Silence fell. Everyone stared at Uncle Martino, who, satisfied with himself and his theory, was sucking a fish bone. If there’s another word for mischief, it can only be Martino.
“What nonsense!” said Aunt Caterina, always the voice of reason. “This is a murder—it’s no laughing matter.”
Aunt Teresa reproved her husband with a sidelong glance; Marco, Ciro and Laura smirked; and Aunt Luisa sighed because she loved conspiracy theories and Martino’s theory had really appealed to her. Poldi still said nothing.
“Beh!” said Uncle Martino, shrugging his shoulders. “That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.”
Aunt Teresa started to say something, but Poldi got there first.
“There may even be something in it—basically, I mean.”
“Why?”
“Because Signora Cocuzza told me something of the kind,” Poldi went on. “The thing is, she recently consulted Madame Sahara about . . . well, a private matter, and she saw something. An envelope. A perfectly normal C4 envelope—you know, buff-coloured, with something inside and ‘Etnarosso’ written on it in capitals. It was lying on Madame Sahara’s desk, Signora Cocuzza says, and she wondered what it meant, whether it was a name and whether Madame Sahara was into wine—you know, the sort of thing that goes through your mind when you’re nervous because it’s the first time you’ve consulted a fortune-teller. Well, when Madame Sahara noticed Signora Cocuzza staring at the envelope, she hurriedly put it away in a drawer. And that’s why the signora remembered it.”
“And what do you deduce from that?” asked Aunt Caterina.
“Madame Sahara was on to something, that’s what I deduce, and I also deduce that the key to Etnarosso and her murder is still at her home in that envelope.”
The aunts smelt a rat.
“You’re not to, Poldi,” Teresa said sharply. “Absolutely not!”
“Not to what?” Poldi protested, innocence personified.
“You’re not going to break into Madame Sahara’s house and look for that envelope!”
“What do you take me for? Of course I won’t. It’d be stupid, considering what a splendid piece of bait that envelope makes.”
“What do you mean?” Aunt Caterina asked suspiciously.
“I’m going to keep the house under surveillance. It’s quite obvious the murderer will sooner or later turn up in the hope of destroying any clues to his identity.”
“And you’ll keep it under surveillance? How?”
“I’ve now got a team, didn’t I tell you? A couple of angels, so to speak. Anyone feel like a martini?”
“Don’t change the subject, Poldi,” said Caterina. “What sort of team? Who’ll be keeping watch on the house, for heaven’s sake?”
“Why, Signora Cocuzza in her old Cinquecento, of course. Special Ops.”
“But if you’re right and the murderer comes looking for the envelope, it could be really dangerous. What if he spots the signora?”
Poldi brushed this aside. “If anyone can be totally invisible, it’s the sad signora. She’s perfect for the job. Besides, she suggested it herself, and anyway, all she has to do is take photos of any suspicious activity from the other side of the street.”
“But you can’t keep her watching the house for days and nights on end, not on her own. Who knows, maybe no one will ever turn up.”
“I’ll relieve her from time to time. We must act! Signor X could put in an appearance at any moment.”
Poldi sounded a trifle defensive. She now realised that she’d been carried away by the sad signora’s thrill of the chase.
“What else could I do, she was so keen on the idea.” Poldi picked up her mobile. “All right, I’ll call her off.”
She glanced at the other aunts to see whether there were any further objections. There weren’t. With a sigh, she waited for Signora Cocuzza to respond from her observation post.
Which she didn’t. The phone rang twice, thrice, four times. The fifth time, her voicemail cut in.
“She’s not answering,” Poldi told the aunts rather helplessly.
“She isn’t?”
“Just her voicemail.”
“Try her again.”
Poldi called again—with the same result. The sad signora didn’t answer. Poldi was becoming uneasy.
“Dear Signora Cocuzza, where are you? Poldi here. Please call me back soonest. I’m cancelling the operation, you hear? So get out of there. Where are you, for God’s sake?”
