Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna

by Mario Giordano

  “Because he’d thought it was his brother, and he owed him on account of the donated kidney.”

  Montana promptly looked suspicious again.

  “How . . . ?”

  Poldi gestured dismissively. “But it wasn’t his brother either?”

  Montana sighed. “He has an alibi for the time in question. And no discernible motive.”

  Poldi thought for a moment.

  “Any news of the Puglisi case? Have you found out who the Hedgehog is?”

  He shook his head, and the frown line between his eyebrows divided his forehead into two continents.

  “That’s because you still don’t believe the two cases are connected, Vito. It’s probable that the individual who tried to kill me has Madame Sahara and Elisa Puglisi on his conscience as well.”

  “No one tried to kill you, Poldi!” snapped Montana. “There’s absolutely no evidence of that. You were hallucinating, that’s why you failed to make it round the bend.”

  “The fact that a person is paranoid doesn’t preclude them from being chased,” Poldi told him calmly. “Yes, I was hallucinating, but someone tried to kill me.” So saying, she opened the drawer of her bedside table and took out the big buff envelope Padre Paolo had recently brought her in his secret agent’s guise. She deposited it on her lap and rested both hands protectively on top. “I’m convinced of it, because it’s all in here. Why else should the appointments diary have vanished?”

  Montana said nothing, but he put out his hand.

  Poldi didn’t budge.

  “Incidentally, Vito, your name’s in here too.”

  She saw him blush. Whether with shame or anger, his poker face made it impossible to tell, but she knew she now had him over a barrel.

  “What are you implying, Poldi?”

  “I’m not implying anything. I’d simply like to know why. The bottom line is this: if you officially accept this appointments diary as a piece of evidence, you’re out of the running because it shows you’re involved—because you visited her regularly. On the other hand, these are only photocopies, so they can’t be used as evidence because I might have doctored them. Unfortunately, the murderer now has the original diary. I could, of course, relinquish these legally invalid photocopies to you unofficially. On a purely private basis.”

  Montana was breathing heavily to stop himself yelling. “Why would you do that, Poldi?”

  “Oh, because friends do each other favours. Or because friends don’t always have to ask questions.” She gave him a look of lamb-like innocence.

  Montana was a model of self-control.

  “Like what?”

  “Like why did you go and see Madame Sahara, Vito. Or how did I come to lay hands on this appointments diary.”

  “You realise you’re trying to blackmail me, Poldi.”

  Poldi’s eyes widened like those of a silent film star reacting to the entrance of a heartless villain. “Vito! The very idea!” Then, in quick succession, “Do you feel I’m blackmailing you?”

  “You’re on thin ice, Poldi,” he growled indignantly. “Very, very thin ice, believe me.”

  “In that case, let’s get off it quickly.” She replaced the envelope in the drawer.

  “Madonna, give it here,” he snarled.

  “Between friends?”

  “Yes, between friends, damn it. From one nosy, foolhardy, blackmailing, exasperating, criminally inclined friend to another.”

  Montana tried to take the envelope at last, but Poldi continued to hang on to it.

  “It’s really a question of two favours.”

  “Enough, Poldi. Stop playing games.”

  “All I want to know is what you’ve found out about Elisa Puglisi. Bring me up to date, that’s all. Where’s the harm? Look at me. Do I look like I could prejudice your investigation? An old biddy suffering from withdrawal symptoms after an attempt on her life? I’m out of the running, Vito. You’ll solve these cases by yourself. I’m curious, that’s all. Come on, do me a favour.”

  Montana didn’t believe a word of it, naturally. He drew another deep breath and at last relieved her of the envelope.

  “All right, fair enough.”

  He swiftly leafed through the photocopies, grunting occasionally but evincing no indication of whether the entries struck him as relevant in some way. When he’d finished, he replaced the photocopies in the envelope.

  “Hm, not uninteresting.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Poldi. “What do you think those big sums of money represent? Extortion, money laundering, crowdfunding?”

  Montana eyed her with a mixture of sorrow and dejection, like someone with something serious on his mind, but something he can’t avoid unloading onto someone else. Poldi, who recognised that expression, felt her blood run cold.

