Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories Page 9

  “Yes,” said Montalbano.

  7

  The following morning, the start of a picture-postcard day, he got up early, took a long walk along the water’s edge, washed up, got dressed, and was already at headquarters by eight o’clock.

  “What kind of night did Rosanna have?” he asked Galluzzo.

  “She had company, Inspector.”

  “Company? Did somebody sleep with her?”

  “She talked all night, Chief. With Fazio. Now she’s asleep in the holding cell, and Fazio’s sleeping in the room with the cots. He left a note saying he wanted to be woken up as soon as you got in.”

  “Let him sleep. I’ll tell you when to wake him up.”

  Nicolò Zito the newsman arrived punctually at half-past eight. When Montalbano told him Rosanna’s story, Zito, who was a journalist born and bred, smelled a news story.

  “What can I do for you, Inspector?”

  Montalbano handed him the girl’s ID card.

  “I want you to . . . to have this picture enlarged and then, today if possible, have it broadcast on your news program.”

  “And what should I say?”

  “You should say that all the families Rosanna Monaco has worked for over the last four years should contact the police for information. And please add that we’ll be extremely grateful and very discreet.”

  “All right. I’ll try to get it in on the midday broadcast.”

  After Zito left, Montalbano told an officer to go wake up Fazio. Who came running without even bothering to comb his hair.

  “The whole thing’s rather complicated, sir.”

  Fazio seemed upset and didn’t know where to begin.

  “Look, Fazio, just tell me what you don’t know how to tell me. I think that’s the best approach.”

  “Well, this morning, at the break of dawn, after spending the whole night talking, Rosanna started crying and saying she couldn’t take any more.”

  “I’m sorry, but to be more precise: Why did you stay behind with her?”

  “I felt sorry for her.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “She sort of had an attack of nerves. She even fainted. And at one point she even told me the name of the person who told her to kill Judge Rosato and gave her the gun.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Her lover, Inspector. Giuseppe Cusumano.”

  “And who’s that?” Montalbano asked, confused.

  “What do you mean, ‘who’s that?’ You testified at his court hearing over the accident!”

  He suddenly remembered. The young tough who’d punched the old motorist in the face! The beloved grandson of Don Sisino Cuffaro.

  Now they really did need to tread lightly!

  “What should we do, Chief?”

  “What would we have done if Rosanna had given you any old name and not that of the grandson of a mafioso of the caliber of Don Sisino Cuffaro?”

  “I would have gone and picked him up discreetly, brought him here, and asked him a few questions.”

  “So what are you waiting for? Go get him. But wait. Do you think it’s a good idea for me to go and talk with the girl?”

  “I dunno. You decide.”

  There was absolutely no guarantee that Rosanna would be as well disposed towards him as she had been towards Fazio. But now, with the name Cusumano in the mix, things had changed. Montalbano couldn’t afford to make even the slightest mistake. He went out of the station and into a little clothing shop, bought a light cotton dress, had it wrapped, returned to headquarters, and went into the holding cell.

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  She’d responded. She’d emerged from her silence. A good sign. The inspector found her intensely beautiful. Her eyes were powerfully alive, her lips fire red with no need for lipstick. Montalbano tossed the package on the mattress.

  “This is for you.”

  She tried to untie the ribbon’s knot but was unable, so she cut it with a single bite of her sharp, sparkling-white teeth, which looked almost like a wild animal’s.

  She unwrapped the package and saw the dress. Her movements, which were almost feverish at first, slowed way down. She picked up the dress, stood up, and held it against her body. The inspector felt a twinge of pride: He’d guessed the size perfectly.

  “Want to try it on? I’ll go outside.”

  He’d never met a woman with the power to resist trying on a new present at once, whether a pair of earrings or a pair of underpants.

  “Yes,” she said.

  When he returned, she was standing in the middle of the room, smoothing the dress down along her hips. In a single movement she saw him, ran up to him, and threw her arms around his neck.

  She acts just like a little girl, he thought for a moment.

  But only for a moment, because he immediately felt her pelvis press against his, remain there, then ever so gently rotate, while her embrace of his neck became tighter and her cheek pressed against his.

  But that’s not like a little girl, Montalbano noticed, freeing himself reluctantly from her embrace.

  He was beginning to understand. That little bit of physical contact had been worth more than a thousand words for giving him a sense of things. She went back and sat down on the cot, leaning slightly forward to check the hem of the dress.

  “I need to ask you a few questions,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “When did Cusumano . . . What do you call him, anyway?”

  “Pino.”

  “When did Pino tell you to kill Judge Rosato?”

  “He wrote it to me in a letter a couple of weeks before he got out of prison.”

  “Did you go and visit him in prison from time to time?”

  “Just once. But not at first. They wouldn’t let me in ’cause I was a minor. But Pino would send me messages.”

