Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions (13 page)

Valentino and Mr X were visible only through a gap between two cars. There was something lying on the small café table, but Poldi couldn't make out what it was. Even Samuele, whom she set to work on the digital original of the photo on Monday morning, failed to get anything more out of it.

The more she examined Valentino's face in the picture, the more certain Poldi became that he was looking thoroughly startled. And as for Mr X's expression, he seemed to be staring at her like a hawk targeting a field mouse – seemed even to follow her with his gaze when she moved to and fro. The photograph mesmerized her; she couldn't stop looking at it. She sat on the sofa until late that night, scanning every square millimetre of the print with a magnifying glass until her eyes were smarting, and she went off to bed with the disturbing suspicion that she might accidentally have photographed Valentino's murderer. Which meant that she herself might be in danger.

Poldi felt perturbed. She wondered if Mr X had recognized her at the funeral. She'd worn a veil and stayed close to Valentino's family. On the other hand, she had made quite an exhibition of herself with the janitor. However, my aunt wasn't the type to get rattled easily – she'd coped with worse situations in Tanzania – and so she did what she always did when scared: she got mad. Thoroughly mad. And when she worked herself up into a rage, she tended to take the bull by the horns. Which meant, in this context, that she had to find Mr X before he found her. But for that Poldi needed some help, so she swallowed her pride and texted Montana an invitation to a candlelit dinner – though she naturally omitted the word “candlelit”.

            
I've got something for you. Dinner at nine?

She stared at the display on her mobile for a good hour, waiting for an answer. Then:

            
OK

Although Poldi thought his response might have been a bit more enthusiastic, she planned the evening with meticulous care, feeling that she couldn't afford to make another mistake in this regard.

To invite the commissario to dinner and present him with the full broadside of her décolleté was naturally in the interests of her investigation, as was the off-the-shoulder red gown in which she welcomed him that evening.

“Because, listen,” she told me later, “career-wise, the old rule of thumb is —”

“I know,” I cut in. “When the chips are down, show plenty of cleavage.”

“You simply display your assets, man or woman alike.”

“What would you advise in my case?” I asked her. “I mean, always assuming I'm not completely beyond hope?”

Poldi submitted my appearance to critical appraisal. “You're developing a little tummy. You could use a bit of exercise. Abs and pecs never do any harm in moderation. Shorts are a no-no except on the beach, men's legs being what they are. But why wear your nice hair so short? Let it grow, so a woman can imagine running her fingers through your wealth of dark curls, know what I mean? Apart from that, you've got nice forearms and strong hands like your father and Peppe. You can afford to display everything from the elbows down.”

That was a start, at least.

Montana needed no such tuition. I mean, he was an Italian – he knew which look to adopt for which occasion. He showed up punctually in a smart black ensemble: slipons without socks, Asiatic linen chinos and, worn over his waistband, a tailored shirt only marginally tight over the beginnings of a tummy but revealing a muscular chest. Collar open, naturally, and sleeves neatly rolled up to the elbows, giving Poldi an unobstructed view of his thoracic hair and silky skin. His olive complexion, dark beard and moustache made him look like Odysseus paying a quick visit to Circe. Or so Poldi thought, and it was all she could do not to hurl herself at him and gobble him up on the doorstep. Instead, she just leant forward a trifle and presented her left cheek for the obligatory mwah-mwah between friends.

To her disappointment, Montana did not take her up on this offer but merely held out a small, gift-wrapped package done up with gold ribbon. “Some gelato for dessert,” he said. “From Cipriani.”

“How kind,” Poldi said sourly.

“Oh, and this…” He was holding a bouquet of white roses and olive sprigs. It was as if he had seen into the depths of my aunt's soul, for it must be explained that a bouquet of olive sprigs and white roses from the gardens of Nymphenburg Palace was what Poldi had been holding in her hand when she plighted her troth with Uncle Peppe at the register office in Ruppertstrasse. That horticultural link between Bavaria and Sicily had remained her favourite form of floral decoration ever since. It reminded her of Peppe, of love and pleasure and life itself, and it cheered her when days were dark.

