Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions

by Mario Giordano

  “Half an hour ago.”

  “What were you doing here all on your own?”

  “I came for a swim.”

  “What, at this hour?”

  “I’m German. We do these kinds of things.”

  The two carabinieri seemed to think this made sense. They checked Poldi’s ID and carefully noted down her name, letter by letter, and likewise the licence number of her car. She was just about to ask them whether it wasn’t high time they sent for forensics and informed homicide when a Polizia di Stato Fiat came roaring up and the whole performance was repeated from scratch.

  Two officers got out, one younger than the other. The former shuffled down to the shore and inspected the corpse, reacted accordingly and returned in tears. In the meantime, the older man sparred with his carabiniere colleague.

  “Franco. What the devil are you two comedians doing here?”

  “I might ask you the same question, Pippo.”

  “We received a call.”

  “So did we.”

  “Did you call us, signora?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see? You two losers can push off. This case is ours.”

  “What number did you call, signora, one-one-two or one-one-three?”

  “Both.”

  “BOTH???”

  Dismayed silence.

  “Holy shit.”

  “So what now?”

  The four policemen stared uneasily at Valentino’s mutilated body.

  “No problem,” said the older state policeman. “You were here first. We’ll beat it.”

  “Hey, not so fast, Pippo. You can have the case.”

  “Oh, sure, that would suit you fine, wouldn’t it? Okay, Marco, let’s go.”

  Beckoning to his young colleague, the older state policeman turned to go.

  “She knows the murder victim,” cried the older carabiniere, pointing to my aunt.

  The state policeman spun round and stared intently at Poldi as if to show the carabinieri how to launch a preliminary attack. “Did you shoot him, signora?”

  “No.”

  “How did you know who he was?”

  “By the tattoo on his arm.”

  “Aha. And where did you know him from?”

  “Valentino – his name is Valentino Candela. He helped me in the house occasionally. He’d been missing for four days.”

  “I see. And what were you doing down on the beach so early?”

  “Going for a swim.”

  “A swim?”

  “She’s German.”

  “I see.”

  A pensive silence.

  “A fine mess, eh, Pippo?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Yes. Haven’t seen anything like this since 1988.”

  “Did you touch anything, signora?”

  “I held his hand.”

  “You did what?”

  “Held his hand.”

  “Why the devil did you do that?”

  “Because… because I felt sorry for him.”

  Even Pippo and Franco seemed to find this logical. The two younger policemen didn’t utter a sound. Still in shock, they stood there smoking while their elders conferred.

  “We must call forensics and homicide.”

  “Yours or ours?”

  “Both.”

  Irresolutely, they stared out to sea past Valentino’s corpse.

  “What a mess.”

  “Just like 1988.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Valentino Candela.”

  “No, I meant in 1988.”

  “Totò Scafidi.”

  “Totò the butcher, that’s right. Horrible business. With a lupara, too. Blood everywhere.”

  Poldi surmised that she wasn’t needed for the moment. Somewhat tremulous and suffering from a slight headache, she went back to her car. She badly needed a drink.

  “You realize, signora, that you may have disturbed a lot of evidence?”

  “This wasn’t the crime scene, in any case,” Poldi said irritably, “as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  “Only the perp could know that,” cried Marco, the young state policeman, and the two older officers instinctively reached for their guns.

  “Stand still.”

  “Don’t move, signora.”

  “Oh, pipe down, laddie,” Poldi growled in German, adding, in Italian, “I’m going home now; I’ve had enough. You’ve got my address and everything.”

  “You’re going nowhere.”

  “You’re a murder suspect.”

  “Like an echo, those two,” my Auntie Poldi told me later. “Like a crotchety old married couple. You know, sometimes I’m glad Peppe and I didn’t grow old together. When I look at couples like that I’d sooner have topped myself.”

  She reached for the whisky bottle, but I jerked it back out of range.

