Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna

by Mario Giordano

  I forbore to comment.

  Meanwhile, the two carabinieri were muttering requests for instructions from headquarters into their car radio and keeping a sharp eye on my aunt the whole time.

  “Boys,” she said, “I don’t mean to nag, but there’s a dead body up there. You need to notify forensics. Above all, you need to notify the Polizia di Stato. Commissario Montana is already on his way from Acireale.”

  “Who?”

  “Why the Polizia di Stato?”

  “After all, we’re here.”

  The two carabinieri exchanged a puzzled glance, as if to reassure themselves that they really were there, then reverted to the business at hand.

  “Where exactly is this body?”

  Poldi got off the Vespa with a sigh. Madonna, how old she was feeling! And tired, very tired.

  “I’ll lead the way, okay?”

  She didn’t get far, for just then she heard a siren. A navy-blue Alfa Romeo came roaring up the hill and skidded to a stop right beside the gate, closely followed by a Polizia di Stato patrol car with blue lights flashing. The carabinieri flinched like gazelles that have just spotted a pride of lions in the grassy savanna.

  Out of the blue Alfa stepped a worried and grumpy commissario, every square inch of whose no longer youthful body my Auntie Poldi had spent recent weeks exploring with a positively Humboldtian taste for adventure. The patrol car behind him proved to contain two old acquaintances: Pippo Zannotta, a pot-bellied, mustachioed inspector, and Marco Console, a very young, baby-faced constable. It was they who had interrogated Poldi on the beach at Praiola some weeks earlier, when she had found Valentino with his face blown away with a sawn-off shotgun. No matter. Pippo and Marco eyed their colleagues from the competition in a way that instantly chilled the air several degrees, and the carabinieri stiffened. Like elementary particles with a different polarity, all four guardians of the law were spoiling for a fight.

  Pippo and Marco recognised my aunt immediately, Poldi having since become a kind of local celebrity. They nodded to her as to a colleague, and drew themselves up behind Montana like bodyguards. Montana himself did not at first deign to glance at his Bavarian companion on so many stormy nocturnal voyages.

  As ever when on duty, he was wearing his crumpled grey suit and a white shirt, and on this occasion the Indian necktie with decorative Lurex motifs from the Ramayana, which Poldi had recently bought him at a fair-trade shop. She thought it went well with his olive-wood complexion, his greying beard and moustache and his scowling green eyes, which at certain nocturnal moments could open wide and regard her with astonishment, as if they had just witnessed a revelation of some kind. It has to be said that my aunt always liked those moments when she herself was surfing back to the shores of reality on a billow of bliss. She liked everything about Montana: his perspicacity, his sarcasm, his way of mashing out half-smoked cigarettes in the ashtray like criminals under arrest, and the reverent delicacy with which he devoured marzipan cherries. Whenever Montana looked at her, my Auntie Poldi promptly experienced a painful itch all over her body, as if she were being enveloped in a tickly web of yearning and desire that Montana alone could tear asunder with his shapely, purposeful hands. Her words, I should point out, not mine. But her pleasure at seeing Montana became mingled at once with something else: uneasiness at being in hot water.

  He looked tired, she thought. Tired, pale, dishevelled and irate—not a good sign. He looked like a man who, after a hard day’s work exacerbated by incompetent idiots, has had to spend the entire night hammering out personal relationship problems with the aid of too little wine and too many cigarettes.

  The image of the gazelles and the lions may have been a bit laboured, I grant you, but—as my Auntie Poldi always says—“restraint is a sign of weakness” in the first place, and second, Montana made an undeniable impression on the uniformed duo despite his less than gigantic stature.

  “Who are you?” Blue Eyes snapped bravely, but that was as far as it went.

  Montana held his ID under the carabinieri’s noses. “I ask the questions. What are you doing here?”

  Montana’s ID plus the don’t-mess-with-me look in his eyes did not fail in their effect.

  “We were here first,” Green Eyes said defiantly. He pointed to Poldi. “She called us. She’s . . . German.”

  He spoke as if that explained everything, including climate change, the euro crisis and the tribulations of the Sicilian soul.

