The Paper Moon (7 page)

“All right.”

“Inspector, can I ask you something?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Why are you centering your investigation on Angelo’s women friends?”

“Because you and Elena are doing nothing but serving me women’s names on a platter
—
or, better yet, on a bed,”
he wanted to say, but didn’t.

“You think it’s a mistake?” he asked instead.

“I don’t know whether or not it’s a mistake. But there certainly must be many other leads one could follow concerning the possible motive for my brother’s murder.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know…something concerning his business…maybe some envious competitor…”

At this point the inspector decided to cheat, laying a trick card down on the table. He put on an embarrassed air, like someone who wants to say something but doesn’t really feel like it.

“What’s led us to favor the…ahem…the feminine hypothesis…”

He congratulated himself for coming up with the right words; even the British-cop-like “ahem” had emerged from his throat to perfection. He continued his masterly performance.

“…was…ahem…a detail that perhaps I’d…ahem…better not…”

“Tell me, tell me,” said Michela, assuming for her part the air of someone expecting to hear the worst.

“Well, it’s just that your brother, when he was killed, had just had…ahem…er, sexual relations with a woman.”

It was a whopper, since Pasquano had said something else. But he wanted to see if his words would have the same effect they had the first time. And they did.

The woman sprang to her feet. Her dressing gown opened. She was completely naked underneath. No panties, no bra. A splendid, lush, compact body. She arched her back. In the motion her hair fell down onto her shoulders. She clenched her fists, arms extended at her sides. Her eyes were popping out of her head. Fortunately they weren’t looking at the inspector. Watching obliquely as if through a window, Montalbano saw a raging sea uncoil in those eyes, with force-eight waves rising to peaks like mountains and crashing back down in avalanches of foam, then re-forming and falling back down again. The inspector got scared. A memory from his school days came back to him, that of the terrible Erinyes. Then he thought the memory must be wrong; the Erinyes were old and ugly. Whatever the case, he clung tightly to the arms of the easy chair. Michela was having trouble speaking; her fury kept her teeth clenched.

“
She
did it!”

The two sheets of sandpaper had turned into grindstones.

“Elena killed him!”

Her chest had become a bellows. Then all at once the woman fell backwards, hitting her head against the armchair and rebounding forcefully before collapsing in a swoon.

Covered in sweat from the scene he’d just witnessed, Montalbano went out of the living room, saw a door ajar, realized it was the bathroom, went in, wet a towel, returned to the living room, knelt beside Michela, and began wiping her face with the towel. By now it had become a habit. Slowly the woman began to come to. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she did was cover herself with the dressing gown.

“Feeling better?”

“Yes. Forgive me.”

She had amazing powers of recovery. She stood up.

“I’m going to go have a drink of water.”

She returned and sat back down, calm and cool, as though she hadn’t just had an uncontrollable, frightful bout of rage verging on an epileptic fit.

“Did you know that Monday evening your brother and Elena were supposed to meet?”

“Yes, Angelo called to tell me.”

“Elena says that meeting never took place.”

“What was her story?”

“She said she went out, but after she got in the car, she decided not to go to their rendezvous. She wanted to see if she could break off with your brother once and for all.”

“And you believe that?”

“She has an alibi, which I’ve checked out.”

It was another whopping lie, but he didn’t want her flying into a rage if some journalist happened to mention Elena’s name.

“Surely it’s false.”

“You mentioned that Angelo used to buy Elena expensive gifts.”

“It’s true. Do you think her husband, with the salary he has, can afford to buy her the kind of car she drives?”

“So if that’s the way it was, what motive would Elena have had for killing him?”

“Inspector, it was Angelo who wanted to end the relationship. He couldn’t take it any longer. She tormented him with her jealousy. Angelo told me she once wrote to him threatening to kill him.”

“She sent him a letter?”

“Two or three, as far as that goes.”

“Do you have these letters?”

“No.”

“We didn’t find any letters from Elena in your brother’s apartment.”

“Angelo must have thrown them away.”

