Paper Moon

“I already did, yesterday. I didn’t go inside, but I rang the doorbell for a long time.”

“All right, but maybe he’s in no condition to come to the door.”

“Why would that be?”

“I dunno …maybehe slipped in the bathtub and can’t walk, or has a very high fever—”

“Inspector, I didn’t just ring the doorbell. I also called out to him. If he’d slipped in the bathtub, he would have answered. Angelo’s apartment is not that big, after all.”

“I’m afraid I must insist you go back there.”

“I won’t go back alone. Would you come with me?”

She looked at him again. This time Montalbano suddenly found himself sinking, the water coming up to his neck. He thought about it a moment, then decided.

“Listen, I’ll tell you what. If you still haven’t heard from your brother by seven o’clock this evening, come back here to the station, and I’ll accompany you.”

“Thank you.”

She stood up and held out her hand. Montalbano took it but couldn’t bring himself to shake it. It felt like a piece of lifeless flesh.

Ten minutes later Fazio appeared.

“A seventeen-year-old kid. Went up to the terrace of his building and shot himself up with an overdose. There was nothing we could do, poor guy. When we got there, he was already dead. The second in three days.”

Montalbano looked at him dumbfounded.

“The second? You mean there was a first? “Why didn’t any one tell me about it?”

“Fasulo, the engineer. But with him it was cocaine,” said Fazio.

“Cocaine? “What are you saying? Fasulo died of a heart attack!”

“Sure, that’s what the death certificate says. It’s what his friends say, too. But everybody in town knows it was drugs.” “Badly cut stuff?” “That I can’t say, Chief.”

“Listen, do you know some guy named Angelo Pardo, forty-two years old and an informer?”

Fazio didn’t seem surprised at the mention of Angelo Pardo’s profession. Maybe he hadn’t fully understood.

“No, sir. “Why do you ask?”

“Seems he disappeared two days ago and his sister’s getting worried.”

“You want me to—”

“No, but later, if there’s still no news, we’ll see.”

“Inspector Montalbano? This is Lattes.” “What can I do for you?” “Family doing all right?”

“I think we discussed them a couple of hours ago.” “Yes, of course. Listen, I’m calling to tell you that the commissioner can’t see you today, as you’d requested.”

“Look, Doctor, it was the commissioner who asked to see me.”

“Really? Well, it makes no difference. Could you come tomorrow at eleven?” “Absolutely.”

Upon learning that he wouldn’t be seeing the commissioner, his lungs filled with air and he suddenly felt ravenous. The only solution was Enzo’s trattoria.

He stepped outside the police station. The day had the colors of summer, without the extreme heat. He walked slowly, taking his time, already tasting what he was about to eat. When he arrived in front of the trattoria, his heart fell to his feet. The restaurant was closed. Locked. What the hell had happened? In rage he gave the door a swift kick, turned around, and started walking away, cursing the saints. He’d barely taken two steps when he heard someone calling him.

“Inspector! “What, did you forget that we’re closed today?” Damn! He’d forgotten!

“But if you want to eat with me and my wife …”

He dashed back. And he ate so much that as he was eating he felt embarrassed, ashamed, but couldn’t help himself. When he’d finished, Enzo nearly congratulated him.

“To your health, Inspector!”

The walk along the jetty was necessarily a long one.

He spent the rest of the afternoon with eyelids drooping and head nodding from time to time, overcome by sleepiness. When this happened, he would get up and go wash his face.

At seven o’clock Catarella told him the lady from the morning had returned.

As soon as she walked in, Michela Pardo said only one word:

“Nothing.”

She did not sit down. She was anxious to get to her brother’s place as quickly as possible and tried to communicate her haste to the inspector.

“All right,” said Montalbano. “Let’s go.”

Passing by Catarella’s closet, he told him:

“I’m going out with the lady. If you need me for anything afterwards, I’ll be at home.”

“Will you be coming in my car?” asked Michela Pardo, gesturing toward a blue Polo.

“Perhaps it’s better if I take my own and follow you. Where does your brother live?”

“A bit far, in the new part of town. Do you know Vigata Two?”

He knew Vigata Two. A nightmare dreamed up by some real-estate speculator under the influence of the worst sorts of hallucinogens. He wouldn’t live there even if he were dead.

2

Luckily for him and the inspector—who never in a million years would have spent more than five minutes in one of those gloomy six-by-ten-foot rooms defined in the brochures as “spacious and sunny”—Angelo Pardo lived just past the new residential complex of Vigata Two, in a small, restored nineteenth-century villa three stories high. The front door was locked. As Michela was unlocking it, Montalbano noticed that the intercom had six nameplates on it, which meant that there were six apartments in all, two on the ground floor and four on the other floors.

“Angelo lives on the top floor and there’s no elevator.”

The staircase was broad and comfortable. The building seemed uninhabited. No voices, no sound of televisions. And yet it was the time of day when people were normally preparing their evening meal.

On the top-floor landing, there were two doors. Michela went up to the one on the left. Before opening it, she showed the inspector a small window with a grate over it, beside the steel-plated door. The little window’s shutters were locked.

“I called to him from here. He would surely have heard me.”

She unlocked first one lock, then another, turning the key four times, but did not go in. She stepped aside. “Could you go in first?”

Montalbano pushed the door, felt around for the light switch, turned it on, and entered. He sniffed at the air like a dog. He was immediately convinced there was no human presence, dead or alive, in the apartment.

“Follow me,” he said to Michela.

The entrance led into a broad corridor. On the left-hand side, a master bedroom, a bathroom, and another bedroom. On the right, a study, a kitchen, a small bathroom, and a smallish living room. All in perfect order and sparkling clean.

“Does your brother have a cleaning lady?”

“Yes.”

“When did she last come?” “I couldn’t say.”

“Listen, signorina, do you come visit your brother here often?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The question flustered Michela.

“What do you mean, ‘why’? He’s…my brother!”

“Granted, but you said Angelo comes to your and your mother’s place practically every other day. So, I suppose you come to see him here on the off days? Is that right?”

“Well…yes. But not so regularly.”

“Okay. But why do you need to see each other when your mother’s not around?”

“Good God, Inspector, when you put it that way … It’s just something we’ve been in the habit of doing since we were children. There’s always been, between Angelo and me, a sort of …”

“Complicity?”

“I guess you could call it that.”

She let out a giggle. Montalbano decided to change the subject.

“Shall we go see if a suitcase is missing? If all his clothes are here?”

She followed him into the master bedroom. Michela opened the armoire and looked at the clothing, one article at a time. Montalbano noticed that it was all very fine, tailored stuff.

“It’s all here. Even the gray suit he was wearing the last time he came to see us, three days ago. The only thing missing, I think, is a pair of jeans.”

On top of the armoire, wrapped in cellophane, were two elegant leather suitcases, one large and the other a bit smaller.

“The suitcases are both here.”

“Does he have an overnight bag?”

“Yes, he usually keeps it in the study.”

They went into the study. The small bag lay beside the desk. One wall of the study was covered by shelves of the sort one sees in pharmacies, enclosed in sliding glass panels. And in fact the shelves were stocked with a great many medicinal containers: boxes, flasks, bottles.

“Didn’t you say your brother was an informer?”

“Yes. An informer for the pharmaceutical industry.”

Montalbano understood. Angelo was what used to be called a pharmaceutical representative. But this profession, like garbagemen turned “ecological agents” or cleaning ladies promoted to the rank of “domestic collaborators,” had been ennobled with a new name more appropriate to our elegant epoch. The substance, however, remained the same.

“He used to be … still is, actually, a doctor, but he didn’t practice for very long,” Michela felt obliged to add.

“Fine. As you can see, signorina, your brother’s not here. If you want, we can go.”

“Let’s go.”

She said it reluctantly, looked all around as if she thought she might, at the last moment, find her brother hiding inside a bottle of pills for liver disease.

Montalbano went ahead this time, waiting for her to turn off the lights and lock the double-locked door with due diligence. They descended the stairs, silent amid the great silence of the building. Was it empty, or were they all dead? Once outside, Montalbano, seeing how disconsolate she looked, suddenly felt terribly sorry for her.

“You’ll hear from your brother soon, you’ll see,” he said to her in a soft voice, holding out his hand.

But she didn’t grasp it, only shaking her head still more disconsolately.

“Listen…your brother…Is he seeing any…doesn’t he have a relationship with anyone?” “Not that I know of.”

She eyed him. And as she was eyeing him, Montalbano swam desperately to avoid drowning. All at once the waters of the lake turned very dark, as though night had fallen.

“What’s wrong?” asked the inspector.

Without answering, she opened her eyes wide, and the lake turned into the open sea.Swim, Salvo, swim.

“What’s wrong?” he repeated between strokes.

Again she didn’t answer. Turning her back to him, she unlocked the door, climbed the stairs, reached the top floor but didn’t stop there. The inspector then noticed a recess in the wall with a spiral staircase leading up to a glass door. Michela climbed this and slipped a key in the door, but was unable to open it.

“Let me try,” he said.

He opened the door and found himself on a terrace as big as the villa itself. Pushing him aside, Michela ran toward a one-room structure, a sort of box standing practically in the middle of the terrace. It had a door and, to one side, a window. But these were locked.

“I haven’t got the key,” said Michela. “I never have.”

“But why do you want…?”

“This used to be the washroom. Angelo rented it along with the terrace and then transformed it. He comes here sometimes to read or to sun himself.”

“Okay, but if you haven’t got the key—”

“For heaven’s sake, please break down the door.”

“Listen, signorina, I cannot, under any circumstances …”

She looked at him. That was enough. With a single shoulder thrust, Montalbano sent the plywood door flying. He went inside, but before even feeling around for the light switch, he yelled: “Don’t come in!”

He’d detected the smell of death in the room at once.

Michela, however, even in the dark, must have noticed something, because Montalbano heard first a sort of stifled sob, then heard her fall to the floor, unconscious.

“What do I do now?” he asked himself, cursing.

He bent down, picked Michela up bodily, and carried her as far as the glass door. Carrying her this way, however— the way the groom carries the bride in movies—he would never make it down the spiral staircase. It was too narrow. So he set the woman down upright, embraced her around the waist, wrapping his hands around her back, and lifted her off the ground. This way, with care, he could manage it. At moments he was forced to squeeze her tighter and managed to notice that under her big, floppy dress Michela hid a firm, girlish body. At last he arrived in front of the door to the other top-floor apartment and rang the doorbell, hoping that there was someone alive in there, or that the bell would at least wake somebody from the grave.

“Who is it?” asked an angry male voice behind the door.

“It’s Inspector Montalbano. Could you open the door, please?”

The door opened, and King Victor Emmanuel III appeared. An exact replica, that is: the same mustache, the same midgetlike stature. Except that he was dressed in civvies. Seeing Montalbano with his arms around Michela, he got the entirely wrong idea and turned bright red.

“Please let me in,” said the inspector.

