The Brewer of Preston_A Novel Read online

  Praise for Hunting Season:

  “Entertaining and every so often moving . . . The comedy is broader, bawdier, and darker in Hunting Season.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “[A] darkly comic Italian revenge noir . . . the fiendishly clever plot builds with a cool undercurrent of suspense. . . . A deftly lean, addictive mystery.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “[A] bawdy little gem from the author of the Inspector Montalbano series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Camilleri] turns his hand to historical fiction: the result is another success. . . . It would take a saint not to crack a smile at the antics that take place in these pages.”

  —Library Journal

  Praise for Andrea Camilleri and the Montalbano Series:

  “Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano mysteries might sell like hotcakes in Europe, but these world-weary crime stories were unknown here until the oversight was corrected (in Stephen Sartarelli’s salty translation) by the welcome publication of The Shape of Water. . . . This savagely funny police procedural . . . prove[s] that sardonic laughter is a sound that translates ever so smoothly into English.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Hailing from the land of Umberto Eco and La Cosa Nostra, Montalbano can discuss a pointy-headed book like Western Attitudes Toward Death as unflinchingly as he can pore over crime-scene snuff photos. He throws together an extemporaneous lunch of shrimp with lemon and oil as gracefully as he dodges advances from attractive women.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “[Camilleri’s mysteries] offer quirky characters, crisp dialogue, bright storytelling—and Salvo Montalbano, one of the most engaging protagonists in detective fiction. . . . Montalbano is a delightful creation, an honest man on Siciliy’s mean streets.”

  —USA Today

  “Camilleri is as crafty and charming a writer as his protagonist is an investigator.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Like Mike Hammer or Sam Spade, Montalbano is the kind of guy who can’t stay out of trouble. . . . Still, deftly and lovingly translated by Stephen Sartarelli, Camilleri makes it abundantly clear that under the gruff, sardonic exterior our inspector has a heart of gold, and that any outburst, fumbles, or threats are made only in the name of pursuing truth.”

  —The Nation

  “Camilleri can do a character’s whole backstory in half a paragraph.” —The New Yorker

  “Subtle, sardonic, and molto simpatico: Montalbano is the Latin re-creation of Philip Marlowe, working in a place that manages to be both more and less civilized than Chandler’s Los Angeles.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Wit and delicacy and the fast-cut timing of farce play across the surface . . . but what keeps it from frothing into mere intellectual charm is the persistent, often sexually bemused Montalbano, moving with ease along zigzags created for him, teasing out threads of discrepancy that unravel the whole.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Sublime and darkly humorous . . . Camilleri balances his hero’s personal and professional challenges perfectly and leaves the reader eager for more.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The Montalbano mysteries offer cose dolci to the world-lit lover hankering for a whodunit.”

  —The Village Voice

  “In Sicily, where people do things as they please, Inspector Salvo Montalbano is a bona fide folk hero.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The books are full of sharp, precise characterizations and with subplots that make Montalbano endearingly human. . . . Like the antipasti that Montalbano contentedly consumes, the stories are light and easily consumed, leaving one eager for the next course.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “The reading of these little gems is fast and fun every step of the way.”

  —The New York Sun

  Also by Andrea Camilleri

  Hunting Season

  THE INSPECTOR MONTALBANO SERIES

  The Shape of Water

  The Terra Cotta Dog

  The Snack Thief

  Voice of the Violin

  Excursion to Tindari

  The Smell of the Night

  Rounding the Mark

  The Patience of the Spider

  The Paper Moon

  August Heat

  The Wings of the Sphinx

  The Track of Sand

  The Potter’s Field

  The Age of Doubt

  The Dance of the Seagull

  Treasure Hunt

  Angelica’s Smile

  To request Penguin Readers Guides by mail (while supplies last), please call (800) 778-6425 or e-mail [email protected]. To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit our Web site at www.penguin.com

  A PENGUIN BOOK

  © Elvira Giorgianni

  THE BREWER OF PRESTON

  Andrea Camilleri, a bestseller in Italy and Germany, is the author of the popular Inspector Montalbano mystery series as well as historical novels that take place in nineteenth-century Sicily. His books have been made into Italian TV shows and translated into thirty-two languages. His thirteenth Montalbano novel, The Potter’s Field, won the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger award and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

  Stephen Sartarelli is an award-winning translator and the author of three books of poetry.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published in Penguin Books 2014

  Copyright © 1995 by Sellerio Editore

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Stephen Sartarelli

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Originally published in Italian as Il birraio di Preston by Sellerio Editore, Palermo.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Camilleri, Andrea.

  [Birraio di Preston. English]

  The Brewer of Preston: a novel / Andrea Camilleri; translated by Stephen Sartarelli.

  pages cm

  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-18856-3

  1. Sicily (Italy)—Fiction. 2. Italy—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Sartarelli, Stephen, 1954– translator. II. Title.

