The Other End of the Line

by Andrea Camilleri

  He decided to smoke a cigarette and wait. Then he heard a clatter of high heels and saw a woman of about forty appear, walking briskly. He was hoping she would stop at number 3, but she kept on going. He went back to the intercom and was raising his hand to buzz when the front door opened.

  He found himself face-to-face with a well-dressed man of about fifty, who asked him:

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  “Yes, I’m looking for Signora Sirch. I had an appointment with her.”

  The man seemed momentarily confused.

  “I don’t think you’ll find her at home today. I saw her leave this morning with a lot of luggage. Signora de Amicis, who lives on the third floor, may know how to get in touch with her.”

  Montalbano felt himself sinking into a bottomless well, but wanted to grab on to any thread of hope that might exist. Without thanking the man, he raced up the three flights of stairs. Reaching the top floor, he rang the doorbell on the left.

  “Who is it?”

  He tried speaking, but his mouth was so parched that only a bizarre voice came out.

  “Who is it?” repeated the woman’s voice behind the door.

  “Inspector Montalbano, police.”

  “Ah, yes!” said the woman, opening the door. She looked about sixty and wore her hair in a bun.

  “I had an appointment,” said Montalbano, “with Signora—”

  “I know all about it,” said the woman, interrupting him.

  “But do you know where she went?”

  “No, she didn’t tell me.”

  “A gentleman I met downstairs told me you would know how to reach her.”

  “No, no. I’m sorry, but she didn’t tell me anything.”

  The thread of hope snapped, and Montalbano began sinking again.

  “But she did leave a letter for me to give you,” the woman continued.

  The inspector’s fall stopped in midair. He suddenly realized that the phone call he’d made the previous evening was a fuckup of tremendous proportions.

  “Ah, here’s the letter,” said the lady, handing him a closed envelope.

  Montalbano took it. The envelope was heavy. He put it in his jacket pocket.

  “Thank you,” he muttered. “Have a good day.”

  And he started going down the stairs on two legs that could barely sustain his weight, so that he had to lean on the bannister the whole way.

  Swimming around in his head was just one word, directed at himself.

  Dumbfuck. Dumbfuck. Dumbfuck.

  He went back to the bar in the piazza, fell heavily into a chair, and ordered a double whisky, neat.

  Dumbfuck. Dumbfuck. Dumbfuck.

  He took the letter out of his pocket, set it down on the table, and stared at it.

  No. He couldn’t bring himself to open it without another strong boost.

  “Bring me another,” he said to the waiter.

  He sipped it slowly. Never taking his eyes off the envelope.

  When he’d finished his drink, he reached out, grabbed the letter, tore open the envelope, and pulled out the contents. There were five pages covered with dense handwriting, bearing no date and no opening greeting. He started reading.

  If you have managed to track me down, due to some mistake on my part, it means that you have already somehow figured out more or less what transpired.

  I thought I had got rid of any trace of my relationship with Elena, but apparently not. I know that you wanted to meet me not because you wanted more information from me, but to put my back to the wall. At first I even thought I would wait for you to come, but then I told myself that by meeting with you I would be losing the freedom that is mine by rights. Your phone call had an extraordinary effect on me. That is, in an instant it allowed me to recover a lucidity I had lost for years, living under a pall of hatred and the desire for revenge. It is this same lucidity that now enables me to recount my story to you, which I am telling for the first and only time.

  I met Franco in Udine one afternoon in July. It was 5:22 p.m. He came into the real estate agency where I worked, and I immediately knew that he would be the man of my life.

  Franco quickly explained to me what he was looking for, and the whole thing was rather complicated. He wanted first of all to find a town in our province where he could eventually move to, and also a large space in which to set up a tailoring shop. One next to the other, if possible. The idea was to settle not in a tourist town but somewhere not far from one, and to arrange it so that the atelier’s name could get around and become known through some intelligent advertising and well-coordinated word of mouth. And so we began our search, and I decided always to accompany him on his visits. We spent whole days driving around looking at towns in the Udine area. It took two months before we finally settled on Bellosguardo. And during those two months we fell in love, even though Franco always maintained, to the very end, that he did not love me, and that it was I who had seduced him. But I had noticed the way he looked at my legs, the way he smiled so affectionately at me. And I could tell he was shy and needed a little encouragement.

  I knew he had a wife who worked far away, and that one day she would rejoin him, but at the time I didn’t really care.

  As soon as he moved into the apartment in Bellosguardo and started renovating and outfitting the tailoring shop, I would go and visit him almost every day. He would sometimes say he didn’t want to see me, and he would pretend not to desire me. But he was shy, and I knew that, deep down, he loved me, too.