  Montana turned his lovely green eyes on Poldi for the first time. But the colour of a person’s eyes is not the colour of the expression in them, and Montana’s expression wasn’t green, it was thunderstorm grey. My aunt raised her hands in submission.

  He shook his head in bewilderment, then readdressed himself to the carabinieri. “All right, you can piss off now.”

  “But we were here first.”

  “Where’s the body?”

  “Somewhere up in the vineyard. So she says.”

  “So why are you dingbats still standing here?”

  “Uh . . . because we had to question the suspect?”

  “Have I got this straight? Someone informs you that there’s a dead body in the vicinity, and you promptly arrest her for murder?”

  “We’re only going by the book.”

  Poldi could tell that Montana’s bile was about to overflow—or his magma, to remain in Sicily’s volcanic world of imagery—and that an eruption of Pompeian dimensions, complete with pyroclastic flow and all the trimmings, was imminent. Pippo and Marco, smirking in the background, were also waiting for their boss to tear the carabinieri to pieces, devour them and regurgitate a few pellets of dark blue uniform. Poldi didn’t want it to come to that. She was sick of the performance anyway, so she got off her Vespa. She felt like greeting Montana with a kiss, but she restrained herself. Thin ice. The man was on duty, after all, and could not be allowed to look foolish in front of those Carabinieri muppets, so she simply walked over to the gate.

  “Stop squabbling, boys. I’ll take you there.”

  Poldi half expected that Madame Sahara had recovered from, say, a fainting fit, got dazedly to her feet and left the vineyard, suffering from a slight residual headache. She couldn’t resist the idea, because the truth is, we all think of ourselves and our nearest and dearest as immortal until the time comes, and even then we wrangle with fate and hope that dead doesn’t mean dead—that there’s such a thing as half dead, almost dead, more or less dead. Scope for negotiation, in other words.

  The fact was, however, that Madame Sahara was still lying amid the Nerello Mascalese vines just as Poldi had found her. Except that she wasn’t alone any more. When Poldi trudged up the hill with her retinue of uniformed naivety and chief inspectorial grouchiness, Achille Avola was standing beside the body wearing jeans and a well-worn T-shirt, his hair as ruffled as if he had received an electric shock. On catching sight of my aunt and the policemen, he stepped back quickly.

  Montana flashed his ID. “And who are you?”

  “This is my vineyard,” Avola replied, as if the dead woman had been trying to dispossess him of it. “I just got out of bed . . . My God, what happened?”

  Montana signed to Pippo to check Avola’s personal particulars and instructed the carabinieri to go up to the house, seal off the immediate vicinity of the crime scene and wait for forensics. This struck the carabinieri as acceptable, although they disliked taking orders from the competition. The sight of the dead clairvoyant appeared to have upset the two young men, however. They looked positively relieved to be able to toddle off up the hill like two puppies no longer compelled to “Sit!” Montana concentrated on the corpse. He pulled on latex gloves, knelt down and examined the dead woman from every angle. He spotted the exposed palm and the inscription on it. He felt the head wound and scanned the footprints round about. Rising with a grunt, he made a brief call to headquarters and then turned to my aunt.

  “When did you find her?”

  “Just over an hour ago. I called
you right away.”

  “Somebody opened her fingers post-mortem. Was it you?”

  Lying was pointless.

  “Er, yes.”

  Montana growled a Sicilian oath that associated the Virgin Mary with something unsavoury.

  “What were you doing here, anyway?”

  “Last night . . . well, I wasn’t really fit to drive, so Signor Avola was kind enough to offer me a bed at his house. And earlier on, when I was catching a breath of fresh air, that’s when I found her.”

  “I see. And you recognised Madame Sahara at once.”

  “Her name was Giuliana. I only met her yesterday. We were introduced by Achille—Signor Avola, I mean.”

  Montana skirted the corpse and came over to my aunt. He got so close he needed to do little more than whisper—so close that Poldi could smell the cologne she had often smelt on herself in the mornings.

  “Pin your ears back, Poldi. I don’t want to have to worm everything out of you. You’re now going to tell me exactly what’s been going on. Why you were here yesterday, what you noticed and how you came to find the body. I want to know everything, every last little detail, is that clear?”