“How ever did you know?” she whispered in awe as she took the bouquet from him.

“
Boh
,” said Montana, a trifle embarrassed, and the evening took its course.

7

                  
Tells of falling between two stools and the three phases of seduction. Montana discloses some personal details and briefly succumbs to jealousy and passion. Poldi finds solace in familiar arms, goes looking for Mr X, and is once more overtaken by her past in Taormina.

The commissario had accepted her invitation with reluctance and slight uneasiness, Poldi told me at the beginning of September.

“Not because of me, of course,” she explained, “but because of the food. He's a Sicilian to his fingertips. German beer is one thing, but German cuisine? Heaven forbid.”

To Montana's great relief, Poldi dispensed with Bavarian delicacies such as white veal sausage, dumplings, cabbage, etc., and served up a Sicilian classic instead. This was
Pasta alla Norma
, for which she used Aunt Teresa's bottled tomato sauce, fried aubergines from Signora Anzalone's garden, and
ricotta salata
brought by Uncle Martino from Noto – for Noto, it must be stressed, is the only legitimate source of
ricotta salata
. The pasta was accompanied by a nice Nerello Mascalese from the slopes of Etna and followed by Montana's gelato, so all the makings of a perfect evening were present.

Filled with optimism by her bouquet, Poldi did not pull out all the stops right away. The night was still young, after all, and it would fall into three phases.

Phase one: confidence-building measures.

Phase two: exchanges of information.

Phase three: the best part, including further exchanges.

“Would you mind opening the wine, Vito?”

Poldi got another chance to admire Montana's shapely forearms as he wielded the corkscrew. He poured two glasses while she continued to stir the
sugo
.

“What shall we drink to?” she asked.

“To the truth.”

“To the truth.”

They clinked glasses. Poldi only sipped her wine because – to repeat – the night was still young. Montana followed suit, then watched her at the stove.

“A decent drop, that.”

“Thanks. I'm sure you know your wines.”

“So-so. You have a nice house.”

“Please make yourself at home. Won't you sit down? You may smoke if you wish.”

“I'd sooner watch you cooking, if you don't mind.”

Montana was clearly in no hurry to learn what sort of information Poldi had for him. Phase one couldn't have been going better.

“I don't mind in the least, my dear Vito, but you must entertain me a little in return.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Entertain you how?”

“Tell me a bit about yourself – and we drank to the truth, don't forget.”

Montana sighed. “Well, go on, ask away.”

“Are you married?”

A superfluous, purely introductory question.

“Divorced four years ago. My ex-wife lives in Milan; she's a lawyer. We have two children, Marta and Diego. The girl's a medical student in Rome, the boy is studying mechanical engineering in Milan.”

Poldi made a mental note of the children's names.

“Then you're all on your own here in Sicily.”

He sighed. “It's complicated.”

“Oh, sure. That's that, then.” Poldi laughed her husky laugh and added the
penne rigate
to the pot, because
Pasta alla Norma
is always made with
penne
. “What brought you to Sicily?”

The commissario sighed again, but this time it was a sigh that came from deep inside and was accompanied by a recurrence of his morose expression. “I was transferred here for disciplinary reasons.”

Poldi turned towards him in surprise, but she had no need to press him further; he merely gave another shrug and went on speaking.

“I came from here originally – from Giarre, to be precise – but I went straight to police college in Milan after completing my national service. Sicilians have a hard time in Milan, if only because of the dialect. They're regarded as Africans, village idiots, thieves, cheats, scroungers. I stuck at it, though. I learnt to speak proper Italian and got rid of my dialect. But listen, I've no wish to bore you with my life story —”

“My dear Vito, believe me, you'll soon know if you're boring me. Right now you can carry the pasta to the table and light the candles.”

She thrust the dish into his hand and watched him light the candles. He did this with the undivided attention he bestowed on every activity, and Poldi promptly pictured what else his hands could doubtless do with the same undivided attention. She had to pull herself together once more to remain entirely in the here and now.

“Excellent,” was Montana's enthusiastic comment on his first mouthful.

“But woe betide you if you say ‘Just like my mamma's.'”

