The Paper Moon (19 page)

“It occurred to me.”

A lie. Said not to boast, but just to avoid looking like a complete nincompoop in her eyes.

“A bit late, however, Inspector. Anyway, what difference does this great discovery make?”

“It means you don’t have an alibi.”

“Ouf! Didn’t I already tell you I had no alibi? Have you forgotten? I didn’t try to make anything up. But you kept insisting: ‘Careful, if you don’t have an alibi, you’re going to be arrested!’ What do you want from me? So in the end I got my alibi, just like you wanted.”

Shrewd, alert, intelligent, beautiful. Stray just one millimeter and she’ll take advantage. So now it was his fault that she lied to Tommaseo!

“How did you persuade Luigi? By promising to sleep with him?”

He couldn’t control himself. The thorn of jealousy was making him say the wrong things. The rabbit couldn’t accept being refused by the cheetah.

“Wrong, Inspector. Everything that I said happened to me on Monday actually happened to me the day before, on Sunday. It didn’t take much to persuade Luigi to move our first encounter up one day when he talked to Tommaseo. And I can tell you that if you want to interrogate him, he’ll continue to swear up and down that we met for the first time that goddamned Monday evening. He would do anything for me.”

What was it that made his ears perk? Some small detail, perhaps, some unexpected change in her tone when she said “that goddamned Monday evening” had suddenly, in a flash, brought something to mind—an idea, an illumination that nearly frightened him.

“You, that evening, went to Angelo’s,” the inspector’s mouth said before the idea had fully taken concrete form in his head.

Not a question but a clear assertion. She shifted position, rested her elbows on her knees, put her head in her hands, and eyed Montalbano long and hard. She was studying him. Beneath that stare, which was weighing his value as a man, brains and balls included, the inspector felt the same unease as when he’d undergone his army physical, standing naked in front of the committee as the doctor measured and manhandled him. Then she made up her mind. Perhaps he’d passed the test.

“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 downstairs?’ 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.

“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
.

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.”

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.

“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.

Milanese real-estate speculator–cum–owner of the top three private nationwide television stations–cum–parliamentary 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.

“Let’s drop the Campanile dialogue”:
A reference to Achille Campanile (1899–1977), a popular journalist, comic play-wright, and humorist famous for his surreal dialogues and wordplay.

cornuto:
Italian for “cuckold,”
cornuto
is a common insult throughout the country, but a special favorite among southerners, Sicilians in particular.

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 belowdecks.

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).

an ancient Greek poet who wrote a love poem to a young Thracian filly:
Anacreon (c. 570–c. 485 BC).

wasn’t a guy named Luigi Pirandello from around there?:
Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), the celebrated Italian play-wright, novelist, short-story writer, and 1934 Nobel laureate, was from the Sicilian town of Agrigento, Camilleri’s model for the fictional town of Montelusa.

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.

Like the coffee they gave Pisciotta and Sindona:
Gas-pare Pisciotta (1924–1954) was an associate of Sicilian separatist rebel bandit Salvatore Giuliano, whom he claimed to have ultimately killed, contradicting the official version of Giuliano’s death. After conviction to life imprisonment, Pisciotta became violently ill after drinking coffee one morning and died forty minutes later. An autopsy showed the cause of death to be strychnine poisoning. Michele Sindona (1920–1986) was a banker with ties to the Mafia and the political underworld, as well as a history of unethical business practices. Convicted of a host of offenses including fraud, perjury, and murder, he, too, was poisoned in his prison cell.

Three thousand lire:
At the time worth about $1.50.

a poet once said:
The poet is Attilio Bertolucci (1911–2000), father of the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci.

The total came to 596,000. Not much if it was in lire:
At the time of the conversion to the euro, 596,000 lira was worth about $300.

From Sweden with love. Ingrid:
A good friend of the inspector’s, Ingrid Sjostrom, a Swede married to a Sicilian and living in Vigàta, figures in several of the other books in this series.

“the ‘Clean Hands’ judges”:
See notes to pages 33 and 127.

Dacter Arquaraquà:
Catarella’s mangling of Dr. Arquà’s name suggests the Sicilian term
quaquaraquà,
which variously means “worthless individual,” “blabbermouth,” and “squealer” or “informant.”

The tombs shall open, the dead shall rise:
A line from the Italian national anthem, often ironically quoted to express astonishment at the occurrence of an unusual event.

TV movies:
In English in the original text.

Boccadasse:
The suburb of Genoa where Livia, Inspector Montalbano’s girlfriend, lives.

to play the fool to avoid going to war:
Fa u fissa pi nun iri a la guerra
. A Sicilian-Calabrian expression that essentially means to “play dumb,” i.e., to feign ignorance.

cotechino:
A large pork sausage served in slices.

“weak thought”:
Il pensiero debole
(weak thought) is a fundamental tenet of the philosophy of postmodern Italian thinker Gianni Vattimo (born 1936), for whom it constitutes a counterweight to such forms of
pensiero forte
(strong thought) as Christianity, Marxism, and other ideological systems, and is intended to overcome the violent clashes and intolerance often associated with these.

the dark wood:
The original Italian is
“selva oscura,”
a direct quote from the opening of Dante’s
Inferno
.

Notes compiled by Stephen Sartarelli