The Scent of the Night (4 page)

‘
Exactly what I said; "If you feel up to it,"' was his reply.

'Oh, I feel up to
it, don t you worry about that’

The man shrugged, disappeared into the kitchen, then returned a few minutes later and started eyeing the inspector. The other couple in the room called him over and asked for
the bill.
The man with the moustache brought it, and they paid and left without saying goodbye.

Saying hello and goodbye must not be the rule around here
,
thought Montalbano, remembering that he himself, upon entering, did not say hello to anyone.

The man with the moustache came out of the kitchen and assumed the exact same pose as before.

It'll be ready in five minutes,' he said. 'Want me to turn on the television while you're waiting?'

'No.'

Finally, a woman's voice calle
d out from the kitchen. 'Giugiu!
'

The
pirciati
arrived. They smelled like heaven on earth. The man with the moustache leaned against the doorjamb as though settling in to witness a performance.

Montalbano decided to let the aroma penetrate all the way to the bottom of his lungs.

As he was greedily inhaling, the man spoke.

‘
Want a bottle of wine within reach before you begin eating?'

The inspector nodded yes; he didn't feel like talking.

A one-litre jug of very dense red wine was set before him. Montalbano poured out a glass of it and put the first bite in his mouth. He choked, coughed, and tears came to his eyes. He had the unmistakable impression that his taste buds had caught fire. In a single draught he emptied the glass of wine, which didn't kid around as to its alcohol content.

'Go at it nice and easy,' the waiter-owner said.

'But what's in it}' asked Montalbano, still half choking.

'Olive oil, half an onion, two cloves of garlic, two salted anchovies, a teaspoon of fine capers, black olives, tomatoes, basil, half a pimento, salt, Pecorino cheese, and black pepper,' the man ran down the list with a hint of sadism in his voice.

‘J
esus
’
'
sa
id
Montalbano. 'And who's in the kitchen?'

'My wife,' said the man with the moustache, going to the door to greet three new customers.

Punctuating his forkfuls with gulps of wine and alternating groans of extreme agony and unbearable pleasure
(Is there such a thing as extreme cuisine, like extreme sex?
he wondered at one point), Montalbano even had the courage to soak up the sauce left in the bottom of the bowl with his bread, periodically wiping away the beads of sweat that were forming on his brow.

'And what would you like for a second course, sir?'

The inspector understood that with that 'sir', the owner was paying him military honours.

'Nothing.'

‘
Youre right. The problem with burning
pirciati
is that you don t get your ta
ste buds back till the next day’

Mon
talbano asked for the bill, pai
d a pittance, got up, headed towards the door and, in accordance with local custom, did not say goodbye. Right beside the exit he noticed a large photograph, and under it the following words:

MILLION LIRE REWARD TO ANYONE WITH INFORMATION ON THIS MAN.

'Who is he?' he asked, turning to the man with the moustache.

‘
You don t know him? That's that damn son of a bitch of a broker, Ernanuele Gargano, the man who—' 'Why do you want information on him?' 'So I can catch him and cut his throat.' 'What did he do to you?'

'To me, nothing. But he stole thirty million lire from my wife.'

'Tell the lady she shall have her revenge,' the inspector said solemnly, putting his hand over his heart He realized he was totally drunk.

The moon in the sky was frightening, so much did it seem like daylight outside. Montalbano drove down the road giddily, thinking he could handle it, screeching around the curves, taking his speed alternately down to six and up to sixty miles an hour. Halfway between Montelusa and Vigita he saw the billboard behind which lay hidden the little road that led to the dilapidated cottage with the great Saracen olive tree beside it. Since over his last couple of miles he'd barely avoided crashing head-on into two different cars coming in the opposite direction, he decided to turn down this road and sit out his drunkenness under the branches of that tree, which he hadn't been to visit for almost a year.

As he bore right to turn onto the little road, he immediately had the impression he'd made a mistake, since in the place of the narrow country road there was now a broad band of asphalt. Maybe he'd confused one billboard with another. He put the car in reverse and ended up backing into one of the supports of the billboard, which began to teeter dangerously,
ferraguto furniture — montelusa
, it read. No doubt about it, that was the right sign. He drove back out onto the road and after going about a hundred yards he found himself in front of the gate to a small villa that had just been built. The little rustic cottage was gone, the Saracen olive tree too. He felt disoriented. He recognized nothing in a landscape that had once been so familiar to him.

Was it possible that one litre of wine, no matter how strong, could reduce him to such a state? He got out of the car and, as he was pissing, kept turning his head to look around. The moonlight afforded good visibility, but what he saw looked alien to him. He took a torch out of the glove compartment and proceeded to circle round the enclosure. The house was finished but clearly not inhabited; the windowpanes still had protective Xs of masking tape over them. The garden inside the enclosure was fairly large. They were building some sort of gazebo there; he could see a pile of tools nearby. Shovels, pickaxes, cement troughs. When he got to the area behind the house, he stumbled into what at first seemed to him a bush of buckthorn. He pointed the torch, got a better look, and cried out He'd seen death. Or, rather, the threshold of death. The great Saracen olive tree lay before him, moribund, having been felled and uprooted. It was dying. They had cut the branches from the trunk with an electric saw, and the trunk itself had been deeply wounded by an axe. The leaves had withered and were drying up. In his confusion Montalbano realized he was weeping, sniffing up the mucus that kept dripping out of his nose, breathing in starts the way little children do. He reached out and placed his hand over the space of a particularly wide gash. Under his palm he could still feel a slight dampness from the sap; it was oozing out little by little, like the blood of a man slowly bleeding to death. He lifted his hand from the wound and tore off a few leaves, which still resisted. He put them in his pocket Then his tears gave way to a kind of lucid, controlled rage.

