IM03 - The Snack Thief

by Andrea Camilleri

  “The son? The doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “My condolences. Come inside. But I can only give you five minutes.”

  Fazio appeared.

  “Car’s ready.”

  “We’ll leave in five minutes. I have to talk to this gentleman first.”

  They went into his office. The inspector asked the doctor to sit down, then sat down himself, behind the desk.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Well, Inspector, I’ve been living in Valledolmo, where I practice my profession, for about fifteen years. I’m a pediatrician. I got married in Valledolmo. I mention this merely to let you know that I haven’t had a close relationship with my parents for some time. Actually, we’ve never been very intimate. We always spent the obligatory holidays together, of course, and we used to phone each other twice a month. That was why I was so surprised to receive a letter from my father early last October. Here it is.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket, took out the letter, and handed it to the inspector.

  My dear Nino,

  I know this letter will surprise you. I have tried to keep you from knowing anything about some business I’m involved in which is threatening to turn very serious. But now I realize I can’t go on like this. I absolutely need your help. Please come at once. And don’t say anything to Mama about this note. Kisses.

  PAPA

  “And what did you do?”

  “Well, see, I had to leave for New York two days later . . . I was away for a month. When I got back, I phoned Papa and asked him if he still needed my help, and he said no. Then we saw each other in person, but he never brought up the subject again.”

  “Did you have any idea what this dangerous business was that your father was referring to?”

  “At the time I thought it had to do with the business he’d wanted to reopen in spite of the fact that I was strongly against it. We even quarreled over it. On top of that, Mama had mentioned he was involved with another woman and was being forced to spend a lot of money—”

  “Stop right there. So you were convinced that the help your father was asking you for was actually some sort of loan?”

  “To be perfectly frank, yes.”

  “And you refused to get involved, despite the desperate, disturbing tone of the letter.”

  “Well, you see—”

  “Do you make a good living, Doctor?”

  “I can’t complain.”

  “Tell me something: why did you want me to see the letter?”

  “Because the murder put everything in a whole new light. I thought it might be useful to the investigation.”

  “Well, it’s not,” Montalbano said calmly. “Take it back and treasure it always. Do you have any children, Doctor?”

  “A son, Calogerino. Four years old.”

  “I hope you never need him for anything.”

  “Why?” asked Dr. Antonino Lapècora, bewildered.

  “Because, if he’s his father’s son, you’re screwed, sir.”

  “How dare you!”

  “If you’re not out of my sight in ten seconds, I’ll have you arrested for the first thing I can think of.”

  The doctor fled so quickly he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting on.

  Aurelio Lapècora had desperately asked his son for help, and the guy decided to put an ocean between them.

  Until thirty years ago, Villaseta consisted of some twenty houses, or rather cottages, arranged ten on each side of the provincial road between Vigàta and Montelusa. In the boom years, however, the frenzy of construction (which seemed to be the constitutional foundation of our country: “Italy is a Republic founded on construction work”) was accompanied by a road-building fever, and Villaseta thus found itself at the intersection of three high-speed routes, one superhighway, one so-called link, two provincial roads, and two interprovincial roads. Several of these roads, after a few kilometers of picturesque landscape with guardrails appropriately painted red where judges, policemen, carabinieri, financiers, and even prison guards had been killed, often surprised the unwary traveler by suddenly ending inexplicably (or all too explicably) against a hillside so desolate as to feed the suspicion that it had never been trod by human foot. Others instead came to an abrupt halt at the seashore, on beaches of fine blond sand with not a single house as far as the eye could see, not a single boat on the horizon, promptly plunging the unwary traveler into the Robinson Crusoe syndrome.

  Having always followed its primary instinct to build houses along any road that might appear,Villaseta thus rapidly turned into a sprawling, labyrinthine town.

  “We’ll never find this Via Garibaldi!” complained Fazio, who was at the wheel.

  “What’s the most outlying area of Villaseta?” inquired the inspector.

  “The one along the road to Butera.”

