Calogero Vizzini, whom I visualised as the archetypal old-school Mafioso with a heart of gold, soon realised that wild, melancholy, taciturn Barnaba possessed a special talent: he was very adept at mental arithmetic. He could work out the most complicated sums in his head, and the answers were always correct. So Vizzini took his protégé out of the day-to-day business and taught him figures. From then on, he made him check invoices, work out prices, protection-money percentages and bribes, and double-enter deliveries that had never taken place. In other words, he soon left Barnaba in sole charge of his accounts. The young man now knew almost all there was to know about Vizzini’s business affairs, and this, among the more criminal members of the Sicilian population, always presented the following instinctive dilemma: kill or adopt?
Vizzini opted for the latter alternative and made Barnaba a partner. Shortly afterwards, Vizzini died under unexplained circumstances or disappeared without trace. His body was never found, nor could it have been, because Barnaba had seen to that with Pasqualina’s assistance. Just twenty-one years old, he was now the respected sole proprietor of a flourishing fruit and special goods import business, wore nothing but bespoke white suits and employed a private secretary who could speak German. Meantime, the hard-working talisman given him by the preternaturally beautiful siren Ilaria finally gave up the ghost and failed to prevent a buxom young waitress named Rosi, who could carry twelve steins of beer at once and possessed a certain acrobatic skill, from becoming pregnant by him. And since Barnaba was a man of honour and also besotted with Rosi and her nocturnal acrobatics, he acknowledged the child as his son, moved out of Pasqualina’s house, rented a seven-room apartment three doors away, and moved into it with Rosi and the discreet private secretary. In short, Barnaba was now a made man and ready to go on holiday to his old home for the first time since leaving it. A great cliffhanger, I thought. End of Chapter Three.
Thoroughly satisfied, replete with sicilianità and feeling rather cool, I bought a butter-yellow shirt at the HiperSimply supermarket and, since Poldi was still out, sat on the roof terrace at sunset with a dry martini, toasted distant Etna like an old friend, waited for nightfall and the resumption of Poldi’s narrative—and smoked my first-ever cigarette.
“What?” Poldi said, aghast, when I told her that evening. “What put that daft idea into your head?”
“A packet of yours was lying around,” I said evasively.
“And you took that as an invitation to screw up your life, did you? Fancy starting smoking at your age. Couldn’t you at least have waited till your midlife crisis?”
“I’m thirty-four, Poldi, and I’m not starting smoking,” I said defensively. “We only smoked a cigarette together. Okay, two.”
“We?”
“Yes, Etna and me.”
She stared at me in disbelief, and I sensed that the more I said, the sillier I’d look. But, as my Auntie Poldi always says, “Faint heart never won fair lady.” And anyway, I was a grown-up. I didn’t have to defer to anyone.
“The thing is,” I said, “I enjoy sitting on your terrace. I enjoy drinking my breakfast cappuccino there, I enjoy eating a lunchtime arancino from the café there, and I enjoy drinking a beer there in the evenings. Those are times when I’m all mine and my own master, know what I mean? I like your terrace with that mountain brooding in the distance all the time. When the sun goes down behind the main crater, it looks like a dark angel unfurling its wings. And it smokes. It smokes all day and all night. It smokes without a break. It’s been smoking for half a million years or more.”
“So you thought you’d smoke too.”
“I know it sounds completely daft.”
“It is completely daft.”
What could I say? When she was right, she was right.
My Auntie Poldi gave me a searching look and topped up our glasses.
“Nice shirt. New?”
“Mm.”
“Suits you. You’re the Mediterranean type. You can wear strong colours.”
“Thanks.”
“A little tip: undo one more button and you’d make an almost casual impression.”
With a sigh, I undid one more button. “That better?”
Poldi nodded and drank and continued to eye me intently. “What’s next, now that you’ve sniffed the flower of coolness? Going to get a tat or a piercing?”
“Listen, Poldi, I . . .”
She silenced me with a gesture. “How did it make you feel, smoking?”
“How did it make me feel?”
“Go on, be quite spontaneous.”
“Connected,” I said. “Somehow connected with the volcano and everything else here. Sicily suddenly became far less annoying. On the contrary, it feels . . .” I hesitated.
Poldi nudged me with her elbow. “Come on, just say it.”
“Like home.”
She nodded as if I’d answered a question correctly for the first time in my life, then took another sip of her drink. “It is and remains totally daft. On the other hand, people who never do anything totally daft are highly suspect, so welcome to the club.”
We clinked glasses.
And I realised that I was really very fond of my Auntie Poldi.
“You now have a new friend,” she told me. “Etna. I predict you’ll smoke many another cigarette together in the future, but that only goes to show that even a stuffy slowpoke like you has a few Cyclopean genes. Right, now tell me about your new chapter.”
“No, leave it, Poldi. First I want to know what was in that pull-out table.”
The padre had managed to reattach the undamaged police seal to the front-door lock. He and Signora Cocuzza were eager to know at once what Poldi had found, but my aunt was in too much of a hurry.
