The Paper Moon Read online

  “Who told you that?”

  “Elena Sclafani. I spoke to her this morning, before coming here.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “No. Because she didn’t know. Angelo’d only made vague mention of it to her, but since she wasn’t interested in the matter, she didn’t ask any more questions.”

  “Ah, the poor little angel! She wasn’t interested in the matter, but she was certainly in a rush to cast suspicion on it. She attacks, then looks the other way.”

  She said this in a voice unfamiliar to the inspector, a voice that seemed produced not by vocal cords but by two sheets of sandpaper rubbed forcefully together.

  “Well, why don’t you tell me the reason?”

  “Abortion.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Angelo got an underage girl pregnant; what’s more, she was a patient of his. The girl, who was from a certain kind of family, didn’t dare say a thing at home and couldn’t turn to any public institution either. That left clandestine abortion as the only option. Except that the girl, once she got home, suffered a violent hemorrhage. Her father accompanied her to the hospital and learned the whole story. Angelo assumed full responsibility.”

  “What do you mean, he ‘assumed full responsibility’? It seems clear to me he was fully responsible!”

  “No, not fully. He had asked a colleague of his, a friend from his university days, to perform the abortion. The friend didn’t want to, but Angelo managed to persuade him. When the whole story came out, my brother claimed that he had done the abortion. And so he was condemned and barred from practicing medicine.”

  “Tell me the girl’s name and surname.”

  “But, Inspector, that was more than ten years ago! I know the girl got married and no longer lives in Vigàta…Why do you want—”

  “I’m not saying I want to interrogate her, but if it proves necessary, I’ll do so with the utmost discretion, I promise.”

  “Teresa Cacciatore. She married a contractor named Mario Sciacca. They live in Palermo and have a little boy.”

  “Signora Sclafani told me that she and your brother always met at his place.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “How is it you never crossed paths with her?”

  “It was I who didn’t want to meet her. Not even by chance. I’d begged Angelo always to let me know whenever Elena was coming over.”

  “Why didn’t you want to meet her?”

  “Antipathy. Aversion. Take your pick.”

  “But you saw her only once!”

  “Once was enough. Anyway, Angelo often talked about her.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That she had no equal in bed but was too money-hungry.”

  “Did your brother pay her?”

  “He used to buy her very expensive gifts.”

  “Such as?”

  “A ring. A necklace. A sports car.”

  “Elena confided to me that she had made up her mind to leave Angelo.”

  “Don’t believe it. She wasn’t done squeezing him yet. She was always throwing jealous fits to keep him close.”

  “So were you this hostile to Paola the Red, too?”

  She leapt, literally, out of her armchair.

  “Who…who told you about Paola?”

  “Elena Sclafani.”

  “The slut!”

  The sandpaper voice had returned.

  “I’m sorry, but who are you referring to?” the inspector asked angelically. “Paola or Elena?”

  “Elena, for bringing her into this. Paola was…is a good person who fell sincerely in love with Angelo.”

  “Why did your brother leave her?”

  “The affair with Paola had gone on for so long…he met Elena at a moment when he was feeling tired of her…To Angelo she represented something new and intriguing that he couldn’t resist, even though I…”

  “Give me Paola’s surname and address.”

  “Inspector! Do you expect me to give you personal information on all the women who had relationships with Angelo? On Maria Martino? Stella Lojacono?”

  “Not all of them. Just those you mentioned.”

  “Paola Torrisi-Blanco lives in Montelusa, Via Millefiori 26. She teaches Italian at the liceo.”

  “Married?”

  “No, but she would have made an ideal wife for my brother.”

  “Apparently you knew her well.”

  “Yes. We became friends. And we continued to see each other even after my brother broke up with her. I called her just this morning, to tell her my brother had been murdered.”

  “By the way, have any journalists contacted you?”

  “No. Have they found out?”

  “The news is starting to leak out. You should refuse to speak to them.”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me have the addresses, if you’ve got them, or the phone numbers of the other two women you remembered.”

  “I don’t have them right at hand. I need to look in some old datebooks. Is it all right if I give them to you tomorrow?”

  “All right.”

  “Inspector, can I ask you something?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Why are you centering your investigation on Angelo’s women friends?”

  “Because you and Elena are doing nothing but serving me women’s names on a platter—or, better yet, on a bed,” he wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “You think it’s a mistake?” he asked instead.

  “I don’t know whether or not it’s a mistake. But there certainly must be many other leads one could follow concerning the possible motive for my brother’s murder.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…something concerning his business…maybe some envious competitor…”

  At this point the inspector decided to cheat, laying a trick card down on the table. He put on an embarrassed air, like someone who wants to say something but doesn’t really feel like it.

  “What’s led us to favor the…ahem…the feminine hypothesis…”

  He congratulated himself for coming up with the right words; even the British-cop-like “ahem” had emerged from his throat to perfection. He continued his masterly performance.

  “…was…ahem…a detail that perhaps I’d…ahem…better not…”

  “Tell me, tell me,” said Michela, assuming for her part the air of someone expecting to hear the worst.