  “So you were suspected of murder,” I said to distract her. “What happened next?”

  “Well, the dickheads simply kept me there till homicide arrived. Which turned out to be an advantage in the long run.”

  “Because that was how you got to know Montana?”

  “You’re always so impatient. If the stories you write are as breathless, you mustn’t be surprised if your readers get stressed and give up. Calm equals strong, in sex as in art.”

  “All styles are good except the boring kind,” I lectured in return. “Voltaire.”

  Poldi took a pull at her drink and gave me a long look. “You don’t believe me, eh? You think I’m lying – you think I made it all up, don’t you?”

  No, I didn’t think that. And even if I had, what then?

  “So you were a murder suspect,” I said.

  4

  Describes how Poldi is questioned by a detective chief inspector with beautiful eyes and demonstrates that she herself is an expert detective. Rumours take shape in Torre Archirafi and Poldi forms a preliminary suspicion. Subtle eroticism notwithstanding, the policeman proves to be a tough nut. Poldi jousts with death, reaches a decision and receives an initial clue to the murder motive.

  It quickly became hot on the beach at Praiola. Poldi continued to sit in her car, cocooned in a bubble of heat, stupidity and fluttering scene-of-crime tape. Sweating, she watched men in paper overalls cordoning off the beach, spraying marks on rocks, planting little flags and taking photographs. All these procedures were carried out as slowly as if they were taking place on a peak in the Himalayas. The forensic medical examiner scraped something from beneath Valentino’s fingernails, dropped it, looked for it feverishly and rediscovered it on a rock. Peering around with a furtive air, he hurriedly inserted it in a glass vial. Poldi sighed.

  Having been familiar with the course of police investigations from an early age, she waited patiently for homicide to arrive so that she could finally dispel any misunderstandings and be permitted to drive home. But they took their time. Instead, more carabinieri and state police turned up to keep the first inquisitive spectators at bay or simply to chat together and cast suspicious glances at my aunt. The approaches to the beach became choked with patrol cars.

  No one brought Poldi any water or asked her any more questions, not even the two young policemen who were detailed to guard her and had confiscated her car key for safety’s sake. They simply stared at her and left her to sweat.

  “You might at least give me a cigarette, boys.”

  After exchanging a glance, the young pups eventually offered her an MS. From their manner, she might have been a prisoner on death row.

  Poldi shut her eyes against the sun and smoked, thinking of Valentino and her brief preliminary investigation, which seemed to indicate that she was the last person to see Valentino alive. Apart, of course, from the murderer.

  A shadow fell across her face.

  “Signora Oberreiter?”

  A man in a pale-grey suit was standing beside the car. Possibly a trifle short for Poldi’s tas
te, he was wearing the grumpy expression of someone attempting to give up smoking. The beginnings of a tummy, but thoroughly fit in other respects, aquiline nose, dark hair not cut too short. A face like a Greek god cast in bronze, beard and moustache flecked with grey. A face devoid of fatigue. An angry little furrow between the eyebrows offset by laughter lines around the eyes. Hands like a pianist’s, slender but strong, with the curving thumbs indicative of willpower. Poldi was something of an expert on these things.

  “My name is Vito Montana. I’m heading this investigation.” The man held up his ID card. Poldi saw a passport photo and the words “Commissario Capo”. A detective chief inspector. “I should like to ask you some questions.”

  “What outfit do you belong to, commissario?”

  “State Police.” The commissario indicated Poldi’s Alfa. “I used to have one of these.”

  “I didn’t kill Valentino.”

  Montana nodded as if this had long ceased to be an issue. “Any idea who it could have been?”

  Poldi shook her head and eyed Montana’s hands.

  “Ring?” asked my Aunt Teresa, pragmatic as usual, when Poldi gave her a detailed description of this first encounter.

  “Absolutely not. And his eyes,” sighed Poldi. “Bright green and always on the move. But quite unlike Russo’s. Not so… predatory. More observant, more receptive – you know, more interesting.”