  “Vito?”

  “There’s something I have to tell you, Poldi,” Montana began with an audible lump in his throat. He took possession of her hand again.

  “Please don’t,” she said softly.

  Montana grimaced. He stroked her hand for a while before answering.

  “Alessia and I . . . we’re getting married. And . . . we’ll be moving to Milan. I applied to a private security service, and they’re taking me on.”

  12

  Tells of heartbreak, Prometheus and consolation prizes. Poldi chucks the case, contemplates another move and is offered a cultural programme. With the friendly assistance of Inspector Chance she encounters some old acquaintances, first in Syracuse and then in Taormina. That kind of thing revives a person’s spirits and arouses the hunting instinct. Poldi immediately experiences one and a half enlightenments, becomes briefly invisible and is then impaled on the horns of a dilemma.

  “I don’t believe it!” I said when Poldi dropped this bomb. “Tell me it isn’t true!”

  “Afraid it is,” she replied calmly and took a big swig of her drink.

  “I just don’t believe it. What’s got into him?”

  Poldi smiled faintly, like someone who has been cut to the quick and is waiting for the wound to heal. Like an outis, a nobody who welcomes a little sympathy but has no wish to be a burden to anyone. Like someone out of sight of land who simply swims on and on.

  “The night I was on my way to him,” she went on, “that was when he proposed. I could tell they’d been chewing the fat for nights on end lately. Well, Alessia guessed that Vito was having an affair with me, and she insisted on a decision. Who can blame her?”

  “But Auntie,” I said, “it’s obvious who he should have plumped for: the jackpot, not the consolation prize.”

  Poldi stroked my cheek. “Sweet of you, my boy, but I’m the consolation prize.”

  “Nonsense. You’re the jackpot, Poldi. You’re smart, you’re funny, you still look great, and you’re an absolute humdinger in bed.”

  “Get on with you! You’re right, of course, but you aren’t qualified to judge.”

  “I most certainly am. Those unvarnished descriptions you keep giving me of your nights of passion—they’re enough to scorch my ears. Anyone who can talk about sex like that knows their onions.”

  “It’s what it is.”

  “And what’s all this shit about a private security service in Milan? He must have been considering it for weeks.”

  Poldi sighed. “And that’s what hurt me most, that he discussed it with Madame Sahara and not with me. In Germany you consult a life coach, in Sicily a fortune-teller.”

  “It all sounds like utter bullshit,” I said, still gobsmacked by the news. Then I had an idea, a suicidal but extremely chivalrous idea. I jumped up off the sofa. “Listen, Poldi, I’ll have a word with him—I’ll go and see him right away. I mean, okay, so he’s a detective chief inspector, he’s probably three times as strong as me, he’s bound to know karate and he’ll be armed into the bargain, but hey, who cares, I’ll tear him off a strip. I’ve got Cyclopean genes too, don’t forget.”

  I was Barnaba, after all, and somehow it felt pretty good to speak out
for once. I was feeling rather dizzy but in full vendetta mode.

  “I’ll give him a piece of my mind, demand an explanation for Alessia and Milan and everything. I’ll give him a roasting, even if he tears me to pieces and drops them out the window. I don’t care, I’m Sicilian enough. He’s trampled on my honour as well as yours. Nobody treats my Auntie Poldi like this and gets away with it.”

  Poldi quickly moved my wine glass out of reach. “Stop talking nonsense, and sit down before you fall down. You can’t afford to stand in your condition.”

  “What condition, and why have you taken my glass away?”

  She yanked me back onto the sofa. “Just sit down. Nobody’s ever had to suffer for the sake of my honour, but thanks for the gesture, my boy, even if it was a pretty daft idea born of the bottle. Besides, the story’s far from finished. Everything became a bit more complicated in the end.”

  “Okay” was all I said, because the rapid up-and-down movements were affecting the speech centre of my brain. I reached for my wine glass in order to lubricate my synapses.

