IM03 - The Snack Thief

by Andrea Camilleri

  “Did Montelusa send you the personal effects along with the body?”

  “Of course,” replied Valente. “Ten thousand lire.”

  “Passport?”

  “No.”

  “What about all that money he had?”

  “If he left it here, I’m sure the signora took care of it. The one who leads a squeaky-clean life.”

  “He didn’t even have his house keys in his pocket?”

  “Not even. How do I have to say it? Should I sing it? He had ten thousand lire and nothing else.”

  Summoned by Valente, Master Rahman, an elementary-school teacher who looked like a pure Sicilian and served as an unofficial liaison between his people and the Mazarese authorities, arrived in ten minutes.

  Montalbano had met him the year before, when involved in the case later dubbed “the terra-cotta dog.”

  “Were you in the middle of a lesson?” asked Valente.

  In an uncommon show of good sense, a school principal in Mazàra, without involving the superintendency, had allowed some classrooms to be used to create a school for the local Tunisian children.

  “Yes, but I called in a substitute. Is there a problem?”

  “Perhaps you could help clarify something for us.”

  “About what?”

  “About whom, rather. Ben Dhahab.”

  They had decided,Valente and Montalbano, to sing only half the Mass to the schoolteacher. Afterwards, depending on his reactions, they would determine whether or not to tell him the whole story.

  Upon hearing that name, Rahman made no effort to hide his uneasiness.

  “What would you like to know?”

  It was up to Valente to make the first move; Montalbano was only a guest.

  “Did you know him?”

  “He came and introduced himself to me about ten days ago. He knew who I was and what I represent. You see, last January or thereabouts, a Tunis newspaper published an article on our school.”

  “And what did he say to you?”

  “He said he was a journalist.”

  Valente and Montalbano exchanged a very quick glance.

  “He wanted to do a feature on the lives of our country-men in Mazàra. But he intended to present himself to everyone as somebody looking for a job. He also wanted to sign on with a fishing boat. I introduced him to my colleague El Madani. And he put him in touch with Signora Pipìa about renting a room.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “Of course. We ran into each other a few times by chance. We also were both at the same festival. He had become, well, perfectly integrated.”

  “Was it you who set him up with the fishing boat?”

  “No. It wasn’t El Madani, either.”

  “Who paid for his funeral?”

  “We did. We have a small emergency fund that we set up for such things.”

  “And who gave the TV reporters the photos and information on Ben Dhahab?”

  “I did. You see, at that festival I mentioned, there was a photographer. Ben Dhahab objected; he said he didn’t want anyone taking his picture. But the man had already taken one. And so, when the TV reporter showed up, I got hold of that photo and gave it to him, along with the bit of information Ben Dhahab had told me about himself.”

  Rahman wiped away his sweat. His uneasiness had increased. And Valente, who was a good cop, let him stew in his juices.

  “But there’s something strange in all this,” Rahman decided.

  Montalbano and Valente seemed not even to have heard him, looking as if their minds were elsewhere. But in fact they were paying very close attention, like cats that, keeping their eyes closed as if asleep, are actually counting the stars.

  “Yesterday I called the newspaper in Tunis to tell them about the incident and to make arrangements for the body. As soon as I told the editor that Ben Dhahab was dead, he started laughing and said my joke wasn’t very funny: Ben Dhahab was in the room right next to his at that very moment, on the telephone. And then he hung up.”

  “Couldn’t it simply be a case of two men with the same name?” Valente asked provocatively.

  “Absolutely not! He was very clear with me! He specifically said he’d been sent by that newspaper. He therefore lied to me.”

  “Do you know if he had any relatives in Sicily?” Montalbano stepped in for the first time.

  “I don’t know, we never talked about that. If he’d had any in Mazàra, he certainly wouldn’t have turned to me for help.”

  Valente and Montalbano again consulted each other with a glance, and Montalbano, without speaking, gave his friend the go-ahead to fire the shot.

  “Does the name Ahmed Moussa mean anything to you?”

  It was not a shot, but an out-and-out cannon blast. Rahman jumped out of his chair, fell back down in it, then wilted.

  “What . . . what . . . has . . . Ahmed Moussa got to do with this?” the schoolmaster stammered, breathless.

  “Pardon my ignorance,” Valente continued implacably, “but who is this man you find so frightening?”

  “He’s a terrorist. Somebody who . . . a murderer. A blood-thirsty killer. But what has he got to do with any of this?”

  “We have reason to believe that Ben Dhahab was really Ahmed Moussa.”

  “I feel ill,” Schoolmaster Rahman said in a feeble voice.

  From the earth-shaken words of the devastated Rahman, they learned that Ahmed Moussa, whose real name was more often whispered than stated aloud and whose face was practically unknown, had formed a paramilitary cell of desperadoes some time before. He had introduced himself to the world three years earlier with an unequivocal calling card, blowing up a small cinema that was showing French cartoons for children. The luckiest among the audience were the ones who died; dozens of others were left blinded, maimed, or disabled for life. The cell espoused, in its communiqués at least, a nationalism so absolute as to be almost abstract. Moussa and his people were viewed with suspicion by even the most intransigent of fundamentalists. They had access to almost unlimited amounts of money, the source of which remained unknown. A large bounty had been placed on Ahmed Moussa’s head by the Tunisian government. This was all that Master Rahman knew. The idea that he had somehow helped the terrorist so troubled him that he trembled and teetered as if suffering a violent attack of malaria.

