The Smell of the Night Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  Praise for Andrea Camilleri and the Montalbano series

  “The idiosyncratic Montalbano is totally endearing.”

  —The New York Times

  “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 outbursts, fumbles or threats are made only in the name of pursuing truth.”

  —The Nation

  “Once again, violence is muted, complications rule, politics roil, but humor ... prevail[s] in the end, Italy is good to visit, even if only in print. And what better way to shorten a flight to Palermo than by gobbling this tasty snack along the way?”

  —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 Sicily’s mean streets.”

  —USA Today

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

  —The Village Voice

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

  —The New York Sun

  “Wittily translated from the savory Italian, Camilleri’s mysteries ... feature the sardonic Inspector Salvo Montalbano, whose gustatory adventures are at least as much fun as his crime solving.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Camilleri once again thrills with his fluid storytelling and quirky characters.”

  -Publishers Weekly

  A PENGUIN MYSTERY

  THE SMELL OF THE NIGHT

  Andrea Camilleri is the author of many books, including his Montalbano series, which has been adapted for Italian television and translated into nine languages. He lives in Rome.

  Stephen Sartarelli is an award-winning translator. He is also the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Open Vault.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2005

  Translation copyright © Stephen Sartarelli, 2005 All rights reserved

  Originally published in Italian as L’odore della notte by Sellerio editore.

  © 2001 Sellerio editore via Siracusa 50 Palermo.

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUHLICATION DATA

  Camilleri, Andrea.

  [Odore della notte. English]

  The smell of the night / Andrea Camilleri ; translated by Stephen Sartarelli.

  p. cm. “A Penguin mystery.”

  eISBN : 978-1-101-00731-0

  I. Sartarelli, Stephen,- II. Title.

  PQ4863.A3894003613 2005

  853’.914—dc22 2005048711

  The scanning, uploading and distribudon of this book via the Internet or via any other means

  without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only

  authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy

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  1

  The shutter outside the wide-open window slammed so hard against the wall that it sounded like a gunshot. Montalbano, who at that moment was dreaming he was in a shoot-out, suddenly woke up, sweaty and at the same time freezing cold. He got up, cursing, and ran to close everything. The north wind was blowing so icy and insistent that instead of brightening the colors of the morning as it had always done, it was carrying them away, erasing them by half, leaving behind only afterimages, or rather faint blotches of the sort made by a Sunday watercolorist. Apparently the summer, which several days earlier had already entered its final throes, had decided during the night to give up the ghost and make way for the season to come, which should have been autumn. Should have been, because, in fact, to judge from the entry it was making, this autumn was already looking like the depths of winter.

  Lying back down, Montalbano started elegizing on the disappearance of the transitional seasons. Where had they gone? Swept up like everything else by the ever faster rhythm of human existence, they too had adjusted.

  Realizing they represented a pause, they had died out, because nowadays no pause can ever be granted by this increasingly frenzied rat race and the endless verbs that feed it: living, eating, studying, fucking, producing, zapping, buying, selling, shitting, dying. Endless verbs that last only, however, a nanosecond, the twinkling of an eye. But weren’t there once other verbs as well? To think, to meditate, to listen, and—why not?—to loaf, to daydream, to wander ... Practically with tears in his eyes, Montalbano reminisced about spring and fall clothes and the lightweight duster his father used to wear. Which made him realize that, to go to work, he’d have to put on a winter suit.

  Making an effort, he got up and opened the armoire where he kept his heavy clothes. The stink of several tons of mothballs assailed his nostrils. At first it took his breath away, then his eyes started watering and he began to sneeze. He sneezed some twelve times in a row, mucus running down from his nose, head ringing, the pain in his chest growing sharper and sharper. He had forgotten that Adelina, his housekeeper, had forever been waging her own personal, all-out war against moths, from which she always, implacably, emerged defeated.

  The inspector gave up. He closed the armoire, went over to the chest of drawers, and pulled out a heavy sweater. Here too Adelina had used chemical weapons, but Montalbano was ready this time and held his breath. He went out on the veranda and laid the sweater down on the table, to air out at least some of the smell. But when, after washin
g, shaving, and getting dressed, he came back out on the veranda to put it on, the sweater—the very one, brand-new, that Liyia had brought him from London—was gone! How was he ever going to explain to her that some son of a bitch had been unable to resist the temptation and had reached out and grabbed it, thank you very much? He imagined exactly how the conversation with his girlfriend would go:

  “Well, fancy that! It was to be expected!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because it was a gift from me!”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It’s got everything to do with it! Everything! You never attach any importance to the things I give you! Like the shirt I brought you from—”

  “I still have it.”

