The Snack Thief

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h2> The first Sunday of the previous year had fallen on the fifth, the widow said, and that fateful date remained forever etched in her mind.

Anyway, upon coming out of church, where she’d attended Holy Mass at midday, she was approached by Signora Collura, who owned a furniture store.

“Signora, tell your husband that the item he was waiting for arrived yesterday.”

“What item?”

“The sofa bed.”

Signora Antonietta thanked her and went home with a drill boring a hole in her head. What did her husband need a sofa bed for? Although her curiosity was eating her alive, she said nothing to Arelio. To make a long story short, that piece of furniture never arrived at their home. Two Sundays later, Signora Antonietta approached the furniture lady.

“You know, the color of the sofa bed clashes with the shade of the wall.”

A shot in the dark, but right on target.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but he told me he wanted dark green, the same as the wallpaper.”

The back room of the office was dark green. So that’s where he had the sofa bed delivered, the shameless pig!

On the thirtieth of June that same year—this date, too, forever etched in her memory—she got her first anonymous letter. She had received three in all, between June and September.

“Could I see them?” Montalbano asked.

“I burned them. I don’t keep filth.”

The three anonymous notes, written with letters cut out from newspapers in keeping with the finest tradition, all said the same thing:Your husband Arelio is seeing a Tunisian jade named Karima, known by all to be a whore, three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The woman went there either in the morning or afternoon on those days. Occasionally she would buy cleaning supplies at a shop on the same street, but everyone knew she was meeting Signor Arelio to do lewd things.

“Were you ever able to . . . verify any of this?” the inspector asked tactfully.

“Do you mean did I ever spy on them to see when the trollop was going in and out of my husband’s office?”

“Well, that too.”

“I don’t stoop to such things,” the woman said proudly.

“But I managed just the same. A soiled handkerchief.”

“Lipstick?”

“No,” the widow said with some effort, turning slightly red in the face.

“And a pair of underpants,” she added after a pause, turning even redder.

o o o

When Montalbano and Galluzzo got to Salita Granet, the three shops on that short, sloping street were already closed.

Number 28 was a small building, the ground floor raised three steps up from street level, with two more floors above that. To the side of the main door were three nameplates. The first said: aurelio lapècora, import-export, ground floor; the second: orazio cannatello, notary; the third: angelo bellino, business consultant, top floor. Using the keys Montalbano had taken from Lapècora’s study, they went inside. The front room was a proper office, with a big nineteenth-century desk made of black mahogany, a small secretarial table with a 1940s Olivetti typewriter on it, and four large metal bookcases overflowing with old files. On the desk was a functioning telephone. There were five chairs in the office, but one was broken and overturned in the corner.

In the back room . . . The back room, with its now familiar dark green walls, seemed not to belong to the same apartment. It was sparkling clean, with a large sofa bed, television, telephone extension, stereo system, cocktail trolley with a variety of liqueurs, mini-fridge, and a horrendous female nude, buttocks to the wind, over the couch. Next to the sofa was a small end table with a faux art nouveau lamp on top, its drawer stuffed with condoms of every kind.

“How old was the guy?” Galluzzo asked.

“Sixty-three.”

“Jesus!” said the policeman, giving a whistle of admiration.

The bathroom, like the back room, was dark green and glistening, equipped with built-in blow-dryer, bathtub with shower-hose extension, and full-length mirror.

They returned to the front room, rummaged through the desk’s drawers, opened a few of the files. The most recent correspondence was more than three years old.

They heard some footsteps upstairs, in the office of the notary, Cannatello. The notary wasn’t in, they were told by the secretary, a reed-thin thirtyish young man with a disconsolate expression. He said the late Mr. Lapècora used to come to the office just to pass the time. On the days when he was there, a good-looking Tunisian girl would come to do the cleaning.

Oh, and, he almost forgot, over the last few months Mr. Lapècora had received fairly frequent visits from a nephew, or at least that’s how Mr. Lapècora introduced him the one time the three had met at the front door. He was about thirty, tall, dark, well-dressed, and he drove a metallic gray BMW. He must have spent a lot of time abroad, this nephew, because he spoke with an odd sort of accent. No, he couldn’t remember anything about the BMW’s license plate, hadn’t paid any notice.

