Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri

  “No, you can’t say that. If you are certain that you have always acted according to the dictates of your conscience—”

  The judge raised a hand, interrupting him.

  “That’s the real question. The crux.”

  “Are you afraid you made some judgments for the sake of convenience or due to outside pressure, things like that?”

  “Never.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “You see, there are some lines of Montaigne that lay out the question somewhat crudely: ‘From the same sheet of paper on which he wrote out his sentence condemning an adulterer,’ writes Montaigne, ‘the same judge tears off a little piece to write a love note to the wife of a colleague of his.’ It’s a crude example, I repeat, but it contains a great deal of truth. Let me put it another way. What sort of state was I in—as a man, that is—at the moment in which I pronounced a harsh sentence?”

  “I don’t understand, Your Honor.”

  “It’s not so hard to understand, Inspector. Have I always been able to keep my private life separate from my application of the law? Have I always been able to prevent my bad moods, my idiosyncrasies, my personal concerns, sorrows, and lack of happiness from staining the white page on which I was about to formulate a sentence? Was I successful in this or not?”

  The sweat had Montalbano’s shirt sticking to his skin.

  “I beg your pardon, Your Honor, but you aren’t reviewing the trials you conducted—it’s your whole life you’re reviewing.”

  He realized at once that he’d made a mistake. He shouldn’t have said what he said. But for a moment he’d felt like the doctor who’s just discovered that his patient is gravely ill: Should I tell him or shouldn’t I? Montalbano had instinctively chosen the first option.

  The judge stood up brusquely.

  “Thank you so much for coming. Good night.”

  The judge did not pass by the following morning. Nor was he anywhere to be seen in the days and weeks that followed. But Montalbano did not forget about the judge. More than a month after that evening encounter, he summoned Fazio.

  “Remember that retired judge, Leonardo Attard?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d like some news of him. You met his housekeeper, didn’t you? What was her name, do you remember?”

  “Her name was Prudenza. How could I forget a name like that?”

  That afternoon Fazio came in to report.

  “The judge is doing fine; he just doesn’t go out anymore. Prudenza told me that since the floor above his became available, he bought it. So now he owns the whole house.”

  “Did he take all his papers up there?”

  “Not a chance! Prudenza told me he wants to leave the upstairs vacant, doesn’t even intend to rent it out. She says he wants to be left alone in that house and doesn’t want any bother. And actually Prudenza told me another thing that she thought was strange. The judge didn’t exactly say he didn’t want to be bothered; he said he didn’t want any regrets. What do you think he meant?”

  It took Montalbano all night to realize that the judge had not misspoken when he said “regrets” instead of “bother.” And when he came to this realization, he broke into a cold sweat. As soon as he got to the office, he attacked Fazio.

  “I want the phone number of Judge Attard’s son at once, the one who lives in Bolzano!”

  Half an hour later he was able to talk to Dr. Giulio Attard, a pediatrician.

  “This is Inspector Montalbano, police. Listen, Doctor, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but your father’s mental state has—”

  “Has worsened? I was afraid of that.”

  “You must come at once to Vigàta. Come and see me at the station, so we can work out a way—”

  “Listen, Inspector, I thank you for your kindness, but at the moment I really can’t come.”

  “Your father is getting ready to kill himself, you know.”

  “Let’s not get melodramatic.”

  Montalbano hung up.

  That same evening, as he was driving past the judge’s house, he stopped, got out of the car, and went and rang the doorbell.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Montalbano, Your Honor. I just came by to say hello.”

  “I wish I could invite you in, but it’s too messy. Please come back tomorrow, if you can.”

  The inspector was walking away when he heard his name called.

  “Montalbano! Inspector! Are you still there?”

  He ran back.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “I think I found it.”

  And that was all. The inspector rang again, repeatedly, but there was no answer.

  He was woken up by the persistent sirens of fire trucks heading in the direction of Vigàta. He glanced at the clock: four a.m. He had a premonition. He went out on the veranda just as he was, in his underpants, and walked down to the water’s edge, where he had the broadest point of view. The water was so cold it made his feet ache. But he barely felt it. He was looking, in the distance, at Judge Leonardo Attard’s house blazing like a torch. Little surprise, with all the paper there was inside! It would take the firemen a very long time to find the judge’s charred body. Of this he was certain.

  Two days later, a very large parcel with a long piece of string wrapped around it numerous times, and a large envelope, were placed on Montalbano’s desk by Fazio.

  “Prudenza brought them here this morning. The judge gave them to her the day before the house burned down, asking her to give them to you.”

  The inspector opened the large envelope. Inside was a sheet of paper with writing on it and another, smaller envelope, which was sealed.

  It took me a while, but in the end I found what I had always assumed and feared. I’m sending you all the documents relating to a trial of fifteen years ago, owing to which the court over which I presided sentenced to thirty years a man who to the very end proclaimed his innocence. I didn’t believe his claims of innocence. Now, after careful review, I realize that I didn’t want to believe his claims of innocence. Why not? If, in reading these documents, you arrive at the same conclusion I did—which was that I was acting more or less consciously in bad faith—then, and only then, open the envelope included herewith. Inside you’ll find the story of a very troubled moment of my private life. This story will explain, perhaps, my actions of fifteen years ago. Explain, not justify them. I should add that the man convicted died after twelve years in prison. Thank you.

