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A PENGUIN MYSTERY
EXCURSION TO TINDARI
Andrea Camilleri is the author of many books, including his Montalbano series, which has been adapted for Italian television and translated into nine languages. He lives in Rome.
Stephen Sartarelli is an award-winning translator. He is also the author of three books of poetry, most recently
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First published in Penguin Books 2005
9 10
Translation copyright © Stephen Sartarelli, 2005
All rights reserved
Originally published in Italian as
editore via Siracusa 50 Palermo.
Publishers Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBL1CATION DATA
Camilleri, Andrea.
[Gita a Tindari. English]
Excursion to Tindari / Andrea Camilleri ; translated by Stephen Sartarelli.
p. cm.
“A Penguin mystery.”
eISBN : 978-1-101-12682-0
I. Sartarclli, Stephen,__II. Title.
PQ4863.A3894G3713 2004
853’.914-dc22 2004053654
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1
He realized he was awake, as his mind was functioning logically and not following the absurd labyrinths of dream. He could hear the rhythmic swashing of the sea; a predawn breeze was blowing through the open window. Yet he stubbornly kept his eyes closed, knowing that the ill humor boiling inside him would come spewing out the moment he opened his eyes, leading him to say or do something stupid he would later regret.
The sound of whistling on the beach reached his ears. At that hour, surely someone walking to work in Vigata. The tune was familiar, but he couldn’t recall the title or lyrics. What did it matter? He never had been able to whistle himself. Not even by sticking a finger up his ass.
Some dumbshit ditty a Milanese friend at the police academy used to sing to him sometimes, which had stuck in his memory ever since. His inability to whistle had made him the favorite victim of his childhood schoolmates, all masters of the art of whistling like shepherds, sailors, mountaineers, even adding fanciful variations. Schoolmates! That’s what had ruined his night of sleep! He’d been remembering them after reading in the newspaper, shortly before going to bed, that Carlo Militello, not yet fifty years old, had been named president of the second-most- important bank in Sicily. The paper expressed its heartfelt best wishes to the new president and printed a photograph of him: eyeglasses, almost certainly gold-rimmed, designer suit, impeccable shirt, exquisite tie. A successful man, a man of order, defender of Values (that is, stock-market values as well as Family, Country, and Freedom). Montalbano remembered him well. Not as a classmate in primary school, but as a comrade in ‘68!
“We’ll hang the enemies of the people with their ties!”
“Banks are only good for being robbed!”
Carlo Militello, nicknamed Carlo Martello—Italian for Charles Martel—because of his supreme-commander attitudes and his penchant for confronting adversaries with words like hammer blows and punches worse than hammer blows, was the most intransigent, most inflexible of anyone. Compared to him, the Ho Chi Minh so often invoked by demonstrators seemed a social-democratic reformist. Martello forced everyone to stop smoking cigarettes so as not to enrich the state monopoly Joints, yes, to their heart’s content. Only once in his life, he claimed, had Comrade Stalin done the right thing, and that was when he’d set about bleeding the banks to finance the Party. “State” was a word that gave them all nightmares, throwing them into a rage like bulls before a red cape. What Montalbano remembered most from those days was a poem by Pasolini, defending the police against the students at Valle Giulia, in Rome. All his friends had spat on those verses, whereas he, Montalbano, had tried to