  “But you were deceived,” said Montalbano, trying to console him.

  “If you’re worried about the consequences,” Valente added, “we can vouch for your absolute good faith.”

  Rahman shook his head. He explained that it wasn’t fear he was feeling, but horror. Horror at the fact that his own life, however briefly, had intersected with that of a cold-blooded killer of innocent children.

  They comforted him as best they could, and as they were leaving they warned him not to repeat a word of their conversation to anyone, not even to his colleague and friend El Madani. They would call him if they needed him for anything else.

  “Even at night, you call, no disturb,” said the schoolteacher, who suddenly had difficulty speaking Italian.

  Before discussing everything they’d just learned, they ordered some coffee and drank it slowly, in silence.

  “Obviously the guy didn’t sign on to learn how to fish,” Valente began.

  “Or to get killed.”

  “We’ll have to see how the captain of the fishing boat tells the story.”

  “You want to summon him here?”

  “Why not?”

  “He’ll end up repeating what he already told Augello. It might be better first to try and find out what people down on the docks think. A word here, a word there, and we might end up learning a lot more.”

  “I’ll put Tomasino on it.”

  Montalbano grimaced. He really couldn’t stand Valente’s second-in-command, but this wasn’t a very good reason, and it especially wasn’t something he could say.

  “You don’t like that idea?”

  “Me? It’s you who have to like the idea. Y
our men are yours. You know them better than I do.”

  “C’mon, Montalbano, don’t be a shit.”

  “Okay, I don’t think he’s right for the job. The guy acts like a tax collector, and nobody’s going to feel like confiding in him when he comes knocking.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll put Tripodi on it. He’s a smart kid, fearless. And his father’s a fisherman.”

  “The important thing is to find out exactly what happened on the night the trawler crossed paths with the motor patrol. There’s something about the whole story that doesn’t add up, no matter which way you look at it.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Let’s forget, for the moment, how he managed to sign on with the boat. Ahmed set out with specific intentions, which are unknown to us. Here I ask myself: Did he reveal these intentions to the captain and the crew? And did he reveal them before they put out or when they were already at sea? In my opinion, he did state his intentions—though I don’t know exactly when—and everyone agreed to go along with him. Otherwise they would have turned around and put him ashore.”

  “He could have forced them at gunpoint.”

  “But in that case, once they put in at Vigàta or Mazàra, the captain and crew would have said what happened. They had nothing to lose.”

  “Right.”

  “To continue. Unless Ahmed’s intention was to get killed off the shores of his native land, I can come up with only two hypotheses. The first is that he wanted to be put ashore at night, at an isolated spot along the coast, so he could steal back into his country undercover. The second is that he’d arranged some sort of meeting at sea, some secret conversation, which he absolutely had to attend in person.”

  “The second seems more convincing to me.”

  “Me too. And then something unexpected happened.”

  “They were intercepted.”

  “Right. But here that hypothesis becomes more of a stretch. Let’s assume the Tunisian motor patrol doesn’t know that Ahmed’s aboard the fishing boat. They intercept a vessel fishing in their territorial waters, they order it to stop, the fishing vessel takes off, a machine gun is fired from the patrol boat, and purely by accident it happens to kill Ahmed Moussa. This, in any case, is the story we were told.”

  This time it was Valente who grimaced.

  “Unconvinced?”

  “It reminds me of the Warren Commission’s reconstruction of the Kennedy assassination.”

  “Here’s another version. In the place of the man he’s supposed to meet, Ahmed finds someone else, who then shoots him.”

  “Or else it is in fact the man he’s supposed to meet, but they have a difference of opinion, an altercation, and it ends badly, with the guy shooting him.”

  “With the ship’s machine gun?”

  He immediately realized what he’d just said. Without even asking Valente’s permission, and cursing under his breath, he grabbed the phone and asked for Jacomuzzi in Montelusa. While waiting for the connection, he asked Valente:

  “In the reports you were sent, did they specify the caliber of the bullets?”

  “They spoke generically of firearms.”

  “Hello? Who’s this?” asked Jacomuzzi at the other end of the line.

  “Listen, Baudo—”

  “Baudo? This is Jacomuzzi.”

  “But you wish you were Pippo Baudo. Would you tell me what the fuck they used to kill that Tunisian on the fishing boat?”

  “Firearms.”

  “How odd! I thought he’d been suffocated with a pillow!”

  “Your jokes make me puke.”

  “Tell me exactly what kind of firearm.”

  “A submachine gun, probably a Skorpion. Didn’t I write that in the report?”

  “No. Are you sure it wasn’t the ship’s machine gun?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Those patrol boats, you know, are equipped with weapons that can shoot down an airplane.”

