* * *
—
It was almost noon when he sat down in his office.
It was almost twelve-thirty when Fazio returned.
“So what was your impression?”
“What can I say, Chief? The man died from a stab wound, but it’s an awfully strange stab wound ’cause his shirt and jacket weren’t stained enough. And Forensics found no trace of blood in the other rooms. It’s possible the man was killed somewhere else and then taken home and left all nice and dressed up in his bed. Which leads me to ask: What does all this mean?”
“I don’t know what to say. Let’s wait for the results of the autopsy, and then we can talk about it. Tell me about the demonstration instead.”
Before answering, Fazio twisted up his mouth and threw up his hands.
“Once again, Chief, what can I say? You know, at the demonstration there weren’t just workers from the factories that are being closed, there was also just regular people, and that’s the real tragedy. There were kids with no hope of ever finding a job. I even recognized some of my son’s former schoolmates who’re now married with kids, clerks and university graduates who’ve lost their jobs with no chance of getting them back. If things go on this way, their only choice will be to emigrate, like they used to do.”
“I know, Fazio. And that’s the least of it, because if these people suddenly decide to let out all the rage they’ve got inside, the whole thing could end very badly. If you’re in no position to feed your children, you’re ready to do just about anything.”
The inspector fell silent for a moment. Something had occurred to him.
“Do you have stuff to do here?”
“Nah.”
“Then come with me.”
On their way out, he said to Catarella: “When Augello gets back, tell him I’ll see him this afternoon.”
When they got to the car, he opened the passenger-side door and said to Fazio: “Get in.”
“Where you taking me?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
* * *
—
Twenty minutes later, Montalbano pulled up outside number 20, Via Umberto Biancamano.
“Let’s go.”
Fazio obeyed.
Montalbano took him by the arm and gestured towards the building in front of them.
“See that third-floor balcony?”
“Yeah.”
“It gives onto a bedroom, and on the bed there lies a man, murdered, all dressed up, with even his shoes on. In short, an exact replica of the murder victim you saw in Via La Marmora.”
As he was talking, Fazio’s face became transformed, jaw dropping, eyes bugging out.
“Are you kidding me, Chief? Are you serious?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“But how do you know this?”
“I know it straight from the mouth of that womanizing asshole, Mimì Augello. Join me for lunch and I’ll tell you a story to end all stories.”
* * *
—
Upon entering the trattoria, Montalbano asked Enzo: “Is the little room free?”
“Yessir.”
“Anybody in it?”
“Nobody.”
“Then we’ll eat in there.”
“As you wish, sir.”
They went in and sat down.
“Do me a favor, Enzo,” said Montalbano without asking Fazio what he wanted. “Bring us two servings of pasta con le sarde, and while we’re waiting, we’ll have some octopus a strascinasale ’cause I’m hungry as a wolf.”
Enzo went out and Montalbano started telling Fazio about all that had happened the previous night.
When he’d finished, Fazio drank down a whole glass of wine in a single gulp.
“That’s a little better,” he said. “I think the most important thing to do at this point is to find out as much as we can about Inspector Augello’s corpse. Do you know what his name is?”
“Wait, I think I remember . . . Yes: Aurisicchio.”
“Okay,” said Fazio. “As soon as we’re done eating, I’ll start looking.”
* * *
—
The moment the inspector stepped into his office, Mimì Augello came in behind him.
“The fucking prosecutor made us wait a whole hour before the body could be taken away.”
He tossed a set of keys onto the inspector’s desk. Montalbano put them in his pocket.
“And what can you tell me about the conclusions Forensics came to? Or were you hypnotized the whole time by Antonia’s ass?”
“I can see the honest and upright Inspector Montalbano is himself not indifferent to the young lady’s world-class posterior. Oh, and on the subject of women, I wanted to let you know I’m going back tonight.”
“Going back where?”
“I got a call from Geneviève.”
“And who’s she?”
“Come on, she’s my lady friend who lives on the fourth floor. She said her husband is feeling better and will be working the night shift out of turn tonight, so we can try again.”
Montalbano looked at him with genuine admiration.
“You’ve really got guts, Mimì! After everything that happened last time . . . and the dead man lying on the bed downstairs . . .”
“Ya gotta strike while the iron is hot, Salvo,” said Augello. Then he continued: “At any rate, Forensics have nothing to go on for now. They’re hoping to find a few fingerprints on the letter opener, but there doesn’t seem to be much chance of it. In my opinion, given the lack of blood, the guy was killed somewhere else. Which leads me to ask: How the hell did they manage to transport the body all the way to the apartment he lived in? In one way or another, they must have taken him out of the car, dragged him to the front door, put him in the elevator, and dragged him into the flat. Now, don’t you think they ran a huge risk?”