Suddenly the thin young man assumed the expression of somebody looking at the ruins of his home after an earth-quake. He said he had a precise opinion about this crime.

“And what would that be?” asked Montalbano.

It could only have been the usual young lowlife looking for money to feed his drug habit.

They went back downstairs, where Montalbano called Mrs. Lapècora from the office phone.

“Excuse me, but why didn’t you tell me you have a nephew?”

“Because we don’t.”

o o o

“Let’s go back to the office,” Montalbano said when they were just around the corner from headquarters. Galluzzo didn’t dare ask why. In the bathroom of the dark green room, the inspector buried his nose in the towel, breathed deeply, then started riffling through the little cupboard beside the sink. He found a small bottle of perfume, brand-name Volupté, and handed it to Galluzzo.

“Here, put some of this on.”

“Where?”

“Up your ass,” came the inevitable reply.

Galluzzo dabbed a drop of Volupté on his cheek, and Montalbano stuck his nose next to it and inhaled. That was it: the very same scent, the color of burnt straw, that he’d smelled in Lapècora’s study. Wanting to be absolutely certain, he repeated the gesture.

Galluzzo smiled.

“Uh, Chief, if anybody saw us . . . who knows what they’d think?”

The inspector didn’t answer, but walked over to the phone.

“Hello, signora? Sorry to disturb you again. Did your husband use any kind of perfume or cologne? No? Okay, thanks.”

o o o

Galluzzo came into Montalbano’s office.

“Lapècora’s Beretta was registered on the eighth of De-cember of last year. Since he didn’t have a license to carry a gun, he was only allowed to keep it at home.” Something, the inspector thought, must have been troubling him around that time, if he decided to buy a gun.

“What are we going to do with the pistol?”

“We’ll keep it here. Listen, Gallù, here are the keys to the office. I want you to go there early tomorrow morning, let yourself in, and wait there. Try not to let anyone see you.

If the Tunisian girl hasn’t found out what happened, she should show up tomorrow according to schedule, since it’s Friday.”

Galluzzo grimaced.

“It’s unlikely she hasn’t heard.”

“Why? Who would have told her?”

It looked to the inspector as if Galluzzo was desperately trying to back out.

“I don’t know . . . Word gets out . . .”

“Ah, and I don’t suppose you said anything to your brother-in-law the reporter? Because if you did—”

“Inspector, I swear, I haven’t told him anything.” Montalbano believed him. Galluzzo wasn’t the type to tell a boldfaced lie.

“Well, you’re going to Lapècora’s office anyway.”

o o o

“Montalbano? This is Jacomuzzi. I wanted to notify you of our test results.”

“Oh God, Jacomù, wait a second, my heart is racing.

God, what excitement! . . . There, I’m a little calmer now.

Please ‘notify’ me, as you put it in your peerless bureau-cratese.”

“Aside from the fact that you’re an incurable asshole, the cigarette butt was a common stub of Nazionale without filter; there was nothing abnormal in the dust we collected from the floor of the elevator, and as for the little piece of wood—” “It was only a kitchen match.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m speechless, breathless—in fact, I think I’m about to have a heart attack! You’ve delivered the murderer to me!”

“Go fuck yourself, Montalbano.”

“It’d still be better than listening to you. What did he have in his pockets?”

“A handkerchief and a set of keys.”

“And what can you tell me about the knife?”

“A kitchen knife, very used. Between the blade and the handle we found a fish scale.”

“Didn’t you pursue that any further? Was it a mullet scale or a cod scale? Keep investigating, don’t leave me hanging!”

“What is wrong with you anyway?”

“Jacomù, try to use your brains a little. If we were in the Sahara desert and you came to me and said you’d found a fish scale on a knife that had been used to kill a tourist, then the thing might, I say might, mean something. But what the fuck could it possibly mean in a town like Vigàta, where out of twenty thousand inhabitants, nineteenthousandninehun-dredandseventy eat fish all the time?” “And why don’t the other thirty?” asked Jacomuzzi, stunned and curious.