  But Poldi moved the glass even farther out of reach. “That’s enough Polifemo for today. Teresa hauled me over the coals about your smoking recently. If you start boozing as well, your aunts will kill me, all three of them. It isn’t that I’d be a loss to humanity, but you’d never get a first-hand account of how I eventually solved the case.”

  Montana’s confession broke Poldi’s heart. That’s the plain truth, and it has to be said: it simply broke her heart—the big heart that had been broken so many times, then healed and cicatrized. And now Montana. His words seemed suddenly to come from very far away, as though not intended for her at all. But then they penetrated the skin, bored steadily deeper, found their target and broke my Auntie Poldi’s heart.

  It surprised her how calm she remained, lying there in her sickbed in the midst of her miniature jungle, while a sad and contrite Montana came out with all the terrible, hackneyed sentences that rendered her heartbreak almost unbearable. It was obvious from the start. You know it yourself. It would never have worked. We were always so good together. You’re very important to me. I’ve been considering it for quite a while. I need a change of scene. I love you. Let’s still be friends. Say something, won’t you?

  “Would you please go now, Vito?” was all Poldi said in a whisper.

  And it wasn’t until he had left the room that she finally allowed herself to weep.

  Strangely enough, she didn’t this time feel an urge to get totally blotto. Later, when Ciccio Pappalardo brought her her nightly Moretti, she silently drained the bottle of beer as if it were a kind of medicine she took because she had to. There was nothing left that could alleviate her pain. Nothing but time.

  Or, of course, some crucial progress in a murder inquiry.

  And that she once again owed to the friendly assistance of Inspector Chance. You know, the scruffy colleague in the cubbyhole at the far end of the corridor, the one who prefers to do less work than more. Unsackable, unpunctual and unpredictable. The colleague who never says hello and never plays Santa at the Christmas office party. The colleague no one ever invites to join them for lunch. The eternally suspect colleague who can be an absolute disaster in the field but sometimes contributes the vital lead in an inquiry. An unpopular colleague, albeit one in constant demand. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Aunts Teresa, Caterina and Luisa never tired of dissing Vito Montana as the most heartless, perfidious and despicable man who ever lived. Even Totti, out of character for the amiable mongrel he was, took to sneezing disgustedly at the sound of Montana’s name. It was as if he’d developed a kind of commissario allergy, but it might also have stemmed from the fact that Uncle Martino secretly rewarded him for his displays of sympathy with morsels of mortadella.

  Not altogether without reason, the aunts were afraid that Poldi might anaesthetise her broken heart by getting blind drunk. Accordingly, they concocted a master plan designed to keep her permanently busy and under supervision after her discharge from hospital, and they recruited Valérie, Padre Paolo and sad Signora Cocuzza for the purpose.

  Poldi apathetically submitted to everything they dreamed up: excursions to the Nebrodi Mountains to look for mushrooms, hours-long gin rummy sessions, visits to Valérie’s gloomy Bourbon relations, uninspired exhibitions at the Zo cultural centre in Catania, innumerable boat rides, car rides, walks and shopping trips to the fish market. She simply didn’t care. Yes, there were times when she really did yearn to get well and truly plastered, but she had herself under control. Of course she drank—the gods couldn’t have prevented that—but she didn’t get wasted. Some faint voice of reason in the farthest back room of her brain must have whispered that she would soon need to have her wits about her.

  In her mailbox one morning she found a letter from Montana, which she tossed unopened into the dustbin. She blocked his number on her contacts list, and then, because that still didn’t hurt enough, deleted it altogether. At the same time, she received emails and phone calls from Russo, who asked after her and invited her to dinner. Poldi deleted all his emails. She was through with men. She occasionally thought in a rather disgruntled fashion of Achille Avola, who had sent neither flowers nor a get-well card and never phoned. She wondered briefly whether to call him, but pride and melancholy forbade it.

  She had also dropped the case. Yes, of course she had made a promise to her papa in buzzard guise, but she just couldn’t fulfil it. She had lost the urge. She was through with investigations of any kind; she didn’t have the energy. She even considered abandoning her pet project—a drunkard’s death beside the Mediterranean—and returning to Munich to finish herself off quietly, without a view of the sea.