“What?! You want me to let you inside?! You’re insane! You have the gall to ask me if you can have sex in my home?” “No, look, Your Majesty, I—” “Shame on you! I’m going to call the police!” And he slammed the door.

“Fucking asshole!” Montalbano let fly, giving the door a kick.

Thrown off balance by the woman’s weight, he very nearly fell to the floor with Michela. He picked her up again like a bride and started carefully descending the stairs. He knocked at the first door he came to.

“Who is it?”

A little boy’s voice, aged ten at most.

“I’m a friend of your dad’s. Could you open?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because Mama and Papa told me not to open the door for anyone when they’re not home.”

Only then did Montalbano remember that before lifting Michela off the ground he’d slipped her handbag over his arm. That was the solution. He carried Michela back up the stairs, leaned her against the wall, holding her upright by pressing his own body against hers (in no way an unpleasant thing), opened the purse, took out the keys, unlocked the door of Angelo’s apartment, dragged Michela into the master bedroom, laid her down on the bed, went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, soaked it with water from the bathroom faucet, went back into the bedroom, placed the towel over Michela’s forehead, and collapsed onto the bed himself, dead tired from the exertion. He was breathing heavily and drenched in sweat.

Now what? He certainly couldn’t leave the woman alone and go back up to the terrace to see how things stood. The problem was immediately resolved.

“There he is!” shouted His Majesty, appearing in the doorway. “See? He’s getting ready to rape her!”

Behind him, Fazio, pistol in hand, started cursing. “Please go back home, sir.” “You mean you’re not going to arrest him?” “Go back home, now!”

Victor Emmanuel III had another brilliant idea. “You’re an accomplice! An accomplice! I’m going to go call the Carabinieri!” he said, racing out of the room. Fazio ran after him. He returned five minutes later. “I managed to convince him. What on earth happened?”

Montalbano told him. Meanwhile he noticed that Michela was starting to regain consciousness.

“Did you come alone?” asked the inspector. “No, Gallo’s waiting in the car.” “Have him come up.”

Fazio called him on his cell phone, and Gallo arrived in a jiffy.

“Keep an eye on this woman. When she comes to, do not, under any circumstances, let her go up to the terrace. Got that?”

Followed by Fazio, he climbed back up the spiral staircase. It was pitch black on the terrace. Night had fallen.

He entered the little room and turned on the light. A table covered with newspapers and magazines. A refrigerator. A sofa bed for one person. Four long planks affixed to the wall served as a bookcase. There was a small liquor cabinet with bottles and glasses. A sink in a corner. A large leather armchair of the sort one used to see in offices. He’d set himself up nicely, this Angelo. Who lay collapsed in the armchair, half of his face blasted off by the shot that had killed him. He was dressed in a shirt and jeans. The jeans’ zipper was open, dick dangling between his legs.

“What should I do, call?” asked Fazio. “Call,” said Montalbano. “I’m going downstairs.” What was he doing there anyway? Soon the whole circus would be there: prosecutor, coroner, crime lab, and Giacovazzo, the new Flying Squad chief, who would lead the investigation …If they needed him, they knew where to find him.

When he went back in the master bedroom, Michela was sitting on the bed, frighteningly pale. Gallo was standing a couple of steps away from the bed.

“Go up to the terrace and give Fazio a hand. I’ll stay down here.”

Relieved, Gallo left.

“Is he dead?”

‘Yes’

‘How?’

‘Gunshot’

“Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” she cried, covering her face with her hands.

But she was a strong woman. She took a sip of water from a glass that apparently Gallo had given her.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why was he killed? Why?”

Montalbano threw his hands up. But Michela was already beset with another concern.

“Mama! Oh my God! How am I ever going to tell her?” “Don’t.”

“But I have to tell her!”

“Listen to me. Call her up. Tell her we’ve discovered that Angelo was in a terrible car accident. That he’s been hospitalized and is in grave condition. And you’re going to spend the night at the hospital. Don’t tell her which one. Does your mother have any relatives around here?”

“Yes, a sister.”

“Does she live in Vigata?”

“Yes.”

“Call up this sister and tell her the same thing. And ask her to go and stay with your mother. I think it’s better if you spend the night here. You’ll see, tomorrow morning you’ll be strong enough to find the right words to tell your mother the truth.”

“Thank you,” said Michela.

She stood up, and Montalbano heard her walk into the study, where there was a phone.

He, too, walked out of the bedroom, went into the living room, sat down in an armchair, and lit himself a cigarette.

“Chief? Where are you?” It was Fazio.

“I’m in here. What is it?”

“I gave the word, Chief. They’ll be here in half an hour, max. But Captain Giacovazzo’s not coming.” “And why not?”

“He spoke to the commissioner, and the commissioner relieved him. Apparently Giacovazzo’s got some delicate matter on his hands. To make a long story short, the case is yours, like it or not.”

“Fine. Call me when they get here.”

He heard Michela come out of the study and lock herself in the bathroom between the two bedrooms. Ten minutes later he heard her come out. She’d washed herself and put on a woman’s dressing gown. Michela noticed that the inspector was looking at her.

“It’s mine,” she explained. “I used to spend the night here sometimes.”

“Did you talk to your mother?”

“Yes. She took it pretty well, all things considered. And Aunt Iole is already on her way to be with her. You see, Mama’s not really all there in the head. At times she’s perfectly lucid, but at other times it’s as though she were absent. When I told her about Angelo, it was as if I were talking about some acquaintance. I guess it’s better this way. Would you like some coffee?”

“No thanks. But if you’ve got a little whisky …”

“Of course. I think I’ll have some myself.” She went out, then returned carrying a tray with two glasses and an unopened bottle. “I’ll go see if there’s any ice.” “I drink it straight.” “Me, too.”

If there hadn’t happened to be a man shot to death on the terrace, it might have been the opening scene of an amorous encounter. All that was missing was the background music. Michela heaved a deep sigh, leaned her head against the back of the armchair, and closed her eyes. Montalbano decided to lower the boom.

“Your brother was killed either during or after sexual relations. Or while masturbating.”

She leapt out of her chair like a Fury.

“Imbecile! What are you saying?”

Montalbano acted as though he hadn’t heard the insult.

“What’s so surprising? Your brother was a forty-two-year-old man. You yourself, who used to see him every day, told me Angelo didn’t have any girlfriends. So let me put the question differently: Did he have any boyfriends?”

It got worse. She began to tremble all over and held out her arm, index finger pointed like a pistol at the inspector.

“You are a…a… “

“Who are you trying to cover for, Michela?” She fell back into the armchair, weeping, hands over her face.

“Angelo …my poor brother…my poor Angelo …”

Through the front door, which had been left open, they heard the sounds of people coming up the stairs.

“I have to go now,” said Montalbano. “But don’t go to bed yet. I’ll be back in a little bit, so we can continue our discussion.”

“No.”

“Listen, Michela. You can’t refuse. Your brother has been murdered, and we must—”

“I’m not refusing. I said no to the thought of your coming back without warning and asking me more questions, when I need to take a shower, take a sleeping pill, and go to bed.”

“All right. But I’m warning you, tomorrow will be a very hard day for you. Among other things, you’ll have to identify the body.”

“Oh God oh God oh God. But why?” One needed the patience of a saint with this woman. “Michela, were you absolutely certain that was your brother there when I broke open the door?”

“Absolutely certain? It was too dark. I caught a se… I thought I saw a body in the armchair and …” “Therefore you cannot confirm that it was your brother in that chair. And theoretically, I can’t either. Do you understand what I’m saying?” “Yes,” she said.

Great big tears started flowing down her face. She muttered something the inspector didn’t understand. ““What did you say?”

“Elena,” she repeated more clearly. “Who’s she?”

“A woman my brother used to …” “Why did you want to cover up for her?” “She’s married.”

“How long had they been seeing each other?” “Six months, at the most.” “Did they get along well?”

“Angelo told me they quarreled every now and then … Elena was …is very jealous.”

“Do you know all about this woman? Her husband’s name, where she lives, and so on?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.” She told him.

“What sort of relationship do you have with this Elena Sclafani?”

“I only know her by sight.”

“So you have no reason to tell her what happened to your brother?” “No.”

“Good. You can go to bed now. I’ll come pick you up tomorrow morning around nine-thirty.”

3

Somebody must have found the switch for the two lights that lit up the part of the terrace nearest the former laundry room. Judge Tommaseo was walking back and forth in the illuminated area, carefully avoiding the surrounding darkness. Sitting on the balustrade with lighted cigarettes in hand were two men in white smocks. They must have been ambulance workers, waiting for the go-ahead to pick up the body and take it to the morgue.

Fazio and Gallo were standing near the entrance to the room. They’d removed the door from its hinges and propped it against the wall. Montalbano saw Dr. Pasquano washing his hands, which meant he’d finished examining the body. The coroner looked angrier than usual. Maybe he’d been interrupted during a game ofbriscolaortressette,which he played every Thursday night.

Tommaseo ran up to the inspector.

“What did the sister say?”

Apparently Fazio had told him where the inspector was and what he was doing.

“Nothing. I didn’t interrogate her.” “Why not?”

“I wouldn’t have dared without you being present, Dr. Tommaseo.

The public prosecutor puffed up his chest. He looked like a turkey-cock.

“So what were you doing all this time with her?”

“I put her to bed.”

Tommaseo look a quick glance around, then huddled up conspiratorially next to the inspector. “Pretty?”

“That’s not the right adjective, but I’d say yes.”

Tommaseo licked his lips.

“When could I …interrogate her?”

“I’ll bring her to your office tomorrow morning, around ten-thirty. Is that okay with you? Unfortunately, I’ve a meeting with the commissioner at eleven.”

“That’s fine, go right ahead.”

He licked his lips again. Pasquano came up.

“So?” asked Tommaseo.

“So what? Didn’t you see him yourself? He got shot in the face. One shot. That was enough.”

“Do you know how long he’s been dead?” Pasquano gave him a dirty look and didn’t answer. “Roughly speaking,” Montalbano bargained. “What day is today?” “Thursday.”

“Roughly speaking, I’d say he was shot late Monday evening.”

“Is that all?” Tommaseo cut in again, disappointed.

“I don’t think I saw any wounds from assegais or boomerangs,” Pasquano said sarcastically.

“No, no, I was referring to the fact that his member was—”

“Oh, that? You want to know why he had it out? He’d just performed a sexual act.”

“Do you mean that he was taken by surprise right after masturbating and killed?”

“I didn’t say anything about masturbation,” said Pasquano. “It might have been oral sex.”

Tommaseo’s eyes started to flash like a cat’s. He lived for these sorts of details. Gloried in them. Wallowed in them.

“You think so? So the murderess killed him right after giving him a—”

“What makes you think it was a murderess?” asked Pasquano, who, no longer angry, was beginning to amuse himself. “It could just as easily have been a homosexual relation.”

“True,” Tommaseo reluctantly admitted.

The homoerotic hypothesis clearly didn’t appeal to him.

“Anyway, it’s not sure there were only oral relations.”

Pasquano had cast the bait, which the prosecutor immediately swallowed.