He grinned. “My mother was probably the only Sicilian woman who couldn't cook. As for my wife, well…”

“Are your parents still alive?”

Montana cleared his throat. “Let's change the subject.”

Poldi guessed that she had touched a big scar, one of many. This pleased her, but she temporarily left it at that and raised her glass again.

“To Sicily and the Sicilians.”

Montana shook his head. “No, to Sicily without the Sicilians.”

Poldi gazed at him all the time while drinking, and the commissario never even blinked in embarrassment.

“I'd had a pretty good career in the state police,” he went on. “During the eighties I spent some time with a special anti-Mafia unit in Rome. Then I went back to homicide in Milan.”

“That sounds excellent. So what happened?”

“There was a murder in the red-light district, and I leant rather too heavily on a politician, a senator from a very long-established dynasty of North Italian industrialists with links to the Roman Curia. Bingo. Five years from retirement I suddenly became the Sicilian scoundrel again. I was denounced, defamed, denigrated and harassed until I became completely ostracized at work.”

“Did they have any solid evidence against you?”

Montana put his fingertips together in the age-old Italian gesture of impotence. “Oh, you know. After so many years in the force there were bound to be a few things; it was quite inevitable. A little favour here, a less than kosher deal there – the little compromises without which no detective can find his way through a morass of lies, corruption and secrecy. I'm not trying to gloss over anything – of course I occasionally got my hands dirty – but I usually got my perp in the end.”

Poldi thought of her father, Georg Oberreiter, who had never made a mistake or got his hands dirty in forty-plus years' service, but he had very seldom spoken about his work and it suddenly occurred to her that she knew very little about him.

“I quite understand.”

“No, I doubt if you do. I'm not trying to justify myself, but my problem with the aforesaid senator was that I don't take bribes. Well, when you're isolated, everything happens very fast. He pulled a few strings, did the signor senator, and before I knew it I'd been transferred to Sicily, to Acireale, and neutralized in the arsehole of the world. Know what that meant?”

Poldi shook her head.

“It was the maximum sentence. They could have retired me early, but no, they transferred me. It wasn't just that they sentenced me to the provincial claustrophobia I'd been happy to escape from four decades earlier; it was worse than that. I'm the foreigner again. The outsider from the north. The Sicilian who thought he was too good for Sicily and came unstuck. Neither one thing nor the other. The reject. The loser. Someone to be distrusted. Someone fighting a losing battle. My colleagues cold-shoulder me. I can't expect any assistance in the Valentino case, and I'm making very little progress. Whenever I interview witnesses I come up against a wall of silence. It doesn't surprise me much – I'm Sicilian, I know the score – but it gets on my nerves. It makes me mad; it drives me insane.”

Montana told Poldi all this without a moment's hesitation, valiantly endeavouring to look into her eyes and not at her cleavage.

Poldi cleared away the plates and brought the gelato. Pistachio and chocolate. Innocent though that sounds, it is a typically Sicilian confection as baroque and magnificent as the whole of Sicily's cuisine. A cuisine like the whole island, a superabundance of aromas, marvels, sensations. A spectacular odyssey for the palate, even in a dish as commonplace as
Pasta alla Norma
, in which the sweetness of the tomato sauce blends with the salty ricotta and the slightly bitter note of the grilled aubergines. Sweet, salt, bitter, piquant – Sicilian cuisine is all-embracing and pleasurably involves all the senses in a single dish. A gelato must also be like this. Sweet as a whispered promise, the pistachio ice cream salty as sea air, the chocolate ice cream faintly bitter and a little tart like a lover's goodbye the next morning.

Perfect for my Auntie Poldi, in other words, and while she allowed a concentrated dose of Sicily to dissolve on her tongue, she conceived of Montana, too, as a baroque dessert of that kind. Sweet, salty and bitter, cool and melting.

“And then a German woman meddles in my inquiries and makes me look stupid,” he went on. “I'm almost tempted to chuck the case and let those idiots in the Carabinieri bust a gut instead, but I don't give up easily – that's my trouble.”