“Get to the point, Mimì,” said Montalbano.
“The point is that it’s highly likely he was killed in some other apartment in the same building. In which case the risk would have been minimal.”
Montalbano sat there and stared at him, waiting.
“And so, in my opinion,” Augello resumed, “we have to sift through everyone who lives at Via La Marmora, the doorman included.”
“Okay,” said the inspector. “You go first.”
“You’re not coming?” asked Augello, surprised.
Montalbano decided it was better, for the moment, not to mention what Fazio was up to.
“No. I have to wait for an important phone call from the commissioner. I’ll come and give you a hand in a couple of hours.”
Augello left, and Montalbano reached out and grabbed the first document for signing.
* * *
—
He was quite surprised to see Fazio reappear before him after only an hour, smirking as if he was bringing big news.
“So, wha’d you find out?”
Fazio sat down.
“I can affirm without a shadow of a doubt that Inspector Augello’s cadaver is not Signor Filippo Aurisicchio.”
“And what makes you so sure?”
“I talked with the guy on the phone, personally in person. So I got the idea to go back to Via Biancamano, and I was lucky enough to run into somebody I know, who asked me what I was doing in the neighborhood, and I told him I needed to talk to Mr. Aurisicchio. My friend gave me a confused look and said: ‘But Aurisicchio moved out of Vigàta last summer! His apartment’s been sitting empty, waiting for someone to rent it.’ And then he gave me the guy’s phone number and said he was now living in Ravenna. So I called him up at once and pretended I was someone interested in his apartment.”
“And wha’d he say?”
“He told me he moved out of the area for work-related reasons,
and that he’d turned the apartment over to an agency.”
“Do you know the name of the agency?”
“Of course: Casamica.”
“So give ’em a ring.”
“Already taken care of.”
To avoid getting upset, Montalbano decided to pretend he hadn’t heard Fazio.
“And wha’d they tell you?”
“They told me to call back in four days, when the boss who has the keys returns.”
“But what kind of fucking agency is that?”
“Apparently Aurisicchio is very jealously protective of his apartment, and so he left his keys with the agency’s boss, who’s in Stromboli, and made him promise that he would be the only one who could open and close the place.”
“Well, we can’t wait that long. We absolutely have to find a solution.”
“Maybe an anonymous phone call . . .”
“No, Fazio, that’s out of the question.”
“Why?”
“Just think for a second. If we find out about the corpse from an anonymous phone call, then we’ll be forced to investigate and discover who it was that made the phone call. And what will we tell the prosecutor?”
“We could write a letter instead.”
“The problem’s the same as with a phone call.”
“So we’re going to have to discover the body ourselves?”
“Yes. But how are we going to get inside? We need an excuse.”
Fazio didn’t know what to say.
Montalbano suddenly had an idea.
Fazio, who knew the inspector well, realized from the change of expression on Montalbano’s face that he’d found a solution.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I can’t at the moment. I have to talk to Augello first. In fact, you know what I say? Come with me; we’ll go and see him together.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s at Via La Marmora, questioning the tenants in the building.”
* * *
—
The phone rang just as the inspector was getting up.
“Chief, ’ere’s summon onna line say’s ’ey’re the chief o’ F’rensix. Bu’ t’ me they soun’ jess like a goil.”
“Put her on.”
“Ciao, Salvo, I just wanted to give you the first results we’ve got, which unfortunately will also be the last. There were no fingerprints on the handle of the letter opener. The killer either wore gloves or wiped them off.”
“Thank you, Antonia, for calling me right away.”
“You’re welcome. Thank you. I’ll be seeing you.”
Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . went the telephone.
And Montalbano felt sort of bad about it.
* * *
—
When they were outside the building on Via La Marmora, the inspector asked the doorman: “Do you know what apartment my colleague is in at the moment?”
“Yes, Inspector. He’s done the attic and the fifth and fourth floors. Now he’s with Signura Musumarra on the third floor.”
“Go and take over for him,” Montalbano said to Fazio. “Continue the questioning and tell Augello to come downstairs ’cause I need to talk to him.”
He didn’t have time to light a cigarette outside the door before Mimì appeared.
“Good God!” said Mimì. “What is this? Aside from a pretty forty-year-old in the attic apartment, the average age of the tenants here is practically over a hundred . . .”
“Never mind that. Did you manage to find anything out?”
“No, it’s as if nobody ever even sees their neighbors in this place. A waste of three hours. What did you want to tell me?”
“Let’s go and have some coffee.”
* * *
—
They sat down at a table apart from the rest.
“I had an idea of how to officially discover your cadaver,” the inspector began immediately.
“And what would that be?”
“Tonight, you must go the same route you did the other night.”
