“Because that same morning I found a dead tench and a dead trout in the tank.”
“Also shot?!”
“No, asphyxiated, from being out of the water too long. In my opinion, the guy emptied the net onto the grass and waited for the fish to die. It would have been too hard for him to hold them in his hands while they were still alive. Then he took the mullet and threw the other two back into the tank.”
“In other words, he made a choice. In your opinion, he chose the mullet because it was the biggest, but he could have had other reasons, don’t you think?”
“Inspector, how could I possibly know what’s going through the head of a—”
“One last thing. What time was it when you closed the restaurant the night before the incident?”
“I always close at twelve-thirty a.m.—for customers, that is.”
“And how much longer does the personnel stay?”
“Usually about an hour.”
The inspector thanked him and hung up. Then, equipped with pen and paper, he went back out onto the veranda and sat down. He wrote:
Monday, September 22 = fish
Monday, September 29 = chicken
He started laughing. It looked like a menu.
Monday, October 6 = dog
Why was it always in the wee hours of Monday morning? For now, at least, better gloss over this. He wrote down the first letters of each animal.
FCD
It made no sense. Then a puerile sense of humor got hold of him, and the only thing those three consonants suggested to him was:
FUCK COCK DICK
He crumpled the sheet of paper into a ball, threw it on the floor, and went to bed more confused than ever.
As Montalbano thrashed about in bed, trying to fall asleep after scarfing down a nearly industrial amount of sardines a beccafico, the man sat reading in a large room with crowded bookshelves covering the walls, the only light coming from a dim table lamp. Looking up from the ancient, exquisitely bound tome he was reading, he closed the book, took off his glasses, and leaned back in his wooden armchair. He stayed that way for a few minutes, every so often rubbing his burning eyes with his fingers. Then, after heaving a deep sigh, he opened the right-hand drawer of his desk. Inside, amidst the paper, erasers, keys, old stamps, and photographs, lay his pistol. He grabbed it and pulled out the empty magazine. He felt around further inside the same drawer, found the box of cartridges, and opened it. There were eight bullets left. He smiled. That was more than enough to do what he had in mind. He put only one bullet into the clip, just one, as he always did, then put the box back in its place and closed the drawer. He slipped the pistol into the right-hand pocket of his shapeless jacket, then felt the left-hand pocket: The flashlight was in its place. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was already midnight. It was going to take him a good hour to get to the appointed place, which meant that he would be able to act at exactly the right time. Putting his glasses back on, he tore a small rectangle of graph paper from a notebook, wrote something on this with a ballpoint pen, then put the piece of paper in the small front pocket of his jacket. Then he stood up, went to get the telephone directory, and thumbed through it until he found the page he wanted. He had to be one hundred percent certain that he had the right address. Next, he unfolded a map he kept within reach on his desk and double-checked the route he would take from his home. Actually, it looked like it would take a little more than an hour. So much the better. He went to the window and opened it. A cold wind hit him straight in the face, making him step backwards. He had better put something over his suit before going out. When he got into his car, he was wearing a heavy raincoat and a black hat.
He started up the car, but after a few sputters the engine stalled. He tried again. Same result. He tried yet again, but the engine still refused to cooperate. He started sweating. If the car really was broken down, he would be unable to do any of the things he had in mind. What then? Should he skip this Monday’s warning? No, that would mean failing to keep his promise, and he always kept his promises. He had no choice but to put the whole thing off and start over. But what if he missed the deadlines? Would he still be able to accomplish the extraordinary task he had set for himself? He felt lost. He tried again, feeling desperate, and this time the engine, after coughing a few times, decided to start.
3
Mimì Augello got it both right and wrong. He’d got it right as to the, well, size of the new victim, but he was wrong as to the species, since it wasn’t a sheep.
On the morning of October 13, Fazio came into the station with the news—which really wasn’t news at all—that a goat had been killed. The usual shot to the head, the usual empty shell, the usual piece of paper.
I’M STILL CONTRACTING
Nobody present breathed a word, nobody dared make a wisecrack.
A dense, uncertain silence hovered in the inspector’s office.
“He’s certainly succeeding, I’ll say!” said Montalbano, deciding he would be the first to speak.
It was his duty, after all. He was the boss.
“Succeeding at what?” asked Augello.
“At making us take him seriously.”
“I took him seriously from the start,” said Mimì.
“Congratulations, Deputy Inspector Augello. I’ll recommend you for a solemn citation from His Honor, the commissioner. Happy?”
Mimì didn’t answer. Whenever the inspector was in this foul a mood, it was best to sit tight and keep one’s mouth shut.
“He’s trying to tell us something else, in addition to keeping us abreast of his contraction,” Montalbano resumed after a pause.
He spoke in a low voice, mostly because he was trying to work things out for himself.
“What makes you think that?”
“Use your brains, Mimì, if it’s not too hard. If he only wanted us to know that he was contracting—whatever he may mean by that—he didn’t need to go running from one end of Vigàta to another, killing a different animal each time. Why change animal?”
“Maybe the first letter of each—” Mimì ventured.
“I’ve already thought of that. Does FCDG mean anything to you?”
