Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories Page 5
Having dropped off the suitcases, he got back in the car and drove to headquarters to inform Fazio that he had some things to do and wouldn’t be back until late morning. He went out, and in one store he bought sheets, pillowcases, towels, tablecloths, and napkins. Then he went to a supermarket and bought up their stock of pots, pans, cutlery, dishes, glasses, and anything else he needed. On top of this he bought some food to put in the fridge. When he headed back to Marinella, his car looked like that of a door-to-door salesman. While unloading all the stuff he noticed that he was still missing a great number of things. And so he went shopping again. He didn’t get back to the police station until after twelve.
“Any news?” he asked Fazio, who, while they awaited the arrival of a deputy inspector, had assumed those duties.
“None. Oh, yes, the honorable M. P. Torrisi phoned twice from Rome asking for you.”
“And who’s this Honorable Torrisi?”
“One of our local honorable representatives in the lower house of Parliament.”
“How many such honorables are there?”
“A lot, if you count the whole province. But the ones with the most votes from Vigàta are Torrisi and Vannicò.”
“Are they from two different parties?”
“No, Chief. They belong to the same parish: the Christian Democrats.”
To his displeasure, the words the commissioner had spoken to him during their sole encounter came back to him.
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“No, Chief.”
He spent that evening and part of the night putting the house in order and moving the furniture around a little. Before going home to Marinella he’d stopped at the Trattoria San Calogero to eat, as had already become his custom. He felt in good shape as he started his home improvement chores, but by the time he went to bed his legs and back felt broken. He had a leaden sleep, heavy and dense. Waking up just after daybreak, he prepared the napoletana, drank half its contents, put on a bathing suit, opened the French door, and went out on the veranda. He nearly broke into tears. Month after month in Mascalippa, he had dreamt of a view like this. Now he could enjoy it whenever he pleased! He stepped down onto the beach and started walking along the water’s edge.
The water was cold. There was no question of going for a swim yet. But his body and mind rejoiced. At last he decided to go back to the house and get ready for the day.
He got to work a little late. Just before leaving home, he’d taken general stock of the situation and written down what he still needed. Then he’d stopped at a carpenter’s shop, recommended to him by Fazio of course, and made an appointment with him to come and cover an entire wall with shelves for the books that would soon be arriving from Mascalippa and those he intended to buy.
He’d been sitting at his desk for about an hour when Fazio came in to tell him that the Honorable Torrisi wanted to talk to him.
“Then put him on,” said Montalbano, picking up the receiver.
“No, Chief, he’s here. He says he arrived in town from Rome last night.”
So the honorable had actually gone out of his way to break the inspector’s balls.
There was no escape, other than through a ground-floor window. He was tempted for a moment, then decided it would be undignified. And why all this aversion when he didn’t even know the man and had no idea what he wanted from him?
“All right, then, show him in.”
The honorable was short and fat and looked about fifty, with a big face showing a smile but unable to camouflage the cold, snakelike look in his eyes. Montalbano stood up and came forward.
“Carissimo! Carissimo!” said the politician, grabbing the inspector’s hand and shaking his arm up and down with such force that Montalbano feared his shoulder might be dislocated for the rest of his natural life.
He sat the man down in one of the two armchairs in a sort of sitting area in one corner of the office.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
“No, please don’t bother, nothing at all! I can’t drink for another two months: I’ve made a little vow to the Blessed Virgin. I just thought I would drop in to meet you and exchange a few words. You see, I’ve gathered such a good harvest of votes here in Vigàta that I feel that it’s my moral duty to—”
“The Honorable Vannicò also did well in this area, didn’t he?” Montalbano wickedly interrupted him, donning the expression of a born, incurable dolt.
The mood changed at once, as if a sheet of ice had formed on the ceiling.
“Well, yes, of course, Vannicò did . . .” Torrisi admitted in a soft voice.
Then, suddenly worried:
“Have you already met him?”
“No, I haven’t yet had the pleasure.”
Torrisi seemed relieved.
“You know, Inspector, I take a keen interest in the problems of today’s young people. And I have to admit, to my great regret and displeasure, that things are not going so well in that regard. Do you know what’s missing?”
“No. What’s missing?” the inspector asked with the face of someone expecting a life-transforming revelation.
“This,” said the politician, touching the lobe of his right ear with the tip of his index finger.
Montalbano balked. What did he mean? That we had to become gay to understand the malaise of our young people?
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid I haven’t understood what’s missing.”
“Ears, my friend. We don’t listen to the young, we don’t lend them our ears. For example, we tend to judge them hastily and irrevocably for what might be just a mistake on their part . . .”
And then there was light! In a flash, Montalbano realized the purpose of the honorable’s visit and what the man was getting at.
