I thought I would be able to continue to write the second part of the Snack Thief, by Andrea Camilleri, the third book in the series about the work, loves and eating habits of Commissario Salvo Montalbano, the creative, at times inspirational State Police Inspector in the Italian station of Vigáta in Sicily, without delay or difficulty, but when I came to begin last night I quickly appreciated that a number of questions had to be answered and which would involve several quick rereadings of the novel.
In the first part I had explained that his deputy, Mimi, had taken on the investigation of the death of a Tunisian Fisherman when the fishing boat on which he worked was fired upon by a Tunisian military patrol vessel claiming it was attempting to stop the fishing boat because it had strayed into Tunisian waters without permission at night and without lights. The fishing boat Captain claimed they were in International waters and had come to Vigáta, the nearest port in Italian Waters rather than return to their home port of Mazára del Vallo fearing that the Tunisians would continue to fire at them if they continued in that direction..
Because I know, or thought I knew the full story I had made an assumption about the location of the port of Mazára del Vallo, and now I am still unsure except that it within a days drive and is very cosmopolitan because at one point a senior police chief tells Montalbano that Mazára is a kind of open town where migrants from North Africa and the Balkans come and go as they please without the authorities being able keep any kind of proper track whatever was expected of them by the central government in Rome.
Take the dead Tunisian fisherman for example; a man who the local free TV station declared was called Ben Dahab who had been on the boat for the first time. The fishing boat was part of a cooperative which agreed to take on at least one Tunisian per voyage, or perhaps it is one migrant worker possessing appropriate papers to live and work. In this instance the TV programme emphasised not only was this the first time the man had worked on this or any other boat from the port but almost nothing was known about him as he appeared to have no family or friends. It was established that he was 32 years of age and from Sfax in Tunisia.
It was the moment when a photo of the man was shown on the television that Salvo’s part time wife of six years walked in with the Snack Thief, five year old Francois, the child of Karima, the cleaning woman and provider of special services who had been employed by Aurilio Lapécora, the Importer and Exporter who had been found murdered in the lift of his apartment block, the case which Salvo was investigating.
When searching her two room two story little cottage with the help of Aisha, a fellow Tunisian who acted as a grandmother to the boy, caring for him while his mother worked or occasionally spent a night away as she had done the night before the murder there had been a commotion in the town with parents surrounding a policeman complaining that a child had been attacking their children and stealing the snack food the children were taking to school for their mid morning break. Salvo had gone with his force during the night and found the boy who he was convinced, as he had rightly concluded that this was the child of Karima who had been told to run off and hide by his mother when she was stopped from taking a bus on the day of the murdered Lapécora by a man regarded by Aisha as a bad man. Later established as Fahrid, for the way he treated her friend. It was also evident from the observations of an invalid woman, Signora Cozzo, who’s flat overlooked the front room of Lapécora that in addition having sex with Karima, that Fahrid was conducting an activity when he visited, including phone calls and correspondence.
On seeing the TV the boy had exclaimed that the man was his uncle, that is not Ben Dahab but Ahmed Moussa and that the surname of Karima was therefore also Moussa. So what this official statement about the man as Ben Dahab? From having had the beginnings of an explanation for the murder of Lapécora Montalbano was now not sure. He had become certain that Karima had gone to the home of Lapécora the night before and had been hidden by him in a room where her perfume was evident when Salvo visited later that day. According to his wife who Salvo had made show him what she had done that morning before leaving her husband asleep and taking the bus to visit her sister, recovering from cancer and she has been doing several times a week, she had not gone into the room and was therefore unaware her rival was in her home. Salvo also had a theory that Karima had made Lapécora let her stay over night so she could open the door for Fahrid to kill her employer him and now this appeared related to death of Karima’s brother.
From the information to hand Commissario Salvo Montalbano was also convinced that the five year old Françoise would not see his mother again. His long term woman companion Livia had immediately taken to the boy. The child had been ravenous on arrival at his home and then fallen asleep, later to be found sleeping in her arms.
Salvo quickly came to resent the child being in his home as the boy brought out all her pent up maternal longings within Livia so she cancelled her flight and made arrangements for her work to be covered and in a heart to heart with Salvo accepted that they were unlikely to marry for years because he was as he is and if they did eventually she was likely to have passed child bearing so this was her opportunity to have a child, if the boy was an orphan.
The position turned again after he saw the boy running away along the beach in tears calling for his mother. He followed and although a language barrier was between them they quickly came to understand each other as the boy appeared to recognise he would never see his mother again and Salvo shared his own experience of losing his mother and being alone. The boy expressed opposition to being placed in a residential home and Salvo made a commitment that this would not happen and the bond between them was established just as strong as between the boy and Livia.
