The Smell of the Night

by Andrea Camilleri

  “And why did she decide to start working again? Did she need the money?”

  “No. The whole time she’d been working in Montelusa she’d managed to put some money aside. I also think she had a small pension. Which, though small, was more than enough for her needs. No, she went back to work because Gargano sought her out.”

  Montalbano jumped straight out of his armchair, as though shot from a bow. Mrs. Vasile-Cozzo gave a start at the inspector’s reaction and put a hand to her heart.

  “They already knew each other?!”

  “Please calm down, Inspector. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Montalbano, sitting back down. “I thought it was she who’d introduced herself to Gargano.”

  “No, here’s how it went. The first time Emanuele Gargano came to Vigàta, he inquired as to the whereabouts of Angelo Cosentino, explaining that his uncle, the one who’d lived in Milan and brought him up, had told him that when Angelo was mayor he’d helped him out a great deal and saved him from bankruptcy. In fact, I myself remember that up until the 1950s there was a salesman named Filippo Gargano living in Vigata. Anyway, Gargano was told that Angelo had passed away and that the only surviving family member was his daughter, Mariastella. Gargano was very keen to meet her and ended up offering her a job, which she accepted.”

  “Why?”

  “You know, Inspector, Mariastella came to me herself and talked to me about this job. It was the last time I saw her. She never came to my house again. In any case, after her father’s death we’d probably seen each other ten times, if that. The answer to your question, Inspector, is simple: She’d fallen naively and hopelessly in love with Gargano. It was clear to me from the way she talked about him. And I don’t believe she’d ever had a boyfriend. Poor thing, you know what she’s like...”

  “But why?” Montalbano repeated.

  Signora Clementina gave him a puzzled look.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? Mariastella fell—”

  “No, I’m wondering why a rogue like Gargano hired her. Out of gratitude? Let’s not kid ourselves. Gargano’s a shark. Who would slit the throats of his fellow sharks without a second thought. He had three employees in Vigàta. One of these, the one who was murdered, was a clever young man, very skilled at his job, though he pretended to be incompetent, or almost. But Gargano understood at once what he was made of. The other was a beautiful girl. In her case, too, one can understand why Gargano took her on. But Mariastella?”

  “Out of self-interest,” the woman said. “Pure self-interest. First of all, because in the eyes of the whole town, he would seem like a man who didn’t forget anyone who had done him a favor, directly or indirectly. And this favor he repaid, in a sense, by hiring Mariastella. Don’t you think that’s a pretty good façade for a con artist? And, secondly, because it’s always convenient for a man, con artist or no, to have a loving woman at his disposal.”

  He thought he remembered that the King Midas office closed at five-thirty. Chatting with Signora Clementina, he’d lost track of the time. He thanked her, said good-bye, promised to come back soon, got in his car, and left. Want to bet he would find the office already closed? Driving past King Midas, he saw Mariastella outside the already closed front door, rummaging through her purse, probably looking for the keys. He found a spot almost immediately, parked the car, and got out. Then everything began to happen as in a slow-motion sequence in a film. Mariastella was crossing the street, head down, without looking to either her left or her right. All at once she stopped, at the exact moment a car was coming. Montalbano heard the screech of the brakes, saw the car ever so slowly strike the woman straight on, and then saw her fall, also very slowly. The inspector started running and everything returned to its normal rhythm.

  The driver got out and bent down over Mariastella, who was lying on the ground, though moving, trying to get back up. Other people were rushing to the scene. The driver, a well-dressed man of about sixty, was scared to death and white as a sheet.

  “She suddenly stopped!” he said. “I thought that—”

  “Are you badly hurt?” Montalbano asked Mariastella, helping her get up. Then he turned to the others: “Go on home! It’s nothing serious!”

  Recognizing Montalbano, the people in the crowd that had formed began to disperse. The driver, however, didn’t budge.

  “What do you want?” Montalbano asked him as he was bending down to pick up Mariastella’s purse.

  “What do you mean, what do I want? I want to take the lady to the hospital!”

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital, I’m fine,” Mariastella said firmly, looking to the inspector for support.

  “No, I insist!” said the man. “What happened was not my fault! I want a medical report!”

  “Why’s that?” asked Montalbano.

  “Because maybe later on, this same lady might quietly come out and say she suffered multiple fractures, and I’ll be in hot water with my insurance!”

  “If you’re not out of my sight in one minute,” said Montalbano, “I’m going to punch you in the face and you can bring me the medical report on that.”

  The man did not breathe a word, but simply got back in his car and drove off with a screech of the tires, something he’d probably never done before in his life.

  “Thank you,” said Mariastella, offering him her hand. “Good day.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get in my car and go home.”

  “Out of the question! You’re in no condition to drive. Can’t you see that you’re trembling?”

  “Yes, but that’s normal. It’ll pass in a few minutes.”

  “Listen, I helped you out by keeping you from going to the hospital. But now you must do as I say. I’ll drive you home in my car.”

  “Yes, but how will I get to work tomorrow?”

