There was time on my visit to the midlands over the weekend of October 5th to 8th to commence reading The Snack Thief the first of the Andrea Camilleri Montalbano books made into TV play and shown in the first series on BBC 4 earlier in the year. The book provides the opportunity to establish the brilliant closeness between the characters in the books and the TV productions and the subtle translation in the English Language by Stephen Sartorially a poet with three collections of his works published. I completed the reading in the early hours of October 11th.
I thought the TV production was brilliant but the book is significantly better than expectation, satisfying and enjoyable experience which inspires me to attempt to write my own works rather than fill me with the sense of failure that has been the basis of my experience and artwork writings over the past decade.
The Snack Thief begins, as in other stories and situations do with Commissario, (Inspector) Salvo Montalbano receiving a misleading telephone call from Catarella the station officer, in control of communications, the front desk and general factotum for the Inspector and his deputy. What Catarella had wanted to convey is that an Italian fishing boat had been fired on by a Tunisian patrol/customs boat and that a man on board had been killed, riddled with machine gun bullets. Not able to arouse his chief Catarella had approached the deputy Mimi Augello who from the book we learn that is there is competitive rivalry combined with mutual respect with his boss, something I only now vaguely recall as their friendships becomes cemented over the subsequent years in which they work together.
Mimi, then a single ladies man and lustful of Salvo’s long term woman friend, Livia Burlando, has taken over the case because although the dead man was from Tunisia and killed by Tunisians with the incident alleged to have taken in Tunisian waters, the Italian fishing boat returned to its home port in Sicily and within the jurisdiction of the police force station in the fictitious Italian town of Vigáte. There much publicity and public outrage when it appears the fishing boat was in International Waters when the attempt was made to stop the vessel by gun fire which killed the fisherman who happened to be the only Tunisian on board.
While deputy Inspector Augello concerns himself with this development Salvo personally investigates the case of a married man found dead in an apartment block lift. Initially there is no connection between the two cases and then it appears that the same individual, gang or group is responsible for the two deaths and others that occur subsequently, and it is only towards the end of the book is it clear that while there is an important connection between the two murders they were committed for very different reasons by different people.
I have said too much too quickly because there is a clever and detailed brilliantly written building up solving the mysteries which as with Romanzo Criminale also reveals the interface between the Italian Security Services and crime and politics although not in this instance the Mafia, the Comorra or other forms of organised crime which have played, and probably continue to play such a role in this beautiful country bedevilled by corruption and crime and more recently its failing baking system.
Salvo discovers that there are three individuals, in one instance a pair, mother and daughter, involved in the discovery of the body and their behaviour demonstrates the understandable tendency, understandable and acceptable to my way of thinking, tendency of Italians to look the other way, to walk on by so to speak when unexpectedly encountering something which could mean they are called a as a witness, involving the police, the court and the media. What we subsequently learn is that the man was murdered on the same floor as his flat, one of a pair, and that the lift was taken down to the ground floor by the murderer with the body alongside. The crime was committed by one person although another had planned to do likewise and left the premises on discovering that someone else had done the deed for him/them. This man had an accomplice who was also a witness to what happened.
What Inspector Montalbano discovers on the first day of the investigation is that Mr Culicchia, an accountant, returning from the shops finds the body in the lift on the ground floor and travels up because his joints can no longer cope with stairs. A bottle of wine rolls out of one of the shopping bags and is first thought to be connected with the dead man but is his. Because the wine has become part of the crime scene Salvo arranges for another bottle to be bought so the man does not have to explain to his wife how he came to lose it. Mr Culicchia had spotted he had dropped the bottle but when he went to retrieve, the lift was back on the ground floor and the man who looked after the block, described as a security guard, one Guiseppi Consentino had found the dead man, called the authorities and prevented further access to the lift. That Salvo arranges for the bottle of wine, replacing that left in the lift appears a compassionate act but it also indicates that Salvo is inconsistent in his behaviour towards friends, colleagues, suspects and villains. He has something of a code of justice as fairness but he is also inconsistent.
In this instance his enquiries reveal that Signora Piccirillo and her daughter Luigina had also discovered the body when calling for the lift to go down and out but they had seen the body and did not want to be involved so they had shut the door and were content when the lift was called for someone else to find which was the security man who mentions the lift had come down from the fifth floor when the dead man lived on the fourth and this alerts Salvo that others had discovered the body before the security man. In order to teach the women a lesson Salvo arranges them to be taken to the station for further questioning and keeps them their waiting for several hours before they are released.