Poldi stared irresolutely at her phone as if it could enforce Signora Cocuzza’s recall, but no dice. With every second that passed, she was becoming more convinced that something had gone badly wrong up in Santa Venerina, that her melancholy friend might be in mortal danger—that it might already be too late.
“I’m going to Santa Venerina,” she announced. “Hell and damnation, why on earth did I let her do it?” She slipped her sandals on and dashed into the house.
“Wait!” called Aunt Teresa. “We’ll come too!”
“You most certainly won’t.”
“No arguments, Poldi!”
A few moments later, like two Special Forces teams, four aunts, an uncle and a dog erupted from the front door of No. 29 Via Baronessa, piled into Poldi’s old but overpowered Alfa and Uncle Martino’s battered, asthmatic Fiat, and sped off towards Etna. Poldi made several vain attempts to get through to her friend en route, which only heightened the general sense of panic.
The route from Torre Archirafi to Santa Venerina is circuitous and winding and takes in potholed secondary roads, a motorway, two level crossings and several straggling little towns. The latter, which basically consist of a main street, a bar and a small piazza in front of the church, are boring in the extreme. Under normal circumstances the trip takes barely twenty minutes, but “under normal circumstances” isn’t a Sicilian concept. In Sicily, it always means a bizarre concatenation of mundane factors. This time only two were involved: senile overconfidence and Saint Venera.
“I should explain,” said Poldi, interrupting her account at this point, “that Venera is the patron saint of Santa Venerina.”
“Really, Poldi,” I protested. “Fancy going off at a tangent about some saint just when it’s getting exciting.”
“Pull yourself together, boy, it’s all a way of building up the suspense—make a note of that for your novel. You have to take your foot off the gas occasionally.”
“But not now, surely?”
Poldi serenely sipped her Scotch. “I can also stop right there.”
“Forza Poldi,” I said with a sigh.
“Well, during the second century Venera was a beautiful Gaulish girl who came to do missionary work in Sicily, where she lived in caves and healed the sick. Everyone loved her, she was such a dear, and she left a scent of roses behind whenever she preached. Naturally enough, the authorities persecuted her for this. She was arrested and taken to Acireale, where the Roman governor tortured her good and proper. She had boiling olive oil poured over her, the poor thing. But lo and behold, Venera emerged from every bout of torture even lovelier than before. In view of this miracle, the sadistic Roman governor repented—he burst into tears and became a convert. Lovely Venera was a phoenix type like me—I feel a certain affinity with her—but it did her no good in the end because they beheaded her. My, what dark days they were . . .”
I stared at her. “Is that it?”
“Yes, sure. Nice story, isn’t it? Whenever you tell a story, it has to have a moral—make a note of that. Well, now we’ve got that out of the way, on with the motley!”
Just before Santa Venerina, Poldi had let Uncle Martino overtake her on a bend because he knew the way to Madame Sahara’s house the way he knew every last corner of Sicily. He raced into the town with his foot hard down, closely followed by Poldi’s Alfa, missed the turning at a roundabout and headed straight for the town centre. There, having realised his mistake, he performed a James Bond skid-turn down a no-entry side street with cars parked on both
sides, leaving just room enough to pass.
As bad luck would have it, factor number one supervened in the shape of a cussed old man who had just pulled out in his rattletrap of a Fiat 500. Since he also preferred to drive down the one-way street and knew the dimensions of his fifty-year-old treasure to a tee, he had decided to turn round and—guess what—miscalculated. The little Cinquecento was stuck sideways-on. It could neither advance nor retreat. There was nothing doing.
Uncle Martino screeched to a stop so abruptly that Poldi almost ran into him from behind. Thumbing his horn and gesticulating feverishly, Martino indicated that the signore in the Cinquecento should clear the road as soon as possible, but the elderly gentleman didn’t even glance at him, just doggedly continued to inch backwards and forwards. Realising the situation was hopeless, Poldi didn’t hesitate; she slammed her gear lever into reverse.
