The Sect of Angels

by Andrea Camilleri

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve been unable to inform her family because we have no address for them. Are you from Palizzolo?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then, if you could inform Dr. Palumbo, I’m sure he could—”

  “I’ll do so at once.”

  *

  The penance is like the sin. What could it mean? Why not discuss it with Montagnet? Two heads might stand a better chance of grasping the meaning.

  He dropped in at the printworks where they published the newssheet he edited and wrote, which came out once a week.

  “We’re still missing the lead article,” said the printer. “And if you don’t send me something by tomorrow, or day after tomorrow at the latest, we’ll have to come out late.”

  Teresi headed back to Palizzolo, but when he got there he found some fifty people still gathered outside the carabinieri station.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The Marquis Cammarata’s been arrested.”

  He turned around and went to inform Dr. Palumbo of the death of Rosalia Pampina.

  CHAPTER IX

  WHAT’S TWO PLUS TWO?

  The investigating magistrate, Artidoro Tommasino, arrived in Palizzolo at the break of dawn and set up shop in a room at the carabinieri compound, along with the court clerk he’d brought with him.

  First he sat and spoke face to face with the captain, and then he sent a carriage to fetch Luigino Chiarapane. He listened to the young man for an hour, then sent him home again.

  After this, he sent for Dr. Palumbo and drew up a report of all the wounds the doctor had found on the lad’s body.

  And after this he had Stefano, Teresi’s nephew, brought in and asked him to describe how they had happened to find Luigino inside a sack, and what they had done as soon as they realized the youth was still alive.

  Then, to everyone’s surprise, he sent for Teresi.

  The moment he saw him enter the building, the lawyer Sciortino, who was standing outside the judge’s room, went in together with Teresi.

  “Which of you is Matteo Teresi?” asked the judge.

  “I am,” said Teresi.

  “And who are you?”

  “My name is Sciortino, and I’m also a lawyer and represent the Marquis Cammarata. I am here to file a formal protest.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are seeking the help of the accuser’s lawyer, while the case is still in the investigative stages!”

  “For your information, I am not seeking the help of anyone! And I refuse to consider your statement any further! I have not summoned Matteo Teresi here in his capacity as the accuser’s lawyer, but as a witness. You can verify this later, when you read the minutes of our meeting. Now leave this room at once!”

  Upon hearing the news of the marquis’s arrest, Teresi had congratulated the captain in his mind for having had the courage to do such a thing; he was thus now further delighted to learn that Judge Tommasino wasn’t afraid of anyone.

  As soon as Sciortino left, the judge began speaking.

  “Let me start by saying, as I have just said, that you are here solely as a witness. Your nephew, Stefano, told me how you managed to find young Chiarapane on the street. He said he’d wanted to take him to the nearest house, which was Palazzo Cammarata, and that you were against this and brought him instead to your house. Is this correct?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Then my question is: Why?”

  Teresi hadn’t been expecting this dangerous question, and had a moment of hesitation.

  “I don’t quite understand,” he said to buy time.

  “Your nephew was very clear on the matter. He told us that when he’d suggested taking the injured young man to Palazzo Cammarata, you replied, saying, in so many words, that you didn’t want to give the marquis the chance to finish the job. So my question is quite simple: Since you had never seen that young man before and therefore knew nothing about him, what made you think at once that he would be risking his life by returning to the Cammarata home?”

  The question was truly dangerous. If Teresi said he knew that the marquis was not to be trusted and had voted against his entry into the club, the judge might get the wrong idea. In the meantime, however, Teresi remembered what he’d been thinking when he found the young man in a sack on the street.

  “Your honor, it was intuition, pure and simple, but still based on certain known patterns of behavior. You see, Stefano told me he thought the lad was a nephew of the marquis and often went to Palazzo Cammarata. Bear in mind that whoever beat the young man up believed him already dead. They then wrapped the body up in the sack and tossed it out just a few hundred yards away from Palazzo Cammarata. It was a precise message. A Mafia message. A corpse dumped far enough away from Palazzo Cammarata to rule out any suspicion that the Cammaratas were in any way involved. And I also remembered that the marquis had often been quick to solicit the services of the local Mafia chieftain, Carmine Pregadio, known as ’u zù Carmineddru. That’s all.”

  After dismissing Teresi, the judge summoned Marquis Cammarata. Since the marquis was still under arrest, he was flanked by a marshal and an unranked carabiniere, who stood on either side of his chair.

  The marshal’s ear was wrapped in a bandage.

  “Did you injure yourself?” the judge asked.

  “No, this man here bit me.”

  “So we must add the charge of resisting arrest and assaulting an officer of the law.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck,” said the marquis, whose face was now sea-green.

  “Listen, my lord marquis, you’ve been accused of attempted murder. What have you got to say for yourself?”

  “That I did it, and you should stop busting my balls.”

