“Let him. Maybe he’d like to join in.”
Signora Cocuzza giggled softly.
“How long will the Excel table take you?”
“I won’t be able to sleep. You’ll have it by tomorrow morning. Go to bed, Donna Poldina. You’re not looking too good.”
“Later. There’s something I have to do first.”
“Madonna, what do you propose to do now?”
“Go to the police, of course. What else?”
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
“And that, my dear, is always the best time to call on a policeman.”
Padre Paolo had scarcely finished photocopying the last page of the diary when Poldi snatched the little book from his hand and took her leave. A strange uneasiness, a kind of foreboding, urged her to hurry. It was the sort of feeling one sometimes gets when a storm is brewing. However, it might simply have been her old crown. The throbbing had now transmuted itself into a stabbing pain, and she sensed she wouldn’t be able to avoid a visit to the dentist.
“Tomorrow,” she told herself. “I’ll go tomorrow. Faint heart never won fair lady.”
There was no one to be seen on the promenade in front of the church. Waves broke sluggishly against the volcanic rocks, the Alfa was parked beneath a street light, a cat flitted along the sea wall. Before she emerged from the church into the glow of the street lights, Poldi lingered in the shadowy side entrance for a moment and looked in both directions. Earlier on in Santa Venerina she had felt sure she was being watched and followed.
Which wasn’t a surprising sensation in a burglar.
But which probably hadn’t been the case.
And which might well have been due to her overtaxed and alcohol-starved nerves.
Poldi could detect nothing suspicious, no sign of movement, no glowing cigarette end, no shadowy figures. Torre Archirafi was asleep, and Poldi herself would have preferred to go to bed with a little nightcap, but Madame Sahara’s diary was an incentive to haste and abstinence.
“Tomorrow,” she thought, “tomorrow I’ll go to the dentist, and that’ll be a good excuse for a drink.”
Discounting a small glass of wine in the sacristy, she hadn’t had a drink since that morning, and she had barely eaten. This resulted in a special form of tremulous paranoia associated with fits of sweating, accelerated heartbeat, stomach-ache, dry lips and a furry mouth, which precluded any other idea.
For the word “drink” had hardly crossed Poldi’s mind when her whole body started whimpering uncontrollably, “Drinkdrinkdrinkdrinkdrink! Nownownownownow!”
Aware that she was suffering from withdrawal symptoms, Poldi planned to have a grappa with Montana rather than lapse into delirium the way she had the last time, in Tanzania.
“Drinkdrinkdrinkdrink! Nownownownow!”
“Don’t panic, Isolde,” she told herself. “Get into the car, call Montana and drive there. He’ll give you a grappa.”
“Nonotlaternow! Drinkdrinkdrinkdrink! Nownownownow!”
And the nerve under the old crown joined in.
It has to be said that Poldi was in no fit state to drive, but her withdrawal paranoia had now reached the point of no return.
Pulling herself together, she tottered over to her car, tossed the diary onto the passenger seat, started the Alfa and somehow piloted it through the narrow one-way streets and out of town. Then she called Montana, not wanting to turn up outside his door in the middle of the night if Alessia was with him.
The commissario picked up after the third ring.
He sounded as irritable as ever, but not as if she had woken him. Poldi even imagined she detected a hint of pleasure in his voice. He spared her the d’you-know-what-time-it-is routine.
“I’m on my way to you, Vito. Are you alone?”
At once, all the irritability and fatigue quit Montana’s voice, and all that was left was the sharp, ever-wary tone of a detective chief inspector on duty.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve got something for you.”
“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”
“It’s the murder motive and the murderer.”
She heard him take a deep breath.
“Poldi, how often have I—”
“Are you alone, Vito?”
“Yes, damn it!”
“I’ll be with you in twenty minutes. And I’ll need a grappa.”
She hung up and took care not to drive too fast. Turning onto the dark Provinciale, she concentrated on the narrow, winding stretch to Acireale and was just driving past the main entrance to Piante Russo when she noticed she was no longer alone in the car.