“I think I’ve inconvenienced you too long,” said Montalbano, standing up.

Michela also stood up. She suddenly looked exhausted. Putting her hand over her forehead as if from extreme fatigue, she teetered slightly.

“One last thing,” said the inspector. “Did your brother like popular songs?”

“He listened to them now and then.”

“But there was no appliance for listening to music in his apartment.”

“He didn’t listen to music at home, in fact.”

“Where did he, then?”

“In his car, during his business trips. It kept him company. He had many CDs.”

Michela said her brother’s garage was the first one on the left. It had two locks, one on the left and one on the right-hand side of the rolling metal door. It didn’t take the inspector long to find the correct key in the set he’d brought with him.

He opened the locks, then slipped a smaller key in another lock on the wall beside the rolling door, turned it, and the door began slowly to rise, too slowly for the inspector’s curiosity. When it had opened all the way, Montalbano went in and immediately found the light switch. The fluorescent light was bright, the garage spacious and in perfect order. Casting a quick glance around, the inspector ascertained that there was no strongbox in the garage and no place in which to hide one.

The car was a rather late-model Mercedes, one of those that are usually rented along with a driver. In the compartment in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats were some ten music CDs. In the glove compartment, the car’s documents and a number of road maps. Just to be sure, he also looked in the trunk, which was sparkling clean: spare tire, jack, red warning triangle.

A little disappointed, Montalbano repeated in reverse the whole complicated procedure he’d gone through to open the garage, then got back in his car and headed to Marinella.

It was nine-fifteen in the evening, but he didn’t feel hungry. He took off his clothes, slipped on a shirt and a pair of jeans, and, barefoot, went out to the veranda and onto the beach.

The moonlight was so faint that the lights inside his house shone as brightly as if each room were illuminated not by lamps but by movie floods. Reaching the water’s edge, he stood there a few minutes, with the sea splashing over his feet and the cool rising up through his body to his head.

Out on the horizon, the glow of a few scattered jack-lights. From far away, a plaintive female voice called twice:

“Stefanu! Stefanu!”

Lazily, a dog answered.

Motionless, Montalbano waited for the surf to enter his brain and wash it clean with each breaker. At last the first light wave came like a caress,
swiiissshhh,
and carried away,
glugluglug,
Elena Sclafani and her beauty, while Michela Pardo’s tits, belly, arched body, and eyes likewise disappeared. Once Montalbano the man was erased, all that should have remained was Inspector Montalbano—a kind of abstract function, the person who was supposed to solve the case and nothing more, with no personal feelings involved. But as he was telling himself this, he knew perfectly well that he could never pull it off.

Back in the house, he opened the refrigerator. Adelina must have come down with an acute form of vegetarianism. Caponata and a sublime pasticcio of artichokes and spinach. He set the table on the veranda and wolfed down the caponata as the pasticcio was heating up. Then he reveled in the pasticcio. After clearing the table, he went and got Angelo’s wallet from the plastic bag. Turning it upside down and sticking his fingers inside the different compartments, he emptied it out. Identity card. Driver’s license. Taxpayer code number. Credit card from the Banca dell’Isola (
Can’t you see you’re losing it? Why didn’t you look in the wallet straightaway? You would have spared yourself the embarrassment with Michela
.) Two calling cards, one belonging to a Dr. Benedetto Mammuccari, a surgeon from Palma; the other to one Valentina Bonito, a midwife from Fanara. Three postage stamps, two for the standard rate and one for priority mail. A photo of Elena in a topless bathing suit. Two hundred fifty euros in bills of fifty. The receipt from a full tank of gasoline.

Enough. Stop right there.

All obvious, all normal. Too obvious, too normal for a man who was found shot in the face with his willy hanging out, whatever the purpose he’d used it for. It was still hanging out, after all. Okay, getting caught with your dick exposed no longer shocked anyone nowadays, and there had even been an honorable member of Parliament, later to become a high charge of the state, who’d shown his to one and all in a photo printed in a number of glossy magazines. Okay. But it was the two things together—the whacking and the exposure—that made the case peculiar.