“And that’s wrong,” he said, assuming a severe expression while laughing his head off inside.
“It is very wrong!” the politician laid it on, swallowing the bait. “I can see that you, Inspector, are a man who understands! I think the Lord himself must have sent you here!”
The Honorable Torrisi kept on talking for a good half hour, always keeping to generalities. But the gist of his argument was: When you testify before the court, try not to be too severe. Try to understand a young man’s distress, even when he is wealthy, even when he comes from a powerful family, even when he punches an old man in the face. The Cuffaros had sent their plenipotentiary ambassador. Apparently the other honorable parliamentary deputy, Vannicò, was the plenipotentiary envoy of the Sinagra family. The commissioner had been right.
The bad mood that had descended on him with the politician’s visit lifted at four o’clock that afternoon, when Mery arrived. Unfortunately, she had to go back to Catania on Sunday evening, but that was more than enough time for her to set some order in the house and in the inspector’s mind (and body).
4
Naturally, the bad mood returned Monday morning, the moment he woke up, when he remembered he had to appear in court. He’d once known a person who was a supervisor of antiquities. The only problem was that this person suffered from a mysterious illness that made him scared to death of museums. He couldn’t be left alone in one. Seeing a Greek or Roman statue nearly made him faint. Montalbano’s case wasn’t quite so extreme, but having anything to do with judges or lawyers made him upset. Even a walk along the beach failed to calm him down.
Montalbano drove there in his own car, for two reasons. The first was that he was appearing in court not as a police inspector but as a private citizen, and so if he’d had someone drive him there in a squad car, it would have been improper. The second was that the person usually assigned driving duties for Montalbano was Officer Gallo, a likable guy except for the fact that, no matter what kind of street or road he was on, even the most godforsaken dirt path in the country, he always drove as if he was on the track at Indianapolis.
“You should probably go to the fourth floor, hall five.”
Probably? Maybe they held mobile hearings in that courthouse, perhaps on roller skates? Or maybe the clerk simply believed that nothing was certain in life?
And that was when, coming out of the Information office, he saw her for the first time: a girl of about sixteen, an adolescent wearing a cheap-looking, light cotton dress and carrying a large, worn-out handbag. She was leaning against the wall beside the carabinieri’s guard post. It was impossible not to look at her, with her huge, dark, wide-open eyes staring into space, and the strange contrast between her still little-girlish face and the already full, aggressive forms of her figure. She kept so utterly still that she looked like a statue.
The entrance hall led to a sort of vast, well-tended courtyard-garden. But how did one get to the fourth floor? Seeing a group of people to the left, Montalbano went towards them. There was an elevator there. Beside it, however, handwritten with a marking pen, was a sheet of paper stuck to the wall which said: The elevator is reserved for judges and lawyers. Montalbano wondered how many of the forty-odd people waiting there for the elevator were judges or lawyers. And how many were slyboots pretending they were judges and lawyers. He decided to enroll in the second group. But there was still no sign of the elevator, and people were starting to grumble. Then a man stuck his head out of a second-floor window and said:
“The elevator’s broken.”
Cursing, groaning, and muttering obscenities, everyone headed for a tall arch through which one saw the beginning of a broad, comfortable staircase. The inspector made it to the fourth floor. The door to hall five was open, but there was nobody inside. Montalbano looked at his watch: It was already ten past nine. Was it possible they were all late? It suddenly occurred to him that maybe the information clerk had been right to be doubtful, and perhaps the hearing was being held in another hall. The corridor was mobbed, with doors opening and closing continually, releasing gusts of lawyerly eloquence. After some fifteen minutes of confusion, he decided to ask a person pushing a cart overloaded with files and binders.
“Excuse me, could you tell me . . . ?”
And he handed him the little card. The man looked at it, gave it back, and resumed pushing his cart.
“Didn’t you see the announcement?” he asked.
“No. Where?” the inspector asked, following behind him, taking short steps.
“On the bulletin board in the glass case. The hearing was postponed.”
“Till when?”
“Till tomorrow. Maybe.”
Apparently ironclad certainties were nonexistent in that courthouse. Montalbano went back downstairs and queued up again in front of the information desk.
“Didn’t you know that the hearing in hall five was postponed?”
“Oh really? Till when?” the information clerk queried.
Then Montalbano saw her again. About an hour had gone by, and the girl was still in the exact same position as before. She must have been waiting for someone, of course, but her immobility was almost unnatural. It made one uneasy. For a moment Montalbano was tempted to approach and ask her if she needed any help. But he changed his mind and left the courthouse.