  “Well, it’s just that your brother, when he was killed, had just had…ahem…er, sexual relations with a woman.”

  It was a whopper, since Pasquano had said something else. But he wanted to see if his words would have the same effect they had the first time. And they did.

  The woman sprang to her feet. Her dressing gown opened. She was completely naked underneath. No panties, no bra. A splendid, lush, compact body. She arched her back. In the motion her hair fell down onto her shoulders. She clenched her fists, arms extended at her sides. Her eyes were popping out of her head. Fortunately they weren’t looking at the inspector. Watching obliquely as if through a window, Montalbano saw a raging sea uncoil in those eyes, with force-eight waves rising to peaks like mountains and crashing back down in avalanches of foam, then re-forming and falling back down again. The inspector got scared. A memory from his school days came back to him, that of the terrible Erinyes. Then he thought the memory must be wrong; the Erinyes were old and ugly. Whatever the case, he clung tightly to the arms of the easy chair. Michela was having trouble speaking; her fury kept her teeth clenched.

  “She did it!”

  The two sheets of sandpaper had turned into grindstones.

  “Elena killed him!”

  Her chest had become a bellows. Then all at once the woman fell backwards, hitting her head against the armchair and rebounding forcefully before collapsing in a swoon.

  Covered in sweat from the scene he’d just witnessed, Montalbano went out of the living room, saw a door ajar, realized it was the bathroom, went
in, wet a towel, returned to the living room, knelt beside Michela, and began wiping her face with the towel. By now it had become a habit. Slowly the woman began to come to. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she did was cover herself with the dressing gown.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Yes. Forgive me.”

  She had amazing powers of recovery. She stood up.

  “I’m going to go have a drink of water.”

  She returned and sat back down, calm and cool, as though she hadn’t just had an uncontrollable, frightful bout of rage verging on an epileptic fit.

  “Did you know that Monday evening your brother and Elena were supposed to meet?”

  “Yes, Angelo called to tell me.”

  “Elena says that meeting never took place.”

  “What was her story?”

  “She said she went out, but after she got in the car, she decided not to go to their rendezvous. She wanted to see if she could break off with your brother once and for all.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “She has an alibi, which I’ve checked out.”

  It was another whopping lie, but he didn’t want her flying into a rage if some journalist happened to mention Elena’s name.

  “Surely it’s false.”

  “You mentioned that Angelo used to buy Elena expensive gifts.”

  “It’s true. Do you think her husband, with the salary he has, can afford to buy her the kind of car she drives?”

  “So if that’s the way it was, what motive would Elena have had for killing him?”

  “Inspector, it was Angelo who wanted to end the relationship. He couldn’t take it any longer. She tormented him with her jealousy. Angelo told me she once wrote to him threatening to kill him.”

  “She sent him a letter?”

  “Two or three, as far as that goes.”

  “Do you have these letters?”

  “No.”

  “We didn’t find any letters from Elena in your brother’s apartment.”

  “Angelo must have thrown them away.”

  “I think I’ve inconvenienced you too long,” said Montalbano, standing up.

  Michela also stood up. She suddenly looked exhausted. Putting her hand over her forehead as if from extreme fatigue, she teetered slightly.

  “One last thing,” said the inspector. “Did your brother like popular songs?”

  “He listened to them now and then.”

  “But there was no appliance for listening to music in his apartment.”

  “He didn’t listen to music at home, in fact.”

  “Where did he, then?”

  “In his car, during his business trips. It kept him company. He had many CDs.”

  7

  Michela said her brother’s garage was the first one on the left. It had two locks, one on the left and one on the right-hand side of the rolling metal door. It didn’t take the inspector long to find the correct key in the set he’d brought with him.

  He opened the locks, then slipped a smaller key in another lock on the wall beside the rolling door, turned it, and the door began slowly to rise, too slowly for the inspector’s curiosity. When it had opened all the way, Montalbano went in and immediately found the light switch. The fluorescent light was bright, the garage spacious and in perfect order. Casting a quick glance around, the inspector ascertained that there was no strongbox in the garage and no place in which to hide one.

  The car was a rather late-model Mercedes, one of those that are usually rented along with a driver. In the compartment in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats were some ten music CDs. In the glove compartment, the car’s documents and a number of road maps. Just to be sure, he also looked in the trunk, which was sparkling clean: spare tire, jack, red warning triangle.

  A little disappointed, Montalbano repeated in reverse the whole complicated procedure he’d gone through to open the garage, then got back in his car and headed to Marinella.

  It was nine-fifteen in the evening, but he didn’t feel hungry. He took off his clothes, slipped on a shirt and a pair of jeans, and, barefoot, went out to the veranda and onto the beach.

  The moonlight was so faint that the lights inside his house shone as brightly as if each room were illuminated not by lamps but by movie floods. Reaching the water’s edge, he stood there a few minutes, with the sea splashing over his feet and the cool rising up through his body to his head.