  The moon was out. With a shovel he borrowed from Fazio, he dug a hole in the sand ten paces away from the veranda. And in it he put the parcel and the two letters. Then he went and took a jerrycan of gasoline from the trunk of his car, went back to the beach, poured about a fourth of the liquid onto the paper, and set it on fire. When the flames went out, he stirred the paper with a stick, poured another quarter can onto it, and lit it again. He repeated this procedure two more times, until he was certain that the whole thing had been reduced to ashes. Then he started filling the hole. By the time he finished, dawn was peering over the horizon.

  PESSOA MAINTAINS

  Montalbano got up at six that morning, a fact that in itself would have made no difference to him had it not been such a dismal day. A sparse rain was falling, pretending it wasn’t there, the very kind of rain farmers used to call “peasant-drenching.” Once upon a time, when people still worked the land, a peasant wouldn’t stop in the face of this sort of rain; he would keep toiling with his hoe, since the rain was so light it seemed hardly to be there at all, and when he returned home in the evening his clothes were completely sodden. And this only worsened the inspector’s already bad mood, since he had to be in Palermo, a two-hour drive away, by nine-thirty that morning, for a meeting whose subject was the impossible—that is, finding ways and methods to distinguish, out of the thousands of illegal immigrants that la
nded on the island every year, those who were poor innocents down on their luck and those who were pure criminals who had finagled their way into the hordes of the desperate. Some genius of a minister claimed to have found a nearly infallible way to do this, and the honorable minister had decided that all law enforcement personnel in Sicily should be duly apprised of it. Montalbano thought this ministerial genius should get the Nobel Prize, since, after all, he’d succeeded in creating nothing less than a method for distinguishing Good from Evil.

  When he got in his car to go back to Vigàta, it was already five in the afternoon. He felt upset. The ministerial genius’s revelation had been received with poorly concealed smirks and was practically unfeasible. A day wasted. As expected.

  What he hadn’t expected was the total absence of his men at the station upon his return. Even Catarella wasn’t there. Where had they all gone? He heard some footsteps in the corridor. It was Catarella returning, out of breath.

  “Ascuze me, Chief. I went to the phammacy t’get s’m assprin. I’m comin’ down witta frou.”

  “But where’s everybody else?”

  “Isspecter Augello’s got the frou, Galluzzo’s got the frou, an’ Fazio an’ Gallo’s—”

  “Got the frou.”

  “No, Chief. They’re fine.”

  “So where are they?”

  “They wen’ to the moider scene where summon was moidered.”

  There you go: You can’t go away for even half a day without people taking advantage and killing someone.

  “Do you know where?”

  “Yessir. Inna Ulivuzza districk.”

  And how did one get there? If he asked Catarella, the guy was liable to send him beyond the Arctic Circle. Then he remembered that Fazio had a cell phone.

  “But why bother to come, Chief?” said Fazio. “The assistant prosecutor has already ordered the body removed, Dr. Pasquano’s already had a look at it, and Forensics are just finishing up.”

  “Well, I’m coming anyway. You and Gallo wait for me. Now tell me how to get there.”

  He could just as easily have taken Fazio’s advice and stayed put at the office. But he felt the need to make up in some way for a day wasted driving more than four hours and listening to a deluge of meaningless words.

  Ulivuzza district was right near the administrative boundary with Montelusa. Another hundred yards and the matter would not have fallen under the jurisdiction of the Vigàta Police. The house where they’d found the murder victim was completely isolated. Made of stones without mortar, it consisted of three rooms in a row on the ground floor. There was a door that served as an entrance, with an opening in the wall beside it that gave onto a stall in which a solitary, melancholy donkey lived. When the inspector arrived, there was only one car there, Gallo’s, parked outside the open area in front of the house. Apparently the bedlam of doctors, nurses, forensics experts, the assistant prosecutor and his retinue was over. So much the better.

  Montalbano got out of his car and stepped straight into a foot and a half of mud. The peasant-drenching rain was no longer falling, but its effects still lingered. The threshold to the house was in fact buried under a good two or three inches of mud, and there was mud all over the room he entered. Fazio and Gallo were standing and drinking a glass of wine in front of the fireplace. There was also an oven, closed by a piece of tin bent into a semicircular covering. The body had been taken away. On the table in the middle of the room lay a plate with the remains of two boiled potatoes transformed into purplish beets by the blood that had filled the plate and spilled over onto the wooden table.

  On the table, which had no tablecloth, there was also a whole round of tomazzo cheese, half a loaf of bread, and half a glass of red wine. The flask was gone, taken by Fazio and Gallo to fill their own glasses. On the floor beside the wicker chair lay a fork.

  Fazio had followed the inspector’s gaze.

