
“You bet,” I said. “So that ruled Valérie out.”
“Whoa. Positive energy or not, once suspicion has you by the scruff of the neck, you don’t shake it off so easily. An investigator must never exclude the possibility of an Explanation C; that’s just the tricky part.”
My aunt suspected that she’d been thoroughly bamboozled, and bitter personal experience had taught her a thing or two about that as well. On the other hand, she had no wish to lose a friend. She never wanted to lose anyone she’d taken to her heart.
“Do you remember where the telephone was that afternoon?”
“I know it was lying on the chest of drawers in the passage when I went to bed that night. But the battery was flat again.”
“You remember that, do you?”
Valérie shrugged her shoulders. “It’s always flat.”
After a moment’s thought, Poldi made two decisions. First, not to let mistrust poison their friendship, and, secondly, not to be bamboozled any more.
“Will you still take me with you to the wedding party?”
“Why even ask?”
“I mean, because I suspected you just now.”
“But it’s your job.”
“My job?”
“Mon Dieu, Poldi, you’re a detective now. You can’t rule anyone out. It’s hard on your friends, but you’re faithfully obeying the call of justice. How does that sound?”
Poldi hadn’t looked at it like that before.
“Lousy. But you’re right.”
Anyone who heaves a pensive sigh at the idea of a Sicilian wedding and pictures Dolce & Gabbana models of all ages seated over pasta and wine at a long table in an olive grove, happily singing and playing mandolins while the newlyweds dance a passionate tarantella, has never attended any such function. Poldi hadn’t either, so the reality hit her like a punch in the solar plexus. A Sicilian wedding takes the following form: umpteen guests assemble in a sala di ricevimento, usually some barn of a multifunctional building with a tiled floor, where they sit on plastic chairs and eat immoderately for hours on end. That’s the prime essential. For drink there’ll be one bottle of wine per table, and that’s enough because, as already mentioned, Sicilians don’t drink much. They make up for that by eating, and that they do without a break. Meanwhile, the young newly-weds sit by themselves at a table of their own with a view of the whole wretched proceedings, which are over by eleven-thirty at the latest. Music? Only from the band, if any. Dancing? No way. High jinks? Forget it. A Sicilian wedding is about as amusing as detention. Its sole object is to impress the friends of the bridal pair’s parents and, more especially, their business associates, by filling them to the gunwales with food. Only when they can’t say “phew” any more is that mission accomplished. The bella figura principle applies here too. The last thing anyone wants is to look like they’re hard up, like business is bad and the future anything but rosy, even if the general economic situation says otherwise. One gauge of the parents’ prosperity is the bomboniera presented to each guest by the bridal pair: little china, glass or even silver containers produced in a wide range of prices by an industry of its own and filled with white sugared almonds, these being the traditional talismans at Italian weddings. From a sober, Protestant point of view, of course, they’re the worst kind of superfluous kitsch. One must, however, adopt an oriental mode of thought, for the bomboniera, like the bride, is a sweet thing robed in splendour. And that’s the whole point: what the bridal pair are sharing with all their guests is something wholly useless and, depending on one’s point of view, tasteless but nonetheless sweet: love.
Poldi understood this, of course, but it did nothing to lift her spirits that night as she opened and shut the lid of her expensive silver bomboniera and watched Russo jovially nudge dignitaries in the ribs, crack jokes, dispense kisses and simultaneously keep an eye on some three hundred wedding guests. His ex-wife and her new husband were the only people he seemed to ignore to the best of his ability, and they repaid him in kind.
Recalling the Uncle Martino rule of thumb – physical stature – for gauging whether or not a man belonged to the Mafia, Poldi surmised that all the male guests under five foot three in height were members of Russo’s organization: contract killers, extortioners, consiglieri, bone-breakers, protection racketeers, purveyors of bribes, lion stealers, drug couriers, money launderers and crooked attorneys. She imagined that Russo was murmuring instructions, whispering warnings and delivering verdicts. Anyone who wasn’t an insider at least knew the score and looked the other way, sealing his lips and shutting his ears – or so Poldi imagined. She wasn’t frightened. It gave her a kind of grim satisfaction to be sitting there as the only steadfast champion of justice.
“And,” she confessed to me later, “I must admit it gave me a certain kick.”
Poldi caught Russo’s eye from time to time, and she realized that the father of the bride was keeping her under observation. Either her or Valérie, who was sitting beside her, chatting to Mimì and Carmela about family matters.
Russo had had the interior of Torre Archirafi’s derelict mineral-water bottling plant decorated for the occasion and transformed into an artificial olive grove with trees from his nursery. That could have been quite atmospheric, had the olive trees not been standing in black plastic tubs, had plastic furniture not been enlisted yet again, and if Russo had staged the whole thing in the open air or at least dispensed with neon lighting. No wonder Poldi was once mor
e beset by melancholy memories to such an extent that she did, after all, drink a glass or two of wine. She didn’t have to drive.
“I couldn’t stop thinking of the time I got married to your Uncle Peppe,” Poldi told me when I was back with her again in September. “We didn’t invite the family, just our hundred best friends, and we partied in the big covered market at the stall belonging to Giovanni, Peppe’s special buddy. It was in the early eighties, and – not that this’ll mean anything to you – we used to listen to Prince and the Police, so Prince and Sting were played as a matter of course. The Spider Murphy Gang played ‘Skandal im Sperrbezirk’, but also ‘Roxanne’ and ‘Purple Rain’. And everyone got drunk and smoked pot and laughed and sang and danced and screwed in the loo till noon the next day. And the next night we started all over again. That’s a proper wedding for you. It’s simply a question of showing respect for love.”
That was why Poldi had given the bridal pair a special present, which she handed them between the first and second main courses: Oshun, the Bantu fertility goddess, an ebony figurine with short legs, a swollen belly, little coloured chains around its neck and huge breasts proffered to the beholder in both hands. Not tourist trash but a genuine antique, at least two hundred years old. The young couple, who had no idea who the woman in the wig and red dress was, thanked her politely and deposited her bizarre gift discreetly beneath the table, where they forgot it at the end of the evening. I’m not superstitious, but I like to imagine that a young cleaner found the figure later and took it home with her, and that she was soon afterwards blessed with a happy marriage, several healthy children and lifelong prosperity.
But to revert to the wedding party, where the second main course was being served: sarde a beccafico, baked sardine rolls stuffed with a paste made of breadcrumbs, olive oil, pecorino, parsley and pine kernels. They’re delicious and look small and innocuous. Most people would bust a gut after three, but the wedding guests shovelled mountains of them onto their plates. The general mood couldn’t have been better.
Except in Patanè’s case. He was sitting morosely with his equally morose-looking wife at one of the outermost tables – in other words, not in pole position, socially speaking. Poldi saw him make repeated attempts to attract Russo’s attention, but his host stubbornly ignored them.
Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions Page 17