He went back to his car, took off his jacket put the torch into his trouser pocket turned on the high beam of the headlights, and confronted the cast-iron gate, scaling it like a monkey, no doubt thanks to the wine, whose effect
hadn't yet worn off. With a leap worthy of Tarzan, he found himself inside a garden with gravelled paths all around, carved stone benches every ten yards or so, clay pots with plants, faux-Roman amphorae with faux-marine excrescences, and capitalled columns clearly made just down the road in Fiacca. And the inevitable, complex, ultramodern barbecue grill. He headed towards the unfinished gazebo, rummaged through the tools, selected a sledgehammer, seized the handle with a firm grip, and began to shatter the ground-floor windows, of which there were two on each side of the house.

After demolishing six windowpanes, he turned the corner and immediately saw a group of motionless, quasi-human figures. Oh God, what were they? He pulled the torch out of his pocket and turned it on. They were eight large statues, temporarily bunched together until they could be arranged by the house's owner according to his liking. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

'Wait there, I’l
l be right back,' Montalbano said to them.

He carefully pulverized the two remaining windows, and then, twirling the sledgehammer high over his head — just as Orlando in fury had done with his sword — he let loose on the group of statues, swinging blindly in every direction.

In some ten minutes' time, all that was left of Snow White, Happy, Grumpy, Dumpy, Sleazy, Snoopy, Duck, and Bumful, or whatever the hell they were called, was a litter of tiny coloured fragments. Montalbano, however, still didn't feel satisfied. Also near the
u
nfinished gazebo, he discovered some cans of spray paint. Picking up the green, he wrote the word
arsehole
four times in big block letters, once on each side of the house. After which he rescaled the front gate, got back in his car, and drove home to Marinella, now feeling completely sober again.

Back home in Marinella, he spent half the night putting his house back in order after the havoc he'd created looking for the notary's receipt. Not that it really need have taken all that time, but the fact is, when you empty out all your drawers you find a great many old, forgotten papers, some of which demand, almost by force, to be read, and you inevitably end up plunging deeper and deeper into the vortex of memory, as things that for years upon years you'd done all in your power to forget begin to come back to you. It's a wicked game, memory, one that you always end up losing.

He went to bed around three in the morning. But after getting up at least three times to drink a glass of water, he decided to bring a jug into the bedroom, setting it on the nightstand Result: by seven o'clock his belly was as though pregnant with water. It was a cloudy morning, and this increased his nervous agitation, which was already at the high-water mark from his bad night. The telephone rang. He picked up the receiver with determination.

'Don't be breaking my balls, Cat.'

‘
Is not who you tink, signore, is me
’
'And who are you?'

'Don you re
c'nize me, signore? Is Adelina’'Adelina!
What's the matter?' 'Signore, I wante
d a tell you I can't come today’
'That's OK, don't—'

'An' I can't come tomorrow neither,
ana
day after that neither’

‘
What's wrong?'

‘
My younges' son's wife was rush to the hospital with a bad bellyache and I gotta look after 'er kids. There's four of 'em and the oldest is ten and he's a bigger rascal than 'is dad.'

It's OK
, Adelina, don't worry about it’

He hung up, went into the bathroom, grabbed a small mountain of dirty laundry, including the sweater that Livia had given him, the one all caked with sand, and threw everything into the washing machine. Unable to find a clean shirt, he put on the same one he'd worn the previous day. He thought he'd have to eat out for at least three lunches and three dinners, but he swore to himself he would resist temptation and remain faithful to the San Calogero. Thanks to Adelina's phone call, however, his bad mood was now overflowing, convinced as he was of his inability to take care of himself or his house.

At the station there seemed to be dead calm. Catarella didn't even notice his arrival, involved as he was in a phone conversation that must have been rather trying, since from time to time he would wipe his brow with his sleeve. On his desk he found a scrap of paper with two names on it, Giacomo Pellegrino and Michela Manganaro, and two corresponding telephone numbers. He recognized
Mimì
's handwriting and immediately remembered that these were the names of the employees of King Midas Associates, along with, of cou
rse, Mariastella Cosentino.
Mimì
, however, hadn't added their addresses, and the inspector preferred to talk to people face to face.
‘
Mimì
,' he called.

Nobody came. The guy was probably still in bed or drinking his first cup of coffee.
‘
Fazio.'

Fazio showed up at once. Isn't Inspector Augello here?'

'He's not coming in today, Chief, and not tomorrow or the next day, either.'

Just like his housekeeper, Adelina. Did
Mimì
likewise have grandchildren to look after?

'And why not?'

'W
hat do you mean, why not, Chief’
Have you forgotten? He's on marriage leave, starting today.'

It had completely slipped the inspector's mind. And to think it was he who'd introduced
Mimì
— even if it was, in
a sense, for unmentionable reasons — to his future wife, Beatrice, a fine, beautiful
girl.
So when's he getting
married?’

In five days. And don't forget, 'cause you're supposed to be Inspector Augello's witness.'

‘I
won't forget. Listen, are you busy?'

‘I’ll
be with you in a second. There's some guy here, Giacomo Pellegrino, who came in to report some acts of vandalism against a small villa he just now finished building.'