The dead man is Aurilio Lapécora whose wife (Antoinette Palmisano) was out visiting a sister when the body of her husband was found and the investigations commenced. They learn that the man ran an import and export business which requires his attention on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays despite the fact that the business appeared to have been closed down. The rest of the time Mr Lapécora appears to have spent sitting and watching the television although as we are to learn this is not an accurate picture of his lifestyle and interests. When the wife returns she is definite that the culprit is her husband’s mistress, who poses as a cleaning woman. She had found out when a local home furnisher mentioned that he would be delivering their new sofa bed and when it had not arrived at their home, which did not surprise her as she could not understand their need, she checked and discovered it had been delivered to the office matching the green colour of the second room.
Salvo and his colleagues visit and find that the front office has an old desk and many dusty files which covered business until three years before. The second room was clean and furnished with the sofa bed, a television, a refrigerator and well stocked with drinks. There is also a
large nude figure which Salvo considers crude bordering on the offensive. So if he business was closed does he attend over three days each week, because of an affair with cleaner? It seems so, at least at first.
An important ingredient of this and all the novels is the relationship between Salvo and a woman who lives and works in Genoa, Livia and where in this book the relationship has continued for six years with Livia mainly visiting Salvo over weekends and holidays, although he also visits Genoa and in a later novel we learn that he has a key to her home as she to his. She is to play her most significant role of the books in this volume
The other ingredient is his love of food and where he insists that no one talks to him so he can concentrate on the eating. This has less significance in relation to the main story lines in this book but I will also give much attention, for as those who know my writings will appreciate I like my food although I neither cook or have cooked for me at home similar delights and all too rarely do I got for great food in restaurants governed by my pocket and the constant need for economy. I will leave the delights he mentions until the end although the relationship with Livia becomes of crucial significance in this book,
Salvo then receives and invitation to visit a widow, a retired school teacher with a mobility disability who lives in a property across the way from the office of Mr Lapécora and when Salvo calls he is unsure what the woman can possibly have to say until she asks him to stand close to her so he can share the view she has from her sedentary position through her window across to that in one of the rooms of the office of Lapécora, the front office. Where today it is possible to see Salvo’s colleagues having their lunch at the table in the room and where the landline telephone is also located as well as a typewriter. She mentions that when the room is lit the gauze covering at the window hides nothing from view but we the readers are not immediately told what it is she had seen and which shapes the rest of investigation concentrating on the as yet mysterious cleaning lady. The woman invites him to stay for a meal and thinking that she will eat food as appropriate for an elderly woman with restricted mobility he declines but then changes his mind on learning that she is to eat braised beef and also a dish of Pasta of alla Norma, although the latter is not described but worthwhile looking up as named after Opera by Bellini who came from Sicily and is made of eggplant usually fried but some prefer roasted with ricotta salata (a firm cheese grated) and tomatoes, hot chill flakes, sea salt oregano and basil. And of course the spaghetti. I mention this meal now because of his acceptance of hospitality while on duty and investigating murder where presumable anyone and everyone is a potential suspect.
It appears that there is no policy in the Sicily police of not accepting hospitality during an official investigation, and before this he has shared coffee with an attractive resident elsewhere in the block of flats and as we are to learn he also becomes more intimately involved with witnesses who may also prove a suspects Salvo works hard and becomes single minded obsessive until he solves a case, and is full of compassion and will bend the rules in the interests of a meaningful justice, although this is not to suggest that he is not also a man of clear vision and principles. However he loses his temper quickly becomes frustrated if his instructions are not carried out instantly.
After the meal Salvo heads for the home of the woman cleaner one, Karima, on a road out of a former small village since expanded, and comprising a simple two room two story dwelling and clean. He notices the perfume Volupte (Voluptuous?) which he had also found traces in a room at the home of the dead man and at the office of the murdered man. He sends Fazio, his loyal assistant, back to the station leaving him without a vehicle in order to learn more about the Karima and the old woman who cares for the girl and her son as only a mother and grandmother can.
While many of the characters in this and all his books are fully drawn, or at least we learn some of their important traits and their attitudes, the picture of Karima even by the end of the book is less rounded than I would like and expect, We learn that is a Tunisian by birth, Ah ha you say was not the fisherman killed on the Italian fishing boat also a Tunisian. In deed this is so but I will leave for now the question of a connection.
What I will say is that she had come to live and work in Sicily several years before and that she also in fact woman undertaking cleaning work for the murdered man three times a week, although possibly not as frequently in the beginning and for others who come forward when a picture of her as reported missing with her son is shown on a local TV station as a result of a request by the Commissario. In addition to charging 50000 lire for the cleaning work visit she also provided additional services for which she charged three times as much, remembering than even by the time when the lire because the Euro two thousand lire could be exchanged for one Euro which I believe was about £15 at the time an amounting to £60 if there was special service in addition. These services were provided once a month sometimes twice.