  “I promise that by this evening one of my men will have your car parked in front of your house. Now please give me the keys, so I don’t forget. It’s the yellow Fiat 500, isn’t it?”

  Mariastella Cosentino took the keys from her purse and handed them to the inspector. As they walked towards Montalbano’s car, Mariastella was slightly dragging her left leg and holding her left shoulder very high, perhaps to lessen the pain.

  “Would you like to take my arm?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Polite and firm. If she’d taken the inspector’s arm, what might people think, seeing her so free and easy with a man?

  Montalbano held the car door open for her, and she got in, slowly and carefully.

  She’d clearly taken a nasty hit.

  Question: What should it have been Inspector Montalbano’s duty to do?

  Answer: To take the unhappy woman to the hospital.

  Question: Then why didn’t he do this?

  Answer: Because, in fact, Mr. Salvo Montalbano, a worm in the guise of a police inspector, wanted to take advantage of Mariastella Cosentino’s moment of trauma so that he could knock down her defenses and find out everything about her and her relations with Emanuele Gargano, con artist and murderer.

  “Where does it hurt?” Montalbano asked as he put the key in the ignition.

  “In my hip and my shoulder. But it’s from the fall.”

  What she meant was that the sixty-year-old man’s car had only given her a hard push, knocking her to the ground. It was her violent fall onto the pavement that had caused the damage. But it wasn’t serious. She would wake up the following morning with her hip and shoulder a fine greenish-blue.

  “Tell me where to go.”

  Mariastella instructed him to drive outside of Vigàta, having him turn onto a road with no houses but a few rare, solitary villas, some of them in a state of abandon. The inspector had never been down this road before, he was sure of it, because he felt astonished to find an area that remained as though frozen in a time before the so-called construction boom had turned everything into a wilderness of cement.

>   “Most of these villas you see were built in the late nineteenth century. They were the country homes of the rich of Vigàta. We turned down vast sums of money for ours. That’s it over there.”

  Montalbano did not take his eyes off the road, but knew that it was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spikes and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies ...

  At last he looked up and saw the house. It was how he’d imagined it, only better. It corresponded perfectly, like an exact replica, with the image that had been suggested to him. But suggested by whom? Was it possible he’d seen that house before? No, he was certain he hadn’t.

  “When was it built?” he asked, afraid of the response.

  “In 1870,” said Mariastella.

  16

  “I haven’t been upstairs for years and years,” said Mariastella, opening up the massive front door. “I’ve settled in on the ground floor.”

  The inspector noticed the heavy iron grates over the windows. The upstairs windows were instead closed in by shutters of a now indeterminate color, with many missing slats. The plaster was flaking off the walls.

  Mariastella turned round.

  “If you’d like to come inside a minute...”

  Her words were an invitation, but the woman’s eyes said the exact opposite. They said: “For pity’s sake, go away and leave me alone.”

  “Thanks,” said Montalbano.

  And he went inside. They crossed a large, unadorned foyer, a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell. Mariastella opened the door to the living room. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. The sort of nightmare he had suffered at Signora Clementina’s place was becoming more and more oppressive. Inside his brain an unfamiliar voice said: “Look for the portrait.” He obeyed. He looked all around, and, lo, on a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of an elderly man with a mustache.

  “Is that your father?” he asked, certain and yet at the same time frightened of the response.

  “Yes,” said Mariastella.

  Montalbano now understood that he could no longer hold himself back, that he had to penetrate even further into that incomprehensible, dark area that lay between reality and what his own mind was suggesting to him, a reality that created itself as he was thinking it. He suddenly felt that he had a fever, and it was rising by the minute. What was happening to him? He didn’t believe in magic spells, and yet at that moment he needed great faith in his own reason not to believe in them, and to keep both his feet on the ground. He realized he was sweating.

  He’d had, in the past—however rarely—the experience of seeing a place for the first time and feeling as if he’d already been there, or of reliving situations he’d been in before. But this was something entirely different. The words that were coming back to him had never been said to him, never been uttered by a human voice. No, he was convinced he had read them somewhere. And these written words had so struck and perhaps troubled him that they had etched themselves in his memory. Forgotten, they were now returning with a vengeance. All at once he understood. Sinking into a fear of a sort he’d never felt or conceived before in his life, he understood. He realized he was living inside a fiction. He’d been transported inside a short story by Faulkner he’d read many years before. How was it possible? But this was no time for explanations. All he could do was to keep reading and living that story and arrive at its terrible conclusion, which he already knew. There was no other way. He stood up.

  “I’d like you to show me your house.”

  She looked at him with surprise and some irritation at the violent manner in which the inspector had asked her to submit. But she didn’t have the courage to say no.

  “All right,” she said, struggling to stand up.

  The real pain of her fall was clearly starting to make itself felt. Keeping one shoulder raised much higher than the other, and propping up her arm in one hand, she led Montalbano down a long corridor. She opened the first door on the left.

  “This is the kitchen.”

  Very big, spacious, but seldom used. Hanging on one wall were some copper pots and pans that had turned almost white from the thick deposits of dust on them. She opened the door across the hall.