  That was what Poldi was afraid of.

  “But what if a few, er, details escape me?” she replied meekly.

  “Details of what magnitude?”

  “Well . . . like the whole of last night?”

  There was nothing to be done, though. Montana insisted on a complete report, so Poldi gave him as detailed an account as she could. He didn’t interrupt her once, just smoked, but she saw the furrow between his eyebrows grow steadily deeper. It might have been a continental divide reshaping the globe.

  “Give my colleagues a description of the dowser,” he growled when Poldi had ended her account. “You can make a formal deposition at headquarters. We’ll discuss the other matter later.” He heeled his cigarette and turned without further comment to Avola, who had been fidgeting nervously a few feet away. “Show me the winery. We’ll talk up there.”

  “Do you still need me?” Poldi called after him.

  “Do as you please” was Montana’s sole response.

  5

  Tells of jealousy, remorse and wine. Poldi gains some new recruits and receives help from still, deep waters, but she also grasps that the shit has hit the fan and doesn’t want to lose Montana because of “it.” Although he has no wish to discuss their relationship, he comes out with a surprise that gives Poldi a great deal to think about.

  Montana’s jealousy affected my Auntie Poldi even more than the heat, her thirst, showers of ash and her throbbing tooth. Although she generally ploughed her way through life regardless and cared little whose nose she put out of joint, she was a fundamentally sensitive person. Furthermore, she was—believe it or not—a faithful soul. When she gave her heart, she did so unreservedly, without a money-back guarantee or insurance cover. She accepted the fact that this could abruptly end in tears, as witness what had happened in Tanzania. Poldi was just not made for compromises, for the grey areas of life, for rear-view mirrors, loopholes or get-out clauses. In affairs of the heart she gave herself and everything she possessed—absolutely. The only trouble was, she could sometimes be derailed by a weakness for dashing traffic cops, pregnant Adam’s apples, well-toned forearms and an occasional glass too many. She castigated herself on the way back to Torre Archirafi for that and for her one-night stand with Avola. There was zero possibility that she had ended up in his bed without having it off with him, and Montana seemed to have sensed this right away.

  “I mean,” Poldi told me some weeks later, “the man’s a detective chief inspector and a Sicilian to boot. That means he has an inbuilt radar for lies and concealment. And for women. That’s because jealousy, like everything else, was invented in Sicily—invented in 1538 by a certain Principe Ignazio di Uzeda.”

  “Eh?” I interjected.

  “Just checking to see if you were listening. Okay, back to Vito. However much of an animal he is in bed—and he is, I must say—he can naturally sniff out rival alpha males. He simply sensed that I’d, well, done it with Achille.”

  “It?” I said, a trifle stung by her little attention check. “Why so coy all of a sudden? It isn’t like you. Why not say you had great sex together? Why not say you tore off each other’s clothes, licked each other from head to foot and screwed each other with such abandon that Etna choked on its own magma in awe?”

  Poldi stared at me, her expression conveying anger, surprise and pity in quick succession. “I can tell you’re hurting and uptight deep inside, and my down-to-earth ways have been too much for you. I’m sorry, okay? You don’t have to say anything, I can sense it. I used the word ‘it’ because it’s a wild card, so to speak. Because there’s still a big black hole in my memory, understand? I wasn’t myself at all, that’s why I said ‘it.’ Wait a while. You’ll understand when you hear what I found out later. You’d sooner say ‘it’ yourself if you were in my place. An unresolved variable in the equation, you follow?”

  “I’m sorry, Poldi.”

  “Okay, let’s forget it.”

  “Tell me something: when are you going to introduce me to your friend Valérie?”

  “Oh sure, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I mean, hey, what’s the objection?”

  Poldi gave me that “Oh yeah?” look which girls since the Stone Age have mastered by the time they’re eleven. “Well, do you or don’t you want to know how the case progressed?”

