I seem to have lost several notes on matters which were to be part of Birthday weekend 2012 reports but where the decision was taken as writing to commence to leave to leave until later. This has happened partly because I am so far behind the original plan which had included writing once or twice about important Leveson developments and finishing the Le Carré novel, The Russia House. It is now three thirty in the afternoon and I will continue for as long as I can today although there is some TV viewing to be undertaken as part of the catching up process.
I begin with the latest episode of Inspector Montalbano which I have seen twice having partly slept through the original showing on Saturday. It was the best yet but required close attention and a second viewing to fully appreciate. I have considered how best to present what is also the most complex and intriguing plot full of clever side issues which I shall now spoil by explaining the story from start to finish.
As with a previous episode the story also concerns an invitation for Montalbano to meet with the boss of a Sicilian Crime Family and as on that occasion there is an issue between the old order and their sense of honour and the new who have none. The man in question is ninety years old who has served a prison sentence for 20 years for the killing of 30 people members of his own or other crime families. The conversation is difficult to understand and he appears to be asking Montalbano to arrest his grandson so that he will live, albeit in prison rather than be killed by forces in the new order. He uses a priest to advise one of Montalbano’s closest associates to advise of location where the son can be arrested but when they find the location where he is been hiding, he is dead, his throat has been cut. Later it is established that in fact it is the Mafia family head who has arranged the killing of his grandson before the grandson killed him.
Why this is also the explanation for other mysteries of the episode will be revealed.
The story also involves the death of a young man who has left home and lives in an expensive apartment block. He has been killed by someone he knows having turned to face the person who called out to him as he was about to enter the apartment building where he lived. In the apartment he had the latest computer, camera and audio equipment, including a wide range of pornographic films. He also had half a dozen home made videos which are of sex with individual women.
Montalbano sends the station front office man and general factotum and something of bungling clown but who came top of the computer course to investigate the contents of the computer and he finds that there is only a large number of letters of a sexy nature written to one woman without identifying details and a novel. The man stays all night going through all the large quantity of CD and DVD Roms but is told to leave the videos.
Montalbano is also approached in the office by the son of a couple who have disappeared and at first he passes the case to a colleague until he is told the couple live in the same building as the murdered young man. There appears to be no immediate connection between the two events or with his meeting with the aging Mafia boss.
While these events occur his deputy is away and later the man calls at the home of Montalbano requesting whisky and advising that he is going to marry, the girl is a police Inspector, they both drink a bottle of whisky in celebration. What the deputy has not said is that they have decided that he will seek a transfer rather than the other way round. Their policed chief boss was delighted with the news saying it would break the mafia type band Montalbano leads.
The Inspector arranges with a friendly newsman to announce the disappearance of the couple and the concern of their son. This leads to the information that the couple had taken a coach trip which had stopped twice but also for a third time on the way back at the request of the couple who had stayed in the coach on the previous stops. They had sat at the back.
The coach driver operates two money making schemes. He bans the travellers from using their camera and then takes pictures which he sells to them. This includes a photo of the couple who appear to be looking at what appears to be a following car. It is arranged for the section to be blown up to enable the number plate of the following car to read. It proves to be that of the young man murdered outside their apartment block. Later the couple are found murdered, also shot in the head, at close range and holding hands as if they knew what we to happen to them.
Montalbano is also able to establish that the couple had dramatically increased their savings although the bank book had disappeared. According to the son they had visited an estranged sister shortly before her death but this did not appear to explain the sudden increase in their wealth. Montalbano calls on the former tenant of the sister who inherited the home in the Will and a copy of this reveals that the couple had been left a piece of scrub land and former stable and derelict building of no worth.
The other source of income for the coach driver is from a university student who tries to sell kitchen pans and ware from which he takes a cut. Montalbano arranges to meet the student in a restaurant and when his deputy arrives with information the Inspector senses their an immediate connection between the two so he suggests that the young woman repeats what she has said to his deputy while he has a meal and then make a formal report back at the station thus building on a possible relationship and taking him away from the attachment to the police Inspector who when she rings to contact the deputy Montalbano makes no effort to advise where he or get a message to him.
