“Yes, I know the place.”
“Well, the fisherman rowed in the direction of the car, saw that there was a body in the driver’s seat, and raced off to report it.”
“Did they manage to establish the cause of the accident?”
“Yes. My cousin, as you know, from the moment Father died, lived in a state of almost constant derangement: too many tranquilizers, too many sedatives. Instead of taking the curve, he continued straight—he was going very fast at that moment—and crashed through the little guard wall. He never got over my father’s death. He had a real passion for him. He loved him.”
He uttered the two words, “passion” and “love,”
in a firm, precise tone, as if to eliminate, with crisp outlines, any possible blurring of their meaning. The voice over the loudspeaker called for passengers taking the Milan flight.
As soon as he was outside the airport parking lot, where he had left his car, Montalbano pressed the accelerator to the floor. He didn’t want to think about anything, only to concentrate on driving. After some sixty miles he stopped at the shore of an artificial lake, got out of the car, opened the trunk, took out the neck brace, threw it into the water, and waited for it to sink. Only then did he smile. He had wanted to act like a god; what Livia said was true. But that fourth-rate god, in his first and, he hoped, last experience, had guessed right.
~
To reach Vigàta he had no choice but to pass in front of the Montelusa police headquarters. And it was at that exact moment that his car decided suddenly to die on him. He got out and was about to go ask for help at the station when a policeman who knew him and had witnessed his useless maneuvers approached him. The officer lifted up the hood, fiddled around a bit, then closed it.
“That should do it. But you ought to have it looked at.”
Montalbano got back in the car, turned on the ignition, then bent over to pick up some newspapers that had fallen to the floor. When he sat back up, Anna was leaning into the open window.
“Anna, how are you?”
The girl didn’t answer; she simply glared at him.
“Well?”
“And you’re supposed to be an honest man?”
Montalbano realized she was referring to the night when she saw Ingrid lying half naked on his bed.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “But not for the reasons you think.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I believe it essential to state that this story was not taken from the crime news and does not involve any real events. It is, in short, to be ascribed entirely to my imagination. But since in recent years reality has seemed bent on surpassing the imagination, if not entirely abolishing it, there may be a few unpleasant coincidences of name and situation. As we know, however, one cannot be held responsible for the whims of chance.
NOTES
3 face worthy of a Lombroso diagram: Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909) was an Italian physician and criminologist who theorized a relationship between criminal behavior and certain physical traits and anomalies, maintaining that such characteristics were due in part to degeneration and atavism. Lombroso’s theories were disproved in the early twentieth century by British researcher Charles Goring, who reported finding as many instances of Lombroso’s criminal physical traits among English university students as among English convicts.
11 The thought of going to the carabinieri . . . under the command of a Milanese lieutenant: The Italian carabinieri are a national police force, bureaucratically separate from local police forces and actually a function of the military (like the Guardia Civil in Spain and the Gendarmes in France). Their officers are often not native to the regions they serve, and this geographic estrangement, coupled with the procedural separateness from the local police, has been known to create confusion in the execution of their duties. The carabinieri are frequently the butt of jokes, being commonly perceived as less than sharp-witted. This stereotype lurks wryly behind many of Inspector Montalbano’s dealings with them.
13 “phone the Montelusa department, have them send someone from the lab”: Montelusa, in Camilleri’s imagined topography, is the capital of the province in which the smaller town of Vigàta is situated. In the Italian law-enforcement hierarchy, the Questura—the central police department of a major city or provincial capital—is at the top of the local chain of command and, as the procedural nucleus, has the forensic laboratory used by the police departments of the various satellite towns or, in the case of a large metropolis, of the various urban zones. The carabinieri use their own crime labs.
15 “what’s new in the chicken coop?”: The name “Gallo” means “rooster” in Italian, and Galluzzo is a diminutive of same.
25 “Twenty million lire”: At the time of this novel’s writing, about 13,500 dollars.
25 “two million [ lire] ”: About 1,350 dollars.
30 Don Luigi Sturzo: Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959) was a priest and founder of the Partito Popolare Italiano, a reform-oriented, Catholic coalition that became the Christian Democratic Party after the Second World War. Persecuted by the Fascist regime, Don Luigi took refuge in the United States and never sought public office.
31 Not even the earthquake unleashed . . . had touched him: This is a reference to what came to be known as Operazione mani pulite (Operation Clean Hands), a campaign, led in the early 1990s by a handful of Milanese investigating magistrates, to uproot the corruption endemic in the Italian political system. Their efforts helped to bring about the collapse of the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties, but, as this and other such allusions in this novel indicate, the new code of ethics had trouble taking hold, especially in the South. Indeed the whole story of Luparello’s career is typical of the Christian Democratic politician reconstituted to conform to the new political landscape while remaining essentially unreconstructed.
32 billions of lire: Millions of dollars.
40 “the prefect”: In Italy, the prefetti are representatives of the central government, assigned each to one province. They are part of the national, not local, bureaucracy.
74 “fifty thousand lire”: About thirty-three dollars, at the time this novel was written.
83 “tens of millions of lire!”: tens of thousands of dollars.
84 corso: A central, usually broad and commercially important, street in Italian cities and towns.
93 the prince of Salina: Prince Fabrizio Corbera di Salina is the protagonist of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s historical novel about Sicily at the time of the Italian Wars of Unification, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard ). In a famous passage, it is actually the prince’s nephew Tancredi who says, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”