  “Let’s go there.”

  “How do you know Via Garibaldi is that way?”

  “Trust me.”

  He knew he wasn’t wrong. He had learned from personal experience that in the years immediately preceding the aforementioned economic miracle, the central area of every town or city had streets named, as dutiful reminders, after the founding fathers of the country (such as Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour), the old politicians (Orlando, Sonnino, Crispi), and the classic authors (Dante, Petrarch, Carducci; Leopardi less often). After the boom, the street names changed. The fathers of the country were banished to the outskirts, while the town centers now featured Pasolini, Pirandello, De Filippo, Togliatti, De Gasperi, and the ever-present Kennedy (John, not Bobby, although Montalbano, in a lost village in the Nebrodi Mountains, once ended up in a “Piazza F.lli Kennedy,” that is, a “Kennedy Brothers Square”).

  In reality, the inspector had guessed right on the one hand and wrong on the other. Right insofar as the centrifugal shift of street names had indeed occurred along the road to Butera; wrong insofar as the streets of that neighborhood, if you could call it a neighborhood, were named not after the fathers of the country, but, for reasons unknown, after Verdi, Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti. Discouraged, Fazio decided to ask for directions from an old peasant astride a donkey laden with dried branches. Except that the donkey decided not to stop, and Fazio was forced to coast alongside him in neutral.

  “Excuse me, can you tell me the way to Via Garibaldi?”

  The old man seemed not to have heard.

  “The way to Garibaldi!” Fazio repeated more loudly.

  The old man turned round and looked angrily at the stranger.

  “Away to Garibaldi? You say, ‘Away to Garibaldi’ with the mess we got on this island? Away? Garibaldi should come back, and fast, and break all these sons of bitches’ necks!”

  6

  Via Garibaldi, which they finally found, bordered on a yellow, uncultivated countryside interrupted here and there by the small green patches of stunted kitchen gardens. Number 70 was a little house of unwhitewashed sandstone consisting of two rooms, one atop the other. The bottom room had a rather small door with a window beside it; the top room, which featured a balcony, was reached by an external staircase. Fazio knocked on the door. It was soon answered by an old woman wearing a threadbare but clean jellaba. Seeing the two men, she unleashed a stream of Arabic words, frequently punctuated by short, shrill cries.

  “Well, so much for that idea!” Montalbano commented in irritation, immediately losing heart (the sky had clouded over a little).

  “Wait, wait,” Fazio told the old woman, thrusting his hands palms forward in that international gesture that means “stop.” The woman understood and fell silent at once.

  “Ka-ri-ma?” Fazio asked and, afraid he might not have pronounced the name correctly, he swayed his hips, stroking a mane of long, imaginary hair. The old woman laughed.

  “Karima!” she said, then pointed her index finger towards the room upstairs.

  With Fazio in front, Montalbano behind him, and the old woman bringing up the rear and yelling incomprehensibly, they climbed th
e outside staircase. Fazio knocked, but nobody answered. The old woman started to scream even louder. Fazio knocked again. The woman pushed the inspector firmly aside, walked past him, moved Fazio away as well, planted herself with her back to the door, imitated Fazio’s swaying of the hips and stroking of the hair, made a gesture that meant “gone away,” then lowered her right hand, palm down, raised it again, spread her fingers, then repeated the “gone away” gesture.

  “She had a son?” the inspector asked in amazement.

  “She left with her five-year-old boy, if I’ve understood correctly,” Fazio confirmed.

  “I want to know more,” said Montalbano. “Call the Immigration Bureau and have them send us someone who speaks Arabic. On the double.”

  Fazio walked away, followed by the old woman, who kept on talking to him. The inspector sat down on a stair, fired up a cigarette, and entered an immobility contest with a lizard.

  Buscaìno, the officer who knew Arabic because he was born and raised in Tunisia up to the age of fifteen, was there in less than forty-five minutes. Hearing the new arrival speak her tongue, the old woman became anxious to cooperate.

