Montalbano's First Case

by Andrea Camilleri

  “And what would that be?”

  “You want to keep him locked in the holding cell without telling anyone.”

  “What do you mean, without telling anyone? By now, Brucculeri’s wife has certainly notified those who need to know. The only thing left to do is wait.”

  “Wait for what, sir?”

  “For their next move.”

  “Sir, listen, I just want to let you know that my family doesn’t need a butler in addition to a maid.”

  Montalbano smiled and Fazio decided to give up. He changed the subject.

  “Ah, sir. While you were at dinner last night, I asked around about the Siracusa family.”

  Fazio started heading toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to grab my notes.”

  “You need to get over this obsession you have for family histories. Stay right there and tell me what you remember.”

  Fazio caved, looking disappointed.

  “Well, his name is Antonio Siracusa, son of the late, I think …”

  “Didn’t I tell you to leave out fathers, mothers, and all that crap?”

  “Sorry, I can’t help it. Anyway, this Siracusa is about forty years old, from Palermo, and he’s been living in Vigata for the past two years, working as a chemist for Montedison. His wife, Enza, about thirty-five years old, is said to be a very beautiful woman. They don’t have any children. He has registered his collection here with us.”

  “Oh, really? And what does he collect?”

  “Guns and revolvers. He has about forty of them.”

  “Good Lord! Did you call them down to the station?”

  “No, sir. They’re both out of town.”

  “When did they leave? Did you find out?”

  “Yes, sir. I spoke to their neighbor. The Siracusas live in a small building with only two apartments. Their neighbor, who’s a sixty-year-old gossip, Mrs. Bufano, told me they left in a hurry, or at least that was her impression, yesterday afternoon, in their car.”

  “Interesting. Mr., or more likely, Mrs., Siracusa, heard on TV that we’re interested in their maid and instead of coming down to the station, they fled. Tell me exactly where their apartment is. And then we can finally get a few hours of sleep.”

  At eight thirty in the morning, looking rested, as if he had slept the whole night through; all dressed up, he leafed through the phone book, found the number for the Montedison plant, dialed it, introduced himself, and asked to speak to the director.

  “Inspector, this is Franzinetti, how can I help you?”

  “Are you the director?”

  “No, he’s not in yet, if there’s anything I can do …”

  “Pardon my asking, but what do you do there?”

  “I’m the head of human resources.”

  “Then I can ask you. I need to speak with Dr. Antonio Siracusa—it’s just a formality, but I was told he’s out of town. Is he on vacation?”

  “Not at all! Yesterday he went home for lunch, and a little later he called us to say he received news regarding the death of an uncle he was very close to. And so he had to leave for a few days.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  It was clear the Siracusas’ coals were wet. So wet, in fact, they had to skip town and stay out of Vigata for a few days, waiting for things to blow over. The only thing left to do was go and talk to the neighbor.

  The building consisted of two garages and two patios on the ground floor, and two apartments with two decks up above. Theoretically, you could have seen the sea from those decks, but first you needed to demolish the ten-story monstrosity they had erected across the street. The yard, he could see through the front gate, was very well maintained. There were two names on the intercom: Siracusa and Bufano. He rang the latter.

  “Who is it?” said the angry voice of an old lady.

  “It’s Dr. Pecorilla.”

  “And what do you want?”

  “Actually, madam, I was looking for Mrs. Enza Siracusa. I’ve been ringing for a while and nobody’s answering.”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad!”

  Montalbano could sense the struggle taking place in Mrs. Bufano’s soul, the fight between her curiosity and the chance to gossip on the one hand, and the fear of opening the door to a stranger on the other.

  “Wait a second,” said the angry voice.

  He heard her fiddle with the lock, then the French doors on the deck opened. An old woman holding binoculars appeared and started to examine the inspector. He let her stare. He had a very reassuring look; even his necktie was dull. The woman went back inside and after a little while Montalbano heard the gate click open. He walked down the entryway, opened the main door, and found himself at the bottom of a staircase that led to a rather spacious landing. On the left, there was a locked door that led to the Siracusas’ apartment. On the right was the door to Mrs. Bufano’s. It was open. Montalbano poked his head in.

  “May I come in?”

  “Come in, come in. This way.”

  The inspector, following her voice, reached a living room where he found Mrs. Bufano opening a window.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Nothing, thank you very much.”

  “Why were you looking for Mrs. Siracusa, Doctor …?”

  “Pecorilla. I’m a physician with the Trinacria insurance company. I had an appointment with Mrs. Siracusa regarding her paperwork, and she told me to come by this morning. I drove all the way from Palermo.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that!” said Mrs. Bufano, overjoyed.

  “This is no way to conduct business,” Montalbano said, pretending to be angry. “It doesn’t reflect well on Mrs. Siracusa’s character. Do you know her well?”

  “Of course I do!” Mrs. Bufano said.

  “Are you two friends?”

  “Of course not! We only say a quick good morning and good-night, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have ears that hear and eyes that see. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly. You said they left. Do you know when?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, around two. They loaded two huge suitcases into their car.”