The moment he got to the station he was told that the people from Mascalippa had called to say that the van with the boxes of Montalbano’s possessions would be arriving in Marinella at five-thirty that afternoon. Naturally, the inspector made sure he was at home by quarter past five, but the van was two hours late and didn’t pull in until it was already getting dark. The driver, moreover, had hurt his arm and was therefore in no condition to help unload the boxes. Cursing like a Turk, Montalbano hoisted one box after another onto his shoulders, with the result that, when all was said and done, he felt like he had a dislocated shoulder and a double hernia. To top it all off, the driver demanded a ten-thousand-lire tip, it wasn’t clear on what grounds, perhaps as a morale booster for having been prevented from helping Montalbano unload.
Back inside, Montalbano opened only one box, the one with the television set. The house already had an antenna on the solarium-roof, and cables leading indoors. He hooked it all up, turned on the set, and tuned in to channel 1. Nothing. Just snow and the sound of frying. He tried the other channels. The only difference was the density of the snowfall, and sometimes the frying sound became, variously, surf or blast furnace. And so he climbed up onto the solarium-roof and noticed that the antenna had moved, perhaps from a gust of wind. With great effort, he managed to turn it a little. When he raced back down to check the television, the snowflakes had turned into ectoplasms, ghosts in a frying pan. Desperately zapping the remote control, he finally got the clearly defined face of a newscaster. He was speaking Arabic. Montalbano turned off the TV and went and sat down on the veranda to try to calm down. He decided to eat something. Taking some bread from the freezer, he put it in the toaster, then ate a can of Favignana tuna dressed in olive oil and lemon.
He realized he absolutely had to find a woman to do the housekeeping, laundry, and cooking. Now that he had a house, he couldn’t always do everything himself. When he lay down in bed, he discovered he had nothing to read. All his books were in two still-unopened boxes, the two heaviest. He got up, opened one box, and, naturally, did not find what he was looking for, a mystery novel by a Frenchman named Pierre Magnan, The Blood of the House of Atreus. He’d already read it, but he liked the way it was written. He opened the second box as well. The book was all the way at the bottom. Glancing at the cover, he set it down at the top of the last pile. He suddenly felt very sleepy.
He arrived at the courthouse slightly late, at ten past nine, because he’d had trouble finding a parking space. And there was the girl again, in the same light cotton dress, with the same purse, the same lost look in her big dark eyes—and in the exact same spot where he’d seen her twice already, not one inch to the left or to the right. Just like alms beggars, who choose their place of preference and stay there until they die or until someone gives them shelter. They’re always there, come rain or shine, in summer as in winter. This girl, too, was asking for something. Not alms, of course, but what?
Today there was a sheet of paper on the elevator door marked in felt pen with the word: Broken. Montalbano climbed three flights of stairs and when he entered hall five, which was a rather small room, he found it packed with people. Nobody asked him who he was or what he was there for.
He sat down in the last row of benches, beside a guy with red hair holding a notebook and ballpoint pen, who every so often took notes.
“Has it been going on for long?” Montalbano asked him.
“The curtain was raised about ten minutes ago. He’s performing the indictment.”
Strange rhetoric. The curtain! Performing! And yet, to judge by appearances, the man seemed rather down-to-earth and to the point.
“I’m sorry, but why did you say the curtain had been raised? We’re hardly at the theater.”
“We’re not? But this is all theater! Where are you from, the moon?”
“Montalbano’s the name. I’m the new police inspector for Vigàta.”
“Pleasure. My name’s Zit
o, I’m a journalist. Just listen to the indictment, then tell me whether it’s all theater or not.”
After the man in robes had been talking for about ten minutes, Montalbano began to have his doubts.
“Are you sure that man is the public prosecutor?”
“What did I tell you?” the newsman Zito said triumphantly.
The statement of indictment had sounded just like a defense argument. It claimed that the assault by Giuseppe Cusumano had indeed occurred, but that one had to take into consideration the young man’s particular emotional state at the time and the fact that the victim of the assault, Mr. Gaspare Melluso, when getting out of his car, had called Cusumano a “cornuto.” He asked for a minimum sentence and a whole slew of allowances for extenuating circumstances. Then the beat cop was called to the stand.
What kind of a trial was this? What was its order of procedure? The cop said he’d hardly seen anything because he was busy talking to two stray dogs who’d seemed nice to him. He’d become aware of a problem when Melluso fell to the ground. He took down the license plate number of the car that later turned out to belong to Cusumano, and then drove Melluso to the emergency room. At the request of the defense lawyer, who was none other than the Honorable Torrisi, the cop admitted he’d clearly heard the word cornuto being uttered in the general vicinity, but in all good conscience could not say who had uttered it.
Then, to his extreme surprise, Montalbano heard his name called. After the customary ritual of generalities and pledges to tell the truth, he sat down and, before he could open his mouth, the Honorable Torrisi asked him a question.