  Teresa, Caterina and Luisa nodded. They knew a thing or two about beautiful eyes.

  But Poldi immediately detected something else in the inspector’s eyes: profound sorrow despite the laughter lines that belied his grumpy manner. She put him in his late fifties, so by no means too young for her. And although he wasn’t, alas, in uniform, one thing was clear from the start: the man appealed to her. This was also the moment when a kind of hunger, a painful ferment in her epicentre, spread rapidly and set everything ablaze.

  “You come from Munich?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re from Munich?”

  “Er, yes, originally, but I live at 29 Via Baronessa in Torre Archirafi. I must change the registration on my car.”

  She surreptitiously adjusted her wig, squinting in the rear-view mirror and cursing herself for not wearing any make-up.

  “What brought you to Sicily?”

  “Love,” she said spontaneously, and Montana smiled. He produced a small notebook and turned over a page. To Poldi’s regret, she could no longer see his eyes.

  “You were acquainted with Valentino Candela?”

  “He sometimes ran errands for me.”

  “And you come here to swim every day?”

  “For my figure’s sake – I’m not twenty any more. That’s to say, no, not every day.”

  “But today.”

  Montana made a note with his strong, willpower-laden hands.

  “Why do you believe this isn’t the scene of the crime?”

  “Heavens, surely you must have noticed?”

  “Noticed what?”

  “Well, there’s hardly any blood beneath his head and none round about, either. There’d have to have been blood everywhere with a killing like this. Like the Totò Scafidi case.”

  Montana looked up from his notebook. Much to Poldi’s regret, he wasn’t smiling any more.

  “You think this murder is somehow connected to that of Totò Scafidi?”

  Poldi sighed. “That was just an incidental remark.”

  “Perhaps you’d better refrain from making incidental remarks, signora. Did you remove anything from the victim’s body or its immediate vicinity?”

  Poldi stared at the cobalt-blue piece of mosaic that had been lying, clearly visible, on the dusty dashboard all this time, like a little jewel. She resisted the impulse to pick it up, but only with the greatest self-control.

  “No.”

  Montana looked out across the beach, thinking hard.

  “Perhaps Valentino was killed near the water’s edge and deposited further up later on. The tide would have washed all the blood away.”

  “Unlikely,” said Poldi. “There’s hardly any tide here, and there are no salt-water marks on his clothing.”

  Montana drew a deep breath, “You come here this morning for a swim, find an appallingly mutilated body, recognize the young man by his tattoo, hold his hand, and then examine the corpse for clues.”

  Poldi said nothing.

  Montana took another look at his notes.

  “Valentino had been missing for three days?”

  “Four, counting today. Since Monday.”

  Montana wrote “Monday” and ringed the word. “And you were worried?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you worry when someone who is normally reliable suddenly disappears and doesn’t answer his phone.”

  “Had something happened between the two of you?”

  Beautiful eyes or no, Poldi was getting sick of being questioned.

  “Certainly not,” she snapped. “I’m just a caring person. It comes naturally to me.”

  “To search a murder victim?”

  “Madonna, commissario, what the hell are you getting at?”

  The chief inspector gave Poldi a long, long look that pierced her to the marrow. Then he handed back her car key. “Thank you, Signora Oberreiter. That will be all for the moment. I have your address in Torre.”

  Their fingers briefly touched as the key changed hands. Poldi gave a start.

  “Number 29 Via Baronessa,” she purred. “It’s easy enough to find.”

  “I hope you aren’t planning to leave the island in the immediate future?”

  He looked at her again, his bright eyes sad despite the laughter lines.

  Poldi smiled at him and started the car. “That would be extraordinarily stupid of me, commissario.”

  “You chatted him up,” I exclaimed when she told me about it later. “You find a dead body and flirt with the chief investigator. You’re simply —”

  “Shameless?”