Which was when factor number two came into play. At that moment, a procession in honour of Venera debouched into the street behind her. In the lead came a priest swinging a censer, followed by four ministrants with a huge figure of the saint on their shoulders and, devoutly singing in their wake, half the inhabitants of Santa Venerina in their Sunday best. Before Poldi could reverse so much as a metre, the procession had reached the bottleneck and come to a halt. Now there was really nothing doing.
At such moments in Sicily, mythical, elemental forces take hold: subterranean telluric currents that shape people’s destinies, create chaos and disentangle it. Uncle Martino had already got out in order to resolve the elderly gentleman’s predicament in some way, but to no avail. Totti bounded around the little car, barking happily. Aunt Luisa got out to clear a space for Poldi to reverse out of the street, but more and more people were pouring down it. There was no hope of extricating themselves.
“What appears to be the problem, signora?” the priest politely inquired of Aunt Luisa. He passed the word to his ministrants, who promptly put the heavy saint down and crowded around the Cinquecento, where their pieces of good advice only exacerbated the chaos.
Poldi, at the end of her tether by now, pounded the steering wheel with her fist. “Hell’s bells and buckets of blood! God give me strength! Get out of the way, you knuckleheads, this is a matter of life or death!”
But not even Poldi’s mastery of Bavarian invective could dissolve the blockage. On the contrary, her piercing cries only attracted more curiosity.
“What’s going on up ahead?”
“No idea. Sounds like someone’s slaughtering a goat.”
“On a Sunday?”
“It’s a flash mob.”
“A what?”
“Like on the Internet, Mamma. I showed you. Just wait, next thing you know, someone’ll sing the ‘Ode to Joy.’”
“Really? How nice.”
“It’s an epileptic fit, sure as eggs. I know that from seeing my neighbour’s husband.”
“When are we going to move on?”
“Ask that signora in the wig, the one in the car, shouting.”
“Isn’t that the padre shouting?”
“Have you heard? The padre’s having an epileptic fit. The Devil is speaking through him.”
“Is he spitting nails?”
“No, but the crazy signora in the wig is.”
“It’s only a goat, folks.”
“I’m a member of the Salvation Army. Can you give me her number?”
Poldi eventually blew her top. Getting out of her Alfa like the Devil incarnate emerging from Pandora’s box, she grabbed every able-bodied young man she could lay hands on. “You and you and you and you, come with me. Avanti! Forza!”
Impressed by the furious apparition in the black wig, the young men obeyed without demur and followed Poldi up the street to the sideways-on old-timer, where she stationed one beside each mudguard. Cries of “Bravo!” began to make themselves heard.
“Would you mind getting out for a moment?” Poldi asked the elderly signore, every inch the courteous professional, even in this extreme situation.
“Why?”
“Because then we can lift your car and turn it round, that’s why.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“Don’t bother, I’ll manage.”
Poldi forced herself to take two deep breaths before she replied.
“No you won’t. You’re sweating like a pig and your heart can’t take much more. Kindly get out.”
“This is my car. I refuse to be evicted from it.”
By this stage, Poldi would gladly have hauled the old man out of his car and high-handedly thrashed him in the presence of Saint Venera, notwithstanding the respect due to age. He looked so gaunt and decrepit, my aunt could have torn him to shreds, but she didn’t. She had a better idea. Bending down, she put her head through the window and whispered something in his ear, so softly that no one else could hear, whereupon the elderly signore abruptly turned pale, stared at Poldi and struggled out of his car.
Naturally I asked Poldi what she had whispered to the old man. I made every effort to squeeze it out of her, but she flatly refused to tell me. “That’ll remain my little secret” she said coquettishly. “Where the stronger sex is concerned, I simply know which button to press.”
However, knowing my aunt as I do by now, I suspect she put her faith in the traditional effect on Sicilian men of a mildly whispered threat, something like, “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” That, combined with the sound of the German language, never fails to send them to panic stations and trigger Code Red. The actual wording is immaterial. I could even imagine Poldi reciting Hölderlin.