  “But you don’t know how to read!”

  “’At’s true. But the person that brought me the messages would read them to me.”

  “What’s the name of the person who brought you the messages?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Where are these messages?”

  “Pino asked me to burn them. An’ so I did.”

  “When did he give you the gun?”

  “He got the person that brought me the messages to give me the gun.”

  “Have you seen Pino since he got out of prison?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was supposed to kill the judge first.”

  “Wait a second: If you killed the judge, you wouldn’t ever have seen Pino again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you would have been arrested. And do you know how many years in jail you get for murder?”

  She laughed a full-throated laugh, throwing her head backwards.

  “They wouldna arrested me. There was two o’ Pino’s men ready to take me outta the courthouse as soon as I shot ’im.”

  “Are you saying that as you were shooting the judge, two of Cusumano’s men would create a diversion so you could escape?”

  “Yeah, that kinda thing.”

  “Do you know what they were going to do?”

  Rosanna hesitated ever so slightly.

  “They were gonna throw a bomb.”

  Not a bad idea, a bomb in a crowd as a diversionary tactic.

  “And naturally you don’t know these men.”

  “No sir.”

  Montalbano remained pensive for a moment.

  “Wha’ss wrong? Fall under a spell?”

  She’d taken a liking to answering questions.

  “No,” the inspector said. “I’m not under any spell. I was just thinking. Assuming that everything you’ve told Fazio
and me is true—”

  She shot to her feet, body tensed and fists clenched at her sides.

  “But iss true! Iss true!”

  “Calm down. I only wanted to know why you decided to tell us everything and pull your lover into this.”

  “He din’t keep ’is word.”

  “How so?”

  “He tol’ me that if the cops caught me before I could shoot, I woun’t spend a single day in jail and they’d let me out right away. And instead . . .”

  “Instead, he forgot all about you.”

  She said nothing, and her eyes turned very dark.

  “He’s too busy,” said Montalbano.

  She turned the black flame of her eyes onto the inspector’s eyes. But said nothing.

  “Too busy enjoying his fresh young wife, whom he hadn’t been able to enjoy for three years.”

  Rosanna clenched her fists so tightly they turned white.

  “And he got you out of his hair with that bullshit about killing Judge Rosato.”

  The girl was at the breaking point. One more word and something was certain to happen.

  “And the proof that he wanted to screw you is that the revolver he gave you couldn’t shoot. It was broken.”

  He heard her exhale, which made a strange sound, the exact same sound as when one is punched in the stomach. She didn’t know the gun would never have worked. And something did indeed happen, though it wasn’t what the inspector had expected. Rosanna stood up, bent forward, grabbed the bottom hem of the dress, pulled it up over her head, threw it at Montalbano’s feet, and remained there, absolutely beautiful, a ray of light in panties and bra.

  “Take your dress back. I don’t want nothing from you.”

  And she started coming towards him. Slowly. Montalbano literally fled towards the door, went out, and locked it behind him. He’d once seen something similar at a circus, when the tamer ran away from a tigress that had rebelled.

  Shortly before the midday bells, Fazio returned.

  “Some definite news, Inspector. Giuseppe Cusumano is out of town. He’ll be back late tonight or early tomorrow morning. And you needn’t worry: I’m going to nab him sooner or later and bring him to you.”

  “I’m not worried. I need to have something verified, but not through bureaucratic channels or we’ll lose a whole month at the very least.”

  “Let me try, if I can.”

  “We need to find out if something the girl told me is true. That is, whether she went to see Cusumano at Montelusa prison a week before his release.”

  “Well, if she went, it should be recorded in the register. I’ll go call them up right now.”

  Less than ten minutes later he was back in the inspector’s office.

  “They’ll let me know within the hour.”

  “Listen, do we have a TV here?”

  “In the station? No. But there’s one in the bar at the corner. We can ask them to turn it on, if you like.”

  “Let’s go have a coffee.”

  There was nobody in the bar. Fazio, who was one of the family there—like everyone else from police headquarters—asked the barman to turn on the television and put on the Free Channel. The news program had already started.

  The usual stuff: two bank robberies in the province, a country house burnt down, an unidentified corpse found inside a well. Then there was an interview with an undersecretary who managed to speak for ten whole minutes without it being possible to understand what he was talking about. Afterwards, the face of Rosanna Monaco suddenly appeared, and Fazio, who knew nothing about this, nearly spilled the coffee in his demitasse. Off camera, Nicolò Zito diligently repeated what Montalbano had asked him to say, which was that any member of any of the families for whom Signorina Monaco had worked as a maid over the past four years should get in touch with police etc.

  “Brilliant move,” Fazio commented. “But do you really think anybody will call?”

