Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna

by Mario Giordano

  “I thought the Mafia didn’t have anything to do with Valentino’s death.”

  “Not directly, but Italo Russo was behind it indirectly. And he, I tell you,” she whispered, “is a capo mafioso, a boss of bosses.”

  “Which you can prove.”

  She gave me a pitying look. “I’m still at the very start of my investigations, but I’ve got a nose for Mafiosi, arch-capitalistic bloodsuckers and dog murderers. It’s an instinct of mine.”

  Poldi could not be weaned of the idea that Lady’s death and the sabotaging of the water supply had only one purpose: to intimidate her.

  “It’s nearly broken Valérie’s heart, and poor little Oscar is down in the dumps. He howls and pines for Lady all day long.”

  “But why was only Lady poisoned, not him as well?” I asked.

  “I wondered that right away, because the pair were inseparable. So what’s the only logical answer?”

  “Er . . .”

  “It’s that Lady was murdered deliberately, of course. And why did the killer pick on Lady and not Oscar? Because she was female. Because the message was aimed at me, get it?”

  “Isn’t that a bit far-fet—”

  A brusquely dismissive gesture. “And if I don’t catch the bastard very soon, poor Oscar will also be for the chop, believe you me. Anyway, I’ve already conducted some preliminary investigations.”

  I got the picture at last. “You mean your hunting instinct has been aroused, eh?”

  “My, we’re adjusting to the same wavelength. You’re slowly catching on. Benvenuto in Sicilia.”

  No doubt about it, Poldi had tasted blood. She’d heard the call of her father’s genes and was prepared, like Detective Chief Inspector Oberreiter before her, to tread her predestined path: criminology and the pursuit of justice. The only trouble was, there hadn’t been another actual murder in the neighbourhood. This, combined with the heat and lack of water and her toothache, was resulting in violent thirst, dire fits of depression and a kind of criminological cold turkey, a withdrawal symptom to which—according to my Auntie Poldi—retired and suspended detectives are particularly prone. Imagine a superbrain functioning at full throttle and someone suddenly pulls the plug. It really can’t be good.

  “I mean, no top-level athlete can stop training from one day to the next, their heart couldn’t take it. They’d go phut. It’s the same with detectives’ brains when there’s nothing to detect. They’re like dogs with nothing to chase and worry to death. They’ll wind up mauling your sweater. Or, as a last resort, some child’s arm. So what’s left for me?”

  It turned out that, as a sort of health measure, Poldi had consequently spent the weeks since my last visit trying to prove that Russo had links with the Mafia. Unsuccessfully hitherto, and no wonder, since her only clue was the photo of a topographical map she’d seen Russo discussing with Corrado Patanè, the building contractor from Riposto. Although Poldi still hadn’t located the area in question, she was convinced that Russo had already smelt a rat and was unmistakably telling her to drop her investigation by cutting off the water and murdering Lady. If she didn’t, her Poldian logic dictated, it meant morto sicuro, or certain death.

  “But he’s got another think coming, that fine gentleman. Do I look like someone who wets her knickers just because some bighead threatens me? I’ve already looked death in the face, I tell you. I know I’m not far short of my sell-by date, but till then, my lad, I’m going to pull out all the stops, amore-wise, criminologically and in general. And when the time comes—well, I know how to leave the stage. To roars of applause, I mean.”

  My Auntie Poldi knew a thing or two about amore, criminology and death, so she embarked on her investigation of the Lady case with total professionalism. In other words, no one was above suspicion.

  She descended on Femminamorta in her dark blue trouser suit, which pinched in places, like a cleansing tsunami breaking on a dirty, jetsam-strewn beach.

  “Weren’t you a bit too hot in a trouser suit?” I asked. “I mean, in this sweltering heat?”

  “Nonsense! It was a must. Why? Because a blue trouser suit is the ideal no-joking-matter look for any woman who’s negotiating contracts or arresting or dating idiots of every description. In American crime series they’re always worn by grouchy, ponytailed women detectives, know the type I mean? They aren’t your type, of course. They’ve no sense of humour. One false word and wham, you’re flat on the ground with a knee in the crotch, and click go the handcuffs.”