“Evening, Poldi.”
Death was occupying the passenger seat.
This time dressed once more in a sombre suit that hung loose off his scrawny frame. In other words, official attire. Holding his clipboard in his left hand, he used the right to toss the pocket diary onto the rear seat, as if it were no longer needed, and clutched the grab handle above the door.
“I detest travelling by car, I really do.”
Poldi was so startled, she almost drove off the road.
“Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!” she exclaimed. “What the devil d’you mean by putting the wind up me like that, you bag of bones? I might have had a stroke!”
Death glanced at his clipboard.
“That’ll happen in due course. I already hinted as much.”
“Oh,” said Poldi, taken aback. “You mean . . .”
Death nodded. “Yes, this time it’s quite official, all stamped and notarised. Like to see it?”
“No, I wouldn’t.” Poldi took her foot off the gas, and with the last lucid thought of which she was still capable, she said, “You’re just a hallucination. Now beat it, you Grim bloody Reaper!”
Death sighed. “That’s what I hate about this job. Not the strange way people cling to life, which consists of nothing but failure and unhappiness, but their needless hostility when faced with the moment of truth. I honestly thought we’d built up something of a rapport by now, Poldi, but never mind, I’m used to it. People can beef at me to their heart’s content. ‘Go on,’ they tell themselves, ‘lay it on thick. It’s only poor old Death, who cares?’”
Poldi was now concentrating fully on the road and doing her best to ignore Death’s yammering.
“I’m still here,” Death whined beside her. And, a moment or two later, “I still am.”
“A stroke, did you say? What kind of stroke? Heart attack? Apoplexy?”
“You’ll soon see.” Death glanced at his cheap wristwatch. “Four, three, two, one . . .”
BANG!
Something heavy rammed the Alfa from behind. Poldi uttered a cry, was thrown around and started swerving. She saw that Death was still clinging to the grab handle, seemingly unconcerned. Regaining control of the car somehow, she looked at the other vehicle in her rear-view mirror. A big SUV with its headlights turned off, it was speeding along close behind her again. Then it rammed her a second time, more violently than before.
BAAANG!!!
“The Hedgehog” was Poldi’s only thought.
The Alfa was now hurled diagonally across the Provinciale and, with a hideous metallic clang, cannoned into the lava stone wall that flanked it. Whoever was driving the SUV put his foot down and bulldozed Poldi along, complete with car and Death, straight for a sharp right-hand bend. Poldi tried desperately to regain control of the Alfa so as not to crash into the wall ahead. When braking did no good, she had the presence of mind to accelerate in the hope of getting away.
“Not yet!” she shouted to Death. “You hear? It isn’t my time yet! I still have to—”
BAAANG!
Another impact from behind. Poldi was thrown forward, the steering wheel escaped from her grasp, and the Alfa raced unchecked towards the wall at the extremity of the bend. And that was that.
Poldi’s penultimate thought was of Montana’s hairy chest, and her very last thought before everything around
her went black was of her beloved Peppe’s muscular forearms.
11
Tells of Poldi’s resurrection, needless to say, but also of her grand entrance, the sympathy she receives, and holding hands. She learns that even fate is only a kind of officialdom, does what a regular jailbird does, and is able to offer Montana a deal. Then she hears of a private security firm in Milan—and would have preferred not to.
“And you think I’m buying that?” I asked, sounding wholly unimpressed when Poldi finally came out with the cause of her injuries.
“You winced, I saw you.”
“No I didn’t. Seriously, though, if you’d really had an accident like that, you wouldn’t have got away with a black eye and a bruised arm.”
“And that’s your expert opinion, is it, Doctor?”
“You invented this accident, Poldi, admit it. Besides, I’d probably have heard about it from someone else.”
“To be honest, nobody thought of you in the immediate aftermath.”
“I see.”
“Now don’t take offence again, just be glad I’m still alive. As soon as I recovered consciousness, I imposed a news blackout on the family, because if anyone’s going to tell you the whole story, it’s me. Everything must be accurate, you hear? It must all be accurate for the benefit of posterity.”
