“You realize I could stick to my story and nobody could ever prove it was false.”
“That’s what you think. The sign is still there.”
“Yes, but getting rid of it would have made things worse. That’s what Luigi and I decided. He’ll just say he forgot a book in the booth and went back to get it that Monday evening. He’s studying for exams at the university. I saw him at the station and mistakenly thought he was closing up. You know the rest. Does it work?”
Damned woman! It worked, all right!
“Yes,” he said reluctantly.
“So I can go on. You’re right, Inspector. That Monday evening, after driving around in the car for about an hour, I went to Angelo’s place, very late for our appointment.”
“Why?”
“I’d decided to tell him once and for all that it was over between us. What had happened the day before with Luigi convinced me that I no longer felt anything for Angelo. So I went to see him.”
“How did you get in?”
“I rang the intercom. There’s an intercom in the terrace room, too. He answered, buzzed me in, and told me to come upstairs. When I got there, he kept dialing and dialing a number on his cell phone. He explained that when he thought I wasn’t coming anymore, he’d called Michela and told her to come see him. Now he wanted to warn her that I was there and that it was therefore better if she didn’t show up. But he couldn’t get hold of her. Maybe Michela had turned off her cell phone. Then he said, ‘Shall we go down-stairs?’ He wanted to make love, Michela or no Michela. I answered no and said I’d come to break up with him. That triggered a big, long scene, with him crying and begging. He even got down on his knees and implored me. At one point he suggested we go away and live together, screaming he couldn’t take any more of Michela and her jealousy. He said she was a leech, a parasite. Then he tried to embrace me. I pushed him away, and he fell into the armchair. I took advantage of this and left. I couldn’t stand it any longer. And that was the last time I saw Angelo. Satisfied?”
While telling her story, the pout of her lips had increased, and her eyes turned a dark, almost gloomy blue.
“So, to conclude your story, it was Tumminello who killed Angelo.”
“I don’t think so.”
Montalbano leapt out of his armchair. What was going through Elena’s head? Wasn’t it to her advantage to fall in with public opinion and blame the mafioso? Of course it was. So why was she casting doubt on the whole affair? What was compelling her to speak? Apparently she couldn’t restrain her own nature.
“I don’t think it was him,” she reiterated.
“So who was it?”
“Michela. Don’t you realize, Inspector, the kind of relationship those two had? They were in love, at least until Angelo fell in love with me. When I left the room, I thought I saw something move in the darkness on the terrace. A shadow moving very fast. I think it was Michela. She didn’t get Angelo’s phone call and had come to see him. And she’d heard him weeping and saying those terrible things about her… I think she went down to the apartment, grabbed the revolver, and waited for me to leave.”
“We didn’t find any weapons in Angelo’s place.”
“So what? She probably took it away with her and got rid of it. But Angelo did own a revolver, which he kept in the drawer of his nightstand. He showed it to me once, saying he’d found it by accident, after his father’s death. Anyway, why do you think Michela killed herself?”
Montalbano suddenly remembered the sheet of stamped paper declaring that a firearm had been found. He’d seen it in a drawer of Angelo’s desk and thought it to be of no importance. And yet it was indeed important, because it corroborated exactly what Elena had just told him and showed that the moon was no longer made of paper. The girl was now telling him the truth.
“So is the interrogation over? Shall I make you that coffee?” she asked.
He looked at her. She looked back. The color of her irises had now turned light blue, and her lips opened into a smile. Her eyes were a sky in early summer, a clear, open sky reflecting the changes of the day. Now and then a little white cloud would pass, ever so small, but the slightest breeze sufficed to make it vanish at once.
“Why not?” said Montalbano
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is the usual disclaimer that by now I’m getting tired of writing: I made this whole story up. And therefore all the characters (along with their names and surnames), and the situations they find themselves in, belong to the realm of fantasy. Any resemblance to real people and situations is purely coincidental.
AC
A. NOTES
5 “You’s a doctor, but not o’ the medical variety”: To rise to Montalbano’s rank of commissario, one must have a university degree, which in Italy makes one a dottore.
33 a truly distinguished corpse: In Italian journalistic jargon, when a prominent figure, especially political, is found dead in suspicious circumstances, he or she is called a cadavere eccellente, or “distinguished corpse.”
33 the old Christian Democratic Party: The Democrazia
Cristiana was the ruling party of Italy from the post—World War II era until its fall from grace and eventual disbandment in the wake of the Mani Pulite scandal in the 1990s.
33 “Clean Hands”: English for Mani Pulite, a nationwide judicial and police investigation in the early 1990s into the endemic corruption in the Italian political system as well as the vast web of collusion between certain politicians, business leaders, intelligence organizations, organized crime, and extremist right-wing groups. After a rash of indictments of political and business leaders, and even a few suicides, Mani Pulite ultimately led to the demise and dissolution of the Christian Democratic Party, which had governed Italy since the end of the Second World War. The Italian Socialist and Social Democratic parties were also dissolved due to the scandal, before being reconstituted in other formations.
33 Milanese real-estate speculator-cum-owner of the top three private nationwide television stations-cum-parlia-mentary deputy, head of his own personal political party, and finally prime minister: A reference to Silvio Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia Party not only reversed many of the legal reforms instituted during the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) scandal, but also resuscitated and recuperated many disgraced politicians formerly of the Christian Democratic Party.
70 “Let’s drop the Campanile dialogue”: A reference to Achille Campanile (1899—1977), a popular journalist, comic playwright, and humorist famous for his surreal dialogues and wordplay.
72 cornuto: Italian for “cuckold,” cornuto is a common insult throughout the country, but a special favorite among southerners, Sicilians in particular.
92 Everyone knew, of course, that the last Savoys were
notoriously trigger-happy: In 1978, when his rubber dinghy was accidentally taken from the docks after a violent storm off of Corsica, Vittorio Emanuele IV, banished heir to the throne of Italy and son of the monarch here parodied, carelessly shot at a man on the yacht onto which the dinghy had been attached. He missed his target but mortally wounded Dirk Hamer, a young German who had been sleeping below decks.
103 a short story by an Italian author that told of a country where making love in public not only caused no scandal but was actually the most natural thing in the world:
The author is Luciano Bianciardi (1922—1971).
107 an ancient Greek poet who wrote a love poem to a young Thracian filly: Anacreon (c. 570—c. 485 BC).
113 wasn’t a guy named Luigi Pirandello from around there?: Luigi Pirandello (1867—1936), the celebrated Italian playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and 1934 Nobel laureate, was from the Sicilian town of Agrigento, Camilleri’s model for the fictional town of Montelusa.
127 others will accuse us of acting like the judges in Milan, all Communists seeking to destroy the system: A common tactic used by Silvio Berlusconi and other politicians of his stripe to turn the public against the judges seeking to clean up the corruption endemic to the Italian political class was to accuse the prosecuting magistrates of being Communists motivated by ideological fervor, an accusation with no basis in fact.