  “No, totally cool.”

  Poldi smiled, looking flattered. “I had to lay a little scent mark, and nothing is more appealing to a detective than a mixture of half-truths and subtle eroticism.”

  “What made you so sure Montana would soon be ringing your doorbell?”

  “Why, I pegged him as a real pro right away. One day at most, I told myself, and he’ll discover that I went looking for Valentino. And what does that mean?”

  I didn’t have a clue.

  “He’ll know that I was one of the last people to see Valentino alive,” she explained. “And that I may know more than he does.”

  That figured.

  Within a few hours Torre Archirafi was enveloped in a fog of rumours, a toxic aerosol of conjectures, remarks hastily cut short, half-truths, whispered names, meaningful glances and eloquent silences. My aunt’s name did not, however, crop up amid these nebulous rumours, a circumstance Poldi attributed to the handsome commissario, who had clearly enjoined the whole police force to silence. She did not delude herself that something wouldn’t leak out sooner or later, but until it did she might be able to glean some information while feigning dismayed ignorance.

  Although no clear picture emerged from the rumours, everyone in town seemed to associate Valentino’s death in some way with his activities for Russo.

  “Simply… blown… away,” Signor Bussacca whispered to Poldi next morning, when she went to replenish her supply of cigarettes and a buy copy of La Sicilia, which had splashed the murder on its front page. “The whole head. A ghastly mess. Blood everywhere – lashings of it.”

  Gossip was the last thing Poldi felt like that morning. She was feeling thin-skinned and irritable, but her curiosity was stronger than the impulse to get back into bed and ignore the world.

  “You mean you saw it?” she asked with simulated horror.

  “Not personally,” Signor Bussacca was forced to concede, “but I’ve got a close acquaintance in the Carabinieri.�
��

  “It’s awful, simply awful.” Poldi mopped her perspiring brow. “He was such a nice young man. Who would do such a thing?”

  Signor Bussacca glanced around and leant towards her. “My close acquaintance in the Carabinieri isn’t supposed to talk about it, but…” He cleared his throat and hesitated, as if to satisfy himself of my aunt’s discretion.

  “Not a word,” Poldi whispered back.

  “Officially, of course, all lines of inquiry are being explored. The fact is, however, my friend in the task force hinted at the existence of some definite leads.”

  Bussacca straightened up as if he had already said too much.

  “What sort of leads?”

  He raised his hands. “Well, the murder weapon, Donna Poldina. A lupara. That says it all, surely.”

  “You mean Valentino was murdered by Cosa Nostra?”

  Bussacca gave an almost imperceptible start, as though bitten by a mosquito. “The Mafia, Donna Poldina, is just an invention of the fascists in the north.”

  Poldi nodded and thought for a moment. “Let’s assume, purely theoretically, that Valentino was murdered by a relatively unimportant criminal organization that traditionally kills traitors and competitors with a sawn-off shotgun. Why should it have done that? Valentino was such a nice young fellow.”

  “Boh,” Bussacca exclaimed, spreading his hands in a gesture of utter ignorance. “Perhaps he wasn’t what he seemed – perhaps he knew too much.”

  “About Russo, you mean?”

  Bussacca gave another shrug. “I mean nothing. Nor do I subscribe to rumours.”

  All at once, Death had entered my Auntie Poldi’s life once more. He had sneaked up on her from behind, shouted “Boo” and laughingly reminded her of his power and the expiry of her own deadline. All at once there he was again, the jack-in-a-box, the capricious djinn whose embrace she had yearned for so ardently, wanting him at last to bring the curtain down on this lousy farce of a life. To request the audience to refrain from applauding and leave the theatre quickly – that had been her aim: to take the whole messy business into her own hands and, having got pleasantly sozzled to the accompaniment of Gloria and the sound of the sea, to let herself glide over to the other side, where my Uncle Peppe might still be waiting for her.