  “The trouser suit plus that wig of yours. No joking matter, I get it.”

  Poldi sighed and shook her head reprovingly.

  “Well, what did Valérie say?” I asked, to nudge her back on track.

  “What do you think?”

  “Mon dieu!” Valérie clapped a hand over her mouth as Poldi, panting and perspiring, flopped down on one of the plastic garden chairs so violently that the seams of her old trouser suit creaked. “You mean everyone’s under suspicion, including me?”

  “Not you, Valérie, of course not.” Sighing, Poldi opened her notebook—a recent gift from Uncle Martino—with a flourish.

  It was the kind FBI types always carry on TV, although Martino realised that the private eye in his favourite crime series never needed a notebook in order to register anything. But the PI was a criminological genius, whereas Poldi . . . Uncle Martino wasn’t so sure about her, if only because of her drinking.

  I have to confess that Poldi’s descriptions of Femminamorta—and, more especially, of Valérie—had ignited my imagination with a vengeance. I pictured the old country house, with its pink, jasmine- and bougainvillea-covered walls and dusty interior, its ancient library, faded photographs and crumbling frescos, palm grove and overgrown garden, as an enchanted place where time had stood still—a little paradise, haunted by the ghosts of Bourbon noblemen, where friendly mongrels romped around and destinies were fulfilled. And presiding in the midst of it—or so I imagined, usually at night—was Valérie, as pale and complicated and sensual and ravishingly beautiful as a girl in a French film noir. But although Femminamorta was less than five minutes from Torre Archirafi by car, Poldi seemed disinclined to share this new friend and her little paradise with anyone. Whenever I casually suggested accompanying her there for once, she found some threadbare pretext for leaving me behind. Although I didn’t take this amiss—I’ve several siblings, after all, so I’m no stranger to envy—my imagination redoubled its efforts to conjure up a magical place with a mysterious mistress more splendidly ethereal than Joseph Conrad or Rider Haggard could have devised. So I thought it only fair for me to incorporate Poldi’s descriptions in my shambles of a novel. Much later, when I finally got to know Valérie and Femminamorta, I found they fitted her descriptions to a tee.

  Valérie had wrapped the little dog’s body in a silk cloth and laid it out beside the old, disused wine press, where it was dark and quiet. A good resting place for little Lady, who had had to endure so much pain at the end of her far too short life, for according to the veterinario, she must have expired in agony. He put the time of death at around 3 a.m. There was no trace of any poisoned bait near the spot in the courtyard where Lady had been found several hours later.

  So Poldi did not believe that Lady had ingested the bait in the courtyard, but that she had been deliberately left there later on. And that, according to her logic, precisely accorded with the motive for the killing. On the other hand, she was well aware that nothing endangered the success of an investigation more than jumping to premature conclusions. Rather than excluding any possibility, therefore, she resolved to begin by exploring all lines of inquiry and assemble facts in a strictly objective and professional manner.

  “Did Lady have any enemies?” Poldi asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “I mean, was there anyone who disliked her? Someone she may have nipped or growled at when startled? An inveterate dog hater, perhaps?”

  “Mon dieu, no!”

  Poldi made a note. “D
id anything happen yesterday? Anything unusual?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Think carefully. Any detail could be important.”

  “No.”

  Another note.

  Professional at work.

  “When did you last see Lady?”

  “About nine o’clock last night. I fed both the dogs in the courtyard. I could hear them for a while after that because they were squabbling over a rubber toy that kept on squeaking.”

  Another note. “And then?”

  Valérie shook her head.

  Poldi closed her notebook. “In that case, I’d now like to question your guests.”

  “Mon dieu, is that really necessary?”

  Valérie had inherited Femminamorta from her father, a descendant of the Sicilian landed nobility. She operated a palm-tree nursery on the small property, which after several generations of profligacy, ignorance and mismanagement represented all that remained of a once-extensive family estate. This being far from enough to cover Valérie’s running costs, she additionally and not entirely officially ran a small B and B and let her numerous empty bedrooms to guests, whom she regaled with an unconventional breakfast comprising coffee, toast, biscuits, fresh avocados, cloyingly sweet French preserves, and stories of her family.