The sexy live letters appear to be written to a married woman hence the secrecy of the relationship, letters which were not posted but handed on meetings to spice up their relationship. The Inspector works out that because of the secrecy, any video of their relationship will have taped on an overprinted commercial tape but after the first ten minutes. This proves the right theory but still there is need to identify the woman. One of his colleagues suggests that that Montalbano should approach the former Nordic wife and swinger he encountered in a previous episode. She who offered herself but the Inspector resisted, with difficulty. The idea is she will know where a woman would go to have pubic hair professional removed. His colleagues arrange for them to have dinner but Montalbano is late back.
He has visited the former stables, isolated on the coast and locked up as a fortress. He has great difficulty in breaking in which includes trying to shoot the look out. The one lack of credibility in the episode is that he carries in his car the implements for breaking and entering including hacksaw, hammer and chisel. Given his behaviour in general perhaps this is not surprising. He notes that although isolated the place has a strong telephone and electricity connection and inside he finds a large disconnected power box with the inside otherwise seeming to have been cleared.
Injured from his efforts he struggles home to find the woman of his dinner date waiting for him. She administers pain relief lotion. She immediately recognises the woman in her video. It is a friend. The woman like her was a national from another country. She is married to an internally recognised transplant surgeon with an exceptionally valuable picture collection. Two weeks ago, that is before the murders she had suddenly returned to native land.
They sleep in the same bed clothed but there is innocent cuddle but nothing more. Later they have lunch after she has spoken to the woman in the video who has explained that has happened. She said that she taken her lover back to their home believing that the husband was away at his clinic and not returning home but he had and found them together in bed. She had been surprised by her husband’s reaction in that he had said nothing to her and she and the impression he was already familiar with her lover who he had driven home, He had then said she must go away and not return unless he said it was OK for her to do so. It is established that he has closed down the transplant critic who was heavily secure before and now there are armed guards. The man himself appeared to have become a recluse in his home.
The Inspector is then contact by the Mafia boss and this is the penultimate piece in the jigsaw he says he is in urgent needs of a liver transplant because his own is failing and that with the closure of the clinic of the famous transplant surgeon his life is doomed because there is a waiting list of 10000.
Montalbano also reads the novel which appears to be about Robots but when it ends he is sickened by the implications of what he understands to be the story.
This is what is worked out. The new Mafia order looking for new ways to make money had recruited the transplant surgeon with his liking for the expensive pictures to undertake transplants for the rich and famous in the circumstances of security and confidentiality. This would have been legitimate if was not for the use of captured able bodied men, women and children whose bodies are then buried or dumped in the ocean. The murdered young man had been a computer specialist and he had rented the use of the property owned by the couple living in the same block as a communication centre for the enterprise.
I did not understand how the young man had come to met the wife of the surgeon or why he was successful in persuading a number of attractive women not just to have sexual relations with him but to be filmed in such and open way given the lengths to which the criminal undertaking was being kept secret and the way it operated. I also did not understand why the operation had been brought to a sudden end because the surgeon discovered that his wife was having an affair with the young man. However the consequence was that it led to the closure of the operation and the elimination of everyone who could provide a lead to the providers and to past customers.
Montalbano assumed that any attempt to take action would be sat on because of the level and power of those involved as customers as much as providers and he works out a way of achieving the objective. He breaks into the home of surgeon late a night in an attempt to threaten the man into confessing, although there is also the suggestion that he was driven to kill the man because of what his greed had led to. He was being followed by his closest colleagues who intervene in whatever he was doing and takes the man into custody and is sufficiently scared to reveal all that he has been involved with.
The Inspector the wakes up his TV news contact and gives him the story of the arrest of the surgeon and also the connection with the death of the grandson of the Mafia Family boss, and which under his instruction he had kept out of the news until then. His only requirement was that the announcement should be made on the main lunchtime bulletin of the day in order to ensure that there was world wide reporting and therefore it was impossible for the authorities to attempt to cover up the connection with the illegal transplants and the Mafia.