  My constant absence from my job led to my firing. I decided to move to Bellosguardo to be close to Franco, and when I told him he didn’t raise any objection. I was pregnant. Franco begged me to have an abortion, but I refused. After Elena, his wife, arrived, I went through days and days of real torment, since we were spending less and less time together and our encounters took on an air of secrecy, which I simply couldn’t bear. And so our relationship grew more and more bitter. I demanded he tell his wife everything and come and live with me, but I quickly realized that Franco was incapable of making so radical a decision. But then chance met us halfway. I’d gone to the general hospital in Udine for a maternity checkup, and when I walked into the waiting room I heard them call for Elena Guida. She was a beautiful woman, very elegant and cheerful. I later learned that she was there for treatments to try to increase her chances of getting pregnant. I waited for her at the exit and introduced myself as the real estate agent who’d helped Franco, and I invited her out for coffee. As we were sitting at a table in the café and Elena was stirring the sugar in her cup, I told her I was expecting a baby boy, and that Franco was the father. She looked at me as if she couldn’t quite believe what I’d said, and finally she stood up in a huff and left. I felt a certain satisfaction at the thought that from that moment on, their life as a couple would become impossible. When the baby was born, I named him after his father. But Franco didn’t even come to see me. So I wrote him a letter, of which I also sent a copy to Elena, in which I asked him to acknowledge paternity of the child. His only answer was to burst into my house in a rage. He no longer seemed himself. He insulted me, accused me of setting him up, and told me I should get any idea of him ever recognizing the boy as his own out of my head. He actually claimed he wasn’t the father. After that I didn’t see him again for a very long time. And in the meanwhile, Franchino wasn’t growing, was always crying, and was never sleeping. He clearly wasn’t well. So I took him to see the doctor, who told me he had a terrible congenital disease and that he would need some very expensive care. At that time I was in dire economic straits and didn’t know what to do. So I finally decided to ask Franco for money, again in writing. A few days later Elena showed up at my place. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye. She came inside and ran straight to the infant’s crib. And she took him into her arms without asking. She noticed that he was small, too
small, and instinctively held him to her breast, raising her sweater and putting his mouth up to her nipple. Cradled like that in her arms, and resting against her breasts, little Franco fell asleep immediately. And he slept for hours, for as long as we needed to come to an agreement concerning his support. Elena told me she herself would see to making sure that Franchino never wanted for anything, but that I must never, for any reason, tell her husband.

  On February 17 I took my son to the hospital, and they kept him there. Around midnight on the night of the 18th, after I’d already gone to bed, someone knocked at the door, and I got up to see who it was. It was Franco, very upset, and I think he’d been drinking. He must have had a heated argument with Elena, and he wanted me to return the money she’d given me without his knowing. I started feeling an intense, unbearable hatred of him growing inside me. But I tried to calm him down, and offered him another glass of wine, into which I put all the sleeping pills I had in the house. But that wasn’t enough, because Franco kept shouting at me that I’d ruined his life by telling Elena about our affair. And he said it was my fault that he was unable to get her pregnant. Since his emotional state seemed to be getting worse and worse, I got dressed and suggested that we go for a walk. Once we were outside we started walking towards the river. It was a nasty night, and luckily there was nobody about who might see us. Franco was staggering and yelling that when we got to the river he was going to throw me in. When we reached the riverbank, he collapsed. Since it had been raining for a long time, the river was quite swollen. That was the moment when all the sleeping pills I’d dissolved in his wine took effect. Franco fell asleep. I removed the scarf he was wearing from his neck and tied his hands with it, so that if upon contact with the cold water he happened to wake up, he wouldn’t be able to swim. Franco was an excellent swimmer. The riverbank was all muddy and slippery, and I gave him an extra push with my foot, to make sure he fell in. Then I turned my back and went home. The next day, in the afternoon, I was questioned by the carabinieri. I told them almost everything, but mentioned nothing about our walk to the river. I said that Franco had left my place in anger, threatening to kill himself and slamming the door behind him. Elena then moved for good to Vigàta, selling their house and workshop a few months after Franco’s death, but before she left she promised me she would continue to help us. My baby didn’t live to see his first birthday.

  But I never told Elena, and she never found out. I was entitled to that money.

  I kept on sending her photos of little Franco, but they were actually of a nephew of mine of almost the same age. Elena asked me many times if she could see him, but I always told her that the boy wasn’t yet ready to know the truth. We carried on this way for years, then a month ago I got a very long letter from Elena, in which she offered me, in exchange for granting her custody of Franchino, a sort of lifelong annuity in my name. It would have been nice to accept, but how could I? Franchino was gone. And so, to stall, I told her that it might be better to work things out in person, and I could come to Vigàta for this. Obviously at Elena’s expense, and in fact she accepted my offer and I still don’t really know what I was thinking when I made it. And so on the appointed day I flew to Trapani, rented a car, and got to Elena’s shortly before dinnertime. I found her different from the way I remembered her. She seemed worried and spoke very little, and our dinner took place in almost total silence. She didn’t even ask me about Franchino. When we’d finished eating she asked if I would come with her downstairs into the shop. And so I followed her down there. We went over to the big worktable, on which there was only a piece of cloth and a pair of scissors. She asked me to have a good look at the scrap of fabric; I immediately recognized it as Franco’s scarf and said so.

  Upon hearing my words, Elena began inveighing against me. She said Franco would never have been able to tie his own hands with that fabric, which was too fragile and delicate and would have torn easily when pulled. As she was saying this, she picked it up and tugged it, and the fabric immediately gave way.

