Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions Read Online Free PDF

turned up on their doorstep so unexpectedly.
    â€œValentino has told us a lot about you, Donna Poldina,” said Maria, hurriedly spooning the gelato into three sundae glasses. “I feel like we already know you quite well.”
    â€œWhere is Valentino now?”
    The Candelas exchanged a worried glance that wasn’t lost on Poldi.
    â€œWe don’t know,” Angelo said in a low voice. “We haven’t heard from him for three days.”
    â€œDoes he often do this sort of thing?”
    The Candelas shook their heads and spooned up their ice cream before it melted completely. Or, thought Poldi, to avoid having to reply.
    â€œAnd you’ve absolutely no idea where he might be?”
    Heads were shaken again and spoons tinkled against sundae glasses. Poldi didn’t believe them. Meditatively, she licked her spoon. The chocolate and pistachio ice creams had run into each other; they tasted sweet and bitter and salty. Like tears and unfulfilled hopes, she thought. All at once, too, as usual in this country.
    â€œPlease don’t misunderstand me,” she said, mustering her best Italian. “I don’t mean to interfere in your private affairs, but I can see you’re worried. I’m worried too. Because… well, he may be in trouble.”
    They both winced at the word “trouble”. Something deep inside Maria seemed to break adrift. It came bubbling up to the surface in the form of an anguished sigh.
    â€œIt was when I heard that sigh, if not before,” Poldi told me later, “that I knew Valentino was really up the creek in some way. I’m an expert on trouble and sighs like that, that’s why. Red alert, know what I mean? I guessed his parents had already given him up for lost, and that they wouldn’t tell me anything more. Omertà and so on. That was when this idea popped into my head: that I had to find him – Valentino, I mean – and find him in a hurry. And that was the only reason why I pinched that little bit of mosaic.”
    Poldi resolutely laid her spoon aside and looked Maria in the eye. “Might I see his room?”
    â€œMany thanks for the ice cream, Signora Poldi,” Angelo said formally, “but it would be better if you left now.”
    Maria glanced sharply at him and rose to her feet. “But first, of course you can see the boy’s room.”
    Valentino’s room resembled that of any young man who still lives at home. An unmade bed, clothes scattered around, an ancient laptop hooked up to a game console, Ferrari posters and pin-ups on the walls. The place smelt of mothballs and weed. A magnificent cannabis plant was thriving in a pot on the window ledge.
    While Poldi was looking around keenly, Maria lingered in the doorway as if afraid of disturbing the spirits that inhabited the room.
    â€œThat’s a variety of cannabis you can’t smoke,” she said. “He only keeps it for decoration, because it’s so pretty.”
    Poldi kept her thoughts to herself. On a chest of drawers she spotted some German textbooks, some Japanese mangas, and a row of colourful little tesserae that glittered in the sunlight – bright shards of ceramic glazed on one side, none bigger than a fingertip. Lying at the outermost edge of these was a yellow crystal of the kind one can sometimes be lucky enough to find on Etna. Pretty to look at, it was a rhomboid prism about an inch across and growing on a porous stone. Poldi picked it up, and when she replaced it her fingers smelt faintly of sulphur. She took a picture of the little ensemble with her mobile phone, and whoops, before she knew it she’d surreptitiously snaffled one of the glazed shards. Unacceptable behaviour, but she’d acted on impulse – genetically programmed, as she put it to me. The thing is, there’s something else one should know about my Auntie Poldi: her father had been a detective chief inspector in Augsburg. Homicide.