Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions (11 page)

The penny dropped with an unpleasant clang.

“Er… Oh yes, of course.”

“I feel we should pick up the thread of our joint passion once more and as soon as possible. Don't you?”

Poldi broke out in a sweat. “What did you have in mind?”

“How about dinner this evening, Donna Isolde?”

“Er, no, I'm awfully sorry, Signor Pastorella, but —”

“Mimì. Please call me Mimì, Donna Isolde.”

“I'm awfully sorry, Mimì, but I've got a family engagement this evening.”

“I quite understand. Then make it tomorrow night. There's something I'd like to show you.”

“I'm afraid I won't be able to make it tomorrow night either, Mimì. The whole of next week is out, and the one after that is even busier – I'm completely booked up.”

Mimì didn't speak. Unable to hear anything but his faint breathing, Poldi was afraid she might have given him a stroke.

“How about if I call you when it's convenient?” she asked in a bright, conversational tone.

“Please do that, Donna Poldina.” His voice sounded even fainter and more feeble than before. “I shall await your call.”

Poldi hung up in a lather. “My God, that's all I bloody well needed.” Then, as if the phone were to blame for everything, she snarled at it: “Don't call me again. Don't put anyone through unless it's Montana,
capisci
?”

But zilch. No Montana. They were difficult days. Never had her thirst seemed greater, the heat more unbearable, life more complicated, the next step more arduous. But Poldi kept a grip on herself. She didn't touch a drop, even though it demanded titanic self-control.

She would have liked to sit on her roof terrace, gazing out over the sea and smoking like Etna, but her right knee was playing up again and made it agony for her to climb stairs. So she pinned a notice to her front door – “SONO AL BAR” – and plonked herself down outside the Bar Cocuzza, where she drank ice-cold almond milk and smoked one MS after another.

“
Namaste
, life,” she sighed, gazing at the sea, and gave the sad signora a friendly nod. “The rest of the world can kiss my ass.”

All she did apart from that was hanker for nightfall, for Montana, for a sign, an idea – for something. At least she wasn't waiting for death any more. That was a start.

6

                  
Describes how Poldi crosses swords with an incorruptible public servant at Valentino's funeral and makes a discovery. On the following Sunday she goes mushroom-picking and promptly makes two further discoveries. She then does something out of character and is reminded of Ruppertstrasse in Munich.

My Auntie Poldi did not see Montana again until Tuesday, at Valentino's funeral. Although she hadn't received an invitation, she was fortunate that Signora Anzalone from next door was always
au courant
where funerals were concerned.

The little cemetery was situated in a suburb of Acireale near the motorway, amid lemon orchards, expanses of wasteland and unofficial rubbish dumps. Isolated cypresses and palm trees reared their heads behind the drystone walls, which were plastered with old advertising posters. Poldi noticed as she drove through the little suburb of Aci Catena that they included a lot of advertisements for fortune tellers and palmists.

By the time she got to the cemetery car park, the mourners had already assembled in front of the gateway, which resembled a small, overly pretentious provincial railway station. Poldi found this somehow appropriate. Montana was not among the mourners, she was disappointed to note. Nor was Russo, but she did spot Valentino's parents. Standing beside the coffin with the
padre
, they were heatedly haranguing an elderly man, who was stubbornly shaking his head. There was clearly a problem of some kind.

Poldi was once more wearing her black dress, plus a veil for camouflage. She had really meant to remain inconspicuously in the background, observing everything with forensic professionalism, but her curiosity was aroused by the dispute, which was becoming ever more heated and involved the noisy participation of more and more of the mourners. As far as she could gather when she had edged a little closer, it was about a missing
marca da bollo
on the burial permit.

The principle is both simple and effective. In Italy, the payment of administrative fees is certified by little official stamps or stickers affixed to the documents in question. These
marche da bollo
can be purchased in
tabacchi
, which, in addition to cigarettes, purvey lottery tickets, picture postcards, local bus tickets, newspapers, stationery, chewing gum, gossip and useful information about the neighbourhood.

The document which Valentino's father was brandishing in the old man's face was adorned with an administrative stamp of this kind. An insufficient one, however, because instead of the requisite twenty-three euros fifty cents only sixteen had been paid. And because of the missing seven euros fifty cents the cemetery janitor was refusing to allow the Candelas to enter. There was nothing to be done – he simply shook his head with adamantine obstinacy and invoked the regulations. Needless to say, someone had already set off for the nearest
tabacchi
to purchase the missing stamp, but he seemed to have gone missing too.

Like the ambient temperature, the argument with the janitor quickly grew heated, and the more heated it became the more adamantly the old man stood his ground – quite why remained his own dark secret. He barred admittance to the cemetery like the Spartans defending Thermopylae. It went without saying that my Auntie Poldi could not idly stand by.