“Because they’re newborn babies.”

o o o

“Hello? Montalbano here. Could I please speak with Dr.

Pasquano?”

“Please hold.”

He had just enough time to start singing: E te lo vojo dì i>

che sò stato io . . .

“Hello, Inspector? The doctor’s very sorry, but he’s performing an autopsy on the two men found goat-tied in Costabianca. But he said to tell you that as far as your murder victim is concerned, the man was bursting with health and would have lived to be a hundred if somebody hadn’t killed him first. A single stab wound, dealt with a firm hand. The incident occurred between seven and eight o’clock this morning. D’you need anything else?”

o o o

In the fridge he found some pasta with broccoli, which he put in the oven to warm up. As a second course, Adelina had made him some roulades of tuna. Figuring he’d had a light lunch, he felt obliged to eat everything. Then he turned on the television and tuned in to the Free Channel, a good local station where his red-haired, Red-sympathizing friend Nicolò Zito worked. Zito was commenting on the killing of the Tunisian aboard the Santopadre as the camera zoomed in on the bullet-riddled wheelhouse and on a dark stain in the wood that was probably blood. All of a sudden Jacomuzzi appeared, kneeling down and looking at something through a magnifying glass.

“Buffoon!” Montalbano shouted, then switched the channel to TeleVigàta, the station where Galluzzo’s brother-in-law Prestìa worked. Here, too, Jacomuzzi made an appearance, except that he was no longer on the fishing boat; now he was pretending to take fingerprints inside the elevator where Lapècora had been murdered. Montalbano cursed the saints, stood up, threw a book against the wall. That was why Galluzzo had been so reticent! He knew that the news had spread but didn’t have the courage to tell him. Without a doubt it was Jacomuzzi who’d notified the journalists, so he could show off as usual. He couldn’t live without it. The man’s exhibitionism reached heights comparable only to what one might find in a mediocre actor or some writer with print runs of a hundred and fifty copies.

Now Pippo Ragonese, the station’s political commenta-tor, appeared on the screen. He wanted to talk, he said, about the cowardly Tunisian attack on one of our motor trawlers that had been peacefully fishing in our own territorial waters, which was the same as saying on the sacred soil of our homeland. It wasn’t literally soil, of course, being the sea, but it was still our homeland. A less fainthearted government than the current one in the hands of the extreme left would certainly have reacted more severely to a provocation that—Montalbano turned off the television.

o o o

The agitation he felt at Jacomuzzi’s brilliant move showed no signs of passing. Sitting on the small veranda that gave onto the beach and staring at the sea in the moonlight, he smoked three cigarettes in a row. Maybe Livia’s voice would calm him down enough so he could go to bed and fall asleep.

“Hi, Livia. How are you?”

“So-so.”

“I’ve had a rough day.”

“Oh, really?”

What the hell was wrong with Livia? Then he remem bered their phone call that morning, which had ended on a sour note.

“I called to ask you to forgive me for my boorishness.

But that’s not the only reason. If you only knew how much I missed you . . .”

It occurred to him that he might be overdoing it.

“Do you miss me, really?”

“Yes, a lot, really.”

“Listen, Salvo, why don’t I catch a plane on Saturday morning? I’ll be in Vigàta just before lunchtime.” He became terrified. Livia was the last thing he needed at the moment.

“No, no, darling, it’s such a bother for you . . .” When Livia got something in her head, she was worse than a Calabrian. She’d said Saturday morning, and Saturday morning it would be. Montalbano realized he’d have to call the commissioner the next day. Good-bye, pasta in squid ink!