  “Please have the accused’s attorney come in,” the judge said to the two guards.

  The lawyer entered.

  “Marquis, would you kindly repeat what you just said to me?”

  “I said it was I who tried to kill that little son of a bitch.”

  Attorney Sciortino’s heart sank into his shoes.

  An hour later, Marquis Filadelfo Cammarata, now in chains “due to the dangerousness of the detainee,” was taken to the prison of Camporeale.

  *

  At three o’clock that afternoon, with the authorization granted him by Judge Tommasino in hand, Captain Montagnet knocked on the great door of Palazzo Lo Mascolo.

  “There’s a carabinieri captain here wants to talk to you,” Filippa the housekeeper said to the baron.

  Don Fofò got worried. Not only did he not want to see so much as the shadow of Captain Montagnet, he also hadn’t forgotten the words of Marquis Spinotta: “His next victim will be you!” And this time the could not escape out the back window, as he’d done at Teresi’s house. There was nothing to be done.

  Calati junco ca passa la china,2 he reminded himself. Then he said to Filippa:

  “Show him into the office—actually, no. Show him into the salon.”

  In the salon hung the painted portraits of some twenty ancestors; they would let the captain know who he was dealing with. Don Fofò took off his dressing gown, and as he was getting dressed his wife, the Baroness Marianna, arrived in a flurry.

  Already when they got married the baroness wasn’t exactly a raving beauty. But now, between the aging process and her anguish over their daughter Antonietta, she’d become frighteningly ugly. She took one look at Fofò and started crying.

  “They’re going to take you to jail! I just know it! This time you’re going to end up in jail!”

  The baron pushed her aside with one hand, and with the other he grabbed his cojones firmly, to ward off back luck, then left the room, descended the stairs, and went into the salon.

  The captain, who was standing and looking at the fam
ily portraits, gave the military salute and handed him a document. Don Fofò felt his heart sink. It was surely an arrest warrant. He started sweating as the room began to spin around him.

  “I haven’t got my glasses,” he said, worried that his voice was trembling.

  “Shall I read it for you?”

  “Yes.”

  The captain read it.

  When he’d finished, the baron very nearly embraced him. He was not going to jail after all, at least not this time. And he was especially glad not to be going to jail because of his slut of a daughter, whom he alternately considered dead and then alive but a slut. He decided to put up a little resistance, for form’s sake, only to give in at once.

  “If I’ve understood correctly, you are authorized to question my daughter, Antonietta, in the presence of her mother.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “May I ask why you wish to speak with my daughter? And why in the presence of her mother? Because, on top of everything else, my daughter is sick in bed.”

  “My good baron, I could have sent two carabinieri here to bring your daughter in for questioning. Out of respect for your feelings as her father, I didn’t do that.”

  So the captain knew that Antonietta was pregnant! His “feelings as her father” couldn’t mean anything else. Therefore there was no need to playact any longer with him.

  “I appreciate your courtesy, but you haven’t answered my question.”

  “I shall do so at once. Your daughter is a minor, Baron. And I need to know whether she was the victim of a rape or a consenting partner. And I must proceed in the presence of her mother precisely because she is a minor.”

  Courteous but firm. On top of everything else, if the captain succeeded in making Antonietta talk, the whole thing could prove useful. The baron would find out the lover’s name.

  “All right,” he said, leaving the room.

  *

  One hour later, the captain was knocking on the great door of Palazzo Cammarata.

  “Bastard! Son of a bitch! Bugger!” the marquise started shouting as soon as she saw him.

  And the seven daughters, including a tiny little girl who to the naked eye looked to be barely five years old, repeated in chorus:

  “Bastard! Son of a bitch! Bugger!”

  While the maids, from the kitchen, echoed:

  “ . . . ugger!”

  Luckily Sciortino the lawyer was there in the house and was able to bring the situation under control and calm the marquise down. And so the captain was able to speak with the underage pregnant girl.

  *

  At five o’clock sharp, Teresi showed up at don Anselmo’s house.

  “Catarina is here.”

  “Don Anselmo, I’d like to ask a favor of you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I would like to speak with Catarina alone.”

  “Why can’t I be present too?” asked don Anselmo, feeling offended.

  “Because there may be some things she won’t want to say to me with her boss present. Please do me this favor. It’s in your own interest.”

  “All right, as you wish. Please go into my office, and I’ll send her straightaway.”

  “I din’t do nothin’,” said Catarina as soon as she came in.

  She was scared to death. Her hands were trembling.

  “Nobody’s saying you did anything.”

  “Are you a lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  Catarina started crying and shouting:

  “Oh my God, my God, I’m done for! Oh the pain and trouble! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, take pity on my unhappy soul!”

  “Why are you acting this way?”

  “’Cause don Anselmo wants to take me to court!”

  “What on earth is going through your head? Why would he want to take you to court!”