“Could be the initials of some subversive group or movement,” Fazio timidly suggested.
“Oh, yeah? Give me an example.”
“I dunno, Chief, how about the Front for Communist Disruption and Grandstanding?”
“You think there are still revolutionary communists around? Give me a break!” Montalbano shot him down gruffly.
Another silence fell. Augello lit a cigarette, Fazio stared at the tips of his shoes.
“Put out that cigarette,” the inspector ordered Mimì.
“Why . . . ?” Augello asked, dumbfounded.
“Because, while you were screwing around in Frankfurt—”
“I was in Hamburg.”
“Wherever you were, while you were out of this beautiful country of ours, some minister woke up one morning and started worrying about our health. If you want to keep smoking, you’re going to have to go for a little walk down the street.”
Cursing between clenched teeth, Mimì got up and left the room.
“Can I go too?” Fazio asked.
“What’s keeping you?”
Alone at last, the inspector heaved a long sigh of satisfaction. He’d managed to give vent to some of the foul mood this idiot who went around killing animals had put him in.
Barely an hour went by before Montalbano’s voice thundered throughout the police station.
“Augello! Fazio!”
They both came running. At the mere sight of Montalbano’s face, Augello and Fazio became convinced that some gear inside the inspector’s brain had started turning in the right direction. He had, in fact, a hint of a smile on his face.
“Fazio, do you know the name
of the person who owned the murdered goat? Wait—don’t say anything; just nod if you know.”
Bewildered, Fazio nodded his head repeatedly.
“Want to bet I know the first letter of the owner’s surname? It begins with the letter L, right?”
“Right!” Fazio exclaimed in admiration.
Mimì Augello clapped his hands briefly, and ironically, and then asked:
“Are you done with your magic tricks?”
Montalbano didn’t answer.
“Now, tell me the surnames of the other animals’ owners,” he said instead, addressing Fazio.
“Haber, Aiello, Iaccari, Lomonaco—the owner of the goat, the one we were just talking about, is Stefano Lomonaco.”
“Hail!” Mimì shouted.
“Hail what?” Fazio asked, bewildered.
“That’s what he wrote: ‘Hail,’” Augello explained.
“You’re right, Mimì,” said Montalbano. “He is writing us another message using the first letters of those last names, not the names of the animals he’s been killing.”
“Now I get it!” said Fazio.
“Then tell us, Fazio. We want to know too.”
“At the house of the old man whose dog he killed, there were also two goats. And this morning I was wondering why he hadn’t gone back to Iaccari’s place instead of dragging himself over ten miles outside of town to kill another goat. Now I know why. Because he needed another surname, one beginning with L.”
“So what are we going to do?” Augello asked.
His tone was between agitation and anxiety. Fazio, too, looked at the inspector with the eyes of a dog wanting a bone.
Montalbano threw his hands up.
“We can’t just wait for him to shoot a man before we intervene,” Mimì insisted. “Because I’m more than convinced that, next time, he’s going to kill somebody.”
Montalbano threw his hands up again.
“I don’t understand how you can just sit there so calmly,” Mimì said provocatively.
“Because I’m not as foolish as you are,” said the inspector, cool as a cucumber.
“Would you please explain?”
“First of all, what makes you think I’m calm? And second, why don’t you tell me what the hell you think we should do? Build an ark like Noah, put every kind of animal in existence in it and wait for the man to come and kill one? And third: We have no way of knowing that next time he’s going to kill a man. He probably won’t kill anyone till the end of his message. For now, he’s only written the first word: ‘Hail.’ He clearly hasn’t finished his sentence yet. We have no idea how long it will be and how many words it will have. My advice to you both is that you sit tight and be patient.”
On the morning of Monday, October 20, Montalbano, Augello, and Fazio were all at police headquarters at the crack of dawn without having made any prior arrangement. Seeing them all show up at such an early hour, Catarella nearly had a heart attack.
“Whass’ goin’ on? Ahh, wha’ss happened? Eh, wha’ss goin’ on?”
He was given three different answers, three different lies. Montalbano said he hadn’t slept a wink because of severe heartburn; Mimì Augello said he’d had to take a friend who’d been staying with him to catch an early train; and Fazio claimed he’d had to go out early to buy aspirin for his wife, who had a slight fever. But by common agreement they sent Catarella out to get three extra-strong coffees at the corner bar, which was already open.
After drinking his coffee in silence, Montalbano fired up a cigarette. Augello waited for him to take his first drag and then launched into his private vendetta.
“No, no, no!” he said, shaking a reproachful finger. “And what are you going to say to His Honor the minister if he suddenly shows up and sees you?”
Cursing, Montalbano left the room and went down to smoke in the front entrance of the station. Taking his third drag, he heard the telephone ring. He dashed back inside like a sprinter.
All three of them, Montalbano, Fazio, and Augello, converged at once in the tiny doorway to Catarella’s switchboard cabinet, which itself was scarcely bigger than a broom closet, and they began to struggle by way of shoulder thrusts. Seeing them all burst in like that, a terrorized Catarella thought they were all coming at him for some reason. Dropping the receiver he had in his hand, he shot to his feet, eyes bulging, back against the wall, hands in the air, and yelled:
“I surrender!”