“How does posterity come into it?” I asked suspiciously.
Poldi looked at me with a touch of surprise and pity. “You mean you haven’t caught on yet?”
“Er, what do you mean?”
She heaved a sigh of resignation. “I’ll put it this way: I solve cases, you write them up. It’s our ticket to international success.”
I stared at her. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“Do I look like I’ve got any time to spare for silly jokes? Well, what do you say? I can see the dust jacket now, right before my eyes: The Leopardess. Great title, no? It’ll go ballistic, I tell you. And our names up top in bold caps. Well, my name in bold caps, yours lower down and a bit more discreet.”
“Tell me something, Poldi. Did they also examine your head after the accident?”
“Very funny, Mr. Author.”
She really was in earnest—her face was utterly devoid of self-doubt. I began to have serious misgivings about her mental state and decided to have a word with Aunt Teresa the next day. For the time being I could only try to change the subject in a cool, firm, friendly way.
“You’re crazy, Poldi. Forget it. Just put it out of your head.”
“You realise you’re throwing away the chance of a lifetime.”
“Just forget it, Poldi. I shall never write a thriller, least of all about you.”
“Is that your last word?”
“You want to hear my last word, Poldi?”
“I insist on it.”
“Kiss my ass.”
She stared at me for a moment, then burst out laughing. A dark laugh originating in the depths of her body, it erupted from her like a kind of volcanic joie de vivre that shook her to the core and made the whole sofa quake. It was a laugh that took me by storm and would have defeated the most inveterate misanthrope. And that was how we spent the rest of the evening: laughing, gasping for breath and drinking.
As for me, I was delighted to have skirted the subject safely. I had salvaged the situation and buried the subject once and for all.
So . . . Bang, penultimate thought, last thought, lights out. Just darkness and silence. The end. Nothingness. And, associated with it, the dread question: Was that it, or does purgatory or reincarnation have some basis in fact? Poldi certainly asked herself that question, anyway, because despite the darkness and silence, she still felt somehow present; somewhere in this endless, dark, silent limbo there hovered a rather grumpy residue of Poldi. She was naked and felt as light and fluffy as a snowflake. She was also holding something in her left hand. When she opened her fingers, she saw that it was the little shard of clay inscribed with the word OΥTIΣ, the one she’d found in the vineyard.
Outis. Nobody. That’s what she was now: nobody. Over and forgotten.
My Auntie Poldi had wanted to be a lot of things in life, but never a nobody.
“I’m not nobody,” she whispered despondently. “I’m Poldi. Isolde Oberreiter. Donna Poldina.” Then, more vigorously, “I’m not nobody!” Finally, she really filled her lungs and let rip: “Hello! Hellooo! Anyone hear me? Hey! Hellooooo!!!”
No reply, not even an echo. The words simply drifted off into a void.
Poldi could no longer feel her body, which she presumed was scrunched up inside the wrecked Alfa. This thought infuriated her.
“Damn it all, what is this? Anyone mind telling me what the hell happens next? Hello? Am I going to float around here for all eternity, or what? This is a total snafu! Where’s the divine light, or at least some decent fire and brimstone? Hey! Someone send Death to me soonest, I badly need to hold a post-mortem with him.”
And so on. Poldi wouldn’t leave it alone. She continued to work herself up into a rage, on the old Bavarian principle that throwing a tantrum can pay off.
As may be imagined, the main thing one loses in limbo is one’s sense of time. Poldi had no idea whether she’d been fulminating for a few minutes or half an eternity when, at long last, there was a development. She heard a door slam in the distance, then shuffling footsteps drawing nearer in no great hurry, then an irritable sigh, and then she felt movement close beside her. A light came on at last, not the kind of divine radiance in pastel rainbow hues to be found in books in an esoteric bookshop, but a common or garden table lamp.