  “This is the dining room.”

  Massive walnut furniture. It had probably been used once, maybe twice at the most, in the last thirty years. She reclosed the door.

  They took a few more steps.

  “Here on the left is the bathroom,” said Mariastella.

  But she didn’t open the door. She took another three steps, then stopped in front of a closed door.

  “This is my room. But it’s messy.”

  She turned towards the door across from it.

  “This is the guest room.”

  She opened the door, reached inside, turned on the light, then stood aside to let the inspector pass. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room ...

  In a flash Montalbano saw what he was expecting to see: Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and discarded socks.

  And on a bed stained brown with dried blood, carefully wrapped in plastic and even more carefully sealed in adhesive tape, lay the man himself, Emanuele Gargano.

  “There’s nothing else to see,” said Mariastella Cosentino, turning off the light in the guest room and closing the door. She turned, now listing to one side, and walked back up the corridor towards the living room. Montalbano, however, stayed put, in front of the closed door, unable to move, to take even one step. Mariastella had not seen the corpse. For her, it did not exist, it was not lying on that bloodstained bed. She had completely repressed it. As she had done, so many years before, with her father. The inspector heard a kind of storm howling inside his brain, windblown head in a windblown expanse, and was unable to form a sentence, to put two words together that might make some sense. Then a wail came to his lips, a kind of yowl, as of a wounded animal. He managed to take a step, wrenching himself painfully out of his paralysis, then ran to the living room. Mariastella was sitting in an armchair. She’d turned pale and was holding her shoulder with her right hand. Her lips were trembling.

  “My God, I’m suddenly in such pain!”

  “I’ll call you a doctor,” said the inspector, seizing upon that moment of normality.

  “Please call Dr. La Spina,” said Mariastella.

  The inspector knew him. He was in his sixties and retired, but still treated his friends. He ran into the vestibule. There was a directory next to the telephone. He could hear Mariastella whimpering in the living room.

  “Dr. La Spina? Montalbano here. Do you know Miss Mariastella Cosentino?”

  “Of course, she’s a patient of mine. Why, has something happened to her?”

  “She was hit by a car and has a lot of pain in her shoulder.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  At this moment the solution he’d been so convulsively seeking occurred to him. He lowered his voice, hoping the doctor wasn’t hard of hearing.

  “Listen, Doctor. I’m going to ask a favor of you, for which I’ll assume full responsibility. Please don’t ask any questions now, but I need for Miss Mariastella to sleep very deeply for a few hours.”

  He hung up and took three or four deep breaths.

  “He’ll be right over,” he said, going back into the living room and trying to assume as normal an attitude as possible. “Does it hurt very badly?”

  “Yes.”

  When he later had to retell this story, the inspector could not remember what else they said to each other. Perhaps they had sat in silence. As soon as he heard a car pull up, Montalbano stood up and went to open the door.

  “I mean it, Doctor, treat her, do whatever you need to do, but most important, put her into a deep sleep. It’s for her own good.”

  The doctor looked
him long in the eye, then decided not to ask any questions.

  Montalbano waited outside, firing up a cigarette and pacing in front of the house. It was dark. The schoolmaster Tommasino came back to mind. What did the night smell of? He breathed deeply. It smelled of rotten fruit, of decomposition.

  The doctor came out of the house about half an hour later.

  “There’s nothing broken. She has a nasty contusion on her shoulder, which I’ve wrapped up, and another on her hip. I persuaded her to get into bed and did as you asked. She’s already asleep and should remain so for a few more hours.”

  “Thank you, Dr. La Spina. For your trouble, I’d like to—”

  “Never mind about that. I’ve been her doctor since she was a little girl. But I don’t feel right leaving her alone. I’d like to call a nurse.”

  “I’ll be staying with her, don’t worry about it.”

  They said good-bye. The inspector waited till the car was out of sight, then went back in the house and locked the door. Now came the hardest part, going back, of his own accord, into the nightmare of the fiction, becoming a character in the story again. He walked by Mariastella’s room and saw her sleeping under a blanket of faded rose color. He saw the rose-shaded lights... the dressing table ... the delicate array of crystal ... Yet hers was not a placid sleep. Her long, iron-gray hair seemed to move continuously over the pillow. He made up his mind, opened the other door, turned on the overhead light, and went in. The wrapping sparkled from the reflections of the light off the plastic. He went up to it and bent down to have a look. Emanuele Gargano’s undershirt was singed right over the heart; the bullet hole was clearly visible. He had not committed suicide. The pistol had been neatly placed on the other nightstand. Mariastella had shot him in his sleep. On the nightstand closer to the dead man lay a wallet and a Rolex. On the floor beside the bed was an open briefcase; inside were some computer diskettes and papers. Pellegrino’s briefcase.

  Now he had to bring the story to its conclusion. Was there, in the second pillow ... the indentation of a head? And was there, on that same pillow, a long strand of iron-gray hair? He forced himself to look. There was no indentation, no strand of iron-gray hair on the pillow.