“Quick, into the car, Padre! We must get out of here.”
Back behind the wheel of her Alfa, she sped through deserted villages and along dark, winding roads, ignoring every red light and continually checking her rear-view mirror for potential pursuers. This, coupled with her style of driving, filled the car with a certain tension and the sound of quick, muttered prayers, but they got back to Torre without further incident. Poldi parked outside the church and hustled her team into its bug-proof interior.
It was quiet inside the sacristy. Not a sound penetrated its thick walls, but there was nothing to be heard outside in any case, other than the murmur of the sea, an occasional bark or the putt-putt of a moped. The inhabitants of Torre Archirafi were sleeping, eating, arguing, procreating or watching the Champions League, but either within their own four walls or in their cars.
It was quiet inside the sacristy, yes, but particularly because Poldi, Padre Paolo and Signora Cocuzza were staring silently at the old refectory table as if loath to wake what was lying on it because it might bite. But books don’t bite, and the book on the refectory table didn’t look as if it was about to start. It looked wholly unremarkable. A small black pocket diary for the current year, complete with ribbon page marker and leather cover, it offered a page a day, and almost every page listed appointments neatly entered in Madame Sahara’s legible handwriting. Poldi had already seen this much back at the house.
“Well,” she said, breaking the silence. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and sat down at the table. “Let’s take a look.”
She began by holding up the diary and riffling the pages to see whether there was anything lodged between them. Discounting a few crumbs of tobacco, there wasn’t. With the padre and the sad signora on either side of her, Poldi eventually opened the diary and went through it page by page.
“What are we looking for?” asked the padre.
“We aren’t looking, we’re finding,” Poldi told him. “No overhasty theories, though. We must form a general picture first.”
And that was what they got. Each entry consisted of a surname and an abbreviated forename, the fee to be charged, usually ticked (120 euros an hour), and sporadic marginal notes such as “Very nervous,” “Extremely worried,” “Debts,” “D
epressive,” “Narcissistic,” “Cocaine problem?” and “No charge!” Madame Sahara had supplemented some of these remarks with cryptic little signs whose meaning Poldi had yet to elucidate. Madame Sahara had also entered other figures against many of the names, some of them in four digits. Although the euro sign was never inserted, Poldi had no doubt that they were sums of money.
“Do these names mean anything to you?” she asked after the first few pages.
“They certainly do,” growled Padre Paolo. “They include every local politician of any repute.”
“I also noticed two actors,” Signora Cocuzza added, “and a footballer.”
“I see,” said Poldi, annoyed that they hadn’t imparted this information sooner. She turned back to January and got them to brief her on every name of any prominence.
A pattern emerged, because the more prominent names were the ones with the bulk of the four-figure sums and cryptic signs against them. Poldi did some rough mental arithmetic and arrived at a total of approximately 120,000 euros for the period up to June. To her, there was only one logical explanation.
“She must have blackmailed these people, don’t you think?”
“Without a doubt,” said the padre.
“It seems so,” said Signora Cocuzza, her habitual caution kicking in. “But they could also have been donations or loans. What’s the word . . . crowdfunding?”
The padre groaned. “Really, signora!”
Poldi checked him with a gesture and looked at her friend admiringly. “Not bad, my dear. That sounds far more plausible. To finance the production of her own TV show.”
For the first time in ages, the merest hint of a smile flitted across the sad signora’s face.
“Thank you, Donna Poldina.”
“Because,” said Poldi, pursuing the idea, “if she’d blackmailed all these different people, one is bound to wonder what she used. Where would Giuliana have got all the relevant information?”
The padre was piqued. “Well,” he growled, “she was a fortune-teller, after all.”
That presented the sad signora with an easy lob.
“Really, Padre Paolo!”
“Either that or she was laundering dirty money.”
“How, Padre? A fortune-teller isn’t a pizzeria.”
“Nor is it a café bar like yours!”
“No bickering, my friends,” Poldi said sternly. “According to her brother, Giuliana’s fortune-telling abilities weren’t great in any case.” And, because nothing is harder than abandoning one’s own theories, she added, “But we shouldn’t completely discount blackmail, not yet. It’s just too good a motive for murder to be ditched altogether. And we’ll also continue to bear your money-laundering theory in mind, Padre.”
That smoothed everyone’s ruffled feathers.
Poldi went on leafing through the months, and the names her team reeled off included almost the entire who’s who of the Catania-Messina region. Politicians, actors, footballers, businessmen—they had all consulted Madame Sahara and sometimes donated a handsome sum—or gritted their teeth as they forked it out, who could tell? Not all were prominent figures. More than half the names meant nothing to the sad signora and the padre. They were ordinary local folk with fears for the future or broken hearts, Poldi supposed: childless women, unemployed men, artisans, petrol pump attendants, seamstresses, lemon pickers, bank clerks, pensioners and charwomen who wanted to invest their hard-earned money profitably or boost their chances of winning the lottery. “Possibly,” Poldi thought as she turned the pages, “the sort of clients Giuliana sometimes wrote ‘No charge’ against.”