From the old woman across the way, “Rear Window” observing neighbour, Signora Clementina Vasile Cozzo it appears that the murdered man enjoyed oral sex with Karima although the sofa bed suggests that she extended other favours to him. Arising from the TV publicity the other clients where she cleaned on regular basis volunteered information about the specialist services which I shall not detail other than to say that one individual liked to be spanked, another bathed while a third bathed her.
Salvo also reveals later what Signora Cozzo had seen from her “Rear Window,” a naked man coming to the phone one night followed by a naked Karima both emerging from the room with the sofa bed. It appears that the young man visited at intervals from memory about once a month, and was not there at times when Lapécora was not, there was much telephoning and use of a typewriter which Salvo was able to establish was different from the one found at the office and which he deduced had a different alphabet in the days before computers which with appropriate software can change the language of the keyboard. This all suggested the young man was not just a pimp.
Salvo insists on staying at the home of Karima talking to the old woman friend of the missing woman and whose name is Aisha, arranging for his assistant to take the car and return to the police station at Vigáte. Although his French is limited Salvo is able to gain the confidence of the woman and learns that the night before she disappeared she had asked Aisha to look after her son as she was to be away for the night and when she returned the following day she was in a state and gather her son, the five year old Françoise and a suitcase saying had to go away and set off for the bus stop.
Aisha was then able to confirm that after Karima had left with her son, the young man, the same one seen by Signora Cozzo at the office, and who also visited Karima at her home from time to time, occasionally staying over and she describes as a bad man because of his violence had called and rushed off in his car on learning she was not home.
Aisha then reveals that she is holding the bank pass book for Karima and it contains 500 million lira or 2500000 euros including a recent addition of 200 million lira confirming that she, the young man and Lapécora were involved in something more that prostitution.
There was also one other significant aspect of his search on the home and office of Lapécora which becomes confirmed on his visit to the home of Karima and her son. At all three he notes the existence of a strong perfume. Later as more of the jigsaw pieces are fitted together he makes Mrs Lapécora go through what she did on the morning of the murder she left early while her husband was still asleep in bed and he makes her act out her recollections rather than tell him. This confirms that she did not enter the room where Salvo believes, Karima and stayed at the flat overnight.
I have mentioned that Mrs Lapécora was convinced that it was Karima who killed her husband having learned that eh had a mistress at the office because of the delivery of the sofa bed. She also reveals that she had received three anonymous letters informing of her husband’s infidelity. These had been in the traditional form of cut out lettering from a paper or magazine but could not be examined by forensics because they had been burnt, at least this is what the widow said, but later she had produced one still in its envelope and this led Salvo to make an important step forward because he was able to establish that the envelop had been typed on the office typewriter and the wording taken from copies of magazines at the office. The husband had sent the letters denouncing himself but why and why had his wife not confronted and made more of an issue of the infidelity.
This had first come to Salvo in the middle of the night when he then telephones Mimi to demand immediate return of his loaned book the Le Carré Smiley novel, his first, Call for the Dead, in which the husband a Civil Servant at the Home Office with responsibility for Classified information had sent a letter to his Employers denouncing himself as a traitor. His deputy as is Fazio and others at the station have long since given up on rebelling when Salvo demands instant action at all times day and night without explaining first why and any possible significance in relation to a current investigation. In this instance Mini leaves the book at the door, driving off at spend back to his bed without wanting to why his boss insisted at that hour.
There was another indication that the dead man had attempted to seek help without going to the police. The Lapécora have a son, a practicing doctor of medicine aged 32 who has been estranged from his father for over a decade and has as little contact as possible. Following publicity he brought Salvo a letter his father had sent when allegedly eh was away and which clearly states that the man has got himself into something put of his depths and he feels threatened. He wants his son to immediately come to him. The son claims that when he returned from his trip away and read the letter he had phone his father who said the problem had gone away and the son was no longer needed. Salvo does not believe the young man and for a moment thinks of a way to make life officially uncomfortable for the son. This all confirms his growing belief that the office was being used for some kind of business or activity about which they were not able to find evidence.
Salvo as I have indicated is a man who reacts to those he feels do not cooperate with his enquiries and one such individual is the head of the local post office, the Commendotore Baldassare Marzachi who he asks for the name of the postman serving the Salita Granet district where the office is located. The man Commendotore, who Salvo calls an imbecile, wants a Judges warrant for something any of his subordinates would have provided without a second thought. Salvo then creates the situation when it looks to a subordinate who enters the office that the Head Postmaster is about to strangle him. He blackmails the man into submission, calling him a piece of shit.
The purpose of the request was to find out the nature of the mail delivered to the office and the obliging postman explained that there was not much but some came regularly from overseas a company Salanidis and they supplied Dates. From the local printer who had known the man and his business for over two decades Montalbano learned that new stationery had been ordered and delivered to the office. None of this information remained at the office.
