The Smell of the Night

by Andrea Camilleri

  He breathed a sigh of relief. At least he’d been spared that. He turned off the light, closed the door, went back in Mariastella’s room, pulled up a chair, and sat down beside her. Somebody had once told him that sedated sleep is dreamless. Then why was that poor body occasionally tossed and shaken by violent starts as if by a strong electrical charge? And that same somebody had also said that one could not truly cry in one’s sleep. Then why were big tears seeping out from under the woman’s eyelids? What did anyone, even scientists, know about what could happen in the mysterious, indecipherable, ineffable country of sleep? He took one of her hands in his. It was hot. He had overestimated Gargano. The man was only a con artist; the murder of Pellegrino had got to him. After pushing his car into the sea and seizing the briefcase, he had run to Mariastella, certain that she would never talk, never betray him. And Mariastella had welcomed him, consoled him, taken him in. Then, after she’d let him fall asleep, she shot him. Was it jealousy? A mad reaction to learning of her Emanuele’s relationship with Giacomo? No, Mariastella would never have done that. Then he understood: She’d shot him out of love, to spare the only human being she’d ever really loved in her life the contempt, the dishonor, the imprisonment that awaited him. There could be no other explanation. The darker side of the inspector’s mind (or perhaps the brighter) suggested a possible solution to him: Grab the whole package, put it in the trunk of his car, take it to the spot where Giacomo was murdered, and fling it into the sea. No one would ever suspect any involvement on Mariastella Cosentino’s part. And he would have the pleasure of seeing the look on Guarnotta’s face when he found Gargano’s corpse carefully wrapped in plastic. Why had the Mafia wrapped him up? Guarnotta would ask himself in dismay.

  But he was a cop.

  He stood up. It was already eight o’clock. He went to the phone; maybe Guarnotta was still in his office.

  “Hello, Guarnotta? Montalbano here.”

  He explained to him what he needed to do. Then he went back into Mariastella’s room, wiped the sweat from her brow with a corner of the sheet, sat down, and again took one of her hands in his.

  Then, after he didn’t know how long, he heard the cars pull up. He opened the front door and went out to meet Guarnotta.

  “Did you call an ambulance and a nurse?”

  “They’re on their way.”

  “Look around carefully. There’s a briefcase in there that might help you recover the stolen money.”

  On the way back to Marinella, he had to pull over twice and stop. He was unable to drive. He was drained, and not just physically. The second time, he got out of the car. By now it was completely dark outside. He took a deep breath. And he noticed that the smell of the night had changed. It now had a light, fresh smell, a scent of young grass, citronella, and wild mint. He drove off again, exhausted but revived.

  Upon entering his house, he froze. Livia was standing in the middle of the room, frowning, eyes flashing with anger. She was holding up with both hands the sweater he had forgotten to bury. Montalbano opened his mouth but no sound came out. Livia slowly lowered her arms, and her face changed expression.

  “Oh my God, Salvo, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  She threw the sweater to the ground and ran to embrace him.

  “What’s happened to you, darling? What’s the matter?”

  And she held him tight, desperate and frightened.

  Montalbano was still unable to speak or return her embrace. He had only one thought in his mind, clear and strong:

  It’s a good thing she’s here.

  Author’s Note

  The idea of assigning Montalbano an investigation into the dealings of a financial “wizard” (a rather anomalous case, sort of a divertissement) came to me while reading an article by Francesco (“Ciccio,” to friends) La Licata entitled “Multinational Mafia,” which mentioned the case of one Giovanni Sucato (the “wizard”), who had “managed, through a kind of pyramid scheme in the millions, to build an empire. Then he was blown up in his car.” My story is far more modest and, especially at the end, much different. Particularly different were my reasons for telling it. For here the Mafia have nothing to do with it, despite the convictions of Inspector Guarnotta, one of the characters. Nevertheless I must state that all names and situations are purely invented and have no basis in reality. Any similarity to real characters, etc.... The short story by William Faulkner that Montalbano finds himself living inside of is “A Rose for Emily.”