Among the March appointments, Poldi eventually came across the first name that was familiar to her as well: E. Puglisi.
“Ah!” she said triumphantly. “I said it. The two murders are connected! You were wrong, Vito. You were so wrong.”
It turned out that the murdered district attorney had consulted her clairvoyant at least once a month from March onwards. On two occasions a smallish four-figure sum was jotted down beside her name.
Satisfied, Poldi continued to turn the pages—until her good mood was abruptly dispelled by the sight of another name.
“I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”
She stared aghast at the name, which might have preferred to sneak out of the diary and avoid her gaze: V. Montana.
Silence in the sacristy. The sad signora and the padre shuffled uneasily in their chairs. Poldi saw that the consultations had begun shortly after she and Montana got to know each other.
“A common enough name,” the sad signora whispered.
The padre nodded vigorously. “A common name. Fills whole pages in the phone book. My grandmother was a Montana.”
“It’s him, I just know it is,” Poldi groaned. “How could you do this to me, Vito?”
“You mean they were . . .”
“No, of course not. Far worse. He went running to Madame Sahara after we met. Why did he never tell me about it? Besides, it means he’s mixed up in this case.”
“Perhaps Madame Sahara was an undercover detective,” the padre hazarded.
“Or he may have needed advice about some . . . well, affair of the heart.”
Poldi stared at her friend for the second time that night.
Signora Cocuzza shrugged her shoulders. “Perhaps you’d better not mention it to him, Donna Poldina. It would go against the grain, but you’d be doing yourself a favour, believe me. Know what you ought to do now?”
“What?” Poldi said between her teeth.
“Take some deep breaths and then we’ll carry on, eh? We’re pros, after all.”
“Et Spiritus Sancti, amen.”
“Namaste, you comedians,” Poldi said, sighing. She was unsurprised by the next familiar names she came to.
A. Avola and C. Avola, for example, or a certain S. Torso on a Wednesday in September. She shivered when she recalled the dowser in the baseball cap. The very name induced a feeling of trepidation, as if it robbed her of the strength to breathe. It turned out that Sean Torso had paid only one visit to Madame Sahara, and he was the sole client she’d made no marginal note against. No fee, no remarks, no cryptic symbol, nothing.
“Perhaps he had an appointment but simply failed to turn up,” the padre suggested.
“It’s possible,” said Poldi. “Or maybe their conversation was about something quite different.”
She confessed to me later that she’d counted on finding some unusual entries in the weeks preceding Giuliana’s death. Eye-catching names, horrendous sums, smudged handwriting, tear stains, names blacked out—something like that. After all, Mago Rampulla had claimed that his sister had been very frightened recently.
Nothing of the kind, though. Madame Sahara’s handwriting looked as neat and assured as ever, even in the very last entry, made on the day before she died. By then, according to Poldi’s rough estimate, she had taken in nearly 250,000 euros. Not bad for a fortune-teller, she thought.
There was, however, one puzzling entry after Elisa Puglisi’s last visit, the day before her death. It was obviously a quotation, because Madame Sahara had put it in inverted commas: “The Hedgehog has the money!”
Neither the sad signora nor the padre could figure out who the Hedgehog was, but Poldi, certain that the murderer and his motive were down there in black and white, right before her eyes, felt queasy despite herself.
Although the meaning of the cryptic symbols in the margins still escaped her, Poldi surmised that they were mnemonic aids for Madame Sahara’s fortune-telling service. She shut the little book but rested both hands on it. She was perspiring, she noticed. Her hands were moist and sweat trickled down beneath her wig.
“Are you feeling all right, Donna Poldina?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Then, “This diary is clearly a motive for murder, and it contains the name of a double murderer. It was the Hedgehog. We must proceed on that basis.”
An extravagant theory, but the team nodded grav
ely.
The sad signora handed Poldi a handkerchief. “What do you propose to do now, Donna Poldina?”
Poldi mopped her brow. “I’m loath to say so, but we’ll have to hand this diary over to the police.”
“Whaaat?” the padre and the sad signora exclaimed in unison.
Poldi raised a conciliatory hand. “But first Montana will have to pay a price for it, and second, we’ll have to evaluate it first. Do you have a scanner, Padre?”
“Er, only a multifunction printer. Will that do?”
“Admirably.” Poldi handed him the diary. “We need a copy of every page. Thanks.” She turned to Signora Cocuzza. “I’d like you to make a list of all the names, entries, dates, symbols and so on.”
“An Excel table, you mean?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Yes, nothing else will do. That way, we can filter and sort the entries by name, date and sum of money.”
“And you can handle that?”
“I sit behind a cash desk, Donna Poldina, remember? I may only run a little café bar in a boring seaside town, and I may not have many talents, but I’m not a complete nincompoop.”
“Of course not, my dear,” said Poldi, touched. “You certainly aren’t.”
And she put her arms round her sad, frail, brave friend, clasped her to her ample bosom and planted a smacking kiss on her cheek.
“What if the padre sees us, Donna Poldina?”
Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna Page 18