Or constituted the peculiarities of the case. Or, better yet, the whacking and the whack-off. Engrossed in these sorts of complex variations on the theme as he was putting everything back in the wallet, the inspector, when he got to the bills of fifty, suddenly stopped.

How much was there in the account Michela had shown him? Roughly ninety thousand euros, of which fifty thousand, however, were Michela’s. Therefore Angelo had only forty thousand euros in the bank. Or scarcely eighty million lire, to use the old system. Something didn’t add up. Angelo Pardo’s earnings probably consisted of a percentage gained on the pharmaceutical products he managed to place. And Michela did suggest that her brother earned enough money to live comfortably. Okay, but was it enough to pay for the expensive presents he supposedly, according to Michela, gave to Elena? Surely not. Nowadays, going to market and buying food for the week, one spent as much as one used to over the whole month. And so? How did someone who didn’t have a lot of money manage to buy jewelry and sports cars? Either Angelo was draining the bank account—and this might explain Michela’s resentment—or he had some other source of revenue, with a related bank account, of which, however, there was no trace. And of which even Michela knew nothing. Or was she merely pretending to know nothing?

He went inside and turned on the television. Just in time for the late news on the Free Channel. His friend, newsman Nicolò Zito, spoke first of an accident between a car and a truck that killed four, then mentioned the murder of Angelo Pardo, the investigation of which had been assigned to the captain of the Montelusa Flying Squad. This explained why no journalists had come to harass the inspector. It was clear poor Nicolò knew little or nothing about the case, and in fact he merely strung a couple of sentences together and moved on to another subject. So much the better.

Montalbano turned off the TV, phoned Livia for their customary evening greeting, which did not result in any squabbling this time—indeed it was all kissy-kissy—and went off to bed. No doubt thanks to the phone call, which calmed him down, he fell asleep straightaway, like a baby.

But the baby woke up suddenly at two in the morning, and instead of starting to cry like babies all over the world, he started thinking.

His mind went back to his visit to the garage. He was convinced he’d neglected some detail. A detail which at the time had seemed unimportant to him but which he now felt was important, very important.

He reviewed, in his memory, everything he’d done from the moment he entered the garage to when he left. Nothing.

I’ll return there tomorrow,
he said to himself.

And he turned onto his side to go back to sleep.

Less than fifteen minutes later, he was in his car, dressed higgledy-piggledy and racing to Angelo Pardo’s place, cursing like a maniac.

If the tenants on the two stories of that building—three stories, actually, counting the ground floor—seemed dead during the day, he could only imagine what they’d be like at three in the morning, or thereabouts. Whatever the case, he took care to make as little noise as possible.

Having turned on the light in the garage, he began studying everything—empty jerry cans, old motor-oil tins, pliers, monkey wrenches—as though with a magnifying glass. He found nothing that was in any way worth considering. An empty jerry can remained, desolately, a simple, empty jerry can still stinking of gasoline.

So he moved on to the Mercedes. The road maps in the glove compartment didn’t have any particular routes highlighted, and the car’s documents were all in order. He lowered the visors, examined the CDs one by one, stuck his hands in the side pockets, pulled out the ashtray, got out, opened the hood, saw only the motor in there. He went behind the car, opened the trunk: spare tire, jack, red triangle. He closed it.

He felt a kind of ever-so-light electric shock and reopened the trunk. Here was the detail he’d neglected. A tiny paper triangle sticking out from under the rubber carpeting. He leaned forward for a better look: It was the corner of a linen envelope. He eased it out with two fingers. It was addressed to Signor Angelo Pardo, and Signor Angelo Pardo, after opening it, had put three letters, all addressed to him, inside it. Montalbano pulled out the first and looked down at the signature. Elena. He put it back in the linen envelope, closed up the car, turned off the lights in the garage, lowered the metal shutter and, with the linen envelope in hand, headed back to his car, which he’d left a few yards away from the garage.

“Stop! Thief!” yelled a voice that seemed to come down from the heavens.