“You want me to lower myself down onto the floor below?”
“Exactly. You can tell your lady friend that you lost your wallet the other night, and you’re sure it happened on your journey to the third floor, so you have to go back and look for it.”
“That means I’m going to miss another night!” Mimì Augello said in despair.
“No, Mimì, you can pull out the story of the wallet after you’ve done what you need to do.”
“Wait a second,” said Augello. “The minute I find that body there, Geneviève is automatically going to be in a pickle because I have to somehow justify the fact that I was in her apartment.”
“I’ve thought of that, too,” said Montalbano. “The official version we’ll give is that the lady called you at the police station because she thought she’d heard someone climbing up onto her balcony, so you went out to have a look and your wallet fell onto the balcony below. Got that?”
“Well, okay,” Augello said in resignation. “I’ll give it a try.”
When they came back to the front door at Via La Marmora, Augello said he was going to go and give Fazio a hand.
“You’re not coming?” he asked.
“No.”
* * *
—
When Mimì headed upstairs, Montalbano went into the doorman’s booth and, seeing a vacant chair, grabbed it and sat down silently beside him.
The doorman laughed.
“What are you doing? Do you want to take my place?”
“No, I just would like to exchange a few words with you.”
“You’re the boss.”
He was a ruddy-faced man of about sixty, with a cheerful expression and a big Turkish-style mustache.
“And what is your name?”
“Bruno Ammazzalorso.”
“That’s not a name from around here.”
“No, in fact my father came here from the Abbruzzi when I was just a little baby.”
Bruno Ammazzalorso, the killer of the brown bear of the Abbruzzi!, thought Montalbano, smiling to himself, musing that if the man had phoned the police station, Catarella would have put the call through, saying, “There’s a jinnelman ’at killed a brown Abbruzzi bear onna line.”
Then he asked: “How long have you been the doorman here?”
“Ten years.”
“And was Signor Catalanotti already living here?”
“Yessir, he was.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Look, Inspector, he was a strange guy, but I don’t hardly know nothin’ about ’im. He never got married. He was a bachelor when I got here, and he stayed a bachelor.”
“But did he have a girlfriend?”
“Dunno, I can’t say. There was both women an’ men goin’ up to his place. An’ maybe some of ’em stayed the night . . .”
“Did he have any relatives?”
“Not that I know of.”
“All right, go on.”
Ammazzalorso took a look around, leaned down towards the inspector, and, lowering his voice, said: “If you really wanna know the truth, I think there was a misunderstanding.”
“What do you mean?”
“Signor Catalanotti never went to work an’ didn’t seem to have any other kind of steady job, either. But he was never short on money! Hell, it practically danced in his pockets. Every morning he’d go out to the café nearby, all slicked up, and then would . . . well, he’d receive visitors.”
“Try to be a little more precise,” said the inspector.
“Sometimes you’d see women and men coming in to talk to him. But you could tell they weren’t his friends. What did they say to him? What was all that talking about? Who knows! Then, at exactly one
o’clock, he would get up and come home for lunch. He’d take a little nap—or so I was told by Giusippina—an’ afterwards I dunno what he did. Sometimes he’d go out again and then come back at eight o’clock on the dot, or else he’d just stay home. I also know he had stuff to do in the evenings.”
“And do you know where he went?”
“I ain’t got the vaguest idea.”
“But were there any days when he just stayed home?”
“Not too often, but, yeah, sometimes. But then he would have people come an’ see him at home.”
Montalbano assumed the same conspiratorial air as the doorman and said: “Let’s talk man to man, eye to eye. Surely you must have had some kind of idea of what Catalanotti was doing.”
“Of course I did.”
4
“Feel like telling me about it?” asked the inspector, grinning complicitly.
Ammazzalorso sat up, leaned back against the chair, and assumed a proud expression.
“Inspector, I ain’t in the habit of makin’ trouble for people.”
“What more trouble could you possibly make for poor old Catalanotti, now that he’s dead?”
“That’s true. Well, all right. What I can say is that, in my opinion—but it’s just my personal opinion—the guy was dealin’ drugs.”
“And what made you think that?” asked Montalbano.
“I dunno. Just because.”
“But do you remember how old the people who used to come to see him were?”
“No kids. Mostly forty years old and up.”
Montalbano got the impression this drug story was neither here nor there. Just a doorman thinking ill of a tenant.
He stood up, shook Bruno Ammazzalorso’s hand, and headed for the stairs.
Two flights of stairs he could handle.
As soon as he reached the landing, Augello and Fazio popped out of the apartment across from Catalanotti’s.
“Any news?” he asked them.
“Wha’d I tell you?” replied Augello. “It’s like a typical residential building in Stockholm.”
The Sicilian Method Page 4