Using his authority, Montalbano grabbed the microphone.
“This is Chief Insp—”
“Hello! Hello! Whooziss talking?” a very shrill, hysterical female voice interrupted him.
“This is Chief Insp—”
“Hurry, hurry! Get over here right away! Quick!”
“Tell me, signora, has one of your animals been killed?”
“Animals? What animals? What, are you drunk first thing in the morning?”
“I’m sorry, please give me your personal particulars.”
“Whass ’iss guy talkin’ about?”
“Your name and address, signora.”
By the end of the strained phone conversation, they’d managed to gather that Signora Agata Gaggiano, who lived in the hamlet of Cannatello, “right azackly nex’ to the water fountain,” was scared out of her wits because her husband, Ciccio, had left the house with his shotgun to go kill a certain Armando Losurdo.
“An’ you c’n b’lieve me, if ’e says ’e’s gonna do it, ’e’s gonna do it.”
“So why’s he want to kill him?”
“’Ow should I know? When’s my husban’ ever tol’ me why ’e does anything?”
“Go and check it out,” Montalbano ordered Fazio.
Fazio left the room, muttering, and in turn ordered Galluzzo, who’d just come into the station, to come with him.
Signora Agata Gaggiano, who was about fifty, was so skinny she looked like the personification of famine. The moment the two policemen appeared in front of her, she decided to break down in tears, resting her head against Galluzzo’s chest. She told the two exhausted representatives of the law (the hamlet of Cannatello was located at the edge of a precipice and they’d had to climb for forty-five minutes on foot to get there, as the road was impassible by car) that her husband had gone out at five-thirty that morning to attend to their animals but had returned only ten minutes later, looking out of his mind, just like Orlando at the puppet theater, hair standing straight up on his head, cursing worse than a wild Turk and bashing his head against the wall. She’d gone up to him to ask him what was wrong, but he acted as if he’d gone deaf and didn’t answer. At a certain point he started yelling that this time he wasn’t going to “let it slide with Armando,” he was going to “shoot ’im as sure as the Lord was God.” And in fact he had grabbed the rifle he kept at the head of his bed and gone back out.
“This time they’ll give ’im life! He’ll never come out again! He’s used ’isself up forever!”
“Signora, before you start talking about life imprisonment,” Fazio cut in, thinking only of getting back to the station as quickly as possible, “tell us who this Armando is and where he lives.”
It turned out that Armando Losurdo was a guy with a few acres of land bordering on the Gaggianos’ property, and not a day went by without the two men squabbling with each other. One day, one of them would cut off the branch of the other’s tree, saying it was jutting out into his field, the next day, the other would lay claim to a chicken that had strayed onto his land and make a soup of it.
“And do you know what happened this time, signora?”
“I don’ know! He din’t tell me!”
Fazio had her explain to him where Armando Losurdo lived, and then he left on foot, followed by Galluzzo, whom Signora Agata had clung to all the while, soaking his jacket with tears and the mucus running from her nose.
When they got to the place, they found themselves in a scene straight out of an American cowboy movie. Someone was shooting out the only window of a rustic cottage at a fiftyish-looking peasant, obviously Ciccio Gaggiano, who, taking cover behind a low wall, answered the other’s pistol fire with blasts from his shotgun.
Gaggiano was too absorbed in the gun battle to notice Fazio coming up behind him. In a flash Fazio jumped on him and even managed, when the man turned around, to deal him a punch in the stomach. As Gaggiano was gasping for breath, Fazio handcuffed him.
Galluzzo, meanwhile, was yelling:
“Police! Don’t shoot, Armando Losurdo!”
“I don’t believe you! Get outta here or I’ll shoot you too!”
“We’re with the police, asshole!”
“Swear it on your mother’s head!”
“Just swear to it,” Fazio ordered him. “Otherwise we’ll be here all day.”
“But this is insane!”
“Just swear to it and stop screwing around!”
“I swear on my mother’s head that I’m a policeman!”
As Losurdo came out of the house with his hands up, Fazio asked Galluzzo:
“But didn’t your mother die three years ago?”
“Yes.”
“So why did you drag your feet?”
“It didn’t seem right to me.”
As soon as Gaggiano saw Losurdo outside, he thrust his shoulder and broke free from Fazio, handcuffs and all, charging at his enemy with head down like a ram. Galluzzo stuck a foot out and tripped him, laying him out on the ground.
Meanwhile, Losurdo was yelling:
“I dunno wha’ss got into the guy! He’s crazy! He just set hisself down behind that wall and started shooting! I din’t do nuthin’ to ’im. I swear on my mother’s head.”
“The guy’s frickin’ fixated on mothers’ heads,” Galluzzo commented.
Gaggiano, meanwhile, had risen to his knees but was so enraged he couldn’t speak. The words got jumbled in his mouth and turned to froth as his face turned purple.
“The donkey! The donkey!” he finally managed to blurt out with a sorrowful voice on the verge of tears.
Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories Page 35