  What had happened to Poldi in the preceding twenty hours would be called by an airline press officer “a fatal combination of circumstances,” and by the man in the street “a can of worms.” In Poldi’s case, it would usually have provided the ingredients for a right royal fit of depression followed by a plunge into the arms of Signor Bacardi. She hadn’t even the strength to fill the empty jerrycan at the public taps or sweep up the inches-thick layer of ash in front of her house or on the roof terrace. She simply wanted to get drunk and fall asleep in the hope that total inebriation would put an end to the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Poldi was in full Hamlet mode. But then she remembered her magical encounter with the buzzard and her promise.

  To take her mind off her impending tête-à-tête with Montana and concentrate on essentials, Poldi began by playing a Zucchero hit at full volume and on repeat. It was just what she needed to fortify her morale. Then she rinsed off the ashes and her hangover under the shower, scented herself liberally, put on a comfortable caftan and treated herself to a wheat beer. According to my Auntie Poldi, nothing perks you up better after a solid night’s boozing than a decent wheat beer, if only because it regulates the pH level in your blood.

  In a recent issue of La Sicilia, which Poldi fished out of the waste paper, she found a photograph of Elisa Puglisi, the murdered district attorney. She carefully soaked the Polifemo label off a bottle and printed a pixellated photo of Madame Sahara from the Internet. Then she pinned the two photos on either side of the wine label to the corkboard on her bedroom wall, which she used during investigations. A photograph of poisoned Lady, already there, she moved down a little, and a print of Russo’s topographic map joined it. Last came an index card inscribed Etnarosso and a bold question mark—and ecco là! All in all, an informative picture, Poldi thought. A picture that allowed of no conclusion other than that the murders of Elisa Puglisi and Madame Sahara were connected, and connected via Achille Avola’s vineyard. And Russo was behind it all somehow.

  Satisfied with herself and her investigative progress, fortified by Zucchero and splendidly refreshed by a wheat beer, she pursued various inquiries into Etnarosso on the Internet, consumed a slice of Thursday’s cold roast pork, watered the plants in the courtyard with what was left in the jerrycan, and then did what had recently become a favourite habit of hers: she went to Sunday Mass.

  “I’ve never been devout,” she explained later, before I could query this in surprise, because I knew tha
t Poldi harboured a fundamental aversion to the Church. “I’m spiritual but not devout, know what I mean? I’ve never had much time for the Church. The mere thought of it infuriates me. The males-only organisations, the pope, the original-sin malarkey, the inhibited cult of the Virgin Mary, the false promises of redemption, the proselytism, the misogyny, the daft words of the psalms and hymns. Mind you, I’ve always liked the tunes. I always enjoyed chanting in the ashram, you know. I screwed every hippie in the temple of that Kali sect in Nevada, I’ve meditated in Buddhist monasteries, and I believe in reincarnation and karma and all that, likewise in people’s essential goodness. I don’t know if there’s a god and if he’s got something against sex and unbelievers, but I can’t help it, I’m Catholic. It’s like malaria: once you’ve got it you never get rid of it, and sooner or later you go and make peace with it.”

  But this was only half the explanation for her regular churchgoing of late. In the first place, she had become friendly with Padre Paolo, who chain-smoked and cheated at gin rummy, and second, for all her dislike of the institution itself, Poldi liked churches. And she had a particularly soft spot for the little church of Santa Maria del Rosario in Torre Archirafi.

  Outwardly, it was an altogether unremarkable chunk of a building right beside the sea, with narrow windows and two squat towers. In order to summon people to Mass, Padre Paolo, never hostile to modernity, had supplemented the two out-of-tune bells with loudspeakers installed in the towers, which blared out apocalyptic Bach cantatas, operatic arias and pop songs several times a day, at full blast and completely distorted.

  In other words, it was a typical Italian fishermen’s church, originally designed more as a multifunctional sea defence and unworthy of a pit stop on a sightseeing tour. Or so one might think. In reality, however, its stout volcanic rock walls housed a unique baroque jewel. Another rule to be observed in Sicily: never be fooled by an unprepossessing exterior or superficial blemishes. What applies to fruit applies equally to churches: outward dilapidation and discoloration always give promise of inner splendour, delicacy and sweetness, though only to the observant.