  Notes

  5 ragioniere Emanuele Gargano: A ragioniere is someone who holds a degree in ragioneria, the study of business administration and accounting.

  23 two billion lire: At the time this novel was written, right before the conversion to euros, it took about two thousand lire to equal one U.S. dollar. Thus two billion lire would have been worth about one million dollars.

  24 a million lire ... twenty billion lire: See note above. Twenty billion lire at the time would have equaled about ten million dollars.

  31 lupara: A sawed-off shotgun, traditionally the weapon of choice among mafiosi and bandits in Sicily. It has since been replaced by more modern firearms.

  32 Lohengrin Pera, that son of a bitch from the Secret Service: Coerced by Montalbano into making certain concessions against his will, the sinister Pera is an important minor character in Camilleri’s The Snack Thief (Penguin, 2003).

  37 five hundred million lire: About two hundred fifty thousand dollars at the time.

  38 tobacco shop: Tobacco products are controlled by the government in Italy and sold in specially designated shops.

  44 who until six months ago had worked in Bolzano: Bolzano is in a far northern, Alpine region of Italy where roughly half the population speaks German.

  46 Saying hello and good-bye must not be the rule around here: In Italy it is customary for people, even clients, to greet each other upon entering and exiting places of public commerce such as shops and restaurants.

  51 as Orlando in fury had done with his sword: A reference to the classic sixteenth-century Italian chivalric romance, Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto (1434-1533).

  64 Turi ... Turiddru: Sicilian diminutives for the name Salvatore.

  74 D‘Annunzio: Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938), an Italian poet and author much celebrated in his time, wrote a novel entitled Forse che sì, forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No), published in 1910.

  76 salary of two million two hundred thousand lire: About one thousand one hundred dollars.

  77 The tombs shall open, the dead shall rise: A line from the Italian national anthem, often ironically quoted to express astonishment at the occurrence of an unusual event.

  79 nunnatu: Sicilian for neonato (i.e., “newborn”). Calogero is referring to tiny baby fish that one is not allowed to catch except on occasions such as the one alluded to here. Also called cicirella (or cicireddra).

  90 patati cunsati: Seasoned potatoes.

  95 “May you bear only sons”: The full expression, uttered often as a toast at weddings, is auguri e figli maschi (literally, “best wishes and male children”).

  108 a debate between those in favor and those against building a bridge over the Strait of Messina: Whether or not to build a bridge over the turbulent Strait of Messina, site of the passage between Scylla and Charybdis in ancient Greek myth, has long been a subject of public debate in Italy. Most recently Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, even while slashing social benefits and privatizing many state-run industries, has revived the project to span the Strait, as part of a broad public-works program intended above all to serve his own greater glory. Camilleri’s reference to the question should be seen in this context.

  117 Punta Raisi: The airport of Palermo.

  132 “Excursion to Tindari”: Excursion to Tindari (Penguin, 2004) is the previous book in the Inspector Montalbano series.

  141 “Thirty million lire”: About fifteen thousand dollars.

  144 Nottata persa e figlia femmina: Literally: “a night lost, and it�
�s a girl.” A Sicilian saying first quoted by Camilleri in Excursion to Tindari, it means more or less “what a lot of wasted effort.” As the narrator explains in that book, it is “the proverbial saying ... of the husband who has spent a whole night beside his wife in labor, only to see her give birth to a baby girl instead of that much-desired son.”

  153 “La donna e mobile”: Aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto.

  156 the violin of Maestro Cataldo Barbera: A reference to the reclusive violinist of Camilleri’s Voice of the Violin (Penguin, 2003), whose virtuosic skills ultimately inspire Inspector Montalbano to solve the case of that book.