  “She says she’d like to tell her uncle the whole story,” Buscaìno translated for them.

  First the kid, now an uncle?

  “And who the fuck is that?” asked Montalbano, befuddled.

  “Uh, the uncle, that would be you, Inspector,” the policeman explained. “It’s a title of respect. She says Karima came back here around nine yesterday morning, but went out again in a hurry. She says she seemed very upset, frightened.”

  “Has she got a key to the upstairs room?”

  “Yes,” said the policeman, after asking her.

  “Get it from her and we’ll have a look.”

  As they were climbing the stairs, the woman spoke without interruption, with Buscaìno rapidly translating. Karima’s son was five years old; she would leave him with the old woman every day on her way to work; the little boy’s name was François; he was the son of a Frenchman who had met Karima when passing through Tunisia.

  Karima’s room was a model of cleanliness and had a double bed, a cot for the boy behind a curtain, a small table with a telephone and television, a bigger table with four chairs, a dressing table with four small drawers, and an armoire. Two of the drawers were full of photographs. In one corner was a cubbyhole sealed off by a plastic sliding door, behind which they found a toilet, bidet and sink. Here the scent of the perfume the inspector had smelled in Lapècora’s study,Volupté, was very strong. Aside from the little balcony, there was also a window on the back wall, overlooking a well-tended garden.

  Montalbano picked out a photograph of a pretty, dark-skinned woman of about thirty, with big, intense eyes, holding a little boy’s hand.

  “Ask her if this is Karima and François.”

  “Yes, that’s them,” said Buscaìno.

  “Where did they eat? I don’t see any stove or hot plate here.”

  The old woman and the policeman murmured animatedly to each other. Buscaìno then said the little boy always ate with the old woman, even when Karima was at home, which she was, sometimes, in the evening.

  Did she receive men?

  As soon as she heard the question translated, the old woman grew visibly indignant. Karima was practically a djin, a holy woman halfway between the human race and the angels. Never would she have done haram, illicit things. She sweated out a living as a housemaid, cleaning the filth of men. She was good and generous; for shopping expenses, looking after the boy, and keeping the house in order, she used to give the old woman far more than she ever spent, and never once did she ask for change. As the uncle—Montalbano, that is—was clearly a man of honorable sentiment and behavior, how could he ever think such a thing about Karima?

  “Tell her,” the inspector said while looking at the photographs from the drawer, “that Allah is great and merciful, but if she’s bullshitting me, Allah is going to be very upset, because she’ll be cheating justice, and then she’ll really be fucked.”

  Buscaìno carefully translated, and the old woman shut up as if her spring had come unwound. But then a little key inside her wound her back up, and she resumed speaking uncontrollably. The uncle, who was very wise, was right; he’d seen things clearly. Several times in the last two years, Karima had received visits from a young man who came in a large automobile.

  “Ask her what color.”

  The exchange between Buscaìno and the old woman was long and labored.

  “I believe she said metallic gray.”

  “And what did Karima and this young man do?”

  What a man and woman do, uncle. The woman heard the bed creaking over her head.

  Did he sleep with Karima?

  Only once, and the next morning he drove her to work in his automobile.

  But he was a bad man. One night there was a lot of commotion. Karima was shouting and crying, and then the bad man left.

  She had come running and found Karima sobbing, her naked body bearing signs of having been hit. Fortunately, François hadn’t woken up.

  Did the bad man by any chance come to see her last Wednesday evening?

  How had the uncle guessed? Yes, he did come, but didn’t do anything with Karima. He only took her away in his car.

  What time was it?

  It might have been ten in the evening. Karima brought François down to her, saying she’d be spending the night out. And in fact she came back the next morning around nine, then disappeared with the boy.

  Was the bad man with her then?

  No, she’d taken the bus. The bad man arrived a little later, about fifteen minutes after Karima had left with her son. As soon as he learned the woman wasn’t there, he got back in his car and sped away to look for her.

  Had Karima told her where she was going?