“Think so?”

“Yeah. It’s possible the woman—assuming, for the sake of hypothesis, that it was a woman—was straddling the man.”

Tommaseo’s eyes turned more catlike than ever. “Right! And as she was bringing him to orgasm and looking in his eyes, she already had her hand on the weapon, and—”

“Wait a second. What makes you think the woman looked her victim in the eyes?” Pasquano cut in, a seraphic expression on his face.

Montalbano felt like he couldn’t take Pasquano’s shenanigans any longer and would burst out laughing at any moment.

“But how could shenotlook him in the eyes, in that position!” said Tommaseo.

“We’re not certain that was the position.”

“But you yourself just finished saying—”

“Listen, Tommaseo, the woman might well have straddled the man, but we don’t know how—that is, whether facing him or with her back to him.”

“True.”

“And in the latter case, she would not have been able to look her victim in the eye, wouldn’t you say? Anyway, from that position, the man would have had an embarrassment of riches. Well, I’m going to go. Good night. I’ll keep you informed.”

“Oh, no you don’t! You have to explain yourself! “What do you mean by ‘an embarrassment of riches’?” said Tommaseo, running after the coroner.

They disappeared into the darkness. Montalbano approached Fazio.

“Did Forensics get lost?”

“They’ll be here any minute.”

“Listen, I’m going home. You stay here. See you tomorrow at the office.”

He got home in time for the local news. Nobody, of course, knew anything yet about the death of Angelo Pardo. But the two local stations, TeleVigata and the Free Channel, were still talking about another death, a truly distinguished corpse.

Around eight o’clock on Wednesday, the night before, the honorable Armando Riccobono, a deputy in parliament, had gone to see his party colleague, Senator Stefano Nicotra, who for the previous five days had been staying at his country house between Vigata and Montereale, taking a modest breather from his normally intense political activity. They’d spoken by telephone on Sunday morning and agreed to meet on Wednesday evening.

A seventy-year-old widower with no children, Senator Nicotra, a Vigata native, was sort of a local and national hero. A former minister of agriculture and twice undersecretary, he had skillfully navigated all the different currents of the old Christian Democratic Party, managing to stay afloat even through the most frightful storms. During the horrific hurricane “Clean Hands,” he had turned into a submarine, navigating underwater by means of periscope alone. He resurfaced only when he’d sighted the possibility of casting anchor in a safe port—the one just constructed by a former Milanese real-estate speculator—cum—owner of the top three private nationwide television stations—cum—parliamentary deputy, head of his own personal political party, and finally prime minister. A number of other survivors of the great shipwreck had gone along with Nicotra, and Armando Riccobono was one of these.

Arriving at the senator’s villa, the honorable Riccobono had knocked a long time at the door to no avail. Alarmed— because he knew that the senator was at home alone—he’d walked around the house and looked inside a window, seeing his friend lying on the floor, either unconscious or dead. Since, given his age, he couldn’t very well climb up through the window and enter, he’d called for help on his cell phone.

In brief, Senator Nicotra had, as the newspapers like to put it, “died of heart failure” that same Sunday evening after speaking to the Honorable Riccobono. Nobody’d been to see him either Monday or Tuesday. He himself had told his secretary he wanted to be left alone and undisturbed and that, at any rate, he was going to unplug the phone. If he needed anything, he would call for it.

TeleVigata, through the pursed lips of their political commentator Pippo Ragonese, was explaining to one and all the vast sweep of Italy’s grief over the loss of the eminent politician. The chief executive—the very same into whose party the senator had fled with all his belongings—had wired a message of condolence to the family.

“What family?” Montalbano asked himself.

It was well known that the senator had no family. And it would have been going too far, indeed it was entirely beyond the realm of possibility, for the chief executive to wire a message of condolence to the Sinagra crime family, with whom the senator had apparently had, and continued to have, long and fruitful—but never proven ties.

Pippo Ragonese concluded by saying that the funeral would be held the following day, Friday, in Montelusa.

Turning off the television, the inspector didn’t feel like eating anything. He went and sat out on the veranda for a bit, enjoying the cool sea air, then went to bed.

The alarm went off at seven-thirty, and Montalbano shot out of bed like a jack-in-the-box. Shortly before eight o’clock, the phone rang.

“Chief, ohh, Chief! Dr. Latte wit ansat the end jess called!”

“What did he want?”

“He said that ‘cause that they’re having the furinal services for that sinator that died and seeing as how the c’mishner gotta be there poissonally in poisson, atta furinal, I mean, the c’mishner can’t come to see youse like he said he was gonna do. Unnastand, Chief?”

“Perfectly, Cat.”

It was a lovely day, but the moment he set down the phone, it seemed downright heavenly to him. The prospect of not having to meet with Bonetti-Alderighi made him practically idiotic with joy, to the point that he composed a perfectly ignoble couplet—ignoble in terms of both intelligence and meter—for the occasion: A dead senator a day

Keeps the commissioner away.

Michela had mentioned that Emilio Sclafani, Elena’s husband, taught Greek at theliceo classicoof Montelusa, which probably meant he got in his car every morning and drove to school. Thus when the inspector knocked at the door of Apartment 6, Via Autonomia Siciliana 18, at 8:40, he was reasonably certain that Signora Elena, the professor’s wife and the late Angelo Pardo’s mistress, would be at home alone. But in reality when he knocked, there was no answer. The inspector tried again. Nothing. He started to worry. Maybe the woman had asked her husband for a lift and gone into Montelusa. He knocked a third time. Still nothing. He turned around, cursing, and was about to descend the stairs when he heard a woman’s voice call from inside the apartment. “Who is it?”

This question is not always so easy to answer. First of all, because it may happen that the person who’s supposed to reply is caught at a moment of identity loss and, second, because saying who one is doesn’t always facilitate things.

“Administration,” he said.

In so-called civilized societies, there is always an administrator administrating you, thought Montalbano. It might be the condominium administrator or a legal administrator, but it really makes no difference, since what matters is that he’s there, and stays there, and that he administrates you more or less carefully, or even secretly, ready to make you pay for mistakes you perhaps don’t even know you’ve made. Joseph K. knew a thing or two about this.

The door opened, and an attractive, thirtyish blonde appeared, dressed in an absurd kimono, with pouty lips a fire red without even a trace of lipstick, and sleepy blue eyes. She’d got out of bed to answer the door and still bore a strong smell of sleep. The inspector felt vaguely uneasy, mostly because, though barefoot, she was taller than him. “What do you want?”

The tone of her question made it clear she had no intention of wasting any time and indeed was in a hurry to go back to bed.

“Police. I’m Inspector Montalbano. Good morning. Are you Elena Sclafani?”

She turned pale and took a step backwards.

“Oh my God, has something happened to my husband?”

Montalbano balked. He wasn’t expecting this.

“To your husband? No. Why do you ask?”

“Because every morning when he gets in his car to drive to Montelusa,I…well,he doesn’t know how to drive… Since we got married four years ago, he’s had about ten mi-nor accidents, and so …”

“Signora, I didn’t come to talk to you about your husband, but about another man. And I have many things to ask you. Perhaps it’s better if we go inside.”

She stepped aside and took Montalbano into a small but rather elegant living room.

“Please sit down, I’ll be right back.”

She took ten minutes to get dressed. She returned in a blouse and skirt slightly above the knee, high heels, and with her hair in a bun. She sat down in an armchair in front of the inspector. She showed neither curiosity nor the slightest bit of concern.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“If it’s already made …”

“No, but I’ll go make it. I need some myself. If I don’t drink a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, I don’t connect.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

She went into the kitchen and started rummaging around. The telephone rang, and she answered. She returned with the coffee. They each put sugar in their demitasses, and neither spoke until they’d finished drinking.

“That was my husband, just now, on the phone. He was calling to let me know he was about to start class. He does that every day, just to reassure me he got there all right.”

“May I smoke?” Montalbano asked.

“Of course. I smoke, too. So …” said Elena, leaning back into the armchair, a lighted cigarette between her fingers. “What’s Angelo done this time?”

Montalbano looked at her bewildered, mouth hanging open. For the past half hour, he’d been trying to figure out how to broach the subject of the woman’s lover, and she comes out with this explicit question?

“How did you know I—”

“Inspector, there are currently two men in my life. You made it clear you hadn’t come to talk about my husband, and this can only mean you’re here to talk about Angelo. Am I right?”

“Yes, you’re right. But before going any further, I would like you to explain that adverb you used: ‘currently.’ What do you mean?”

Elena smiled. She had bright white teeth, like a wild young animal.

“I mean that at the moment there’s Emilio—my husband—and there’s Angelo. More often there’s only one: Emilio.”

While Montalbano was contemplating the meaning of these words, Elena asked:

“Do you know my husband?” “No.”

“He’s an extraordinary person, kind, intelligent, understanding. I’m twenty-nine years old. He’s seventy. He could be my father. I love him. And I try to be faithful to him. I try. But I don’t always succeed. As you can see, I’m speaking to you with total sincerity, without even knowing the reason for your visit. By the way, who told you about me and Angelo?”

“Michela Pardo.”

“Ah.”

She snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray and lit another. A wrinkle now furrowed her beautiful brow. She was concentrating very hard. Not only beautiful, but also quite intelligent, no doubt. Without warning, two more wrinkles appeared at the corners of her mouth.

“Did something happen to Angelo?”

She’d finally asked.

“He’s dead.”

She shook as though from an electrical current, and closed her eyes tight.

“Was he murdered?”

She was quietly weeping, without sobbing. “What makes you think there was a crime?”

“Because if it had been a car accident or natural death, a police inspector would not have come to interrogate the victim’s mistress at eight-thirty in the morning.”

Hats off.

“Yes, he was murdered.” “Last night?”

“We found him yesterday, but he’d been dead since Monday night.”

“How did he die?” “Shot.” “Where?” “In the face.”

She gave a start, trembling as though she felt suddenly cold.

“No, I meant where did it happen?”

“At his place. Do you know that room he had up on the terrace?”

“Yes, he showed it to me once.”

“Listen, ma’am, I have to ask you some questions.”

“Well, here I am.”

“Did your husband know?”

“About my affair with Angelo? Yes.”

“Was it you who told him?”

“Yes. I never kept anything from him.”

“Was he jealous?”

“Of course. But he could control himself. Anyway, Angelo wasn’t the first.”

“Where would the two of you meet?”

“At his place.”

“In the room on the terrace?”

“No, never. As I said, he showed it to me once. He told me he went up there to read and sunbathe.” “How often did you meet?”

“It varied. Normally, when one of us felt like it, we would call the other. Sometimes we went as long as four or five days without seeing each other, maybe because I was too busy or because he had to go out on his rounds of the province.”

“Were you ever jealous?”

“Of Angelo? No.”

“But Michela told me you were. And that lately the two of you had been quarreling a lot.”

“I don’t even know Michela. I’ve never met her. But Angelo used to tell me about her. I think she’s mistaken.”

“About what?”

“About our quarrels. Jealousy wasn’t the reason.”