o o o

Around eleven o’clock the next morning, since nothing was happening at headquarters, the inspector headed lazily off to Salita Granet. The first shop on that street was a bakery; it had been there for six years. The baker and his helper had indeed heard that a man who owned an office at number 28

had been murdered, but they didn’t know him and had never seen him. As this was impossible, Montalbano became more insistent in his questioning, acting more and more the cop until he realized that to get to his office from his home, Mr. Lapècora would have come up the opposite end of the street. And in fact, at the grocer’s at number 26, they did know the late lamented Mr. Lapècora, and how! They also knew the Tunisian girl, what’s-her-name, Karima, good-looking woman—and here a few sly glances and grins were exchanged between the grocer and his customers. They couldn’t swear by it, of course, but the inspector could surely understand, a pretty girl like that, all alone indoors with a man like the late Mr. Lapècora, who carried himself awfully well for his age . . . Yes, he did have a nephew, an arrogant punk who sometimes used to park his car right up against the door to the shop, so that one time Signora Miccichè, who tipped the scales at a good three hundred pounds, got stuck between the car and the door to the shop . . . No, the license plate, no. If it had been one of the old kinds, with pa for Palermo or mi for Milan, that would have been a different story.

The third and last shop on Salita Granet sold electrical appliances. The proprietor, a certain Angelo Zircone (as the sign said outside), was standing behind the counter, reading the newspaper. Of course he knew the deceased; the shop had been there for ten years. Whenever Mr. Lapècora passed by—in recent years it was only on Mondays,Wednesdays, and Fridays—he always said hello. Such a nice man. Yes, the appliance man also used to see the Tunisian girl, and a fine-looking girl she was. Yes, the nephew, too, now and then. The nephew and his friend.

“What friend?” asked Montalbano, taken by surprise.

It turned out that Mr. Zircone had seen this friend at least three times. He would come with the nephew, and the two of them would go to number 28. About thirty, blondish, sort of fat. That was about all he could tell him. The license plate? Was he kidding? With these license plates nowadays you couldn’t even tell if someone was a Turk or a Christian . . . A metallic gray BMW. If he said any more, he’d be making it up.

The inspector rang the doorbell to Lapècora’s office. No answer. Galluzzo, behind the door, was apparently trying to decide how to react.

“It’s Montalbano.”

The door opened at once.

“The Tunisian girl hasn’t shown up yet,” said Galluzzo.

“And she’s not going to. You were right, Gallù.” The policeman lowered his eyes, confused.

“Who leaked the news?”

“Jacomuzzi.”

To pass the time during his stakeout, Galluzzo had orga-nized himself. Having seized a pile of old issues of Il Venerdì di Repubblica, the glossy Friday magazine supplement of the Rome daily that Mr. Lapècora kept in orderly stacks on a shelf with fewer files, he had scattered them across the desk-top in search of photos of more or less naked women. After tiring of looking at these, he had applied himself to solving a crossword puzzle in a yellowed old magazine.

“Do I have to stay here all frigging day?” he asked dejectedly.

“I’m afraid so. You’ll have to make the best of it. Listen, I’m going in back, to take advantage of Mr. Lapècora’s bathroom.”

It wasn’t often that nature called so far off schedule for him. Perhaps the rage he’d felt the previous evening upon seeing Jacomuzzi playing the fool on television had altered his digestive rhythms.

He sat down on the toilet seat, heaving his customary sigh of satisfaction, and at that exact moment his mind brought into focus something he’d seen a few minutes earlier but had paid absolutely no attention to.

He leapt to his feet and raced into the next room, holding his pants and underpants at half-staff in one hand.

“Stop!” he ordered Galluzzo, who, in fright, turned pale as death and instinctively put his hands up.

There it was, right next to Galluzzo’s elbow: a black R in boldface, carefully cut out of some newspaper. No, not some newspaper, but a magazine: the paper was glossy.

“What is going on?” Galluzzo managed to articulate.

“It might be everything and it might be nothing,” replied the inspector, sounding like the Cumaean sibyl.

He pulled up his trousers, fastened his belt, leaving the zipper down, and picked up the telephone.

“Sorry to disturb you, signora. On what date did you say you received the first anonymous letter?”

“On the thirteenth of June of last year.” He thanked her and hung up.

“Gimme a hand, Gallù. We’re going to put all these issues of this magazine in order and see if any pages are missing.” They found what they were looking for: the June 7 issue, the only one from which two pages had been torn out.

“Let’s keep going,” said the inspector.

The July 30 issue was also missing two pages; the same for the September 1 issue.

The three anonymous letters had been composed right there, in the office.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Montalbano said politely.

Galluzzo heard him singing in the bathroom.