However he soon also reached the view that the boy should not stay with them and he arranges for his Deputy to find someone safe, his married sister with two boys who live on one of the smaller islands to the main island of Sicily and he also sends Livia back to Genoa, although why he did not suggest she took the boy with her is not covered, perhaps he did not want the bond between her and the boy to become even stronger.
His motive was to protect the boy. Salvo had persuaded his chief to put pressure on the licensing authority to provide the ownership of the vehicle the priest cyclist who witnessed the boy’s mother being held against her wishes or so it seemed to him and he had had noted down the registration number. Usually such requests would take weeks so there was surprise and then dismay when the response came back quickly, the ownership of the vehicle was protected. The state security services were a law unto themselves, using criminals including the mafia to do their bidding and with links to politicians and political party interests
It is as the two cases have became connected that Salvo turns his attention to establishing the true circumstances of the death of the brother, no fisherman and who was behind the story of the event presented to the media by the Tunisian authorities and which appeared to be supported in general by the Italian government, and why?
He visits Mazára the following day and the Vice Commissioner Valente who had gone to a judge and obtained a warrant so they could search the room of the alleged fisherman as soon as Salvo arrived.
According to the landlady of the rented accommodation the man was well spoken and appeared well bred, a man of distinction who had arrived ten days before and wanted to stay another ten days having offered to pay for the whole month in advance. She had asked for 900000 expecting him to bargain like other Arabs and settled for five or six hundred thousand but he had pulled out a fat wad of 100000 bills and handed nine without hesitation. When the body of the man was examined at Vigáta he had only 10000 lire on him and no passport. The only thing of interest is that they found a plane ticket from Rome to Palermo ten days previously.
The next person contacted is an elementary school teacher who acted as a link with the Tunisian Community where the local school was providing a unit for Tunisian children and this had attracted attention in the home country and a paper published an article in the school earlier in the year and Ben Dahab had contacted and introduced himself as a journalist wanting to write about the local Tunisian people. He wanted to be regarded as another immigrant looking for a job and said he wanted to sign on a fishing boat. He had integrated well into the local community and they had met a few times. They, his group which had a fund had paid for the funeral. They had attended a festival and a photographer had taken a photo about which the man had protested. However following his death and the publicity when a TV crew arrived he had passed to them the photo that had been taken.
The school teacher then disclosed he had telephoned the paper in Tunis to make arrangement for the return of the body to be told the journalist was at his desk. He was unable to help with information about relatives elsewhere in Sicily.
When they asked if the name Ahmed Moussa meant anything the school man paled and explained that this was the name of a Terrorist - a blood thirsty killer so what had such a man to do with their enquiries? When they told him the man said he felt ill in a feeble voice. Three years before Moussa had blown up a cinema showing a cartoon film aimed for young children where it could be said the lucky ones died while the rest were blinded, maimed and some disabled for life. His group were an extreme nationalist faction viewed with suspicion by other fundamentalists. A large bounty had been placed on his head by the Tunisian government. The schoolmaster said his response was not one of fear but horror that he had been involved with cold blooded killer of young children.
The information also had impact on Salvo and Valente who ordered coffee which they drank in silence reflecting on what they had learned. It was evident that Moussa had not signed on to fish or in anticipation of being killed. They decided to summon the Captain of the fishing boat to hear what his story was in the new circumstances. Later Salvo speculated back at the office that Ahmed had put to sea either to be put ashore in Tunisia secretly or to meet someone off shore, an explanation which Salvo favoured most.
There was then an incident which only after reading the whole book the significance is explained and one of the mysteries solved. Salvo runs out of petrol on his way back to the office and has to be rescued by the Carabinieri, and such is the relationship between the two forces that Salvo has to pretend that something else happened for his delay. However it is at this point that he sees two passenger carrying and stopping buses come to a halt at stops on either side of the road at the same time going in opposite directions to and from the same destinations.
It is also at this time that men come forward after seeing the pictures of Karima and her son to admit they hired the woman as a cleaner and were provided with additional service for additional payments. On the assumption that all the men have come forward having assumed that if they did not do so, the Commissario believed he had obtained her full schedule, Salvo was then able to calculate her monthly and annual earnings and the grand total for the time she is known to have been on the Island. Even assuming she received significantly more from Lapécora there was a huge gap between the savings from her income and the amount in the pass book, about twice as much again.
The statement from the Tunisians authorities after the Italian formal protest was also something which further aroused Salvo’s concerns and suspicions as they stick to their story that the boat was in their waters near the town from which Karima and Ahmed had come that the military patrol boat had fired warning shots for the fishing boat without lights to stop and when it continued there was a further burst of fire which killed one of those on board who by coincidence and fortunately happened to be one of their own nationals, and who by now Salvo knew had been a dangerous Terrorist maniac with a price on his head.