“Then what was?”

“I wanted to leave him.”

“You did?!”

“Why are you so surprised? The feeling was fading, that’s all. And then …” “And then?”

“And then I realized Emilio was taking it too hard, even though he didn’t let it show. It was the first time he felt so bad.”

“Angelo didn’t want you to leave him?”

“No. I think he was starting to develop a feeling for me that he hadn’t counted on at the beginning. You know, in matters of women, Angelo was rather inexperienced.”

“Forgive my asking, but where were you Monday evening?”

She smiled.

“I was wondering when you would ask. I have no alibi.” “Can you tell me what you did? Did you stay home? See friends?”

“I went out. Angelo and I had planned to get together Monday evening at his place, around nine o’clock. But when I went out, almost unconsciously, I took a wrong turn. And I kept on going, forcing myself not to turn back. I wanted to see whether I could actually give Angelo up, as he was waiting to make love to me. I drove around aimlessly for two hours, then went back home.”

“Weren’t you puzzled that Angelo didn’t contact you the following morning and in the days that followed?”

“No. I thought he wasn’t calling me out of spite.”

“Didn’t you try to call him?”

“No, I would never have done that. It would have been a mistake. Maybe it really was all over between us. And I felt relieved at the thought of it.”

4

The telephone rang again.

“Excuse me,” said Elena, getting up.

But before leaving the room, she asked:

“Do you have many more questions to ask me? Because I’m sure this is a girlfriend whom I’m supposed to—”

“Ten more minutes at the most.”

Elena went out, answered the phone, returned, and sat down. From the way she walked and talked, she seemed completely relaxed. She had managed to metabolize the news of her lover’s death in a hurry. Maybe it was true she no longer gave a damn about the man. So much the better. Montalbano wouldn’t have to hold back or feel embarrassed.

“There’s one thing that now seems a bit—how shall I say?—odd to me…Forgive me, I’m not very good with adjectives …or maybe it seems odd only to me, since I’m… I couldn’t…

He felt completely nonplussed. He didn’t know how to put the question to this beautiful girl, who was a pleasure just to look at.

“Say it,” she encouraged him with a little smile.

“Okay. You told me you went out Monday evening to go to Angelo’s place, where he was waiting to make love with you. Is that right?” “That’s right.”

“Were you planning to spend the night there with him?”

“Absolutely not. I never spent the night there. I would have come back home around midnight.”

“So you would have stayed about three hours with Angelo.”

“More or less. But why …?”

“Did you ever happen to arrive late for a date with him?”

“A few times.”

“And how did Angelo behave in those instances?”

“How was he supposed to behave? He was usually nervous, irritated. Then he would slowly calm down and …” She smiled in a completely different way from a moment be-fore. A smile half concealed, secret, self-directed, eyes sparkling with amusement. “And try to make up for the time lost.”

“What if I were to tell you that Angelo, that evening, didn’t wait for you?”

“What do you mean? I really don’t think he went out, since you said they found him on the terrace …”

“He was killed right after having sexual relations.”

She was either as great an actress as La Duse or truly shaken. She quickly made a few meaningless gestures, stood up and sat down, brought her empty demitasse to her lips, put it down as if she’d drunk from it, pulled a cigarette out of her pack but didn’t light it, stood up and sat down, knocked over a small wooden box that was on the coffee table, looked at it, then set it down.

“That’s absurd,” she finally said.

“You see, Angelo behaved as if he was absolutely certain you were no longer going to his place on Monday evening. Out of some sort of resentment towards you, or out of spite, or to get back at you, he may have called another woman. And now you must answer me truthfully: That evening, as you were driving around in your car, did you phone Angelo and tell him you weren’t going to his place?”

“No. That’s why I say it’s absurd. One time, you know, I even showed up two hours late. And he was beside himself, but still waiting. Monday evening he had no way of knowing what I’d decided. I could have descended on him at any moment and surprised him!”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Montalbano.

“Why?”

“Because Angelo, in a way, had taken a precaution: He’d gone up to the room on the terrace. And the glass door leading to the terrace was locked. Do you have a key for that door?”

“No.”

“So you see? Even if you’d arrived unexpectedly, there was no way you could have surprised him. Do you have keys to his apartment?”

“No.”

“So all you could have done was knock on the apartment door, and nobody would have answered. Before long you would have concluded that Angelo wasn’t home, that he’d gone out, perhaps to blow off some steam, and you would have given up. In his room on the terrace, Angelo was out of your reach.”

“But not the killer’s,” Elena said, almost angrily.

“That’s another matter,” said Montalbano. “And you can help me in this.”

“How?”

“How long had you been with Angelo?” “Six months.”

“During that time, did you have a chance to meet any of his friends, male or female?”

“Inspector, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear enough. When we got together, it was always to … well, it was always for a very specific purpose. I would go to his place, we’d have a whisky, get undressed, and go to bed. We never once went to the movies together, or to a restaurant. More recently he wanted to do those kinds of things, but I didn’t. And that also led to quarrels.”

“Why didn’t you want to go out with him?”

“Because I didn’t want to give people a reason to laugh at Emilio.”

“But surely Angelo must have spoken to you about some of his friends or girlfriends!”

“He did. He told me, shortly after we met, that he had just broken up with a certain Paola, ‘the red,’ as he called her. He also told me about a certain Martino, with whom he often went out to lunch and dinner. But the person he spoke most often about was his sister, Michela. They were very close, and had been so since childhood.”

“What do you know about this Paola?” “I’ve already told you everything I know: Paola, red hair.”

“Did he talk about his job?”

“No. One time he mentioned that it paid well but was boring.”

“Did you know that he’d had a medical practice for a while and then gave it up?”

“Yes. But he didn’t give it up. The only time he ever spoke to me about it, he made vague mention of some episode that had forced him to stop practicing. It was totally unclear to me, but I didn’t probe any further because I didn’t care.”

This was absolutely new. He had to find out more about it.

Montalbano stood up.

“Thank you for your openness. A rare thing, I assure you. I think, however, I’ll need to meet with you again.”

“Whatever you say, Inspector. But please do me a favor.” “At your service.”

“Next time don’t come so early in the morning. You can even come in the afternoon. As I said, my husband knows everything. Sorry, but it’s just that I’m a late riser.”

He pulled up in front of Angelo Pardo’s building over half an hour late. But he could take his time, since the meeting with the commissioner had been postponed. He rang the intercom bell, and Michela buzzed open the door. As he was climbing the stairs, the building still seemed dead. No voices, no sounds. Who knew whether Elena, when coming to see Angelo, had ever run into any of the other tenants?

Michela was waiting for him at the door.

“You’re late.”

Montalbano noticed she was wearing a different dress, but one still made to hide what could not be hidden. She’d also changed her shoes.

Did she therefore keep a whole wardrobe in her brother’s apartment?

Michela realized what was going through the inspector’s head.

“I went home early this morning. I wanted to see how Mama had spent the night. And so I took the opportunity to change clothes.”

“Listen, this morning you have to go see the Public Prosecutor Tommaseo. I’d meant to go with you, but I think there’s no point in my being there.”

“What does this man want from me?”

“He needs to ask you some questions about your brother. Could I use the telephone? I’ll tell Tommaseo you’re on your way.”

“But where am I supposed to go?” “To the courthouse, in Montelusa.”

He went into the study and immediately sensed something strange. Something had changed, but he didn’t know what. He called up Tommaseo and told him he couldn’t attend the meeting with Pardo’s sister. The prosecutor, though he didn’t show it, was naturally pleased.

Back in the hallway, Michela was ready to leave. “Could you please give me the keys to this apartment?” She hesitated a moment, unsure, then opened her purse and handed him the set.

“What if I need to come back here?”

“Come to the station and I’ll give them back to you. Where can I find you this afternoon?” “At home.”

He closed the door behind Michela and ran into the study.

From time immemorial the inspector had a kind of photographic eye built into his head. When, for example, he entered a room that was new to him, he could capture in a single glance not only the arrangement of the furniture but also the objects sitting on top of the different pieces. And he would remember all this even after some time had passed.

He stopped in the doorway, leaned his right shoulder against the jamb and, looking very carefully, discovered at once what didn’t tally.

The overnight bag.

The previous evening the bag was resting upright on the floor beside the desk, whereas now it was entirely under the desk. There was no reason to move it; it was not in the way, even if one had to use the phone. Michela must therefore have picked it up to see what was inside and not put it back where it was before.

He cursed. Shit, what a big mistake he’d made! He should not have left the woman alone in the murdered man’s home. He had made it as easy as possible for her to get rid of anything that might prove in some way compromising for her brother.

He grabbed the overnight bag and set it down on the desk. The little suitcase opened up at once; it was not locked. Inside, a great mass of papers with letterheads of a variety of pharmaceutical companies, instruction inserts for medicines, order forms, receipts.

There were also two datebooks, one big and one small. He looked first at the big one. The index of addresses was densely packed with the names and telephone numbers of doctors all over the province, hospitals, and pharmacies. In addition, Angelo Pardo diligently wrote down every work-related appointment he had.

Montalbano set this aside and thumbed through the smaller one. It was Pardo’s private datebook. It contained the names and phone numbers of Elena Sclafani, his sister, Michela, and many others the inspector didn’t know. He looked at the page for the previous Monday. Pardo had written,9 pm E.Thus what Elena had told him about her rendezvous with Angelo was true. He set the little datebook aside as well and picked up the phone.

“Montalbano here, Cat. Lemme talk to Fazio.”

“Straightaway, Chief.”

“Fazio, could you come meet me right now at Angelo Pardo’s place?”

“On the terrace?”

“No, downstairs, in the apartment.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Oh, and bring Catarella along with you.”

“Catarella?!”

“Why, can’t he be moved?”

The desk had three drawers. He opened the one on the right. Here, too, papers and documents relating to the man’s career as—what was that again?—ah, yes, as a “pharmaceutical industry informer.” The one in the middle wouldn’t open. It was locked, and the key was nowhere to be seen. Probably Michela had taken it. What a goddamn idiot he’d been! He was about to open the drawer on the left when the telephone on the desk rang so suddenly and loudly that it scared him. He picked up the receiver.

“Yes?” he said, squeezing his nostrils with the index fin-ger and thumb of his right hand to alter his voice.

“You got a cold?”

“Yes.”

“Izzat why you din’t come lass night, scumbag? I’ll be waitin f’r ya t’night. And ya better come, even if you got pneumonia.”

End of phone call. A man of few but dangerous words. A commanding voice. Surely some doctor upset at a pharmaceutical informer’s failure to show would not call him a scumbag. Montalbano picked up the big datebook and looked at the page for the previous day, Thursday. The part for the evening was blank. There was no writing. Whereas the morning part featured an appointment in Fanara with a certain Dr. Caruana.

He was about to open the left-hand drawer when the phone rang again. Montalbano began to suspect that there was some sort of connection between the drawer and the telephone.

“Yes?” he said, doing the same rigmarole with his nostrils.