“My good man,” she told the janitor, “there must surely be some sensible way of resolving this issue.”

The old man stared at her as if he was the nymph Galatea being wooed by Polyphemus the Cyclops, but he may simply have been thrown by her German accent.

“I'm sorry,” he said testily, “I have to observe the regulations.”

He tried to turn on his heel, but Poldi simply hung onto him. The mourners had in the meantime formed a circle around him anyway, so escape was almost impossible.

“Look, signore,” Poldi went on, “I can understand your point of view. I come from Germany, where people would back you a hundred per cent. You're doing a great job here. No, seriously. Regulations are regulations, after all. The thing is, though, Germany is a cold country. Where burials are concerned, a day or two's delay doesn't matter there, whereas here in Sicily the sun beats down on us unmercifully, which is why Frederick II praised the Sicilians for being the inventors of humanitarianism. We in Germany can only dream of that. Look, we're all hot. I'm hot, you're hot, Valentino's poor parents are hot – and Valentino, who's waiting in his coffin to be laid to rest forever, is also hot. I dread to think what a high old time the putrefactive bacteria are having in his body right now. You don't really want to cross swords with us. You're only doing your job and we haven't paid the full fee. We're the problem that's spoiling your well-earned lunch break, and the last thing we want is to keep you from your
pranzo
, so help us not to be your problem any longer. Do we really want to go on bickering until we fry our brains and the sewage gas in Valentino's coffin explodes, or do we find a kind, humane, practical solution such as the Germans would envy?”

Silence reigned for a moment. Everyone stared at Poldi. One or two people nodded, brows were mopped and cries of “
Ecco
” or “
Brava
” could be heard.

The janitor seemed puzzled by Poldi's rhetoric, but he eventually succumbed once more to whatever had been bugging him that day.

“No,” he said. “You'll just have to wait until someone turns up with the missing stamp, and that's that.”

This drew cries of indignation from the assembled mourners, but the old man, seemingly unmoved, elbowed the crowd brusquely aside. That was when Poldi blew her top. She hurriedly fished a fifty-euro note out of her handbag and grabbed the janitor's arm again. “Now listen to me,” she snarled at him in Bavarian, thrusting the money into his hand. “I know exactly what you're after, you old fox. Here, take this and pipe down, all right?”

Bavarian and a bribe – it ought to have been a surefire combination, but it completely missed the target. The obdurate janitor uttered a cry of rage, flung the note to the ground, stamped on it and treated Poldi to a tirade in Sicilian. Hurt, offended, insulted, profoundly sullied and humiliated, he eventually turned his back on her and forged a path through the crowd. It was all over. Diplomatic relations were severed for good. Not even mass indignation and threats to storm the cemetery could change his mind. He simply locked the cemetery gate and disappeared into his lodge.

It was almost noon by now. The sky resembled polished steel; the air above the car park was shimmering. Poldi groaned beneath her veil and waited for the dam to burst – for a revolt to break out and the janitor to be lynched. Instead, the mourners were merely overcome by fatalistic resignation. Valentino's mother might have been turned to stone, the
padre
mopped his brow, the last indignant voices fell silent. Perhaps it was simply too hot. The Sicilian midday sun was reducing rage to fatalism. After a brief consultation it was decided to deposit the coffin and wreaths in the shade of a eucalyptus tree beside the cemetery gate and wait for the missing administrative sticker to arrive.

Poldi sensed that she had gone too far, that she might have made a mess of things. She was about to hurry after the old man when a strong hand caught her by the arm.

“Leave it, Signora Poldi.”

Montana seemed to have materialized like magic, once more wearing his creased grey work suit and aviator sunglasses. Poldi was so taken aback by his sudden appearance and so electrified by his touch that she was briefly lost for words.

“I'll deal with this.”

Poldi saw Montana speaking to the old man through the window of the lodge. The janitor kept shaking his head until Montana showed him his ID and asked him something. Then the old man visibly knuckled under and, with a look of bitter resignation, ended by opening the gate. Amid applause from the mourners, Montana spoke briefly to Valentino's parents and the
padre
, and Valentino could at last be carried to his final resting place.

“Like a knight in shining armour,” said Poldi, when she had caught up with Montana in the graveyard.

He grinned at her and looked around to see if they could be overheard. Then, casually, he said, “We found some money in Valentino's room.”

“How much money?”

“Nearly ten thousand euros. In a plastic bag behind his wardrobe.”

Poldi stared at him in disbelief. “So you took my theft theory seriously.”

“I'm thorough, that's all. His parents say they knew nothing about it. I'm inclined to believe them, because the money certainly wouldn't have been there any longer if they had.”