  All the surrounding land was owned by Italo Russo, whom Poldi had it in for and thought capable of any atrocity. Russo, too, raised palm trees, but on a far bigger scale. Not just palm trees, either, but olive, lemon and orange trees, bougainvilleas, strelitzias and oleanders, for supplying to hotels and the owners of sizeable properties. Piante Russo was a nurseryman’s empire, but my aunt saw it as an ever-expanding pestilence that threatened to absorb Femminamorta as well.

  “Because that,” she told me once, “would be the final triumph of an unscrupulous upstart over the degenerate aristocracy.”

  I never discovered whether all Russo really wanted was Valérie herself. It would have been understandable enough despite their difference in age, but Valérie always firmly denied it, and after all that happened subsequently, I too have my doubts. On the other hand, I can’t imagine anyone desiring a piece of jewellery without the jewel. But to revert to Poldi’s investigation . . .

  “Tell me about your guests,” she said.

  “They’re Germans,” Valérie replied. “But—mon dieu!—absolutely delizioso!”

  For Valérie, like Poldi, happiness possessed a simple binary structure, and the whole of human existence was suspended between two relatively distant poles. Between heaven and hell, love and ignorance, responsibility and recklessness, splendour and scuzz, the essential and the dispensable. And within this dual cosmic structure there existed only two kinds of people: the deliziosi and the spaventosi, the charming and the frightful. Rule of thumb: house guests, friends and dogs are always deliziosi, the rest are spaventosi. At least until they prove otherwise.

  “You see,” Poldi told me once, “Valérie has understood that happiness is a simple equation. Happiness equals reality minus expectation. If you don’t expect too much, you’re less disappointed and happier quicker, get it? The converse is only logical: if you do expect too much . . .” She looked at me. “But I’ve no need to tell you that.”

  My Auntie Poldi was an expert at boosting one’s self-confidence.

  However, the deliziosi claimed to have heard and seen nothing, nor could Turi and Mario, who tended Femminamorta’s palm cuttings, contribute more to the investigation than an expression of their sorrow at Lady’s death.

  Doris was the éminence grise of a five-strong party of German deliziosi, former schoolmistresses from Bad Cannstatt on an educational trip, who had occupied nearly all the vacant rooms in Femminamorta for the past three days. They were led by a retired headmaster from Filderstadt, but, to repeat, Doris generally ruled the roost. An athletic sixty-nine-year-old clad in sensible clothes and hiking boots, she had keen eyes and a firm sense of how the world should be run—and a dead dog wasn’t going to upset her world order unduly. Although the other four deliziosi were less athletic, they likewise sported sensible clothes and rucksacks as if about to venture into the heart of darkness. At Valérie’s request, the little party and their tour guide had duly assembled in the garden, where Poldi was to interrogate them.

  Poldi had grasped at once that these deliziosi represented a genuine challenge to her criminological neutrality and kind-heartedness.

  “You mean because they were anoraks?” I interjected when she brought me up to date on the evening of my arrival. I don’t know what got into me—I may have been hoping for a smidgen of understanding—but, to quote Poldi herself, happiness equals reality minus expectation.

  To judge by her look of reproof, I was a puppy that had still to grasp the simplest order to “Sit!” “Rubbish!” she exclaimed. “People who call other people anoraks are anoraks themselves. I mean, it isn’t a question of fashion or taste or life choices.”

  “So what is it a question of?”

  “The shadows of the past! I realised in a flash that this Doris was just the sort of know-it-all and pessimist that has haunted and harassed me all my life.”

  I was gobsmacked.

  “But, er . . .” I struggled for words. “You shouldn’t care about such things. I mean, you’re . . .”