“Dr. Angelo Pardo?”

The voice of a woman, fiftyish and stern. “Yes, it’s me.”

“Your voice sounds strange.” “A cold.”

“Ah. I’m a nurse with Dr. Caruana in Fanara. The doctor waited a long time for you yesterday morning, and you didn’t even have the courtesy to inform us you weren’t coming.”

“Please give my apologies to Dr. Caruana, but this cold…I’ll get back in tou—”

He interrupted himself. Wasn’t he taking this a bit too far? How could the dead man he was pretending to be ever get back in touch?

“Hello?” said the nurse.

“I’ll call back as soon as I can. Good day.”

He hung up. An entirely different tone from that used by the unknown man in the first phone call. Very interesting. But would he ever succeed in opening the drawer? He moved his hand carefully, keeping it out of the telephone’s view.

This time he succeeded.

It was stuffed full of papers. Every possible and imagina-ble kind of receipt of the sort that help keep a household running: rent, electricity, gas, telephone, maintenance. But nothing concerning him, Angelo, personally in person, as Catarella would say. Maybe he’d kept the papers and things more directly related to his own life in the middle drawer.

He closed the left-hand drawer, and the telephone rang. Perhaps the phone had realized a bit late that he’d tricked it, and it was now taking revenge.

“Yes?”

Again with nostrils plugged.

“What the hell happened to you, asshole?”

Male voice, fortyish, angry. He was about to respond when the other continued:

“Hold on a second, I’ve got a call on the other line.”

Montalbano pricked his ears but could only hear a confused murmur. Then two words loud and clear:

“Holy shit!”

Then the other hung up. What did it mean? Scumbag and asshole. It was anyone’s guess how a third anonymous caller might define Angelo. At that moment the intercom next to the front door rang. The inspector went and buzzed open the door downstairs. It was Fazio and Catarella.

“Ahh, Chief, Chief! Fazio tol’ me you was needin’ me poissonally in poisson!”

He was all sweaty and excited by the high honor the inspector was bestowing on him by asking him to take part in the investigation.

“Follow me, both of you.”

He led them into the study.

“You, Cat, take that laptop that’s on the desk and see if you can tell me everything it’s got inside. But don’t do it in here; take it into the living room.”

“Can I also take the prinner wit’ me, Chief?”

“Take whatever you need.”

“With Catarella gone, Montalbano filled Fazio in on everything, from his fuckup in leaving Michela alone in Angelo’s apartment to what Elena Sclafani had told him. He also told him about the phone calls. Fazio stood there pensively.

“Tell me again about the second call,” he said after a moment.

Montalbano described the call again.

“Here’s my hypothesis,” said Fazio. “Let’s say the guy who phoned the second time is named Giacomo. This Giacomo doesn’t know that Angelo’s been killed. He calls him up and hears him answer the phone. Giacomo’s angry because he’s been unable to get in touch with Angelo for several days. “When he’s about to start talking to him, he tells him to hold on because he’s got a call on another line. Right?”

“Right.”

“He talks on the other line and somebody tells him something that not only upsets him but makes him break off the conversation. The question is, what did they tell him?”

“That Angelo’s been murdered,” said Montalbano.

“That’s what I think, too.”

“Listen, Fazio, do the newsmen know about the murder yet?”

“Well, something’s been leaking out. But to get back to our discussion, when Giacomo finds out he’s talking to a fake Angelo, he hangs up immediately.”

“The question is, why did he hang up?” said Montalbano. “Here’s a first idea: Let’s say Giacomo’s a man with nothing to hide, an innocent friend from nights of wining and dining and girls. While he’s thinking he’s talking to Angelo, somebody tells him Angelo’s been killed. A real friend would not have hung up. He’d have asked the fake Angelo who he really is and why he was passing himself off as Angelo. So we need a second idea. Which is that Giacomo, as soon as he learns of Angelo’s death, says ‘Holy shit’ and hangs up because he’s afraid of giving himself away if he keeps on talking. So it’s not an innocent friendship, but something shady. And that first phone call also seemed fishy to me.” “What can we do?”

“We can try to find out where the calls came from. See if you can get authorization, and then take it to the phone company. There’s no guarantee it’s going to work, but it’s worth a try.”

“I’ll try right now.”

“Wait, that’s not all. We need to find out everything we can about Angelo Pardo. Based on what Elena Sclafani told me, it seems he was kicked out of the medical association or whatever it’s called. And that’s not the sort of thing that’s done for chickenshit.”

“All right, I see what I can do.”

“Wait. What’s the big hurry? I also want to know the whole life story of Emilio Sclafani, who teaches Greek at theliceoof Montelusa. You’ll find the address in the phone book.”

“All right,” said Fazio, making no more sign of leaving. “Another thing. What about Angelo’s wallet?” “He had it in the back pocket of his jeans. Forensics grabbed it.”

“Did they grab anything else?”

“Yessir. A set of keys and the cell phone that was on the table.”

“Before the day is over, I want those keys, cell phone, and wallet.”

“Fine. Can I go now?”

“No. Try to open the middle drawer of Pardo’s desk. It’s locked. But you have to be able to open and reclose it so that it looks like it hasn’t been touched.”

“That’ll take a little time.”

“You’ve got all the time you want.”

As Fazio started to fiddle around with the drawer, Montalbano went into the living room. Catarella had turned on the laptop and was fiddling around himself.

“Iss rilly difficult, Chief.”

“Why?”

” ‘Cause iss got the lass word.”

Montalbano was befuddled. What, can computers talk now?

“Cat, what the hell are you saying?”

“Iss like diss, Chief: When summon don’t want summon to look at the poissonal tings he got inside, he gives it a lass word.”

Montalbano understood.

“You mean a password?”

“Ain’t dat what I said? And if you don’t got the lass word, y’can’t get in.” “So we’re fucked?”

“Not nicissarily, Chief. He’s gotta have a form wit’ the name ‘n’ sir name o’ the owner, date a boith, name o’ the missus or girlfriend or brother and sister and mother and father, son if you got one, daughter if you got one—”

“All right, I’ll have everything to you today after lunch. Meanwhile take the computer back to the station with you. Who are you going to give the form to?”

“Who’m I sposta give it to, Chief?”

“Cat, you said, ‘He’s gotta have.’ Who’s ‘he’?”

“He’s me, Chief.”

Fazio called him from the study.

5

“I got lucky, Chief. I found a key of my own that seemed like it was made for that lock. Nobody’ll be able to tell that it’s been opened.”

The drawer looked to be in perfect order.

A passport, whose information Montalbano wrote down for Catarella; contracts stating percentages to be earned on products sold; two legal documents from which Montalbano copied down, again for Catarella’s benefit, the names and birth dates of Michela and her mother, whose first name was Assunta; a medical diploma, folded in four, dating from sixteen years ago; a letter from the medical association, from ten years earlier, informing him of his dismissal without explaining how or why; an envelope with a thousand euros in bills of fifty; two mini-albums with photos from a trip to India and another to Russia; three letters from Signora Assunta to her son, in which she complained of her life with Michela and other similar matters—all personal, but all, well, utterly useless to Montalbano. There was even an old declaration concerning the recovery, in the mother’s apartment, of a pistol formerly belonging to Pardo’s father. But there was no trace of the weapon; perhaps Angelo had gotten rid of it.

“But didn’t this gentleman have a bank account?” asked Fazio. “How is it there are no checkbooks anywhere, not even old, used-up ones, or any bank statements?”

No answer to the question was forthcoming, since Montalbano was wondering the same thing.

One thing, however, that puzzled the inspector more than a little, and stumped Fazio as well, was the discovery of a small, dog-eared booklet entitledThe Most Beautiful Italian Songs of All Time.Though there was a television in the living room, there was no sign anywhere of records, CDs, CD players, or even a radio.

“How about the room on the terrace? Did you see any discs, headphones, or a stereo there?”

“Nothing, Chief.”

So why would somebody keep a booklet of song lyrics locked up in a drawer? Most striking was the fact that the book looked like it had been often consulted; two detached pages had been carefully stuck back in place with transparent tape. Moreover, numbers had been written in the narrow margins. Montalbano studied these, and it didn’t take him long to realize that Angelo had jotted down the meter of the lines.

“You can close it back up. By the way, did you say you found a set of keys in the room upstairs?”

“Yeah. Forensics took it.”

“I repeat: I want that wallet, cell phone, and keys this afternoon. What are you doing?”

Instead of reclosing and locking the drawer, Fazio was emptying onto the desk, in orderly fashion, all the things there were inside it.

“Just a second, Chief. I wanna see something.”

When the drawer had been completely emptied, Fazio pulled it entirely out from its runners and turned it over. Underneath, on the bottom, was a chrome-plated, squat, notched key, stuck to the wood by two pieces of tape crossed in an X.

“Well done, Fazio.”

While the inspector was contemplating the key he’d detached, Fazio put everything back into the drawer in the same order as before and locked the drawer with his own key, which he slipped back into his pocket.

“If you ask me, this key opens up a little wall safe some-where,” the inspector surmised.

“If you ask me, too,” said Fazio.

“And you know what that means?”

“It means we need to get down to work,” said Fazio, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.

After two hours spent moving paintings, moving mirrors, moving furniture, moving rugs, moving medicines, and moving books, Montalbano’s pithy conclusion was: “There’s not a goddamn thing here.”

They sat down, exhausted, on the living-room couch. They looked at one another. And they both thought the same thing:

“The room upstairs.”

They climbed the spiral staircase. Montalbano opened the glass door, and they walked onto the terrace roof. The door to the little room had not been put back on its hinges but was only leaning in place with a piece of paper taped to it, forbidding entry and saying that the premises were under legal process. Fazio set the door aside, and they went in.

They had two strokes of luck. First, the room was small, and therefore they didn’t have to break their backs moving too much furniture. Second, the table had no drawers, and so they didn’t waste much time. But the result was exactly the same as that obtained in the apartment downstairs, which the inspector had brilliantly, though perhaps not so elegantly, summed up in few words. The one difference was that they were now sweating profusely, since the sun was beating down on the little room.

“Maybe the key is for a safe-deposit box at a bank?” Fazio ventured when they returned to the flat below.

“I doubt it. Usually those keys have a number on them, or an imprint, something enabling the bank people to recognize it. This one is smooth, anonymous.”

“So what are we gonna do?”

“We’re gonna go eat,” said Montalbano, waxing poetic.

After a thorough bellyful and a slow, meditative-digestive stroll, one step at a time, to the lighthouse and back, he went to the office.

“Chief, djou bring me the form that he needs?” asked Catarella the moment he walked in. “Yes, give it to him.”

According to the complex Catarellian language, “him” of course meant Catarella himself.

The inspector sat down, pulled out the key Fazio had found, set it on the desk, and started staring at it as though he wanted to hypnotize it. But the opposite thing happened. That is, the key hypnotized him. In fact, a few minutes later, he let his eyes shut, overwhelmed by an irresistible desire to sleep. He got up, went and washed his face, and at that moment he had a brainstorm. He called Galluzzo into his of-fice.