“Ten thousand euros?”

“Mm.”

“Maybe Valentino saved it.”

“That's one way of putting it. All new, consecutively numbered notes in four batches, none of them containing less than two thousand euros.”

Poldi resorted to her native tongue. “Well, I'll be buggered.”

“Eh?”

“Hearty congratulations, my dear. And all because I went on at you like that. What do you say?”

No response.

She nudged him. “Well, go on, say it – say the magic word.
Dai
. It's not hard.”

Montana sighed resignedly. “Thanks.”

Poldi beamed. “You owe me one.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And now you're going to look around to see if Valentino's employer turns up for his funeral.”

“Or the person he owed that money to. Who knows?”

“Anyone here you suspect?”

Montana grinned at her again. “Was it true, that business about Frederick II and what he said about the Sicilians?”

Poldi made a dismissive gesture. “No, but I'm sure dear old Fred would have agreed with me.”

“So you were lying.”

“In a good cause. Besides, it wasn't a lie, strictly speaking, it was oratory.”

“You lied to a public servant – you tried to bribe him. I could take that personally.”

“Are you flirting with me, commissario?”

Montana looked at her through his sunglasses. He wasn't grinning any more. All at once, his face looked as hard and impenetrable as the midday sky.

“Don't do it again, Poldi. And never lie to me. Never.”

Without waiting for her to reply, he strode off in search of a better view of the mourners. Poldi cursed herself for having interfered.

Valentino's last journey ended in a wall containing three tiers of burial niches. In the top row gaped a rectangular aperture which would be sealed with a stone slab as soon as Valentino's coffin had disappeared into it for good. The few wreaths included one from “Piante Russo” on behalf of the entire workforce. Poldi felt that the whole ceremony passed off far too cursorily and with insufficient solemnity, as though Valentino couldn't be walled up and forgotten quickly enough. Although she knew this wasn't the case, the thought suddenly depressed her. Piqued by Montana's harsh words, she began to weep and gave her tears free rein. She wept for Valentino, who had deserved something better than such a death and such a funeral. She wept for my Uncle Peppe and all the people in her life who had left her undeservedly and far too soon. And she also wept a little for herself.

Having recovered her composure and given her nose a good blow, she noticed a tall, red-haired man who hadn't caught her eye before. He added a small bunch of flowers to the other floral offerings, then hurriedly withdrew and made for the exit. He was sunburnt and wearing dark glasses. Not a Sicilian, Poldi surmised, and in his late forties. She would have liked to take a photograph of him, but felt it would be inappropriate. However, she saw that Montana was following him.

“Who's that?” she asked an aunt of Valentino's, who was standing beside her.

The woman shook her head. “Never seen him before.”

Poldi thought for a moment, then followed Montana to the exit. When she emerged into the car park, the commissario was standing beside his car, lighting a cigarette.

“Who was that?”

“No idea,” he grunted.

“Did you get his licence number?”

Montana shook his head. “He drove off in a taxi.”

“A taxi?”

“Believe it or not, we've recently got taxis in Sicily. We may even get electric light before long.” Looking irritable, he mashed out his unsmoked cigarette, said a curt goodbye, got into his car and left Poldi standing there.

“Idiot,” Poldi called after him. Her heart felt as heavy as Etna.

It didn't escape the aunts that Poldi was making no progress with the Valentino case and suffering from a recurrence of the blues. Accordingly, Aunt Teresa and Uncle Martino took her mushroom-picking the following Sunday. Their objective:
joie de vivre.
Their means to that end: beautiful natural surroundings, fresh air, physical exercise, and – of course – mushrooms.

Aunt Teresa and Uncle Martino went mushroom-picking on Etna nearly every weekend and were normally accompanied by their ground-floor neighbours the Terranovas, with whom they were linked not only by thirty years' acquaintanceship but also by fierce competition for the biggest and finest mushrooms.

According to Uncle Martino, nowhere in the world afforded a wider variety of edible mushrooms – or bigger ones, of course – than the infinitely fertile volcanic soil on the slopes of the Mongibello, or Etna, and the mushrooms stored in Aunt Teresa's chest freezer suggested that he was right. It was said that the Satan's mushroom, which is regarded as extremely poisonous elsewhere in the world, became excellent fare when grown in that soil. I never tried one, nor did my Auntie Poldi, because she didn't like eating mushrooms anyway, far less picking them. Poldi wasn't keen on the great outdoors in general, being more of an urbanite. The most she had ever done was drive out of Munich to bathe and sunbathe with Uncle Peppe beside the Staffelsee, which is as warm as the Mediterranean. Truth to tell, though, even in that sadly remote and closed chapter of her life she preferred to sit in a lakeside beer garden rather than lie on a towel on the sand.