His also attempt to establish the kind of life the dead man led when he was not at the office and finds that eh regular meets a group at the Caffé Albanese on Tuesdays to play cards and talk. Able to question one of the men present he finds nothing he did not already know and when Salvo challenges that the man seems to nothing about his alleged friend, the man recounts a gruesome story of a woman the story of a woman who left her son with her brother who had then chopped the baby up which he then boiled. I now come to the turning point in the case and why the book is called the Snack Thief.
There are three strands which come together.
On leaving the homes of Karima and her neighbour Aisha, Salvo had seen there was a mini crowd commotion surrounded one of the police man attending the investigation. The policeman explained that these were parents whose children said that a small boy had attacked them on the way to school taking from them food snacks which the parents had provided because of the length of the school morning until lunch time which in Italy is usually at one or even one thirty.
Salvo is approached by a man who has seen the local news photo of Karima and her son but mentioned that he had seen the woman, afraid in a stationery car as he passed by on his cycle. He had not the seen the child. But he does note the registration number
Right at the beginning of the story after Salvo had been woken by Catarella with news of the killing of the Tunisian fisherman he had switch off the phone. He had been contacted by his long term woman friend Livia who lives and works in Genoa. She said she was coming to see him at the weekend although because he had become involved in the Lapécora case he thought it was best she delayed the visit until the case was over, She was insistent and said she was coming over regardless and that he did not need to attend the airport or go out of his way as she would let herself into his home as she had her own key and await his return. He had also warned her that his boss who was planning to retire early had invited him and then both of them when he said she was coming to visit for an evening meal where his wife would be cooking a meal of Pasta with the ink of the squid. It was not this delicacy which Salvo feared but the cooking of his boss for which she had no ability but liked to believe that she had.
It was the arrival of Livia and something she said that caused Salvo to go out in the middle of he night assembling all his team and going to the village of Karima and Aisha leaving police vehicles outside the village and those entering dressed in civilian clothing. Usually he went off leaving Livia without explanation but in this instance while there was no explanation to her or the other officers, he asked her to come with him, saying she would be helpful.
It should evident from having presented these strands together that Salvo was assuming that Karima’s boy had managed to run off when his mother had been stopped at the bus stop and had been living wild since then, attacking the children for food out of desperation. He was the Snack Thief.
This was confirmed when Salvo waiting patiently until the dawn spied movement and boy was making his way to his mother’s home from where he had been hiding. It was as Salvo and suspected when the boy calmed down on being caught and was taken to his home to be looked after by Livia. This was to prove not only the turning point in the case but to have dramatic and significant repercussions for Salvo and for Livia and their relationship of six years.
Before ending this first part I mentioned at the beginning that I enjoyed the love of Salvo for good cooking and of food generally. He is insistent that when the food is before him there is no talking so he can concentrate on detecting the flavours of what he is eating similar to that of the connoisseur’s drinker of fine wines.
While I have mentioned that when Salvo joined Mrs Cozzo for her lunch which included braised beef, red meat is rarely mentioned as part of his diet which always appears to include a pasta dish and fish, sometimes the two are combined. He tends to eat out at midday, sometimes pretending to Livia he has eaten a sandwich, and sometimes deciding to stop for one course and then taking two or even three as he enjoys his sweets, especially Neapolitan ice creams. In the evenings he east out on the veranda of his home directly on the sandy beach, usually deserted, from where he swims early mornings and in the evenings. Unless Livia is present and cooks for him his daily (housekeeper) will leave the evening meal prepared for him in the refrigerator, meals prepared to his exacting standards and likings. At one point he goes home to Pasta with Broccoli and a Roulade of Tuna.
At the start of the novel he savours “a lalonga all‘agro dolce” - hake in a sauce of anchovies. I digress mentioning first an account in one of the Alexandrian Quartet books with Laurence Durrell when he describes the enjoyment of opening and eating a whole tin of olives, I cannot remember if these were stuffed with anchovy pieces or not, but I also enjoy separately the anchovy where a tiny jar or tin costs more than a generous helping of sprats, such is the way of things. Finding amore inexpensive tin of anchovies at Tesco on way home from the Midlands I purchase three tins and consume some with tea. Salvo’s dish of hake with a sauce of anchovies mixed with whisked egg to create the sauce is in fact his starter or antipasto and arrives with eight pieces of fish, sufficient, he comments for four diners. His deputy joins him and orders spaghetti with clams which the Commissario is horrified to note his colleagues smothers with Parmesan cheese and then commits a further culinary crime by adding two spoonfuls of pepper.
After the meal on returning to his office Montalbano learns that the authorities have decided that the investigation should handed over to the Tunisians which means Mimi has lost his case whereas Salvo is fully engaged in his which he regards as a victory over his deputy. This is also significant in terms of the connections between the two cases. This will be covered in my second and final writing of the experience of the Snack Thief.
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