The latest episodes of Montalbano, the Potter’s Field, rank among the best if not the best although I was confused during the performance because of the inclusion of a scene taken directly from the Snack Thief. In the Snack Thief Salvo goes to stay at a restaurant Inn for a few days avoiding visiting the hospital where father is dying. There he meets an academic teacher of philosophy who like him insists on eating in silence so they can enjoy the meal which includes pasta with crab meat and a sublime second dish which in the book they consider the various herbs and other contents as a miracle. They talk of the background of the chef who reveals he was a petty criminal who was visited by the Virgin Mary. There is an important conversation between Salvo and the Academic about their tendency to run away from unpleasantness.
In the Potter Field, the deputy Mimi Assistant is being a pain in the backside driving Catarella, the front desk man and series clown to tears and annoying everyone at the station to an extent that Fazio, the faithful and trusted Inspector assistant reveals to Salvo that they have considered making a formal complaint via their Federation. Salvo speculates that Mimi is having an affair because one point his wife Beba chastises the Inspector for keeping the Inspector out at all hours at night and Salvo covers for the what he believes is the errant husband by apologising for his actions.
The episode begins similarly to the last with Salvo having a nightmare while the rain teams down outside. On this occasion the nightmare consists of a mafia politician insisting that Montalbano takes a job in the new government is forming and Catarella comes in and says he will shoot Salvo if he agreed to the request and both men then start to shoot the Inspector at which point he wakes up because Catarella is at the door, Montalbano having switched off his phone.
They drive to what is a very muddy place where the rain appears to have brought to the surface a body which has disappeared again by the time Salvo arrives to join his deputy and Fazio who have been sheltering from the rain. Catarella, who has already slipped down an embankment, discovers the body when he slips again into a small clump of shrubs. To say body is not strictly accurate because the bag contains thirty body parts and the face and finger tips have been obliterated to make identification as difficult as possible. The death is believed to have occurred by a single shot to the head about two months before.
On the journey Catarella rehearses his part in a passion play as Judas. Thirty pieces of silver... Get the connection!!!!!! And alter Salvo watches Catarella in his performance and again as with his taking on board electronic communication and coming top of the class he is excellent in his performance and draws applause, Italian style for the watch crowd. Catarella is his own worst enemy, something which I know all too well.
A beautiful young wife arrives at the station insisting seductively for the help of Montalbano to locate her husband, a ships officer from whom she has had no contact and where she has received a postcard which arouses her suspicions because the handwriting is different from others previously received. She is flirtatious to an extent which concerns Fazio knowing the propensity of his boss to get involved with beautiful young women while conducting an a long distant relationship with his long term woman friend Livia who lives and works in Genoa
Before the visit from the officer’s wife Salvo received a report from a passer by of witnessing what appeared to be an attempt to hit a run the same young woman. He has only got a couple of the letters of the car index but later after seeing the same vehicle he notes down then index and provides this to Salvo.
The young woman explains that because of the brevity of her husband’s stays ashore they have rented a small apartment by the docks so they can spend all the time together. At first Salvo dismisses the woman’s concern suggesting that her husband has run off with someone but the woman shows him an intimate and passionate letter. Having been given the key to the apartment Salvo arranges for the local police to visit and they report indications different from what the wife has stated. They fax pictures which show that two people had been drinking beer, the place is in a mess and the man’s trousers, those which he was supposed to be wearing when he left to board his ship are still in the flat. Moreover the shipping line confirms the husband never arrived for the journey. The evidence appears to confirm that the man in the Potters Field is the husband and the woman goes into mourning.
She innocently reveals something which Salvo and the team have already found out that that the husband was a ward of a Crime Family. The anti Mafia squad have received an anonymous letter claiming that the boss of the Family, a very old man who has a good relationship with Salvo in that he is willing to help to prevent further violence as the end of his life approaches, was personally responsible for the death of the missing man because of some slight. However when the anti mafia squad investigate they find that the boss has been in a coma and is dying. Salvo visits and a lieutenant reveals that the man is concerned about the allegation given that several decades before he had believed that an agent in Columbia was a traitor and had him executed chopping up the body in thirty pieces as a warning to others. Finding that he was wrong he had “adopted” the boy, providing for his education which had led him to become an officer in the merchant navy, and he married in Columbia and settled in Sicily with the financial help of the family but where the man was not involved in any aspect of the criminal businesses.
Oddly some cocaine powder was found in a shoe box at the flat. When Salvo visits the flat he finds a neighbour who has antipathy to anyone from the republican government as she is a monarchist which Salvo also pretends so she he talks to him in a way she has not talked to others disclosing that she had found a syringe half full of blood in the waste bin which when Salvo checks is spotless clean but looks red rusty at the base. There are traces of dried blood in the shower which tests confirm are those of dead man and missing husband. Amazingly it takes time for Salvo to find out that the bins have an inner film against rusting and the marks are also of dried blood the same as found inside the flat.
When Salvo then finds that the index number of the car seen to have attempted to hit and run the young wife now widow is that of his Deputy Mimi, he is able to piece the mystery together and begins to acquaint Fazio with his understanding and plan. The final piece to arrange for a letter to be sent in an older woman’s handwriting, he gets his housekeeper to write out in her hand a letter in effect demanding money because the writer has the syringe and the letter is posted from where the flat is located so the trap is sprung,
I had worked out the core plot very early on when despite what the young woman said about the relationship with her husband, Fazio reported that there was very little contact between the two because the man was constantly at sea and the implications was that she found ways to be entertained in the meantime with the latest the local butcher although there appeared to have been a cooling off over the past two months when she appeared to have moved on to someone else. Salvo takes a look at the butcher to confirm his suspicion that that she had decided to get the butcher to kill her husband and try and frame the Mafia boss because she disliked the new sexual interests of her husband, no doubt because of his experiences in foreign shores. She had lured the husband to the butcher’s shop where he had been shot in the head and then his body chopped up in the same way as his father having learned about the death from her husband and the association with the Crime Family. She had taken a syringe of his blood together with his trousers to the flat together with the cocaine to make it look as if the husband had returned there, met someone and been killed. She had made the mistake of throwing away the syringe in the trash can. In order to complete the perfect crime she had sent the anonymous letter and then set about meeting and seducing Mimi known for his weakness and which was why she had also asked Mimi to take charge of the investigation and why he had become so upset when Salvo took the case on after first saying he would leave it to his deputy.
This is where the humanity and loyalty to his colleagues comes to the fore. First he gives Mimi control of the case much to the horror of Fazio before going off for his visit to the gourmet restaurant hotel. Then on the day he plans to arrest the widow and murdering conspirator butcher he gets Fazio to ensure that Mimi is kept busy out of the way. When he calls Mimi into his office to say he has arrested the woman with her lover and she has confessed, Mimi collapses realising that his world of home and work is about to collapse not realising that Salvo has been organising things in such a way that nothing of his own involvement in the cover up or Mimi’s indiscretions will come to the fore. The episode ends with Mimi giving Salvo a great hug as he goes off on a holiday with his wife and son.
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