“Listen, do you know where Orazio Genco lives?”

“The robber? Of course I know where he lives. I went there twice to arrest him.”

“I want you to go see him, ask him how he’s doing, and give him my regards. Did you know that Orazio hasn’t gotten out of bed for a year? I don’t feel up to seeing what kind of state he’s in.”

Galluzzo wasn’t surprised. He knew that the inspector and the old burglar were fond of each other and had become, in their own way, friends.

“Am I just supposed to give him your regards?”

“No. “While you’re at it, let him have a look at this key.” Montalbano took it out and handed it to him. “Make him tell you what kind of key it is and what he thinks it’s for.”

“Bah!” said a skeptical Galluzzo. “That’s a modern key.”

“So?”

“Orazio’s old and hasn’t been working for years.” “Don’t worry, I know he keeps informed.”

As Montalbano was drifting off to sleep again, Fazio suddenly appeared with a plastic bag in hand. “Did you go shopping?”

“No, Chief, I went to Montelusa to get what you wanted from Forensics. It’s all in here.” He set the bag down on the desk.

“And I also want you to know I talked to the phone company. I got the authorization. They’re going to try to identify the phones that those calls came from.”

“And the information on Angelo Pardo and Emilio Sclafani?”

“Chief, unfortunately, I’m not God. I can only do one thing at a time. I’m going out to make the rounds now, see what I can find out. Oh, one more thing. Three.”

And he held up the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of his right hand.

Montalbano gave him a befuddled look.

“You become some kind of kabbalist or something? What’s ‘three’ supposed to mean? You wanna play fling flang flu?”

“Chief, you remember that kid who died from an overdose? And do you remember I told you Engineer Fasulo was also killed by drugs, even though everybody said it was a heart attack?”

“Yes, I remember. So who’s the third?”

“Senator Nicotra.”

Montalbano’s mouth took the shape of an O. “Are you kidding?”

“No, Chief. It was well known the senator dabbled in drugs. Every now and then, he would shut himself up in his villa and take a three-day trip by himself. Looks like this time he forgot to buy a return ticket.”

“But is this certain?”

“Gospel, Chief.”

“How do you like that? The guy did nothing but talk about morals and morality! Tell me something: When you went to the kid’s house, did you find the usual stuff— syringe, rubber hose?”

“Yeah.”

“With Nicotra it must have been something else, some badly cut stuff. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand these things. Anyway, may he rest in peace.”

As he was leaving, Fazio practically ran into Mimi Augello in the doorway.

“Mimi!” the inspector bellowed. “What a lovely surprise! A sight for sore eyes!”

“Leave me alone, Salvo, I haven’t slept a wink for two days.”

“Is the little one sick?”

“No, but he cries all the time. For no reason.” “That’s your opinion.” “But the doctors—”

“Forget about the doctors. Obviously the kid’s not in agreement with you and Beba about having been brought into the world. And considering the way the world is, I can’t say I blame him.”

“Listen. Don’t start in with your jokes. I just wanted to tell you that five minutes ago I got a call from the commissioner.”

“And what the hell do I care about your lovey-dovey phone calls? ‘Cause nowadays you and Bonetti-Alderighi are downright hand in glove with each other, except it’s not clear who’s the hand and who’s the glove.”

“Did you get it out of your system? Can I talk now? Yes? The commissioner told me that tomorrow morning, around eleven o’clock, Inspector Liguori’s coming here, to the station.”

Montalbano darkened. “The asshole from Narcotics?” “The asshole from Narcotics.” “What’s he want?” “I don’t know.”

“I don’t even want to see his shadow.”

“That’s precisely why I came in to tell you. You, tomorrow, as of eleven o’clock, should make yourself scarce. I’ll talk to him.”

“Thanks. My best to Beba.”

He phoned Michela Pardo. He wanted to see her, not only because he had to ask her some questions, but also to find out why and what she’d taken from her brother’s apartment. The stupidity of having let her sleep at Angelo’s place weighed heavily on his mind.

“How’d it go this morning with Judge Tommaseo?” he asked her.

“He made me wait half an hour in the anteroom and then had someone inform me that the meeting had been postponed until tomorrow at the same hour. I’m glad you called, Inspector. I was about to call you.”

“What is it?”

“I wanted to know when we could have Angelo back. For the funeral.”

“To be honest, I don’t know. But I’ll find out. Listen, could you come by the station?”

“Inspector Montalbano, I decided it was better to tell Mama that Angelo is dead. I told her he died in a car accident. She had a very violent reaction, and I had to call our doctor. He gave her some sedatives, and she’s resting now. I don’t want to leave her alone. Couldn’t you come here?”

“Sure. When?”

“Whenever you like. In any case, I can’t leave the house.”

“I’ll be there around seven o’clock this evening. Let me have the address.”

About an hour later, Galluzzo returned. “How’s Orazio doing?”

“Pretty far gone, Chief. He’s waiting for you to come see him.”

He pulled the key out of his pocket and handed it to the inspector.

“According to Orazio, this is the key to a portable Exeter strongbox, forty-five centimeters by thirty by twenty-five centimeters tall. He says you can’t open those boxes even with an antitank mine. Unless you’ve got the key.”

He and Fazio had searched the apartment and the room on the terrace for a wall safe. Surely they would have seen a strongbox that size. Which must mean that somebody had taken it away. But what could they do with it without the key? Or maybe the person who took it owned a duplicate key? And did Michela know nothing about this? It was becoming more and more necessary to talk with that woman. He’d promised her he would find out about the funeral, so he called Pasquano.

“Hello, Doctor, am I disturbing you?”

One had to approach Pasquano carefully. He had a decidedly nasty, unstable character.

“Of course you’re disturbing me. Actually, to be more precise, you’re breaking my balls. You’re making me get blood all over the receiver.”

Someone else who didn’t know the doctor would have hung up in embarrassment, apologizing profusely. But the inspector had been so long associated with him that he knew that sometimes it was better to throw fuel on the fire.

“Doctor, I don’t give a fuck.”

“About what?”

“Whether I’m disturbing you or not.”

It worked. Pasquano let out a big fat belly laugh.

“What do you want?”

“Angelo Pardo’s family wants to know when we can give back the body for the funeral.” “Five.”

What the hell had gotten into Fazio and the doctor? Had they both become Cumaean sibyls? Why had they taken to reciting numbers?

“What’s that mean?”

“I’ll tell you what it means. It means that before I get to Pardo, I have five other autopsies to perform. Therefore the family will have to wait a bit. Tell them their dear departed is not having such a bad time of it in the freezer. Oh, and while I’ve got you on the line, I should tell you I was mistaken.”

Madunnuzza santa,the patience one needed with this man!

“About what, Doctor?”

“About whether Pardo had had sexual relations before he was killed. I’m sorry to disappoint Judge Tommaseo, who was off to such a flying start.”

“So you did examine him!”

“Just superficially, and only the part I was curious about.”

“But then why…?”

“Why was it out, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, maybe he’d gone and taken a piss in a corner of the terrace and wasn’t allowed the time to put it back in. Or maybe he was planning a moment of solitary pleasure but they beat him to it and shot him. But that sort of thing’s not my province. It’s you, Mr. Inspector, who’s conducting the investigation, isn’t it?”

He hung up without saying good-bye.

So, come to think of it, Elena was right when she refused to believe that Angelo had met with another woman while he was waiting for her. But the doctor’s hypothesis didn’t hold water either.

There was no bathroom in the former laundry room, only a sink. If Angelo needed to go and didn’t feel like going downstairs to his flat, there was no need to do it in some dark corner of the terrace; he could have used the sink as a toilet bowl.

Nor was the masturbation hypothesis very convincing.

Yet in both cases it was very odd that Pardo hadn’t had time to put himself back in order. No, there must be some other explanation. Something not so simple as Pasquano’s theories.

Mimi Augello appeared in the doorway. “What do you want?”

He had dark circles under his eyes, worse than when he used to spend his nights womanizing. “Seven,” said Mimi.

Montalbano looked like he’d suddenly gone mad. He sprang out of his chair, red in the face, and screamed so loudly they must have heard him all the way to the port: “Eighteen, twenty-four, thirty-six! Fuck! And seventy, too!”

Augello got scared, and chaos erupted all over the station, doors slamming, footsteps racing. In an instant, Galluzzo, Gallo, and Catarella were in the doorway.

“What’s going on?”

“What happened?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing,” said Montalbano, sitting back down. “Go back to your posts. I had a little attack of nerves, that’s all. It’s over.”

The three men left. Mimi was still staring at him

“What got into you? What were those mysterious numbers you said?”

“Ah, so it’s me who’s being mysterious with numbers? Me? Didn’t you come in here and say ‘seven’?”

“What, is that a mortal sin or something?”

“Never mind. What did you want to tell me?”

“That since Liguori’s coming tomorrow, I did some research. You know how many drug deaths we’ve had in the province in the last ten days?”

“Seven,” said Montalbano.

“Exactly. How did you know?”

“Mimi, you told me yourself. Let’s drop the Campanile dialogue.”

“What campanile?”

“Forget it, Mimi, or I’ll have another attack of nerves.” “Do you know what people are saying about Senator Nicotra?”

“That he died of the same illness as the other six.” “And that explains why Montelusa Narcotics has decided to get a move on. Don’t you have any ideas about it?” “No, and I don’t want to.” Mimi left, and the phone rang.

“Inspector Montalbano? Lattes here. Everything all right?”

“Just fine, Doctor, with the Virgin’s good grace.” “The pups?”

What the fuck was he talking about? The children? How many did he think he had? What do puppies do, anyway?

“They’re growing, Doctor.”

“Good, good. I wanted to let you know that the commissioner will expect you tomorrow afternoon between five and six.”

“I’ll definitely be there.”

It was time to go see Michela.

Walking past Catarella’s closet, he saw him with his head buried in Angelo Pardo’s computer.

“Getting anywhere, Cat?”

Catarella gave a start and leapt to his feet.

“Ahhh, Chief, Chief! We’s sinkin’ fast! The last word’s got the last word! I can’t get in! Iss impetrinable!”

“Don’t you think you can do it?”

“Chief, even if I gotta stay up and awake all night, I’m gonna find that first secret word!” “Cat, why did you say ‘first’?”

” ‘Cause, Chief, there’s tree files that got past words.”

“Lemme get this straight. So if it takes you ten hours to find the password to one file, that means it’s going to take you at least thirty hours to find all three?”

“Just like you say, Chief.”

“Best of luck. And, listen, if you find the first, don’t hesitate to give me a ring, no matter the hour.”

6

He got in the car and left, but after he’d gone a hundred yards, he slapped himself on the forehead, cursed, began a dangerous U-turn, and the three motorists behind him vociferously let him know that: One, he was a tremendouscornuto.

Two, his mother was a woman of easy virtue.

Three, his sister was worse than his mother.

Back at the station, he walked past Catarella without the other’s noticing, engrossed as he was in the computer. A whole regiment of gangsters could have entered those offices with a single shot being fired.