  I tried to object that the scarf may have become fragile over time and because it had been underwater.

  “No,” Elena said to me, getting more and more angry. “I got more of the same fabric yesterday morning. I’ll show it to you. You’re a murderer.” And she turned towards the shelf to get it. But the sound of the word “murderer” had sent me back in time. For a moment I was back on the riverbank, tying Franco’s hands, and when I returned more or less to the present, I grabbed the big scissors that were on the table and started stabbing her wildly. I spared her breasts because that was where Franchino had found a moment of peace. When my rage subsided I was all covered in blood, and so I got undressed, took a shower, put on a dress that I found on the bed, stuffed all my dirty clothes in a shopping bag, and began my journey home.

  I won’t be getting any more money from Elena, but I finally feel free again.

  And there you have it.

  At the bottom of the last page was her signature, written bright and clear: Nevia Sirch.

  Although the woman had played him for a fool, Montalbano couldn’t help but feel a certain satisfaction.

  The inner workings of his brain had functioned well, just a little too slowly.

  The letter had served to fill him in on a few details, but otherwise the general thrust of his investigation had been correct.

  He put the letter back into the envelope and summoned the waiter. He paid for the whisky and inquired whether there was a police or carabinieri station in town.

  There were the carabinieri.

  He asked for directions to their compound and headed off. After identifying himself, he was received by a marshal who gave him a funny look, no doubt owing to the unprecedented phenomenon of a police inspector asking anything at all of the carabinieri.

  Montalbano told him the whole story, and when he’d finished he handed him the letter.

  He waited for the marshal to finish reading and then asked:

  “What do you intend to do?”

  “It’s too late,” replied the officer. “Too late to set up any roadblocks, I mean. But I’m going to get busy immediately trying to find her. Could you leave me your cell phone number?”

  “Why?” asked Montalbano.

  “Aren’t you interested to know how the case develops?”

  Could he really tell the marshal that he didn’t care anymore at all about the whole affair? No, he couldn’t. He gave him the number.

  And what now?

  Should he look immediately for a hotel right there in town or get back in the car and drive back to Trieste with Esther? But he rather liked Bellosguardo, and so he decided to spend the night there.

  They gave him a beautiful room at the hotel that was also called the Leon d’Oro.

  And now he began to feel the fatigue of the day. He settled into a nice velvet armchair and turned the television on to help pass the time.

  Less than an hour later he got a call from the marshal, who informed him that Nevia Sirch had been pulled over by the police in a routine check, and even though she didn’t have any insurance on her car, they’d let her go. And she’d gone.

  Montalbano’s thought was that at least he wasn’t the only fuckup in town.

  “At this point,” the marshal added, “she’s probably gone off to Slovenia.”

  “And why would she do that?”

  “She has relatives there. Sooner or later we’ll find her, you’ll see.”

  Montalbano thanked him, and two minutes later the telephone rang again.

  It was Livia.

  “Salvo! I want you here! You promised. And I’ve thought of a solution that will save you some time.”

  “Time for what, Livia?”

  “You see? As usual, you’ve forgotten. Tomorrow’s my friends’ renewal of the vows.”

  Maria, beddra matre! Montalbano cried out in his head, but not in
to the phone.

  “Giovanna and Stefano,” Livia continued, unstoppable as a swollen river, “are expecting you, and you will come. I’ve looked at all the schedules, and there’s a flight from Trapani to Trieste tomorrow morning. After you land you can rent a car at the airport and we’ll meet up directly in Udine.”

  “In Udine?” asked Montalbano, interrupting her. “Why in Udine?”

  “You see? You forgot that, too, of course. The renewal is taking place in Udine. I’ll be arriving there tomorrow at three in the afternoon on the train from Genoa.”

  Udine?

  “Udine?” Montalbano asked again, completely confused.

  “Yes, Salvo, we’ll meet at the station tomorrow afternoon at three.”

  The inspector finally decided to have his revenge.

  “I’m already there.”

  “Come on, don’t be silly,” said Livia.

  “Let me correct myself,” said Montalbano. “You can consider me already there.”

  Livia sent him a kiss that was so loud that it made his ear ring, and then she hung up.

  Montalbano got more comfortable in the armchair. He felt at peace with himself and the world. Now the only problem facing him was finding a place where he could buy a nice suit ready-to-wear.

  Author’s Note

  As usual, the characters and situations featured in this novel have no connection with any real events or persons.

  I would like to thank Valentina Alferj, who helped me to write this book, not only physically but also by intervening creatively in its drafting. In other words, now that I am blind, I would not have been able to write this story (nor those that I hope will follow) without her.

  Notes

  Cosma and Damiano always appear together . . . there was something saintly about Dr. Osman: Saints Cosmas and Damian (died ca. AD 287) were Arab Christian martyrs, reputedly twin brothers, who practiced medicine charitably, won many converts to the new faith, and perished in the anti-Christian persecutions of the emperor Diocletian. There are many churches in Italy dedicated to the two saints, called Cosma and Damiano in Italian, though none to one brother without the other.