To the accompaniment of cries of “Bravo!,” laughter and applause, the youths made a concerted effort to heft the Cinquecento in the desired direction, and in a few moments the traffic jam dissolved, the scared old gentleman was able to drive off, Saint Venera was hoisted into the air, and Uncle Martino and Poldi could step on the gas again.
They got to Madame Sahara’s house a minute later. It was like something out of a fairy tale. Behind a high, lava stone wall loomed a four-square, pistachio-green old villa with basalt window arches and a wraparound terrace. Bougainvillea climbed up its walls like all-enveloping violet foam, strelitzias and bananas reached to the first floor, palms and cypresses seemed to be standing guard on every side. A huge hibiscus aimed its fat, yellow, trumpet-shaped blossoms at the house as if their principal function was to awaken it from its dreams every hundred years; tubs of cactuses and rubber plants paraded on the terrace. The shade-dispensing greenery all around made the house look like a forgotten island jutting from a slumbering ocean of flowers and foliage.
An inconspicuous brass plate beside the entrance to the garden read Villa Sahara. Next to it was an iron bell pull. The first-floor windows stood open to reveal silk curtains billowing lazily, invitingly, in the warm late-afternoon breeze. No other form of movement could be detected, nor was there anything to be heard but the omnipresent hum of honeybees and bumblebees.
Poldi spotted Signora Cocuzza’s small Japanese car parked across the road beside a wall overgrown with bougainvillea. The little silver runabout was almost invisible amid such a sea of blossom. More importantly, it was empty.
Poldi dialled the sad signora’s number for the umpteenth time, yet again without success. There was no answering beep from inside the car, either. It was locked and displayed no signs of violence.
“Where on earth can she be?” asked Aunt Luisa.
“She’s been gone too long for a trip to the loo,” Poldi mused aloud. “So there’s only one possibility.” She pointed to Madame Sahara’s house.
“Why would she have gone inside?” demanded Aunt Caterina.
“It was a spontaneous decision,” Poldi concluded. “Something must have happened. She’s inside there, I tell you. Stay here.” And she made straight for the house.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you!” Aunt Teresa called after her. “We’re coming with you.”
“Oh no y
ou aren’t.”
“Oh yes we are.”
“It could be dangerous.”
“That’s just why we’re coming. Basta!”
Did I already mention that it’s quite pointless to argue with Aunt Teresa? All three aunts are as soft and gentle as a breeze in springtime, but they were born under the sign of Taurus, which means they’re stubborn too. Once in motion, they’re unstoppable.
It was dawning on Poldi that membership of a team had its disadvantages, and that she would have to address the subject of joint decision-making at her next team meeting. At present, however, there was nothing to be done.
So they all passed through the unlocked wrought-iron gate, under a basalt arch and into Madame Sahara’s enchanted garden. Poldi led the way, followed by Totti, Aunt Teresa, Aunt Luisa, Aunt Caterina and, bringing up the rear, Uncle Martino, who kept looking in all directions with total professionalism.
Beyond the gate, a narrow path meandered towards the house, flanked by waist-high grass and luxuriant flowering shrubs. Poldi gave a little start when a snake crossed her path, then pressed boldly on with aunts, uncle and dog at her heels.
The front door had been jimmied open. The interior was cool and hushed, the thick walls being proof against the heat of the day. An old refrigerator hummed somewhere. No one ventured to say anything or breathe too loudly. Poldi and her team crept around the house as if loath to awaken evil incarnate enjoying a postprandial siesta. They realised that they might at any moment come upon Signora Cocuzza lying in a pool of blood, if not something even worse.
But all they encountered at first was devastation and disorder. Someone had made a thorough search of the house. Every cupboard, drawer and chest had been opened and its contents strewn across the floor. It looked as if a storm or demon had rampaged through the building, unnoticed by the world outside. In the kitchen Poldi waded through smashed crockery and spilt milk mingled with the contents of the open refrigerator and packets of pasta and instant coffee.
In obedience to a sort of inspiration and her criminological instinct, Poldi quickly took some photographs with her mobile phone as she picked her way cautiously through the mess like a skater on thin ice.
Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna Page 11