Back in his room, he opened the little bag Fazio had brought him and pulled out the set of keys that had belonged to Angelo. He immediately noticed a key that looked exactly like the one he had in his pocket, which was supposed to open a strongbox. Normally those locks came equipped with only two keys. Thus the one they’d found under the drawer must be a spare key Angelo kept hidden.

So he’d been wrong about Michela. It couldn’t have been she who took the strongbox; she had no way to open it.

Perhaps the box hadn’t disappeared from Angelo’s apartment because it had never been there in the first place. Perhaps he kept it elsewhere.

Where elsewhere?

Montalbano slapped his forehead again. He was conducting this investigation like a senile idiot who forgot the most basic things. Angelo was a pharmaceutical representative and traveled all over the province, didn’t he? Why hadn’t it already occurred to him that Angelo must have a car and might also have a garage?

He emptied Fazio’s bag onto the table. Cell phone. Wallet. And car keys. QED: Hewasa senile idiot.

He put everything back in the bag and brought it with him. Catarella didn’t notice him this time either.

Michela was wearing a kind of loose, formless dressing gown, which a large, slack knot turned into a kind of prison smock, and pair of slippers. She kept her dangerous eyes lowered. What sins or evil intentions was her body guilty of, for her to punish it by hiding it that way?

She led him into the living room. Finely crafted old furniture, certainly heirlooms handed down from father to son.

“Forgive me for receiving you in these clothes, but since I’m constantly having to look after Mama …”

“Not at all! How is your mother doing?”

“Luckily, she’s resting at the moment. It’s the effect of the sedatives. The doctor says it’s best this way. But her sleep is agitated, as if she were having nightmares. She moans.”

“I’m sorry,” said Montalbano, who never knew what to say in these instances and therefore stuck to generalities.

She broached the question first. Directly.

“Did you find anything at Angelo’s place?”

“What do you mean by ‘anything’?”

“Anything that might help you to understand who it was that—”

“No, nothing yet.”

“You made me a promise.”

Montalbano immediately understood.

“I phoned Montelusa. They’re going to need at least three more days before they can get authorization to return the body. But don’t worry, I’ll keep you informed.”

“Thanks.”

“You just asked me if we found anything in your brother’s apartment and I said no. But we haven’t even found what was supposed to be there.”

He’d cast the baited hook. But she didn’t bite. She just stood there a bit shocked, which was understandable.

“Such as?” she asked.

“Did your brother earn a good living?”

“Good enough. But don’t get the wrong idea, Inspector. Perhaps it’s better to say enough for his needs and ours.”

“Where did he keep his money?”

Michela looked at him—fortunately just for a second— surprised by the question.

“He kept it in the bank.”

“Then how can you explain that we haven’t found any checkbook, bank statement, nothing?”

Unexpectedly, Michela smiled and stood up. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

She reappeared carrying a big portfolio, which she set down on the coffee table. Opening it up, she pulled out a checkbook for the Banca dell’Isola, searched a bit more, pulled out a sheet of paper, and handed the checkbook and paper to the inspector.

“Angelo has an account with this bank, and that’s the most recent statement.”

Montalbano looked at the figure corresponding to the credit column: ninety-one thousand euros.

He handed the two things back to Michela, who put them back in the portfolio.

“That money’s not all from Angelo’s earnings. About fifty thousand euros of it are mine, an inheritance left me by an uncle who was particularly fond of me. As you can see, my brother and I pooled our resources. In fact, the bank account is in both our names.”

“How is it that you have all the books?”

“Well, Angelo was often out of town on business trips and had trouble meeting certain deadlines. So I took care of things and gave him the receipts. Did you find them?”

“Yes, that I did. Did he also have a garage to go with the apartment and the room on the terrace?”

“Of course. There are three garages behind the building. His is the first on the left.”

See, dear Montalbano, youaregetting senile!

“Why do you say Angelo couldn’t make his payments on time because he was out of town? Weren’t most of his trips rather brief and limited to this province?”

“Not exactly. He used to go abroad at least once every three months.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know, Germany, Switzerland, France …The countries where the big pharmaceutical firms are located. They would summon him there.”

“I see. Would he stay away a long time?”

“It varied. From three days to a week. No more than that.”

“Among your brother’s keys we found one that was rather unusual.”

He took out the key in his pocket and handed it to her.

“Do you recognize it?”

She looked at it with curiosity.

“I’d say no, I don’t really recognize it. But I must have seen one rather like it amongst his other keys.” “Did you never ask him what it was for?” “No.”

“This key opens a portable strongbox.” “Really?”

She looked at him. Bright, inviting eyes, to all appearances. In no way perilous.But careful, Montalbano. Underneath, hidden, there are probably tangles of giant algae you’ll never extricate your feet from.

“I never knew that Angelo had a strongbox. He never told me he did, and I never saw it in his apartment.”

Montalbano stared hard at the tip of his left shoe. “Did you find it?” she continued.

“No. We found the keys but not the box. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?” “Quite strange.”

“And that’s another one of those things that should definitely have been in the apartment but weren’t.”

Michela gave a sign that she understood what Montalbano was getting at. She leaned her head back—she had a beautiful, Modiglianiesque neck—and looked at him through— luckily—half-closed eyes.

“You’re not thinkingItook it?”

“Well, you see, I made a mistake.”

“What?”

“I left you alone at your brother’s place that first night. I shouldn’t have. You therefore would have had all the time in the world to—”

“To remove things? Why would I do that?”

“Because you know a lot more about Angelo than we do.”

“Of course I do! Some discovery! We grew up together. We’re brother and sister.”

“And therefore you’re inclined to cover for him, even unconsciously. You told me that at one point your brother decided to stop practicing medicine. But that’s not really how things went. Your brother had his license revoked.”

“Who told you that?”

“Elena Sclafani. I spoke to her this morning, before coming here.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“No. Because she didn’t know. Angelo’d only made vague mention of it to her, but since she wasn’t interested in the matter, she didn’t ask any more questions.”

“Ah, the poor little angel! She wasn’t interested in the matter, but she was certainly in a rush to cast suspicion on it. She attacks, then looks the other way.”

She said this in a voice unfamiliar to the inspector, a voice that seemed produced not by vocal cords but by two sheets of sandpaper rubbed forcefully together.

“Well, why don’tyoutell me the reason?”

“Abortion.”

“Tell me more.”

“Angelo got an underage girl pregnant; what’s more, she was a patient of his. The girl, who was from a certain kind of family, didn’t dare say a thing at home and couldn’t turn to any public institution either. That left clandestine abortion as the only option. Except that the girl, once she got home, suffered a violent hemorrhage. Her father accompanied her to the hospital and learned the whole story. Angelo assumed full responsibility.”

“What do you mean, he ‘assumed full responsibility’? It seems clear to me he was fully responsible!”

“No, not fully. He had asked a colleague of his, a friend from his university days, to perform the abortion. The friend didn’t want to, but Angelo managed to persuade him. When the whole story came out, my brother claimed that he had done the abortion. And so he was condemned and barred from practicing medicine.”

“Tell me the girl’s name and surname.”

“But, Inspector, that was more than ten years ago! I know the girl got married and no longer lives in Vigata … Why do you want—”

“I’m not saying I want to interrogate her, but if it proves necessary, I’ll do so with the utmost discretion, I promise.”

“Teresa Cacciatore. She married a contractor named Mario Sciacca. They live in Palermo and have a little boy.”

“Signora Sclafani told me that she and your brother always met at his place.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“How is it you never crossed paths with her?”

“It was I who didn’t want to meet her. Not even by chance. I’d begged Angelo always to let me know whenever Elena was coming over.”

“Why didn’t you want to meet her?”

“Antipathy. Aversion. Take your pick.”

“But you saw her only once!”

“Once was enough. Anyway, Angelo often talked about her.”

“What did he say?”

“That she had no equal in bed but was too money-hungry.”

“Did your brother pay her?”

“He used to buy her very expensive gifts.”

“Such as?”

“A ring. A necklace. A sports car.” “Elena confided to me that she had made up her mind to leave Angelo.”

“Don’t believe it. She wasn’t done squeezing him yet. She was always throwing jealous fits to keep him close.” “So were you this hostile to Paola the Red, too?” She leapt, literally, out of her armchair. “Who…who told you about Paola?” “Elena Sclafani.” “The slut!”

The sandpaper voice had returned.

“I’m sorry, but who are you referring to?” the inspector asked angelically. “Paola or Elena?”

“Elena, for bringing her into this. Paola was …is a good person who fell sincerely in love with Angelo.”

“Why did your brother leave her?”

“The affair with Paola had gone on for so long …he met Elena at a moment when he was feeling tired of her… To Angelo she represented something new and intriguing that he couldn’t resist, even though I …”

“Give me Paola’s surname and address.”

“Inspector! Do you expect me to give you personal information on all the women who had relationships with Angelo? On Maria Martino? Stella Lojacono?”

“Not all of them. Just those you mentioned.”

“Paola Torrisi-Blanco lives in Montelusa, Via Millefiori 26. She teaches Italian at theliceo.”

“Married?”

“No, but she would have made an ideal wife for my brother.”

“Apparently you knew her well.”

“Yes. We became friends. And we continued to see each

other even after my brother broke up with her. I called her just this morning, to tell her my brother had been murdered.”

“By the way, have any journalists contacted you?”

“No. Have they found out?”

“The news is starting to leak out. You should refuse to speak to them.” “Of course.”

“Let me have the addresses, if you’ve got them, or the phone numbers of the other two women you remembered.”

“I don’t have them right at hand. I need to look in some old datebooks. Is it all right if I give them to you tomorrow?”

“All right.”

“Inspector, can I ask you something?” “Go right ahead.”

“Why are you centering your investigation on Angelo’s women friends?”

“Because you and Elena are doing nothing but serving me women’s names on a platter—or, better yet, on a bed,”he wanted to say, but didn’t.

“You think it’s a mistake?” he asked instead.

“I don’t know whether or not it’s a mistake. But there certainly must be many other leads one could follow concerning the possible motive for my brother’s murder.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know … something concerning his business…maybe some envious competitor… “

At this point the inspector decided to cheat, laying a trick card down on the table. He put on an embarrassed air, like someone who wants to say something but doesn’t really feel like it.

“What’s led us to favor the…ahem…the feminine hypothesis… “

He congratulated himself for coming up with the right words; even the British-cop-like “ahem” had emerged from his throat to perfection. He continued his masterly performance.

“…was…ahem… a detail that perhaps I’d … ahem…better not… “

“Tell me, tell me,” said Michela, assuming for her part the air of someone expecting to hear the worst.

“Well, it’s just that your brother, when he was killed, had just had …ahem…er,sexual relations with a woman.”

It was a whopper, since Pasquano had said something else. But he wanted to see if his words would have the same effect they had the first time. And they did.