  172 pasta ‘ncasciata: One of the many forms of southern Italian pasta al forno, that is, a casserole of oven-baked pasta and other ingredients. Pasta ’ncasciata generally contains small macaroni, tuma or caciocavallo cheese, ground beef, mortadella or salami, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, eggplant, grated Pecorino cheese, basil, olive oil, and a splash of white wine.

  175 “Seven hundred million lire in all”: About three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  181 “that guy who was found hanged under the Blackfriars’ Bridge.... that other guy, the one who faked being kidnapped by the Mafia, shot himself in the leg, and then drank a cup of poisoned coffee in prison ...”: The man found hanged under the Blackfriars’ Bridge was Roberto Calvi, president of the Banco Ambrosiano, a bank with ties to the Vatican, not to mention a host of holdings in offshore companies and Swiss bank accounts, and closely connected to a shadowy network of secret Masonic lodges, mafiosi, politicians, and arms traders. The second man Montalbano alludes to was Michele Sindona, a financier at the center of a similar, and indeed related, web of interests. It was, in fact, while investigating Sindona that the Italian courts eventually discovered the existence of the famous P2 Masonic lodge—whose membership included industrial barons, intelligence men, neo-Fascists, mafiosi, and numerous politicians—triggering a scandal that would ultimately spell the ruin, in the early 1990s, of the Christian Democratic Party, which had dominated the Italian government since the end of the Second World War.

  182 “So he plays the fool, as the saying goes, to avoid going to war”: Fa u fissa pi nun iri a la guerra. A Sicilian-Calabrian expression that essentially means to feign ignorance or to “play dumb.”

  199 “O Gesù biniditto!”: O blessed Jesus! (Sicilian dialect).

  200 “Signora Clementina”: Clementina Vasile-Cozzo is a character in both The Snack Thief and Voice of the Violin and a friend of Inspector Montalbano.

  Notes by Stephen Sartarelli

  FOR MORE MONTALBANO NOVELS, LOOK FOR THE

  The Shape of Water

  The first book in Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series, The Shape of Water is sly, witty, and engaging. Early one morning, Silvio Lupanello, a big shot in the village of Vigata, is found dead in his car in a scandalous set of circumstances. Enter Inspector Salvo Montalbano, Camilleri’s cynical, humorous, shrewd, and unyielding detective who goes head to head with the most powerful and corrupt figures in Vigata to solve the murder.

  ISBN 0-14-200239-9

  The Terra-Cotta Dog

  Second in the Montalbano series, The Terra-Cotta Dog opens with the tenacious Inspector’s mysterious tête-à-tête with a Mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and dying words that lead him to an illegal arms cache in a mountain cave. There, in a secret grotto, he finds a harrowing scene: two young lovers, dead fifty years and still embracing, watched over by a life-size terra-cotta dog. Montalbano’s passion to solve this old crime takes him, heedless of personal danger, on a journey through the island’s past and into a family’s dark heart amid the horrors of World War II bombardment.

  ISBN 0- 14-200263-1

  The Snack Thief

  When an elderly man is stabbed to death in an elevator and a crewman on an Italian fishing trawler is machine-gunned by a Tunisian patrol boat off Sicily’s coast, only Montalbano, with his keen insight into human nature, suspects the link between the two incidents. His investigation leads to the beautiful Karima, an impoverished housecleaner and sometime prostitute, whose young son is caught stealing other schoolchildren’s midmorning snacks. But Karima disappears, and the young snack thief’s life—as well as Montalbano’s—is on the line. The third in the series, The Snack Thief is full of Humor, cynicism, compassion, and earthiness.

  ISBN 0-14-200349-2

  Voice of the Violin

  In this latest novel, Montalbano’s gruesome discovery of a lovely, naked young woman suffocated in her bed immediately sets him on a search for her killer. Among the suspects are her aging husband, a famous doctor; a shy admirer, now disappeared; an antiques-dealing lover from Bologna; and the victim’s friend Anna, whose charms Montalbano cannot help but appreciate. But it is a mysterious, reclusive violinist who holds the key to the murder.

  ISBN 0-14-200445-6

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