  “It happened while he was eating,” he said. “They executed him with a single shot to the base of the skull.”

  It made Montalbano angry whenever television reporters used the word execute to mean murder. And he also got upset with his men when they did the same. But this time he let it slide. If Fazio had let it slip out, it was because he’d been shaken by that single shot to the base of the skull, coldly fired point-blank.

  “What’s over there?” the inspector asked, indicating the other room with an inclination of his head.

  “Nothing. A double bed with no sheets, just the two mattresses, two nightstands, an armoire, and two chairs like this one here.”

  “I knew him,” said Gallo, wiping his mouth with his hand.

  “The murder victim?”

  “No, his father. His name was Antonio Firetto. The son’s name was Giacomo, but I never met him.”

  “What ever became of the father?”

  “That’s just it,” said Fazio. “We can’t find him. We looked all around the house and the general area for him, but he’s nowhere to be found. If you ask me, he was grabbed and taken away by the people who killed his son.”

  “What do you know about the guy who was killed?”

  “Chief, Giacomo Firetto is the guy who was killed!”

  “So?”

  “Chief, the guy’d been on the lam for five years. He was a Mafia grunt: small-time butchery jobs, mostly, or so they say. You’re the only one who’s never heard of him.”

  “Did he belong to the Cuffaros or the Sinagras?”

  The Cuffaros and Sinagras were the two Mafia families that had been fighting for years over control of the province of Montelusa.

  “Giacomo Firetto was forty-five years old, Chief. When he still lived around here, he belonged to the Sinagras. He was just a kid at the time, but with a great future. To the point that the Riolo family from Palermo borrowed him for a while. For a long while, in fact, since he stayed with them till he was killed.”

  “And so whenever he was in the area, his dad would put him up.”

  Fazio and Gallo exchanged a lightning-quick glance.

  “Chief, his father was a good and honest man,” Gallo said decisively.

  “Why do you say he was . . . ?”

  “Because in our opinion, by now they’ve already killed him too.”

  “Well then give me some sense of what you two think happened here.”

  “With your permission,” said Gallo, “there’s something else I’d like to say. Antonio Firetto was around seventy, but he had the spirit of a child. He wrote poetry.”

  “What?”

  “Yessir, poetry. He didn’t know how to read or write, but he wrote poetry anyway. Beautiful poetry. I heard him recite a few poems.”

  “And what did he talk about in these poems?”

  “I dunno, the Blessed Virgin, the moon, the grass. That kind of thing. And he never wanted to believe what people said about his son. He claimed that his son was incapable of doing such things, that he had a good heart. He just never wanted to believe it. Once he got into a violent tussle in town with a guy who’d called his son a mafioso.”

  “I get the picture. So you’re telling me it was quite natural for him to put his son up, since he thought he was innocent as Christ.”

  “Exactly,” said Gallo, almost defiantly.

  “Let’s get back to the subject. So what do you guys think happened here?”

  Gallo looked at Fazio as if to say it was up to him to talk.

  “Here’s how I think it went,” said Fazio. “Giacomo probably came here in the early afternoon. He must have been dead tired, because he threw himself down on the bed with his muddy shoes still on. His father lets him rest, then fixes him something to eat. When Giacomo sits down at the table, it’s already dark outside. His father apparently isn’t hungry, or is used to eating later, so he goes out to give a hand to the donkey in the stall. But there are two men outside, waiting for
the right moment. They immobilize him, then tiptoe into the house and kill Giacomo. Then they bring the old man with them, and escape in the car that Giacomo drove to get here.”

  “And why in your opinion didn’t they kill the old man right here, when they killed his son?”

  “Dunno. Maybe Giacomo had told his father something, and they wanted to know what they’d said to each other.”

  “They could have done it in the stall next door.”

  “Maybe they thought it would take a while. Somebody might come by. Which in fact happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The murder was discovered by a friend of Antonio’s who lives a few hundred yards from here. Apparently they would get together every evening after supper for a glass of wine and some conversation. His name is Romildo Alessi. Anyway, this Alessi, who has a motor scooter, dashed to a nearby house where he knew there was a telephone. When we got here, the corpse was still warm.”

  “Your reconstruction doesn’t make sense,” Montalbano said brutally.

  Gallo and Fazio looked at each other in bewilderment.

  “And why not?”

  “If you can’t figure it out by yourselves, I’m not gonna tell you. What was the dead man wearing?”

  “Trousers, shirt, jacket. All light stuff, seeing how hot it is, in spite of the rain.”

  “So he was armed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because anyone who wears a jacket in the summertime is armed and hiding a weapon under the jacket. So, was he armed or not?”

  “We didn’t find any weapon.”

  Montalbano sneered.

  “So you guys think a dangerous fugitive is going to go around without so much as a miserable handgun in his pocket?”

  “Maybe his weapon was taken away by the people who killed him.”

  “Maybe. Did you have a look around?”

  “Yessir. And so did Forensics. We didn’t even find the shell. Either the killers took it, or they shot him with a revolver.”