  No, she hadn’t said anything. The old woman had only seen them heading on foot towards the old quarter of Villaseta, where the buses stop.

  Did she have a suitcase with her?

  Yes, a very small one.

  He told the old woman to look around. Was there anything missing from the room?

  She threw open the doors of the armoire, and the scent of Volupté exploded in the room. She opened a few drawers and rummaged around in them.

  When she’d finished, she said that Karima had packed that suitcase with a pair of slacks, a blouse, and some panties. She didn’t wear bras. She’d also thrown in a change of clothes and some underwear for the boy.

  The inspector asked the woman to look very carefully. Was anything else missing?

  Yes, the large book she kept next to the telephone.

  The book turned out to be some sort of diary or ledger. Karima must certainly have taken it with her.

  “She’s not planning to stay away very long,” Fazio commented.

  “Ask her,” the inspector told Buscaìno, “if Karima spent the night out often.”

  Now and then, not often. But she always let her know.

  Montalbano thanked Buscaìno and asked him:

  “Could you give Fazio a ride to Vigàta?”

  Fazio gave his superior a perplexed look.

  “Why, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to hang around a little longer.”

  Among the many photographs the inspector began to examine were those in a large yellow envelope, some twenty-odd photos of Karima in the nude, in various poses from provocative to downright obscene, a kind of sampling of the merchandise, which was obviously of the highest quality. How was it a woman like that hadn’t succeeded in finding a husband or rich lover to take care of her so she wouldn’t have to prostitute herself? There was a shot of a pregnant Karima some time before, gazing lovingly at a tall, blond man and literally hanging from him. Probably François’s father, the Frenchman passing through Tunisia. Other photos showed Karima as a little girl with a boy slightly older than her. They bore a strong resemblance, had the same eyes. Brother and sister, no doubt.
Actually there were a great many photos of her with her brother, taken over the years. The last must have been the one in which Karima, with her infant son, a few months old, in her arms, stood next to her brother, who was wearing some sort of uniform and holding a submachine gun. He took this photograph and went downstairs.

  The woman was crushing minced meat in a mortar, folding in grains of cooked wheat. On a platter beside her, all ready to be roasted, were some skewers of meat, with each morsel wrapped in a vine leaf. Montalbano brought his fingertips together, pointing upwards, artichokelike—a cacòcciola, in Sicilian—and shook his hand up and down. The old woman understood the question and, pointing to the mortar, said:

  “Kubba.”

  Then she picked up one of the skewers.

  “Kebab,” she said.

  The inspector showed her the photo and pointed at the man. The woman answered something incomprehensible. Montalbano felt pissed off at himself. Why had he been in such a hurry to send Buscaìno away? Then he remembered that for years and years the Tunisians had been mixed up with the French. He gave it a try.

  “Frère?”

  The old woman’s eyes lit up.

  “Oui. Son frère Ahmed.”

  “Où est-il?”

  “Je ne sais pas,” said the woman, throwing up her hands.

  After this exchange straight out of a French conversation manual, Montalbano went back upstairs and grabbed the photo of the pregnant Karima with the blond man.

  “Son mari?”

  The old woman made a gesture of scorn.

  “Simplement le père de François. Un mauvais homme.”

  She’d met too many of them—bad men, that is—had the beautiful Karima, and was apparently still meeting them.

  “Je m’appelle Aisha,” the old woman said out of the blue.

  “Mon nom est Salvo,” said Montalbano.

  He got in the car, found the pastry shop he’d caught a glimpse of on the way, bought twelve cannoli, and drove back to the house. Aisha had set a table under a tiny pergola behind the cottage, at the front of the garden. The countryside was deserted. Before doing anything else, Montalbano unwrapped the pastry tray, and the old woman immediately ate two cannoli as an appetizer. Montalbano wasn’t too thrilled with the kubba, but the kebabs had a tart, herbal flavor that made them a little more sprightly, or so, at least, he defined them according to his imperfect use of adjectives.