  “Of course you still have it! You’ve never worn it! And what is this, anyway, the famous Inspector Montalbano getting robbed by some two-bit thief? It’s enough to make you bury your head in the sand!”

  And at that moment he saw it. The sweater, that is. Buffeted away by the north wind, it was rolling along the sand, and as it rolled and rolled, it got closer and closer to the point where the water soaked the beach with each new wave.

  Montalbano leapt over the railing and ran, sand filling his socks and shoes, and arrived just in time to snatch the sweater away from an angry wave that looked particularly hungry for that article of clothing.

  Walking back to the house, half blinded by the sand whipped into his eyes by the wind, he had no choice but to accept that the sweater had been reduced to a formless, sodden mass of wool. Once inside, the phone rang.

  “Hi, darling. How are you? I wanted to let you know that I won’t be at home today. I’m going to the beach with a friend.”

  “You’re not going to the office?”

  “No, it’s a holiday here. Feast of San Giorgio, patron saint of Genoa.”

  “The weather’s nice up there?”

  “Fabulous.”

  “Well, have fun. Talk to you tonight.” This was all he needed to make his day. Here he was, shivering with cold, while Livia would be lying blissfully in the sun. Still further proof that the world was no longer turning the way it used to. Now up north you died of heat, and down south you’d soon be seeing ice, bears, and penguins.

  He was getting ready. to reopen the armoire, holding his breath, when the phone rang again. He hesitated a moment, but then the thought of the upset stomach he would get from another whiff of mothballs persuaded him to pick up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, Chief, Chief!” yelled the tortured, panting voice of Catarella. “Is that you yourself in person, Chief?”

  “No.”

  “Then who is this with whom I’m speaking with?”

  “This is Arturo, the inspector’s twin brother.”

  Why was he fucking around with that poor idiot? To vent his bad mood?

  “Really?” said Catarella, astonished. “Excuse me, Mr. Twin Brother Arturo, but if the inspector’s like roundabout the house, couldja tell ’im I need to talk to him?”

  Montalbano let a few seconds go by. Maybe the story he’d just invented could come in handy on another occasion. He wrote down on a piece of paper, “My brother’s name is Arturo,” then greeted Catarella.

  “Here I am! What’s up?”

  “Oh, Chief, Chief! All hell’s breaking out! You know the premises where that broker Gragano gots his office?”

  “You mean Gargano?”

  “Yes. Why, ain’t that what I said? Gragano.”

  “Never mind. I know where it is. What about it?”

  “What’s about it’s a man with a gun’s about it. Sergeant Fazio seen ‘im when he was just chancing to be passing by by chance. Looks like he’s got a mind to shoot the lady that works there. Says as how he wants all the money back that Gragano stole from ’im or he’s gonna kill the lady.”

  The inspector threw the sweater onto the floor, kicked it under the table, and was out the door. The time it took to get in the car was enough for the north wind to send him into seizures.

  The ragioniere Emanuele Gargano, a tall, handsome, well-dressed forty-year-old with always the right shade of suntan, looked like an American movie star. He belonged to that short-lived breed of businessman that is the fast climber, short-lived because by the age of fifty they’re already so worn out that they’re ready for the scrap heap (the latter being a favorite expression of theirs). Ragioniere Gargano, by his own account, was born in Sicily but had worked a long time in Milan, where, in short, and again by his own account, he’d made a name for himself as a kind of financial miracle worker. Then, judging himself sufficiently famous, he’d decided to go into business for himself in Bologna, where, still by his own account, he’d brought fortune and happiness to dozens of small investors. Some two years back he’d surfaced in Vigata, to work towards what he called “the economic reawakening of this beloved and unlucky land of ours,” and in just a few days he had set up offices in four of the larger towns of Montelusa province. He was a man who was never at a loss for words and had great powers of persuasion over everyone he met, always with a big, reassuring smile on his face. In a week’s time—spent racing from one town to the next in a shiny, eye-popping luxury car, a kind of lure for his prey—he had won over about a hundred clients, average age sixty or more, who had turned their life savings over to him. After six months had passed, the aging pensioners were called in to pick up, risking heart attacks on the spot, a twenty-percent return on their investment. The ragioniere then summoned all his clients from the surrounding province to Vigata for a gala dinner, at the end of which he let it be known that, in the coming semester, the returns might even be slightly higher. The news spread and people began lining up at the counters of his various local offices, begging Gargano to take their money. Which the ragioniere magnanimously accepted. In this second wave, alongside the oldsters were handfuls of kids anxious to make money as quickly as possible. At the end of the second semester, the returns of the first group of clients increased to twenty-three percent. It was smooth sailing for a while, with a stiff tail wind, but then, one day towards the end of the fourth semester, Emanuele Gargano failed to show up. His agencies’ employees and clients waited two days and then decided to phone Bologna, where the general management office of “King Midas Associates”—the name of the ragioniere’s investment firm—was supposedly located. Nobody answered. A quick investigation led to the discovery that the premises of King Midas Associates, leased by said firm, had been turned back over to their legal owner, who for his part was furious that the rent hadn’t been paid for many months. After a week of pointless searches yielded not a trace of Gargano in or around Vigata, and after several riotous assaults on the agencies by people who had invested their money with Midas, two schools of thought emerged concerning the ragioniere’s mysterious disappearance.