  PQ4863.A3894B5713 2014

  853'.914—dc23

  2014041659

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Andrea Camilleri

  Also by Andrea Camilleri

  About the Author

  Title Page

 
Copyright

  It was a frightful night

  A spectre is haunting the musicians of Europe

  Would he try to raise the mosquito net?

  Get me Emanuele

  On the morning of the day

  Ladies and, so to speak, gentlemen

  Turiddru Macca, son

  Only the young have such feelings

  You know how I feel about this

  The early morning sun hung milky and wan

  Late as usual

  I wish either my father

  By now everyone knew him

  The wind rose from the west

  In endeavoring to describe

  Oh, what a beautiful day!

  How much longer is this going to last?

  I am an elementary school teacher

  An ordinary-looking young man

  If on a winter’s night already

  It was a pleasure to set the fire

  Giagia my dear

  The oranges were more plentiful

  Chapter I

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  It was a frightful night

  It was a frightful night, downright scary. As a thunderclap more boisterous than the rest rattled the windowpanes, young Gerd Hoffer, not yet ten years old, woke up with a start, realizing at the same time that he needed to go. It was an old story, this pee problem. The doctors’ diagnosis was that ever since birth the child had suffered from weak retention—of the kidneys, that is—and that it was therefore natural for him to relieve himself in bed. His father, however—mining engineer Fridolin Hoffer—wouldn’t hear of it. He could not resign himself to having brought a waste of a German boy into the world, and thus he believed that what was needed was not medical care but a Kantian education of the will. For this reason, every morning that the good Lord brought upon the earth, he would inspect his son’s bed, raising the blanket or sheet, depending on the season, insert an inquisitorial hand, and inevitably find a wet spot, whereupon he would deal the boy a powerful slap on the cheek, which would swell up like a muffin under the effect of brewer’s yeast.

  This time, to avoid his father’s customary morning punishment, Gerd got up in the dark to the light of the thunderbolts and set out on a tentative journey to the privy, heart galloping in fear of the dangers and ambushes lurking in the night. One time a lizard had climbed up his leg, another time he had crushed a cockroach underfoot, making a squishy sound the mere thought of which still turned his stomach.

  Reaching the latrine, he rolled his nightshirt up over his belly and began to urinate. Meanwhile he looked out the low window, as he always did, onto Vigàta and its sea, a few miles beyond Montelusa. He would get excited whenever he managed to spot the faint glow of an acetylene lamp on some lost paranza. A kind of music would burst forth in his head, a rush of sensations he couldn’t express; only a few scattered words would appear and glitter like stars in a black sky. He would start to sweat and, when back in bed, could no longer fall back asleep, tossing and turning until the bedsheets became a sort of hangman’s rope around his neck. A number of years later he would become a poet and author, but he did not know this yet.

  That night it was different. Between the lightning, the thunder, and the flashes on the horizon, all of which frightened him as much as they fascinated him, he saw a phenomenon he had never seen before. Over Vigàta, the sun or something similar seemed to be rising. This, however, was utterly impossible, since his father had shown him, with Teutonic precision and a wealth of scientific detail, that the first light of day always arrived from the opposite direction—that is, from the great picture window in the dining room.

  He looked more carefully; there could no longer be any doubt: a reddish half-moon covered the sky over Vigàta. Against the light, he could actually see the shapes of the most elevated buildings, the ones on the Piano della Lanterna, which loomed over the town.

  He knew from painful experience how dangerous it was to wake his father up when he was fast asleep, but he decided that this time the circumstances called for it. Because there were only two possibilities: either the earth, having grown weary of always turning in the same direction, had changed course (the very idea of it made his head spin with excitement, born as he was a poet and author); or his father had, for once, fallen short of his sovereign infallibility (and this second prospect made his head spin even more, born as he was a son). He headed towards his father’s room, happy that his mother wasn’t there—she was in Tübingen to help out Grandma Wilhelmina—and, the moment he entered, he was overwhelmed by the cataclysmic snoring of the engineer, a great hulk of a man measuring almost six foot six and weighing nearly nineteen stone, with red crew-cut hair and a big handlebar mustache, also red. The boy touched the noisy mass and withdrew his hand at once, as if he had burnt himself.

  “Eh?” said his father, eyes immediately wide open, as he was a light sleeper.

  “Vater,” Gerd muttered. “Father.”

  “Was ist denn? What’s wrong?” asked the engineer, striking a match and lighting the lamp on his nightstand.

  “The night’s making light over Vigàta.”

  “Light? What light? Morning light?”

  “Yes, Vater.”

  Without saying another word, the engineer gestured to his son to draw near, and as soon as the boy was within reach, he dealt him a terrific slap.