  “So you can’t really tell me …”

  “Nothing at all. But … and this is just my impression … it looked like they were running away.”

  “You’re good,” Montalbano said ingratiatingly. “You must be a very keen observer.”

  “Eh!” Mrs. Bufano exclaimed, shaking her right hand in a gesture that meant she could see all things of this world and sometimes even a few things from the next.

  “You said you have ears that hear and eyes that see. By any chance, have you seen or heard anything out of the ordinary? You know, as an insurance company …”

  “My dear Doctor, let me just give you one example. A month ago the husband had to go to Rome for a week—he told me himself, he’s a bit more sociable. Well, every night that week the wife entertained guests. Two different men, one night she would see the first and the next the second.”

  “But how did you know that …”

  “I could hear the clang of the gate, you see? Then I’d get up and … come, I’ll show you.”

  She led him down the hallway. Next to the front door there was a window that illuminated it. Mrs. Bufano opened it slightly.

  “I would come here to look at the person who was entering the Siracusa home.”

  At that point Montalbano thought that the honest thing to do would be to call Mrs. Concetta Pimpigallo to tell her she had been right regarding Mrs. Siracusa’s whorishness.

  They went back to the living room.

  “What about him, the husband, what’s he like?” the inspector asked.

  “He’s worse than she is, when it comes to women.”

  Montalbano was now in a hurry to leave—he had just had a crazy
idea. He said good-bye to the old lady, thanked her, went out onto the landing, and looked for what he was after. Next to the Siracusas’ front door he found a window identical to Mrs. Bufano’s. It looked like it wasn’t completely shut, as if they had left it cracked. He absolutely had to try. He went down the stairs, opened the front door to the building, and closed it, so that Mrs. Bufano would hear. Then he carefully opened it again, leaving it ajar. He walked out to the front gate, opened it, and left it ajar, as he did with the front door. At a glance, it would seem as if it were locked. As he walked to his car, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, Mrs. Bufano go back into her apartment and shut the French doors. He started the car, and drove to the next street over, parked it, got out, and walked back to the building. The front gate didn’t make a sound. The front door opened quietly. He had started to climb the stairs as gingerly as possible when something exploded, a sound in between a bomb and thunder. Montalbano was scared to death. Then, slowly, he realized that the horrible noise was actually music. Mrs. Bufano was listening, at maximum volume, to a song that went, Let’s harvest the grain, the grain, the grain … How long was the typical song? Three minutes? Three and a half minutes? He climbed the remaining steps as fast as he could and pushed in the glass of the Siracusas’ window. It opened. Montalbano grabbed the sill with both hands and tried to jump in. But his arms were too weak and he fell back onto the landing, cursing. He managed to do it on his third attempt. His ass was on the sill; the upper half of his body was bent backward, with his head and chest inside the apartment, and his legs still hanging out over the landing. He tried to turn around and as he was rotating, his underwear squeezed his balls. He endured the pain, and managed to get one leg into the apartment. He was almost there. He managed to bring the other leg inside, let himself fall onto the ground, and then shut the window, as the last notes of the song were playing. Another one started immediately after, this one saying, Love, my love, bring me many roses.

  As soon as both his feet had touched the floor of the Siracusas’ apartment, Montalbano felt a sort of electric charge climbing through his leg, up his spinal cord, and then to his brain. He thought that the rhabdomancers, whenever they felt water hundreds of yards underneath the ground, must have experienced a similar sensation. His body was telling him that he was right on top of the gold mine, the water, the solution. Like a sleepwalker, he went in, barely looking at the two bedrooms—the master bedroom and the guest bedroom—the two bathrooms, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, a sort of storage closet, used as a darkroom, and finally he reached the place his legs were taking him: the study, or whatever it was, where Antonio Siracusa, doctor in chemistry, worked. As he walked, he realized that the apartment looked as though thieves had ransacked it: opened closets, clothes strewn about, drawers half closed, and chaos everywhere. But he knew it was the sign of a sudden escape. In Dr. Siracusa’s study, however, everything was neat. A big desk, four chairs, a wall covered in shelves filled with bottles, jars, vases containing powders of different colors. Against another wall there was some sort of safe, tall and narrow, shiny and clean, locked. In the corner there was a metal file cabinet, open, filled with cards. Montalbano sat down at the desk. On top of it there was a reading lamp, a camera inside its case, and on the left side, many sheets of paper on which he read different chemical formulas. But on the right, there were only three or four pieces of paper. A request to install a new phone line; the results of a blood test; a letter from Commendator Papuccio, the owner of the building, in which he argued it wasn’t his responsibility to repair the leaky roof; and finally a form. That form made Montalbano literally jump out of his seat. It was the rough draft of an application to visit a prisoner in jail. His name was Giuseppe Cusumano and the applicant’s name was Rosanna Monaco. Thus the author of the application on behalf of Rosanna—who was illiterate—and the guarantor of her signature, was Dr. Siracusa.