  “’Cause I din’t watch over my daughter and now she went and got pregnant!”

  “Listen, Catarina. Don Anselmo can’t do anything to you, believe me. Anyway, I’m not here as a lawyer, but as don Anselmo’s friend.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “No papers wit’ writing on them?”

  “No papers.”

  The woman calmed down a little.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I’d like to try to find out who got your daughter pregnant.”

  “She says it was the Holy Spirit.”

  “Listen, the Holy Spirit is a spirit. Which means he doesn’t have a body, do you understand? I want you to tell me what the two of you do on Sundays, after you go to Mass.”

  “We go an’ eat at my sister’s place.”

  “And do you stay at your sister’s until four o’clock?”

  “Sometimes . . . sometimes . . . ”

  Teresi felt a kind of tingling along his spine. He pretended not to be too interested, lighting a cigar and taking a few puffs.

  “So, you were saying that sometimes . . . ”

  “Sometimes, right after we eat, she goes back to the church. But I take her there.”

  “And do you stay and wait for her?”

  “No sir. She says: ‘Mamà, come back an’ get me in about a hour or hour an’ a half.’ An’ so that’s what I do.”

  Teresi, choking on his cigar smoke, started coughing.

  “Now listen. When you go back to get her, are there sometimes other people with her?”

  “Bah . . . sometimes there’s another girl.”

  “How about boys?”

  “Boys? Never!”

  “And has Totina sometimes stayed at the church for more than an hour or hour and a half?”

  “No, not at the church. But there was that time when they went on a retreat for a half a day.”

  *

  On his way to the carabinieri station to talk to the captain, Teresi couldn’t get the words Rosalia had said to the hospital doctor out of his head. The penance is like the sin.

  And all at once the meaning of those words flashed before him, blinding and paralyzing him to the point that he almost got run over by a carriage. He recovered only because he’d managed for a moment to obliterate that meaning from his mind. He didn’t want to believe it.

  *

  “If you’ve come here to talk to me about Marquis Cammarata, you know as well as I, Signor Teresi, that the matter is no longer in my hands,” the captain said, to stay on the safe side.

  “That’s not why I came. And I thank you for agreeing to see me.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Have you been informed that Rosalia Pampina committed suicide this morning at dawn?”

  “Oh my God, no,” said Montagnet. “The poor girl!”

  He looked intently at Teresi.

  “But how did you find out about this unlucky young woman?”

  “I committed an indiscretion.”

  “Did you read the report I’d left on my desk?”

  “Yes. I’m also a journalist, you know.”

  “I know. I read your articles, to keep myself informed. It’s part of my job.”

  “Just to keep yourself informed?”

  The captain pretended not to have heard, and kept on talking.

  “That girl . . . Rosalia . . . was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by the brigand Salamone. She was freed by Lieutenant Villasevaglios, but apparently she never—”

  “First,” said Teresi.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “First she was raped by the brigand Salamone, and then, when she felt guilty about it, she requested permission to confess her sins to a priest.”

  “I know. I spoke to her parish priest.”

  “And what did he tell you?”

  “He said she arrived just as he wa
s closing the church, insisted that she make a confession, and then left after she’d done this. But according to my research, she did not go straight back home, but returned about an hour and a half later. Since the woman she works for told me that as of that moment she no longer said a word and didn’t want to eat or drink anything, there are two possibilities: either she didn’t really start feeling the effects of the outrage done to her until after the confession, or, on her way home, had another unpleasant encounter that proved fatal to her.”

  “Tertium non datur?”3 asked the lawyer.

  “I don’t see how . . . ”

  “Captain, the hospital doctor told me that just the night before, Rosalia had seemed to be improving, to the point that she began to speak again. She repeated twice, in dialect, a statement that I’ll translate for you: ‘the penance is like the sin.’”

  Montagnet looked at him, not knowing what to say.

  “The penance is like the sin,” he repeated softly.

  Then he understood.

  He bolted upright and suddenly lost all his Piedmontese military aplomb.

  “Oh, shit!” he said.

  Then he sat back down and ran his hand over his brow.

  “You must excuse me,” he said, slightly embarrassed at having uttered an obscenity. “If you don’t mind . . . ” he said, undoing his tie and unfastening the top button of his shirt.

  “Actually, that’s not all I have to tell you,” Teresi resumed. “A short while ago I spoke to the mother of one of the mysteriously pregnant girls.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name is Totina; she’s the daughter of don Anselmo Buttafava’s overseer.”

  “Ah, yes, I know.”

  “Every Sunday Totina comes into town to attend Mass and then, afterwards, she sometimes goes back to the church and spends some time alone with the priest. She says her baby was conceived by the intercession of the Holy Spirit.”

  “More or less the same thing the other two girls I questioned today said,” the captain observed. “One of them told me it was the will of God, and the other said that the fruit of her womb was willed by the Lord.”