  “I’m positive they will. Those who have nothing to hide will call. Just to show us how respectful of the law they are. Those with a dirty conscience will instead pretend they didn’t know about our invitation. But we’ll manage even to get the names of those who didn’t come forward. With a little luck, that is.”

  Before going to lunch, he gave the officer at the switchboard precise instructions: If anyone called in reference to the girl, he should ask them to come to the station after four o’clock. And if anyone couldn’t make it then, they should leave their telephone number.

  With the taste of the sea still in his mouth—the mullet were a miracle of freshness—he took a long walk along the jetty, all the way to the lighthouse.

  He had the troubling sensation that he was doing everything wrong, but he couldn’t figure out where the mistake was. Maybe the mistake lay precisely in the way he was conducting the investigation. He felt like a person floating on his back in the sea who notices that a gentle current is carrying him away and inertly abandons himself to that current.

  When he got back to headquarters, Fazio was out. In compensation the switchboard operator informed him that five people had called in reference to Rosanna Monaco. Of these five, four would be coming to the station as of four p.m., at half-hour intervals. The fifth, on the other hand, a Signor Francesco Trupiano, was sick with the flu and didn’t feel up to going out, but the inspector, if he wished, could come by his place whenever he wanted. Given that there was still almost an hour before the first appointment, and Signor Trupiano lived close by, Montalbano decided to pay him a call.

  Trupiano came to the door himself. He was an elderly man, skinny as a rail, and wearing a coppola on his head, woolen gloves, and a shawl around his shoulders.

  “Please come in,” he said, but in saying it he fled like a hare into the apartment. “The draft! Please close the door! The draft!”

  He yelled as if he was afraid he might be sent off to war. Montalbano closed the door and followed him into a sitting room with dark, heavy, but clean furniture. Signor Trupiano had run and sat down in an armchair in front of the TV set and put a blanket over his legs. At his feet was a brazier that gave off smoke. The inspector started to sweat, almost hoping the guy had nothing to tell him.

  “And what can you tell me, sir, about this Rosanna Monaco?”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Everything you can tell me.”

  “And what can I tell you?”

  “I don’t know what you can tell me, Signor Trupiano. I’ll try asking you a few questions, all right?”

  “All right, but I’m only tangentially involved.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re interested in the people Rosanna worked for, from four years ago till now, is that right?”

  “Correct.”

  “So I’m involved only for the first five months of those four years.”

  “So Rosanna worked for you for five months, four years ago?”

  “No, sir, Rosanna worked for us for a year and five months. But you can’t count that year, otherwise the number of years you’re interested in becomes five. Make sense?”

  “What was your profession, Signor Trupiano, accountant?”

  “I was a watchmaker.”

  That explained the man’s precision.

  “All right, then, let’s talk about those five months that were part of the four years. What was Rosanna like?”

  “Very pretty.”

  “I don’t want to know what she was like physically, but as a person.”

  “What did she do, die?”

  “Who?”

  “Rosanna.”

  “No, she’s quite alive.”

  “So why did you say ‘was’?”

  “Would you please answer my question?”

  “She was good. A good person. Worked hard. Never talked back. My wife, rest
her soul, had no complaints.”

  “You’re a widower?”

  “Since two years ago.”

  “What sort of hours did Rosanna work?”

  “She would arrive at eight in the morning and leave at six in the evening.”

  “An excellent girl, in short.”

  “For one year and four months.”

  Montalbano, who was falling asleep from the heat he felt just from seeing Trupiano all covered up as he was, or perhaps from the poisoning of the noxious fumes rising from the brazier, at first didn’t notice the time discrepancy.

  “Thank you,” he said, starting to get up. But then he stopped, buttocks in midair. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”

  “I said she was a good girl for one year and four months.”

  “And what happened the last month?” the inspector asked, pricking up his ears and sitting back down.

  “During the last month, she changed.”

  “How?”

  “She became agitated, talked back all the time, showed up late to work and then didn’t feel like working. Then, one day, she stopped coming. Sometime after that, her mother came asking about her daughter, but I didn’t tell her anything.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her anything?”

  “Because she was rude and loud.”

  “Could you tell me what you didn’t tell Rosanna’s mother?”

  “Sure. There were phone calls.”

  “Phone calls she made herself?”

  “No, sir, she didn’t make the phone calls, she received them. Every day, around five-thirty—in other words, half an hour before Rosanna got off work—she would get a call. And she would race to the phone like someone had lit a fire under her bum, if you’ll excuse the expression.”

  “So you never had a chance to find out who—”

  “Well, sometimes Rosanna didn’t manage to pick up in time, and so either me or my wife would answer. It was always a young man, always the same one.”

  “He never told you his name?”

  “He did, all the time. He would say: ‘It’s Pino . . .’”

  “Cusumano!” the inspector yelled, hearing something like the triumphal march to Aida strike up in his head.

  Signor Trupiano gave a start in his armchair and got scared.