The episode closes as his deputy announces his engagement to the university student the Inspector had introduced him to. They have had a whirlwind romance which the Inspector has encouraged at every opportunity. He was also most affected by the case where the organs of able bodied children had been used to the rich and the powerful. He had called his mistress and she had sense she was needed. She suggested they could also get married at the same time as the deputy. He agrees. They are at a romantic location but one wonders if this will in fact happen.
I begin with the latest episode of Inspector Montalbano which I have seen twice having partly slept through the original showing on Saturday. It was the best yet but required close attention and a second viewing to fully appreciate. I have considered how best to present what is also the most complex and intriguing plot full of clever side issues which I shall now spoil by explaining the story from start to finish.
As with a previous episode the story also concerns an invitation for Montalbano to meet with the boss of a Sicilian Crime Family and as on that occasion there is an issue between the old order and their sense of honour and the new who have none. The man in question is ninety years old who has served a prison sentence for 20 years for the killing of 30 people members of his own or other crime families. The conversation is difficult to understand and he appears to be asking Montalbano to arrest his grandson so that he will live, albeit in prison rather than be killed by forces in the new order. He uses a priest to advise one of Montalbano’s closest associates to advise of location where the son can be arrested but when they find the location where he is been hiding, he is dead, his throat has been cut. Later it is established that in fact it is the Mafia family head who has arranged the killing of his grandson before the grandson killed him.
Why this is also the explanation for other mysteries of the episode will be revealed.
The story also involves the death of a young man who has left home and lives in an expensive apartment block. He has been killed by someone he knows having turned to face the person who called out to him as he was about to enter the apartment building where he lived. In the apartment he had the latest computer, camera and audio equipment, including a wide range of pornographic films. He also had half a dozen home made videos which are of sex with individual women.
Montalbano sends the station front office man and general factotum and something of bungling clown but who came top of the computer course to investigate the contents of the computer and he finds that there is only a large number of letters of a sexy nature written to one woman without identifying details and a novel. The man stays all night going through all the large quantity of CD and DVD Roms but is told to leave the videos.
Montalbano is also approached in the office by the son of a couple who have disappeared and at first he passes the case to a colleague until he is told the couple live in the same building as the murdered young man. There appears to be no immediate connection between the two events or with his meeting with the aging Mafia boss.
While these events occur his deputy is away and later the man calls at the home of Montalbano requesting whisky and advising that he is going to marry, the girl is a police Inspector, they both drink a bottle of whisky in celebration. What the deputy has not said is that they have decided that he will seek a transfer rather than the other way round. Their policed chief boss was delighted with the news saying it would break the mafia type band Montalbano leads.
The Inspector arranges with a friendly newsman to announce the disappearance of the couple and the concern of their son. This leads to the information that the couple had taken a coach trip which had stopped twice but also for a third time on the way back at the request of the couple who had stayed in the coach on the previous stops. They had sat at the back.
The coach driver operates two money making schemes. He bans the travellers from using their camera and then takes pictures which he sells to them. This includes a photo of the couple who appear to be looking at what appears to be a following car. It is arranged for the section to be blown up to enable the number plate of the following car to read. It proves to be that of the young man murdered outside their apartment block. Later the couple are found murdered, also shot in the head, at close range and holding hands as if they knew what we to happen to them.
Montalbano is also able to establish that the couple had dramatically increased their savings although the bank book had disappeared. According to the son they had visited an estranged sister shortly before her death but this did not appear to explain the sudden increase in their wealth. Montalbano calls on the former tenant of the sister who inherited the home in the Will and a copy of this reveals that the couple had been left a piece of scrub land and former stable and derelict building of no worth.
The other source of income for the coach driver is from a university student who tries to sell kitchen pans and ware from which he takes a cut. Montalbano arranges to meet the student in a restaurant and when his deputy arrives with information the Inspector senses their an immediate connection between the two so he suggests that the young woman repeats what she has said to his deputy while he has a meal and then make a formal report back at the station thus building on a possible relationship and taking him away from the attachment to the police Inspector who when she rings to contact the deputy Montalbano makes no effort to advise where he or get a message to him.