It was the child Françoise who provided the precipitating inspiration for Salvo to begin to understand how all the pieces of the mystery so far might fit together, or more accurately it was his Deputy, who fancied Livia and brought a jigsaw puzzle for the child to play as the excuse of calling on her when she was alone without Salvo to hand. Livia had told Salvo how quickly the child had put the pieces together and then the child expressed a view which first dumbfounded the Inspector and then made him declare the boy a genius and his Deputy a great asset for his action in providing the jigsaw. The boy had commented that Jigsaws were easy to do because the pieces were cut in such a way to make the one picture and he thought it would be better if this was not so and it was possible to create several pictures with the same pieces. Now I do not for a moment accept that the child was able to express such a profound thought which to my mind goes to the heart of the police failure around the world to often convict the wrong person for a crime or for others to reach conclusions, politicians and media especially about a situation because of the information presented to them but which is in fact only one conclusion of several possible from the information to hand. We too readily listen to the facts as they are presented and say yes 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 makes 10 but if you sit in a court you will find that another person, usually the defendant will argued that from these numbers which may be accepted if you add one more or subtract one less, you will get a different total. The point the boy was making and one which I have found from experience is that although the numbers do add to ten, it is a different ten if you add 3 to 2 and then 4 to 1 although the amount is that same it is different because of the way the numbers are added together. The same pieces provide more than one way of looking at the information, more than one picture more than one solution and it is therefore dangerous to accept the first solution without exploring if there are others just as valid
It was not what happened to Ahmed which Salvo directed his attention but to the fact that it was possible for Mrs Lapécora to take the bus from Vigáta to Fiacca where her sister lived get off and then return home, having produced evidence that she had got the bus before the death of her husband but quickly returned by getting on the bus from Fiacca to Vigáta as witnessed by Salvo albeit much later in the day. Inspection of the bus timetables and contact with the drivers of the said buses was the next step because this was a journey which the woman had made several times a week ever since her sister had been diagnosed with cancer and was therefore recognised.
Salvo was now able to work out that not only had Lapécora’s wife done this but it was possible for her to have then got to Fiacca only an hour later than her statement had stated. Had she and not Karima killed her husband? Curious more curious! Perhaps the two events were not connected in the way Salvo and his colleagues and commenced to believe? While they waited to interview the woman again the opportunity came to interview the Captain of the fishing boat.
The Captain, and owner of the vessel, the Santopadre, Angelo Prestia, was a fat sweaty man and Valente and Salvo were initially unable to get him to tell the truth and he passed the buck to one Commendatore Mario Spadaccia, Chief of the Cabinet, (but at what level of government in relation to the Police I remain in ignorance. He had provided the Captain with his card for such an enquiry. (I will report the complexity of law enforcement in Italy as well as the complex structure of the State police system at the end of part three).
Spadaccia explained that he had been asked to assist the Tunisian authorities by his boss on the basis of arranging for a journalist investigating conditions to sign on a fishing boat whose captain he knew would cooperate. It was at this point that Salvo’s boss telephoned to advise that the car number driven by the man who had abducted Karima belonged to the Italian Secret Service. The first action of Salvo was to arrange for Karima’s friend Aisha to be taken to a place of safety. His second was get his deputy to pick up the child and take him to a place of Safety and the third was tell Livia to get out of town.
In confirming that Valente agreed his new understanding Salvo enlighten us the reader who may not have made 10 from 1,2,3,4. The wanted Terrorist Ahmed Moussa had used the man Fahrid, he who visited Karima and had abducted her in a car provided by the Italian Secret Service, to blackmail Lapécora into using his Import and Export business as a front for some as yet unknown purpose. Ahmed comes to Italy believing he has the support/protection of the Italian Secret service for his Movement/ cause with a view to having an off shore meeting of some kind unaware that the Italian and Tunisian secret services are in cahoots in a plan to get rid of him and his sister and indeed anyone else who could identify involvements, the boy the old lady carer and Lapécora himself, perhaps even his wife had she remained at home that day.
Although convinced Karima was dead and disappeared Salvo gets his colleagues and the media to intensify the search for the boy and the mother and he formally asks the registration authorities to identify the owner of the vehicle as the woman is wanted for the murder of Lapécora. He has a plan which is only revealed towards the end of the book.
He is a realist about the powers of the state and politicians, and of the Mafia. He therefore often works towards achieving a sense of justice as fairness which is outside official system. His trusted assistant Fazio goes to the apartment of Lapécora while the widow is away and removes a small cup from the display cabinet which is placed in an evidence bag together with the knife used to kill her husband.