  But this did not explain their sudden departure. There must have been something else. The inspector opened the drawer on the right side of the desk: more formulas; correspondence with Montedison; the license issued by the police headquarters in Palermo for the collection of firearms; another form with the same information, but issued by the headquarters in Montelusa; a complete list of the weapons, which the inspector set aside on the table. The lefthand drawer was locked. The inspector forced it opened with a letter opener. The first thing he saw was a key. He picked it up, got up, and walked over to the safe—the key turned; it was the right one; however, Montalbano didn’t open the safe but rather went back to the desk. In that drawer there were also two big envelopes, one bursting with papers, the other with very few things inside, almost empty. He opened the first one, pouring its contents onto the desk, which was soon covered in photographs. All in color. All the same size. All showing the same subject: naked women. From age fifteen to fifty, lying on the same unmade bed. Weapons weren’t the only things Dr. Siracusa collected. Clearly he was in the habit of immortalizing all of his conquests post coitum. And then he would develop and print them in his private lab. All on the down-low, far from prying eyes. Taking one of the pictures with him, the inspector got up and went into the master bedroom: the bed was the same as the one in the pictures. The Siracusas were a most progressive couple. Chances were that while the doctor was using the master bedroom, his better half was doing her own entertaining in the guest room. He went back to the study, put the pictures back in the first envelope, took out the second one, and poured its contents onto the desk. It contained only three pictures. The subject was the same: a naked lady portrayed first lying on her back, then on her stomach, and finally with her legs spread open. The lady was actually a girl the inspector knew: Rosanna. And yet a relationship between the man of the house and his maid was not enough to justify their sudden departure. Things were bound to be a lot more complicated than that. The inspector pocketed the picture showing Rosanna on her back, placed the others in the envelope, and put the envelope in the drawer. He picked up the list of weapons and opened the safe. Built especially for this purpose, it was lined on the inside with light-blue velvet. It contained only guns and revolvers, of all different kinds, dimensions, and age. No rifles. No muskets. They were arranged in four rows of ten, three on the inside of the right door, four on the back wall, and three on the inside of the left door. Each weapon was held in place by three pins with a golden head made of plastic. It was a serious display case. There were forty of them there, and forty of them had been registered with the police station. None of them was missing. The safe had enough space for at least forty more. On the bottom of the safe there was a drawer and the inspector opened it. There was no ammunition of any kind—only holsters, brushes, and special oils. He closed the drawer and then the safe, and he was about to put everything back in its place when something started to bother him, something about the weapons safe. He went back and opened the doors to the safe and the drawer as well. Then he noticed that between the base of the safe and the drawer there was too much space, at least ten inches. There must have been a secret compartment there. But how was he going to open it? The blinds let in enough light. He grabbed the chair, sat in front of the open safe, and lit a cigarette. He looked at it so intensely that his eyes were going pitter-patter. And what if it was just a flaw in the design? No, impossible. And all of a sudden he realized he had solved the busillis. If each weapon was held in place by three pins, then why was the last one on the bottom row held up by four? He got up and, with his index finger, pushed the first three golden pins. Nothing happened. When he pushed the fourth one he heard a click and a narrow compartment, hidden between the bottom of the safe and the drawer, exactly where Montalbano thought it would be, sprung open. The inspector pulled it out completely. There were a gun and a revolver held in place with the usual pins, so that they wouldn’t shift when the drawer was opened or closed. Next to these two weapons there were three other pins, arranged as if they were supposed to hold another weapon, which wasn’t there. You could still see
its impression on the velvet. Montalbano picked up the gun—American, deadly looking—and its look was the only deadly thing about it. The firing pin spring had been loosened, rendering the gun useless. The same thing that had been done to Rosanna’s revolver. The serial number had been filed off this one as well. He put it back. There were also three boxes of ammo; one was open, with six bullets missing.

  He put everything back in its place. He returned to the hallway. Mrs. Bufano was listening to, Watch me swing, watch me swing, as I dance the twist. Luckily, there was a stool nearby. He put the stool under the window, he opened it, climbed, jumped, closed it, went down, and left. Olè! I give you Inspector Salvo Montalbano: otherwise know as the acrobat.

  The first thing the dispatcher told him was that Representative Torrisi had been calling all morning. It was urgent, actually critical, that he speak with him.

  “When he calls back, patch him through.”

  Fazio showed up soon after.

  “How did it go with Rosanna?”

  “It went well, sir. It looks like she’s getting along with my wife. Although she asked me at least four times when exactly we’re going to arrest Pino Cusumano. She’s obsessed with it; she can’t wait to see him behind bars. How strange, huh, sir?”

  “What’s so strange about it?”

  “How do you mean, sir? First the girl was ready to kill a man just to please her boyfriend, and now, just a few days later, she wants to see her boyfriend rot in jail.”

  “She feels betrayed; she told us that Cusumano was going to get her out of trouble; instead he left her right where she was.”

  “Bah. You know what? It reminds me of an opera.”

  “La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento?”

  “Yes, sir. That one, precisely.”

  Without saying a word, Montalbano put a hand in his pocket, took out the photo of Rosanna lying naked on her back, and handed it to Fazio. He took it, looked at it, and dropped it on the table as if it were poisonous.

  “Holy Mother!”