  The child staggered, brought a hand to his cheek, but only hardened in his resolve. He repeated:

  “That’s right, Vater, it’s making morning light over Vigàta.”

  “Ko at vunce to your room!” the engineer ordered him. Never would he let his son’s eyes—which he presumed to be innocent—see him get out of bed in his nightshirt.

  Gerd obeyed. Something strange must be happening, the engineer thought as he put on a dressing gown and headed to the bathroom. A single glance was more than enough to convince him that, never mind the morning light, a fire, and a big one, had broken out in Vigàta. If he listened hard, he could even hear a church bell ringing frantically.

  “Mein Gott!” said the engineer, almost breathless. Then, barely containing his urge to shout for joy, he frantically got dressed, opened the main drawer of his desk, withdrew a big golden trumpet equipped with a cordon to sling it over the shoulder, and raced out of the house without bothering to shut the door behind him.

  Once in the street, he let out a long whinny of contentment and began to run. Thanks to the fire, he would have his first chance to test the ingenious fire-extinguishing device he was planning to patent, which he had built from his own designs over long months of passionate labor during off-hours from the mine. It was a broad cart without side panels, and a thick slab of iron nailed onto its flat bed. Tightly screwed onto this slab was a sort of gigantic copper alembic, which was connected to another, smaller alembic, beneath which a cast-iron compartment, open on top, served as a boiler. The little alembic, when filled with water and heated by the fire below, produced, in keeping with Papin’s astonishing discovery, the pressure needed to drive the cold water held in the larger alembic forcefully outward. Hitched to the big cart was a smaller one that carried firewood and two ladders that could be coupled together. The whole thing was drawn by four horses; a team of six volunteer firefighters would take up standing positions on either side of the large cart. During training sessions and rehearsals, the machine had always produced good results.

  Arriving at the top of the street that sliced through the former Arab quarter now inhabited by miners and zolfatari, Fridolin Hoffer took a deep breath and sounded a shrill blast on his trumpet. He walked all the way down the long street, his broad barrel chest sore from the force with which he repeatedly blew into the trumpet. When he reached the end, he did an abrupt about-face and began to walk back up the street, resuming his blowing.

  The effects of his midnight horn blowing were immediate. The m
en of his team, forewarned of the meaning of an impromptu nighttime reveille to the blasts of a trumpet, started dressing in haste after reassuring their trembling wives and bawling children. Then one of them ran to the storehouse where the machine was kept while the coachman took care of attaching the horses, and a third and a fourth lit the fire under the small alembic.

  The other inhabitants of the populous neighborhood, unaware of anything but duly terrorized by the blasts of the trumpet, which sounded like the heralds of the Last Judgment, barricaded themselves as best they could behind doors and windows in a tumult of shouts, cries, yells, sobs, prayers, ejaculations, and curses. Suddenly awakened, Signora Nunziata Lo Monaco, ninety-three years old, became immediately convinced that the riots of ’48 had returned and panicked, froze, and fell backwards as stiff as a broomstick relegated to its dusty corner. Her family found her dead the following morning and laid the blame on her heart and her age, and certainly not on the German’s ultrahigh C.

  The team of firefighters, meanwhile, having completed their preparations, gathered closely around the engineer. They were nervous and excited about the great opportunity before them. The engineer looked them in the eye one by one, then raised an arm and gave the signal to start. In a flash they climbed aboard and headed off to Vigàta at a gallop. Every few minutes Hoffer gave a blast of the trumpet slung over his shoulder, perhaps to warn any rabbits or dogs that might find themselves in his path, since there certainly were no people about at that hour on a night of such dreadful weather.

  For Gerd, too, who’d been left alone at home, it was a strange night. Hearing his father leave, he got up out of bed, went and locked the front door, and lit all the lamps in the house, one after the other, until he was in a sea of light. Then he sat down in front of the mirror in his mother’s bedroom. (The engineer and his wife slept in separate rooms, which was the biggest scandal in town and considered scarcely Christian, but in any case nobody really knew what religion the German and his wife belonged to.) He took off his nightshirt and, sitting there naked, began staring at himself. Then he went into his father’s study, grabbed a ruler from the desktop, and returned to the mirror, which was a full-length glass. Taking in hand the thing between his legs (dick? peter? cock? peepee?), he held it along the ruler. Repeating the action several times, he remained unsatisfied with the measurement, despite having pulled on the skin so hard that it hurt. He laid down the ruler and, discouraged, went back to bed. Closing his eyes, he began to address a long and detailed prayer to God, asking Him, by apposite miracle, to make his thing like that of his classmate Sarino Guastella, who was as tall as he, weighed the same as he, but was inexplicably four times longer and thicker down there than he was.