  “Really? Your scientific precision simply amazes me, Jacomù.”

  “How do you expect me to talk to an ignoramus like you?”

  After Montalbano related the contents of the phone call, they sat awhile in silence. When Valente finally spoke, he said exactly what the inspector was thinking.

  “Are we sure the patrol boat was Tunisian?”

  Since it was getting late, Valente invited the inspector to his house for lunch. But as Montalbano already had firsthand experience of the vice-commissioner’s wife’s ghastly cooking, he declined, saying he had to leave for Vigàta at once.

  He got in his car and, after a few miles, saw a trattoria right on the shore. He stopped, got out, and sat down at a table. He did not regret it.

  12

  It had been hours since he last spoke with Livia. He felt guilty for this; she was probably worried about him. While waiting for them to bring him a digestivo of anisette (the double serving of bass was beginning to weigh on his stomach), he decided to call her.

  “Everything okay there?”

  “Your phone call woke us up.”

  So much for being worried about him.

  “You were asleep?”

  “Yes. We had a very long swim. The water was warm.”

  They were living it up, without him.

  “Have you eaten?” asked Livia, purely out of politeness.

  “I had a sandwich. I’m on the road. I’ll be back in Vigàta in an hour at the most.”

  “Are you coming home?”

  “No, I have to go to the office. I’ll see you this evening.”

  It was surely his imagination, but he thought he heard something like a sigh of relief at the other end.

  But it took him more than an hour to get back to Vigàta. Just outside of town, five minutes away from the office, the car suddenly decided to go on strike. There was no way to get it started again. Montalbano got out, opened the hood, looked at the motor. It was a purely symbolic gesture, a sort of rite of exorcism, since he didn’t know a thing about cars. If someone had told him the motor consisted of a string or a twisted rubber band as on certain toy vehicles, he might well have believed it. A carabinieri squad car with two men inside passed by, then stopped and backed up. They’d had second thoughts. One was a corporal, the other a ranking officer at the wheel. The inspector had never seen them before, and they didn’t know Montalbano.

  “Anything we can do?” the corporal asked politely.

  “Thanks. I don’t understand why the engine suddenly died.”

  They pulled up to the edge of the road and got out. The afternoon Vigàta-Fiacca bus stopped a short distance away, and an elderly couple got on.

  “Motor looks fine to me,” was the officer’s diagnosis. Then he added with a smile: “Shall we have a look at the gas tank?”

  There wasn’t a drop.

  “Tell you what, Mr. . . .”

  “Martinez, Claudio Martinez. I’m an accountant,” said Montalbano.

  No one must ever know that Inspector Montalbano was rescued by the carabinieri.

  “All right, Mr. Martinez, you wait here. We’ll go to the nearest filling station and bring back enough gasoline to get you back to Vigàta.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  He got back in the car, fired up a cigarette, and immediately heard an ear-splitting horn blast behind him. It was the Fiacca-Vigàta bus wanting him to get out of the way. He got out and used gestures to indicate that his car had broken down. The bus driver steered around him with a great show of effort and, once past the inspector’s car, stopped at the same point where the other bus, going in the other direction, had stopped. Four people got off.

  Montalbano sat there staring at the bus as it headed towards Vigàta. Then the carabinieri returned.

  By the time he got to the office it was already four o’clock. Augello wasn’t in. Fazio said he’d lost track of him since morning; Mimì’d stuck his head in at nine and then disappeared. Montalbano flew into a rage.

  “Everybody does whatever he pleases arou
nd here! Anything goes! Ragonese will turn out to have been right, just wait and see!”

  News? Nothing. Oh yes, the widow Lapècora phoned to inform the inspector that her husband’s funeral would be held Wednesday morning. And there was a land surveyor by the name of Finocchiaro who’d been waiting since two to speak to him.

  “Do you know him?”

  “By sight. He’s retired, an old guy.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. But he seems a tad upset.”

  “Let him in.”

  Fazio was right. The man looked shaken. The inspector asked him to sit down.

  “Could I have some water, please?” asked the land surveyor, whose throat was obviously dry.

  After drinking his water, he said his name was Giuseppe Finocchiaro, seventy-five years old, unmarried, former land surveyor, now retired, residing at Via Marconi 38. Clean record, not even a traffic ticket.

  He stopped, drank the last gulp of water remaining in the glass.

  “On TV today, on the afternoon news, they showed a photograph. A woman and child. You know how they said to inform you if we recognized them?”

  “Yes.”

  Yes, period. One more syllable, at that moment, might have sparked a doubt, a change of mind.

  “I know the woman. Her name’s Karima. The kid I’ve never seen before. In fact I never knew she had a son.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “She comes to clean my house once a week.”

  “What day?”

  “Tuesday mornings. She stays for four hours.”

  “Tell me something. How much did you pay her?”

  “Fifty thousand. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “Sometimes as much as two hundred thousand for extras.”

  “Like blow jobs?”

  The calculated brutality of the question made the surveyor first turn pale, then red.

  “Yes.”

  “So, let me get this straight. She would come to your house four times a month. How often did she perform these ‘extras’?”