Poldi nodded sympathetically. She was growing steadily fonder of Montana in a way she'd believed was no longer possible. And although I can report only what my aunt told me, of course, I feel sure her emotions were ablaze. I can picture them sitting there together, my Auntie Poldi and Vito Montana, in the house at No. 29 Via Baronessa, stirring their melting pistachio and chocolate gelato and sipping the rest of the wine just to avoid having to say any more, because the ice cream was melting away and they didn't know where the evening would lead, so it might be better if it led nowhere. Or so I imagine.

“I know what you mean, Vito,” Poldi said at length in a husky voice, laying her hand on his arm. “I know something about falling between two stools.”

Montana produced his cigarettes. “May I?”

“But of course, Vito.”

Poldi watched him light a cigarette with his usual air of concentration, saw him inhale the first few lungfuls of smoke in silence and look at her searchingly. She realized that he still regarded her as part of his case. It was high time to introduce phase two.

“Have you managed to establish the identity of the red-haired man at the funeral?”

Montana shook his head. “The taxi driver was no great help. The man flagged him down outside the cathedral in Acireale and had himself driven back there. He clearly didn't speak much, but the cabby is sure he was a foreigner – an American, he suspects, because he tipped him so generously.”

“And I suspect Valentino's family didn't have a clue who he was or what he was doing at the funeral. Although he did bring some flowers with him.”

Montana nodded. “However, there is some news from the lab.”

Poldi sat up, galvanized. “Really?”

“Those idiots in Messina took a hell of a time, ostensibly because half the staff are on leave, but Valentino was obviously drugged before his death.”

“No.”

Montana remained quite calm. “The evidence isn't a hundred per cent, but the lab in Messina found traces of flunitrazepam in Valentino's urine. That's a strong sedative.”

“Knockout drops,” Poldi said in hushed tones.

“Also available as tablets, which are known as roofies or flunies. They work very quickly and last for up to seven hours.”

“So the murderer drugged Valentino first and then shot him?”

Montana stubbed out his cigarette. She noticed that he never smoked more than half.

“Well, Poldi, what have you got for me?”

Poldi was well prepared. She reached into the drawer beneath the table, pulled out the photograph and put it down in front of him.

Montana stared at the print without touching it. “When was this taken?” All at once, his voice sounded as brittle as splintering slates.

“The Wednesday before Valentino died.”

“And you never said a word to me about it all this time?”

“Good God, Vito, it wasn't until yesterday that I noticed the two of them were in the photo.”

He gave her a puzzled look. “But you took the damned thing.”

She rolled her eyes. “My God, I snapped the
Vigile
. I didn't notice that Valentino and Mr X were there until last night.”

“The
Vigile
? Why him?”

“Oh, Vito, it's a long story, and certainly no grounds for jealousy. So what do you say?”

The commissario said nothing. He picked up the photo at last, though only with his fingertips, and studied it closely.

“It's the truth, Vito,” Poldi insisted. “I didn't notice the two of them at the time. But look at the startled expression on their faces. What if I accidentally photographed Valentino's murderer?”

Montana looked up at her. “What then?”

“Then I could be in danger.”

“Is that why you invited me here tonight?”

Salty, bitter, sharp – his tone of voice suddenly combined them all, and Poldi thoroughly disliked that fact.

“I could offer myself as bait.” It was supposed to sound jocular, but it didn't. It sounded despairing.

Montana thought for a moment. Then he rose and pocketed the photo.

“Thanks for dinner. I'll call you.”

That put paid to phase three. The commissario hurried to the door before Poldi could even get to her feet. She tottered after him with legs like mozzarella and got there just in time. “Vito, wait. This is ridiculous.”

He looked at her. “Ridiculous, you say?”

“No. Yes. I mean —”

She got no further, for Montana, halfway out into the street, which smelt of jasmine and cat's piss, suddenly bent forwards, drew my Auntie Poldi to him, and kissed her. He kissed her as desperately and greedily as a drowning man and as gently as summer rain. Or so Poldi felt. It was a lingering kiss, and she didn't hesitate to respond with all her might. She could smell him, feel his breath, feel his hands around her neck and on her hips, feel his chest against hers – and more.