He stopped and looked up. On the top floor was an open window; against the light, the inspector recognized His Royal Majesty Victor Emmanuel III, pointing a hunting rifle at him.

What, was he going to start arguing from two stories away with a raving lunatic at that hour of the night? Anyway, when that guy got a bee up his ass, there was nothing doing. Montalbano turned his back to him and walked away.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Montalbano kept walking, and His Majesty fired. Everyone knew, of course, that the last Savoys were notoriously trigger-happy. Fortunately, Victor Emmanuel was not a good shot. The inspector dived into his car, turned on the motor, and drove off, screeching his tires even worse than the cops in American movies, as a second shot ended up some thirty yards away.

As soon as he got home, he started reading Elena’s letters to Angelo. All three had the same two-part plot.

Part one consisted of a kind of passionate erotic delirium—clearly, Elena had written the letters right after a particularly steamy encounter—where she remembered, with a wealth of detail, what they had done and how many orgasms she had had during Angelo’s endless tric-troc.

Montalbano stopped, perplexed. Despite his personal experience and his readings of a variety of erotic classics, he didn’t know what “tric-troc” meant. Maybe it was a term from the sort of secret jargon that lovers always invent between themselves.

Part two, on the other hand, was in a completely different tone. Elena imagined that Angelo, when he went on his business trips to the different towns in the province, had girlfriends galore in each place, like those sailors who supposedly have a woman in every port. This drove her mad with jealousy. And she warned him: If she could ever prove that Angelo was cheating on her, she would kill him.

In the first letter, in fact, she claimed she had followed Angelo in her car all the way to Fanara, and she asked him a precise question: Why had he stopped for an hour and a half at Via Libertà 82, seeing that there was neither a pharmacy nor a doctor’s office at that address? Did another mistress of his live there? Whatever the case, Angelo would do well to remember: Any betrayal meant sudden, violent death.

When he finished reading the letter, Montalbano wasn’t entirely convinced. True, these letters proved Michela right, but they didn’t correspond to the Elena he thought he’d met. It was as though they’d been written by a different person.

And anyway, why would Angelo have kept them hidden in the trunk of the Mercedes? Did he not want his sister to read them? Was he perhaps embarrassed by the first part of the letters, which told of his acrobatics between the sheets with Elena? That might explain it. But did it make sense that Elena, who was so attached to money, would murder the person who was giving her a great deal of money, if only in the form of presents?

Without realizing it, he grabbed the telephone.

“Hello, Livia? Salvo here. I wanted to ask you something. In your opinion is it logical for a woman to kill a lover who lavishes her with expensive gifts, just because she’s jealous? What would you do?”

There was a long silence.

“Hello, Livia?”

“I don’t know if I would kill a man out of jealousy, but if he woke me up at five o’clock in the morning, I certainly would,” said Livia.

And she hung up.

He got to work a bit late. He hadn’t managed to fall asleep until around six, after tossing and turning with a single thought lodged in his brain—namely, that according to the most elementary rules, he should have apprised Prosecutor Tommaseo of Elena Sclafani’s situation. Whereas he didn’t feel like it. And the problem set his nerves on edge just enough to prevent him from sleeping.

One look at his face sufficed to tell the entire police station that this wasn’t a good day.

In the closet there was somebody else in Catarella’s place. Minnitti, a Calabrese.

“Where’s Catarella?”

“He stayed up all night working at the station, Chief, and this morning he collapsed.”

Maybe he’d taken Angelo Pardo’s computer home with him, because there was no sign of it anywhere. The moment the inspector sat down at his desk, Fazio came in.

“Two things, Chief. The first is that Commendator Ernesto Laudadio came here this morning.”

“And who is Commendator Ernesto Laudadio?”

“You know him well, Chief. He’s the man that called us when he got it in his head you wanted to rape the murder victim’s sister.”

So His Majesty Victor Emmanuel III went by the name of Ernesto Laudadio! And while he was earnestly lauding God, he was busting his fellow man’s balls.

“What’d he come for?”