  The first had it that Emanuele Gargano, after changing his name, must have moved to an island in Oceania, where he was now living it up with beautiful half-naked women, laughing all the while at those who’d placed their trust and savings in his hands.

  The second found it more likely that the ragioniere had carelessly made off with some mafioso’s money and was now serving as fertilizer six feet underground or as fish feed in the local waters.

  In all of Montelusa province there was one woman, however, who saw things differently. Only one, and her name was Mariastella Cosentino.

  Fiftyish, stocky, and homely, Mariastella had applied for a job at Midas’s Vigata agency and, after a brief but intense meeting with the boss in person, had been taken on. That’s how the story went. Yet however brief the meeting, it had been long enough for the woman to fall hopelessly in love with the ragioniere. And while this was the second job for Mariastella—who, after getting a degree in accounting, had stayed home for many years to help out her parents and later her widowed father, who’d become more and more demanding before he died—it was, in fact, her first love. For Mariastella had been promised since
birth to a distant cousin she’d never seen except in photographs and never known in person because he died of an unknown illness in his youth. Things were different this time, however, and Mariastella had not only seen her beloved alive and speaking on several occasions, but had even, one morning, got so close as to smell the scent of his aftershave. That incident drove her to do something audacious—so audacious, indeed, that she would never in the world have thought herself capable of it. She took the bus to Fiacca to visit a relative who owned a perfume shop and, after smelling bottle after bottle, found the aftershave used by her beloved. She bought a flask of it, which she kept in the drawer of her bedside table. On certain nights, when she woke up alone in bed, alone in the large, empty house and overcome with distress, she would uncork it and inhale the scent, and this allowed her to go back to sleep, murmuring, “Good night, my love.”

  Mariastella was convinced that Emanuele Gargano had not run away with all the money entrusted to him, much less been killed in some row with the Mafia. When questioned by Mimi Augello (Montalbano had no desire to get involved in the case, claiming he didn’t understand a damn thing about money matters), Miss Cosentino had stated that, in her opinion, the ragioniere must be suffering from temporary amnesia and would reappear sooner or later and set all the wagging tongues to rest. And she’d said this with such lucid fervor that Augello was in danger of believing it himself.

  Armed with her faith in Gargano’s honesty, Mariastella would open up the office every morning, sit down and wait for her love to return. Everyone in town laughed at her. Everyone, that is, who hadn’t had any dealings with the ragioniere, since those who’d lost their money were not in a laughing mood. The day before, Gallo had told Montalbano that Miss Cosentino had even gone to the bank to pay, out of her own pocket, the rent that was due on the office. So why had the guy now threatening her with a gun got it in his head to take it out on her? Poor thing, she had nothing to do with the whole affair. And why, in fact, had the distraught investor come up with his brilliant idea so late, some thirty days after Gargano’s disappearance, in other words at a time when most of the ragioniere’s victims had resigned themselves to the worst? Montalbano belonged to the first school of thought, the one that believed that the ragioniere had split after screwing everybody, and he felt very sorry for Mariastella Cosentino. Every time he happened to pass in front of the agency and saw her sitting there calmly behind the counter, he felt an ache in his heart that would stay with him for the rest of the day.