With Livia taking sleeping ills before her journey back to Genoa, Salvo leaves his apartment with all the change available and goes to a local street phone to make a number of calls.
His media contact is advised to someone with a camera outside police headquarters in the morning and then a favour, a small remote control video camera that is silent. He then made a call to the boss of the head of Cabinet at Trapani pretending to be a newspaper from Milan exposing a story about the alleged fisherman and the role of himself and the Secret Service. Salvo is convinced that the man was being honest in his ignorance which convinces that the head of the Cabinet misled or lied.
He then advises Valente that the whole thing had been set by Spadaccia and arranges to see him the following day...
He then contacts Mimi was his last coin to establish where the boy is now located and Mimi protests about the way Livia had looked at him when he had taken the boy away to sister on an isolated farm with her husband and two sons of similar age.
He used up all his spare coinage knowing that the home telephone was likely to be listened to by the security services or someone on their behalf. Livia was in bed already asleep having taken sleeping pills angry at him, saying she wanted the boy but ready to depart to her home the following day.
Following his leak of some of the truth, local station media was issuing denials by the Tunisian authority claiming that there were a dozen men with the name of the man killed. His friend brought the camera requested and shows him how it works.
The following day he left before Livia awoke and he knew his note advising that Mimi would take her to the airport was inadequate even though it also said he would phone later in the day. When he arrived at the police headquarters he found Fazio anxious having failed to make contact unaware that the phone had been switched off. Aisha had been found dead at her home. Montalbano punched himself in the face for failing to save his witness. It appeared the woman had been unable to keep away from her home and returned to meet her destiny with death. He visited and arranged to get an official report on the death.
He then visited a notary he knew with the bank book and established that in order for a trust to be set up so the boy would inherit when of age he needed proof of the death of his mother/ He obtained a receipt for the book after asking the notary to hold for him.
He then summoned Lapécora’s widow to the station and wrote again vehicle registration authorities demanding they private the name and address of the owner of Security Service vehicle as the owner was wanted in connection with the murders of Karima and Aisha,
He would have admit that with the help of Fazio he tricked Mrs Lapécora into admitting that she had killed her husband after finding out that the Karima had been in her home and then tried to put the blame on Karima. THe motive was not jealousy but self protection in the sense that she wanted to stop the flow marital funds to the woman with the 200 million transferred to her/the last straw.
Early for his meting with Valente and the Commendatore Spadaccia Salvo stops at a restaurant for lunch, a sauté of clams in bread crumbs, a roast turbot with oregano and caramelised lemon and a butter chocolate timbale in orange sauce.
Spadaccia immediately admitted it was not his boss who asked him to arrange the visit of Moussa but a Ministry in Rome. This was all Salvo said he wanted confirmed which infuriated the Commendatore no end, but served the purpose of bringing him face to face with Ship’s captain as he arrived to be interviewed again. Angelo Prestia simmered in the next office while they enjoyed a cigarette in silence. Salvo suggested that Angelo had participated in premeditated murder and that the Commendatore had made a sworn statement saying he had never met or had contact with the Captain. They then sent the man away bewildered.
Salvo explained that he has lit the fuse which would blow up when the two me to work out what was going on. They considered that the captain had become too well known following the media attention to be silenced in the way of the two women. On his way home he passes the restaurant where he had lunch and then turns his vehicle around abruptly and goes to cook to check how he prepared his striped mullet which no doubt he then enjoys.
The following morning Salvo went to see his boss to explain the story to date but also a deliberate planned lie that the vehicle number he had given to be checked was the wrong one and therefore the vehicle did not belong to the secret service.
When he arrives at his desk he finds a letter from a friend of his father to say that the man was dying of cancer and that he has only a few days to live. A year before when Salvo had been wounded Livia said his father had phoned her every day although he had only once come to see him in when he was convalescing.
He then spends the day alone reflecting wondering how the situation has come about that the had stopped communicating directly. Later he phones his boss to explain why he would not be coming to dinner and that meal of pasta in squid ink. He was invited because the boss wanted announce his early retirement early and at the same time to say he was recommending a promotion for Salvo, a promotion which would involve a move from Vigáta. He then got iron his car and went to a town where three films were showing and chose a film for children which because it was late there was no one in cinema except himself. He found himself laughing out loud at some of the funny moments.
On return home late he spotted the vehicle of Colonel Lohengrin Pera of the Italian Security services waiting for him a man of such short stature that Salvo refers to him as an elf. He sits the man down makes an excuse to put away a book and sets the camera rolling.
No comments:
Post a Comment