The sexy live letters appear to be written to a married woman hence the secrecy of the relationship, letters which were not posted but handed on meetings to spice up their relationship. The Inspector works out that because of the secrecy, any video of their relationship will have taped on an overprinted commercial tape but after the first ten minutes. This proves the right theory but still there is need to identify the woman. One of his colleagues suggests that that Montalbano should approach the former Nordic wife and swinger he encountered in a previous episode. She who offered herself but the Inspector resisted, with difficulty. The idea is she will know where a woman would go to have pubic hair professional removed. His colleagues arrange for them to have dinner but Montalbano is late back.
He has visited the former stables, isolated on the coast and locked up as a fortress. He has great difficulty in breaking in which includes trying to shoot the look out. The one lack of credibility in the episode is that he carries in his car the implements for breaking and entering including hacksaw, hammer and chisel. Given his behaviour in general perhaps this is not surprising. He notes that although isolated the place has a strong telephone and electricity connection and inside he finds a large disconnected power box with the inside otherwise seeming to have been cleared.
Injured from his efforts he struggles home to find the woman of his dinner date waiting for him. She administers pain relief lotion. She immediately recognises the woman in her video. It is a friend. The woman like her was a national from another country. She is married to an internally recognised transplant surgeon with an exceptionally valuable picture collection. Two weeks ago, that is before the murders she had suddenly returned to native land.
They sleep in the same bed clothed but there is innocent cuddle but nothing more. Later they have lunch after she has spoken to the woman in the video who has explained that has happened. She said that she taken her lover back to their home believing that the husband was away at his clinic and not returning home but he had and found them together in bed. She had been surprised by her husband’s reaction in that he had said nothing to her and she and the impression he was already familiar with her lover who he had driven home, He had then said she must go away and not return unless he said it was OK for her to do so. It is established that he has closed down the transplant critic who was heavily secure before and now there are armed guards. The man himself appeared to have become a recluse in his home.
The Inspector is then contact by the Mafia boss and this is the penultimate piece in the jigsaw he says he is in urgent needs of a liver transplant because his own is failing and that with the closure of the clinic of the famous transplant surgeon his life is doomed because there is a waiting list of 10000.
Montalbano also reads the novel which appears to be about Robots but when it ends he is sickened by the implications of what he understands to be the story.
This is what is worked out. The new Mafia order looking for new ways to make money had recruited the transplant surgeon with his liking for the expensive pictures to undertake transplants for the rich and famous in the circumstances of security and confidentiality. This would have been legitimate if was not for the use of captured able bodied men, women and children whose bodies are then buried or dumped in the ocean. The murdered young man had been a computer specialist and he had rented the use of the property owned by the couple living in the same block as a communication centre for the enterprise.
I did not understand how the young man had come to met the wife of the surgeon or why he was successful in persuading a number of attractive women not just to have sexual relations with him but to be filmed in such and open way given the lengths to which the criminal undertaking was being kept secret and the way it operated. I also did not understand why the operation had been brought to a sudden end because the surgeon discovered that his wife was having an affair with the young man. However the consequence was that it led to the closure of the operation and the elimination of everyone who could provide a lead to the providers and to past customers.
Montalbano assumed that any attempt to take action would be sat on because of the level and power of those involved as customers as much as providers and he works out a way of achieving the objective. He breaks into the home of surgeon late a night in an attempt to threaten the man into confessing, although there is also the suggestion that he was driven to kill the man because of what his greed had led to. He was being followed by his closest colleagues who intervene in whatever he was doing and takes the man into custody and is sufficiently scared to reveal all that he has been involved with.
The Inspector the wakes up his TV news contact and gives him the story of the arrest of the surgeon and also the connection with the death of the grandson of the Mafia Family boss, and which under his instruction he had kept out of the news until then. His only requirement was that the announcement should be made on the main lunchtime bulletin of the day in order to ensure that there was world wide reporting and therefore it was impossible for the authorities to attempt to cover up the connection with the illegal transplants and the Mafia.
The episode closes as his deputy announces his engagement to the university student the Inspector had introduced him to. They have had a whirlwind romance which the Inspector has encouraged at every opportunity. He was also most affected by the case where the organs of able bodied children had been used to the rich and the powerful. He had called his mistress and she had sense she was needed. She suggested they could also get married at the same time as the deputy. He agrees. They are at a romantic location but one wonders if this will in fact happen.
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