  “Now you’re talking like Teresa.” She sighed. “Yes, of course I shouldn’t care, but I do, don’t you see? It’s what’s called a backstory wound—make a note of that for your novel. Without a backstory wound your characters will be nothing more than puppets. Whether in life or in a novel, each of us is haunted by a shadow that keeps whispering, ‘Don’t become like me and you’ll be better off!’ You can’t help this, and you certainly can’t choose your own shadow. Where I’m concerned”—Poldi grabbed my half-empty bottle of beer—“I’ve been haunted all my life by a Doris. Prosit, namaste, kiss my ass!”

  Criminologically speaking, therefore, Poldi was virtually marking time, and that rather worried her.

  “And in other respects?” I said, to change the subject. “How’s it going with Montana?”

  “Between the sheets, you mean, or in general?”

  “In general will do me for now.”

  “Well, it’s complicated.” She cleared her throat. “He’s jealous.”

  “Er . . . who of?”

  “Of my criminological successes, of course. And also”—she hummed and hawed—“well, of Achille.”

  Typical Auntie Poldi. I was stunned.

  “Which Achille would that be?”

  “Like another beer? A panino, perhaps?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “And don’t bully me. I’m getting on a bit and I’m still your aunt, which means I deserve some respect.”

  There was a brief silence. Then, with a groan, she heaved herself off the sofa, toddled into the kitchen without further comment and returned carrying a bottle of red wine, which she plonked down on the table in front of me.

  “Thanks, but no.” I made a dismissive gesture.

  “It’s to look at, not to drink. Don’t you notice anything?”

  I scrutinised the bottle. Labelled Polifemo, it was a Nerello Mascalese from Etna produced by a vineyard named Avola. Neither name meant anything to me, but I’m no wine expert. At a loss, I rotated the bottle in both hands. The label depicted a kind of map of the vineyard; the typography was probably meant to convey a classical impression but looked as if it had been doodled, just before the lunchtime break, by a student intern at a provincial advertising agency.

  “Pretty label.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Poldi beamed. “Vito said so too. Well, then I met Achille, and everything became a bit complicated.”

  2

  Tells of love at a mature age, of discontinued lines and chest hair, of ashes and wine, of dreamy places, the taste of murder weapons, and Montana and his current case. Poldi gets a brush-off and loses her temper. She chances on a preliminary clue, meets two old acquaintances and loses her
temper again. She is rescued, goes up in flames and—no, doesn’t lose her temper, just tells a white lie for which she pays soon afterwards.

  Until a few weeks earlier, Vito Montana had been morosely and rather bitterly looking forward to the end of his career as the Polizia di Stato’s chief inspector in charge of homicide cases in Acireale. Morosely because that was in the nature of the man, and bitterly because a Roman senator whose toes the cussed commissario had trodden on in the course of a murder inquiry had engineered his transfer from Milan to Sicily in order to silence him—and although Vito Montana was a native of Giarre, he detested Sicily with the fervour of a grand inquisitor. Then he made the acquaintance of my Auntie Poldi, and, in a curiously touching way, the two of them seemed destined for each other. Two slightly scratched and dented leftovers from the jumble sale of life, they had been put on sale once more by a wanton fate. Roll up, roll up, last chance to buy! On the one hand, Commissario Montana of the crumpled suits, a stocky but—by Poldi’s standards—well-built man in his late fifties, with a greying beard, green eyes and a permanent frown. A dogged detective by trade and—according to my Auntie Poldi—a sexual force of nature. And there beside him—ecco là!—my aunt herself. Only a little older, she was a glamorous, baroque apparition in her wig and Nefertiti make-up, and, booze and depression notwithstanding, still afire with joie de vivre and wholesome Bavarian passion. They made a dramatic, uneasy couple for whom “complicated” wasn’t the word. I likened them to two charged elementary particles hurled at one another at the speed of light by fate’s cyclic accelerator. In other words, they resembled my great-grandfather Barnaba and his unbearably beautiful Eleonora in the novel I’d made so little progress with in recent weeks. That had to change, and fast.

  At all events, Montana’s response to Poldi’s investigation of the Lady case was a trifle irritable.

  “Of course it’s awful about poor little Lady, but, Madonna, dogs get poisoned every day in this country. Farmers have been putting out poisoned bait to keep strays off their land since the time of the Caesars. We aren’t as sentimental about animals as you are.”