  In short, she was in a really bad way.

  But the inevitable happened: whenever you think you’ve reached rock bottom, fate disabuses you with another shitload of misfortune.

  In order to take Poldi’s mind off her troubles, Uncle Martino had devised a little cultural programme. Cleverly, he had obtained three tickets for a Tuesday afternoon performance of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound at the Greek theatre in Syracuse—in other words, the story of a very inquisitive man whom the gods punish by chaining him to a rock, where an eagle regularly pecks at his liver.

  When the Greeks drove the Sicanians out of Sicily in the fifth century BC, what were the first things they built? Temples? No, theatres! And the theatre at Syracuse had fifteen thousand seats, which made it the biggest in the ancient world. During the summer months it is still in use today. Uncle Martino insists that the plays of Euripides and Aeschylus were first performed there. Aeschylus, who visited Sicily more than once, also died there. (The cause of his death was remarkable: clobbered on the head by a falling tortoise.) He knew how to charm his audiences with sophisticated stage effects, and this tradition continues to inspire Sicilian directors to this day.

  Just as they were in antiquity, performances are staged in daylight, in the afternoon. This means it is still hot, so Uncle Martino had paid a couple of euros extra for seats in the shade. Whenever you go anywhere with Martino, you get there too late or just before closing time. At the very last moment, just when you should be leaving for your destination, he will nip off to buy cigarettes or a newspaper, fish or bread, take the dog for a walk or look for his glasses. That presents you with a choice: either blow a gasket or make another booking, because Uncle won’t be back within the next hour. It’s simply that Uncle knows one has to make regular sacrifices to the gods of happiness by wasting time, and his own happy life bears this out.

  Not so Aunt Teresa. Like any other sensible person waiting on tenterhooks with bags packed or three tickets for shady seats in the Greek theatre, she goes ballistic and bombards her husband with imprecations when he finally reappears. It’s all water off a duck’s back to Uncle Martino. Never at a loss for some dubious explanation, he calmly insists that there’s still plenty of time. Amazingly enough, this often proves to be the case.

&nbs
p; Syracuse is just under an hour’s drive from Catania, but afternoon traffic is always backed up. It’s little use trying to overtake everyone on the hard shoulder, because you aren’t the only one to do so.

  Syracuse is a bright, cheerful place built of pale sandstone. In Catania, that dark old baroque and art nouveau city built of volcanic basalt, the soul dives down into mythical depths; in Syracuse it returns to the light and breathes anew in its Renaissance squares or beside the Fountain of Arethusa. If Catania is the Cyclops, Syracuse is the nymph. No wonder the Greeks erected their largest theatre there.

  Needless to say, the performance had been long under way by the time Uncle Martino, Aunt Teresa and Poldi finally got there, perspiring and irritable after their drive with one eye on the clock. Grouped on the semicircular stage was an ancient chorus attired in tunics, and a less than youthful Prometheus was solemnly addressing the gods in Italian. Poldi couldn’t understand a word. What she likewise failed to understand was the presence of a yellow crane on the right side of the stage. And of course—how could it be otherwise?—their expensive seats in the shade were already occupied. The usher pointed to the spot where three elderly ladies in black were gazing doggedly at the chorus and Prometheus with stony faces. Poldi watched Uncle Martino thread his way through the tiers of spectators and accost the three ladies in a friendly manner. However, they displayed no sign of allowing themselves to be evicted from their nice seats, even when he showed them his tickets. From the way they grimly ignored him, he might have been thin air.

  Meanwhile, Aunt Teresa and Poldi waited up top in the sweltering sun. Aunt Teresa fanned herself, and even Poldi, who liked hot weather, found the heat a trial. As sweat trickled down beneath her wig, she began to lose her temper, a sign that her animal spirits were gradually reviving. When she saw that Martino was too much of a gentleman to simply shoo the three witches away, she went striding down to join him.

  “Ladies, these are our seats, so would you mind?”

  No reaction. The three old scarecrows merely looked more obdurate than ever. They seemed to neither see Poldi nor hear her.