Poldi was sitting on her sofa in the midst of an infinite void. On her right, the occasional table with the lamp on it; on her left, or where I normally sit, Death. He was once more wearing his scruffy leisurewear outfit and holding his clipboard. Looking extraordinarily cross, he was in the process of inserting a handwritten note beside one of the entries. Then he turned to Poldi. She saw, in the subdued light of the table lamp, that he was looking—by his standards—quite agitated.
“How are you feeling, Poldi?”
The question surprised her, if only because of its unusually personal nature. There was a cutting retort on the tip of her tongue, but she restrained herself.
“Oh, you know, the way you do when you’re dead and you feel like a parcel delivered to the wrong address—one that nobody collects and it’s obvious nobody wants.”
Death appeared to understand the allusion, because he sighed. “Look, Poldi, I’m only doing my job. I’m just the operational infrastructure without which the whole system would collapse. I’m an Indian, not a chief. God knows we’ve got enough chiefs here. Everyone always wants to be boss, or at least team leader, but nobody wants to do the actual work. I didn’t pick this job—that’s not the way it works here. You’d be surprised how many things don’t work. A whole heap of them. Our internal communication is beneath contempt. Separation of the factual from the emotional? Wrong! At board level they keep dreaming up new strategies to suit themselves. We at the lower end of the hierarchy are the last to hear, but it’s we who have to put them into practice successfully. What’s more, we have to do everything with the same number of staff as we had during the start-up phase. Co-determination? Flat hierarchies? Change management? Time off in lieu? Forget it. Someone like me, who’s down among the grass roots day after day, would have plenty of ideas for improving matters. If only they’d take us along with them and make their messages clear, everything could work like a dream—I helped to construct the system, after all. But no, everything functions strictly top-down. The board are only interested in results. Growth, growth, growth—I can’t bear to hear the word. At my last annual review I laid it on the line: the agreed targets, I told them, are totally unrealistic. I refuse, I said, to allow myself to be demotivated any further in this way. Pow! That shut them up. But does anyone really listen to someone like me? No, nobody. There isn’t even a works council, can you imagine? But do I complain? No, I don
’t, I just do my job, though I don’t know how much longer I can stick to it. I’ve done a thousand years’ overtime. The board would look pretty silly if I packed it in. There have always been stressful phases, of course. The dinosaurs, Atlantis, the medieval plague epidemics, Spanish flu, the world wars. But those were phases. These days I can scarcely keep up with my workload—I’m at the end of my tether. And now something like this happens.”
Poldi sensed that she was now under discussion. “Something like what?”
Death pulled a rueful face. “A couple of digits got transposed, but nobody spotted it because the board abolished quality control a long time ago—rationalising, they called it. I used to handle that as well, once upon a time, but I haven’t been able to manage it for ages.”
“So what does that mean in words of one syllable?”
Death drew a deep breath. “It wasn’t your turn yet, Poldi. Because you kicked up such a fuss, the mistake came to light in the entry registration office. There was a hell of a stink, I can tell you. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone there got the sack. Of course, they tried to sweep everything under the carpet as usual and did their best to pin it on me. ‘Leave me out of it,’ I told them. ‘You messed it up, you sort it.’ I always get stuck with it in the end, though.”
Poldi felt her hackles rise again, but she controlled herself. “Okay, my lad, so I’m not dead at all.”
“No. Sorry about the circumstances, but you can forget about receiving an apology from this organisation, any more than Job and his family did back when. However, I did persuade them to credit at least a little something to your lifespan account as a goodwill gesture.”
Poldi pricked up her ears. “How much time are we talking about?”
Death grimaced with embarrassment. “I’m not at liberty to—”
“Yes, yes, I get it,” Poldi broke in irritably. She gave him a searching stare.
He was looking tired and drained, as if he, too, could use a drink. Poldi had really got to know him recently, and she almost felt a trifle sorry for him.
“Your organisation stinks to high heaven. If you think I’m so relieved I’m going to say thanks, namaste, let’s forget all about it, you’ve got another think coming, you hear? You can give your board a message from Isolde Oberreiter: they’re welcome to kiss my ass!”
Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna Page 19