  Out on the horizon, the glow of a few scattered jack-lights. From far away, a plaintive female voice called twice:

  “Stefanu! Stefanu!”

  Lazily, a dog answered.

  Motionless, Montalbano waited for the surf to enter his brain and wash it clean with each breaker. At last the first light wave came like a caress, swiiissshhh, and carried away, glugluglug, Elena Sclafani and her beauty, while Michela Pardo’s tits, belly, arched body, and eyes likewise disappeared. Once Montalbano the man was erased, all that should have remained was Inspector Montalbano—a kind of abstract function, the person who was supposed to solve the case and nothing more, with no personal feelings involved. But as he was telling himself this, he knew perfectly well that he could never pull it off.

  Back in the house, he opened the refrigerator. Adelina must have come down with an acute form of vegetarianism. Caponata and a sublime pasticcio of artichokes and spinach. He set the table on the veranda and wolfed down the caponata as the pasticcio was heating up. Then he reveled in the pasticcio. After clearing the table, he went and got Angelo’s wallet from the plastic bag. Turning it upside down and sticking his fingers inside the different compartments, he emptied it out. Identity card. Driver’s license. Taxpayer code number. Credit card from the Banca dell’Isola (Can’t you see you’re losing it? Why didn’t you look in the wallet straightaway? You would have spared yourself the embarrassment with Michela.) Two calling cards, one belonging to a Dr. Benedetto Mammuccari, a surgeon from Palma; the other to one Valentina Bonito, a midwife from Fanara. Three postage stamps, two for the standard rate and one for priority mail. A photo of Elena in a topless bathing suit. Two hundred fifty euros in bills of fifty. The receipt from a full tank of gasoline.

  Enough. Stop right there.

  All obvious, all normal. Too obvious, too normal for a man who was found shot in the face with his willy hanging out, whatever the purpose he’d used it for. It was still hanging out, after all. Okay, getting caught with your dick exposed no longer shocked anyone nowadays, and there had even been an honorable member of Parliament, later to become a high charge of the state, who’d shown his to one and all in a photo printed in a number of glossy magazines. Okay. But it was the two things together—the whacking and the exposure—that made the case peculiar.

  Or constituted the peculiarities of the case. Or, better yet, the whacking and the whack-off. Engrossed in these sorts of complex variations on the theme as he was putting everything back in the wallet, the inspector, when he got to the bills of fifty, suddenly stopped.

  How much was there in the account Michela had shown him? Roughly ninety thousand euros, of which fifty thousand, however, were Michela’s. Therefore Angelo had only forty thousand euros in the bank. Or scarcely eighty million lire, to use the old system. Something didn’t add up. Angelo Pardo’s earnings probably consisted of a percentage gained on the pharmaceutical products he managed to place. And Michela did suggest that her brother earned enough money to live comfortably. Okay, but was it enough to pay for the expensive presents he supposedly, according to Michela, gave to Elena? Surely not. Nowadays, going to market and buying food for the week, one spent as much as one used to over the whole month. And so? How did someone who didn’t have a lot of money manage to buy jewelry and sports cars? Either Angelo was draining the bank account—and this might explain Michela’s resentment—or he had some other source of revenue, with a related bank account, of which, however, there was no trace. And of which even Michela knew nothing. Or was she merely pretending to know nothing?


  He went inside and turned on the television. Just in time for the late news on the Free Channel. His friend, newsman Nicolò Zito, spoke first of an accident between a car and a truck that killed four, then mentioned the murder of Angelo Pardo, the investigation of which had been assigned to the captain of the Montelusa Flying Squad. This explained why no journalists had come to harass the inspector. It was clear poor Nicolò knew little or nothing about the case, and in fact he merely strung a couple of sentences together and moved on to another subject. So much the better.

  Montalbano turned off the TV, phoned Livia for their customary evening greeting, which did not result in any squabbling this time—indeed it was all kissy-kissy—and went off to bed. No doubt thanks to the phone call, which calmed him down, he fell asleep straightaway, like a baby.

  But the baby woke up suddenly at two in the morning, and instead of starting to cry like babies all over the world, he started thinking.

  His mind went back to his visit to the garage. He was convinced he’d neglected some detail. A detail which at the time had seemed unimportant to him but which he now felt was important, very important.

  He reviewed, in his memory, everything he’d done from the moment he entered the garage to when he left. Nothing.

  I’ll return there tomorrow, he said to himself.

  And he turned onto his side to go back to sleep.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, he was in his car, dressed higgledy-piggledy and racing to Angelo Pardo’s place, cursing like a maniac.

  If the tenants on the two stories of that building—three stories, actually, counting the ground floor—seemed dead during the day, he could only imagine what they’d be like at three in the morning, or thereabouts. Whatever the case, he took care to make as little noise as possible.

  Having turned on the light in the garage, he began studying everything—empty jerry cans, old motor-oil tins, pliers, monkey wrenches—as though with a magnifying glass. He found nothing that was in any way worth considering. An empty jerry can remained, desolately, a simple, empty jerry can still stinking of gasoline.