The woman sprang to her feet. Her dressing gown opened. She was completely naked underneath. No panties, no bra. A splendid, lush, compact body. She arched her back. In the motion her hair fell down onto her shoulders. She clenched her fists, arms extended at her sides. Her eyes were popping out of her head. Fortunately they weren’t looking at the inspector. Watching obliquely as if through a window, Montalbano saw a raging sea uncoil in those eyes, with force-eight waves rising to peaks like mountains and crashing back down in avalanches of foam, then reforming and falling back down again. The inspector got scared. A memory from his school days came back to him, that of the terrible Erinyes. Then he thought the memory must be wrong; the Erinyes were old and ugly. Whatever the case, he clung tightly to the arms of the easy chair. Michela was having trouble speaking; her fury kept her teeth clenched.“Shedid it!”

The two sheets of sandpaper had turned into grind-stones.

“Elena killed him!”

Her chest had become a bellows. Then all at once the woman fell backwards, hitting her head against the armchair and rebounding forcefully before collapsing in a swoon.

Covered in sweat from the scene he’d just witnessed, Montalbano went out of the living room, saw a door ajar, realized it was the bathroom, went in, wet a towel, returned to the living room, knelt beside Michela, and began wiping her face with the towel. By now it had become a habit. Slowly the woman began to come to. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she did was cover herself with the dressing gown.

“Feeling better?”

“Yes. Forgive me.”

She had amazing powers of recovery. She stood up.

“I’m going to go have a drink of water.”

She returned and sat back down, calm and cool, as though she hadn’t just had an uncontrollable, frightful bout of rage verging on an epileptic fit.

“Did you know that Monday evening your brother and Elena were supposed to meet?”

“Yes, Angelo called to tell me.”

“Elena says that meeting never took place.” “What was her story?”

“She said she went out, but after she got in the car, she decided not to go to their rendezvous. She wanted to see if she could break off with your brother once and for all.”

“And you believe that?”

“She has an alibi, which I’ve checked out.”

It was another whopping lie, but he didn’t want her flying into a rage if some journalist happened to mention Elena’s name.

“Surely it’s false.”

“You mentioned that Angelo used to buy Elena expensive gifts.”

“It’s true. Do you think her husband, with the salary he has, can afford to buy her the kind of car she drives?”

“So if that’s the way it was, what motive would Elena have had for killing him?”

“Inspector, it was Angelo who wanted to end the relationship. He couldn’t take it any longer. She tormented him with her jealousy. Angelo told me she once wrote to him threatening to kill him.”

“She sent him a letter?”

“Two or three, as far as that goes.”

“Do you have these letters?”

“No.”

“We didn’t find any letters from Elena in your brother’s apartment.”

“Angelo must have thrown them away.”

“I think I’ve inconvenienced you too long,” said Montalbano, standing up.

Michela also stood up. She suddenly looked exhausted. Putting her hand over her forehead as if from extreme fatigue, she teetered slightly.

“One last thing,” said the inspector. “Did your brother like popular songs?”

“He listened to them now and then.”

“But there was no appliance for listening to music in his apartment.”

“He didn’t listen to music at home, in fact.” “Where did he, then?”

“In his car, during his business trips. It kept him company. He had many CDs.”

7

Michela said her brother’s garage was the first one on the left. It had two locks, one on the left and one on the right-hand side of the rolling metal door. It didn’t take the inspector long to find the correct key in the set he’d brought with him.

He opened the locks, then slipped a smaller key in another lock on the wall beside the rolling door, turned it, and the door began slowly to rise, too slowly for the inspector’s curiosity. When it had opened all the way, Montalbano went in and immediately found the light switch. The fluorescent light was bright, the garage spacious and in perfect order. Casting a quick glance around, the inspector ascertained that there was no strongbox in the garage and no place in which to hide one.

The car was a rather late-model Mercedes, one of those that are usually rented along with a driver. In the compartment in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats were some ten music CDs. In the glove compartment, the car’s documents and a number of road maps. Just to be sure, he also looked in the trunk, which was sparkling clean: spare tire, jack, red warning triangle.

A little disappointed, Montalbano repeated in reverse the whole complicated procedure he’d gone through to open the garage, then got back in his car and headed to Marinella.

It was nine-fifteen in the evening, but he didn’t feel hungry. He took off his clothes, slipped on a shirt and a pair of jeans, and, barefoot, went out to the veranda and onto the beach.

The moonlight was so faint that the lights inside his house shone as brightly as if each room were illuminated not by lamps but by movie floods. Reaching the water’s edge, he stood there a few minutes, with the sea splashing over his feet and the cool rising up through his body to his head.

Out on the horizon, the glow of a few scattered jack-lights. From far away, a plaintive female voice called twice:

“Stefanu! Stefanu!”

Lazily, a dog answered.

Motionless, Montalbano waited for the surf to enter his brain and wash it clean with each breaker. At last the first light wave came like a caress,swiiissshhh,and carried away,glugluglug,Elena Sclafani and her beauty, while Michela Pardo’s tits, belly, arched body, and eyes likewise disappeared. Once Montalbano the man was erased, all that should have remained was Inspector Montalbano—a kind of abstract function, the person who was supposed to solve the case and nothing more, with no personal feelings involved. But as he was telling himself this, he knew perfectly well that he could never pull it off.

Back in the house, he opened the refrigerator. Adelina must have come down with an acute form of vegetarianism. Caponata and a sublime pasticcio of artichokes and spinach.

He set the table on the veranda and wolfed down the caponata as the pasticcio was heating up. Then he reveled in the pasticcio. After clearing the table, he went and got Angelo’s wallet from the plastic bag. Turning it upside down and sticking his fingers inside the different compartments, he emptied it out. Identity card. Driver’s license. Taxpayer code number. Credit card from the Banca dell’Isola(Can’t you see you’re losing it? Why didn’t you look in the wallet straightaway? You would have spared yourself the embarrassment with Michela.)Two calling cards, one belonging to a Dr. Benedetto Mammuccari, a surgeon from Palma; the other to one Valentina Bonito, a midwife from Fanara. Three postage stamps, two for the standard rate and one for priority mail. A photo of Elena in a topless bathing suit. Two hundred fifty euros in bills of fifty. The receipt from a full tank of gasoline. Enough. Stop right there.

All obvious, all normal. Too obvious, too normal for a man who was found shot in the face with his willy hanging out, whatever the purpose he’d used it for. It was still hanging out, after all. Okay, getting caught with your dick exposed no longer shocked anyone nowadays, and there had even been an honorable member of Parliament, later to become a high charge of the state, who’d shown his to one and all in a photo printed in a number of glossy magazines. Okay. But it was the two things together—the whacking and the exposure—that made the case peculiar.

Or constituted the peculiarities of the case. Or, better yet, the whacking and the whack-off. Engrossed in these sorts of complex variations on the theme as he was putting everything back in the wallet, the inspector, when he got to the bills of fifty, suddenly stopped.

How much was there in the account Michela had shown him? Roughly ninety thousand euros, of which fifty thousand, however, were Michela’s. Therefore Angelo had only forty thousand euros in the bank. Or scarcely eighty million lire, to use the old system. Something didn’t add up. Angelo Pardo’s earnings probably consisted of a percentage gained on the pharmaceutical products he managed to place. And Michela did suggest that her brother earned enough money to live comfortably. Okay, but was it enough to pay for the expensive presents he supposedly, according to Michela, gave to Elena? Surely not. Nowadays, going to market and buying food for the week, one spent as much as one used to over the whole month. And so? How did someone who didn’t have a lot of money manage to buy jewelry and sports cars? Either Angelo was draining the bank account—and this might explain Michela’s resentment—or he had some other source of revenue, with a related bank account, of which, however, there was no trace. And of which even Michela knew nothing. Or was she merely pretending to know nothing?

He went inside and turned on the television. Just in time for the late news on the Free Channel. His friend, newsman Nicold Zito, spoke first of an accident between a car and a truck that killed four, then mentioned the murder of Angelo Pardo, the investigation of which had been assigned to the captain of the Montelusa Flying Squad. This explained why no journalists had come to harass the inspector. It was clear poor Nicold knew little or nothing about the case, and in fact he merely strung a couple of sentences together and moved on to another subject. So much the better.

Montalbano turned off the TV, phoned Livia for their customary evening greeting, which did not result in any squabbling this time—indeed it was all kissy-kissy—and went off to bed. No doubt thanks to the phone call, which calmed him down, he fell asleep straightaway, like a baby.

But the baby woke up suddenly at two in the morning, and instead of starting to cry like babies all over the world, he started thinking.

His mind went back to his visit to the garage. He was convinced he’d neglected some detail. A detail which at the time had seemed unimportant to him but which he now felt was important, very important.

He reviewed, in his memory, everything he’d done from the moment he entered the garage to when he left. Nothing.

I’ll return there tomorrow,he said to himself.

And he turned onto his side to go back to sleep.

Less than fifteen minutes later, he was in his car, dressed higgledy-piggledy and racing to Angelo Pardo’s place, cursing like a maniac.

If the tenants on the two stories of that building—three stories, actually, counting the ground floor—seemed dead during the day, he could only imagine what they’d be like at three in the morning, or thereabouts. Whatever the case, he took care to make as little noise as possible.

Having turned on the light in the garage, he began studying everything—empty jerry cans, old motor-oil tins, pliers, monkey wrenches—as though with a magnifying glass. He found nothing that was in any way worth considering. An empty jerry can remained, desolately, a simple, empty jerry can still stinking of gasoline.

So he moved on to the Mercedes. The road maps in the glove compartment didn’t have any particular routes high-lighted, and the car’s documents were all in order. He lowered the visors, examined the CDs one by one, stuck his hands in the side pockets, pulled out the ashtray, got out, opened the hood, saw only the motor in there. He went be-hind the car, opened the trunk: spare tire, jack, red triangle. He closed it.

He felt a kind of ever-so-light electric shock and re-opened the trunk. Here was the detail he’d neglected. A tiny paper triangle sticking out from under the rubber carpeting. He leaned forward for a better look: It was the corner of a linen envelope. He eased it out with two fingers. It was addressed to Signor Angelo Pardo, and Signor Angelo Pardo, after opening it, had put three letters, all addressed to him, inside it. Montalbano pulled out the first and looked down at the signature. Elena. He put it back in the linen envelope, closed up the car, turned off the lights in the garage, lowered the metal shutter and, with the linen envelope in hand, headed back to his car, which he’d left a few yards away from the garage.

“Stop! Thief!” yelled a voice that seemed to come down from the heavens.

He stopped and looked up. On the top floor was an open window; against the light, the inspector recognized His Royal Majesty Victor Emmanuel III, pointing a hunting rifle at him.

What, was he going to start arguing from two stories away with a raving lunatic at that hour of the night? Any-way, when that guy got a bee up his ass, there was nothing doing. Montalbano turned his back to him and walked away.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Montalbano kept walking, and His Majesty fired. Everyone knew, of course, that the last Savoys were notoriously trigger-happy. Fortunately, Victor Emmanuel was not a good shot. The inspector dived into his car, turned on the motor, and drove off, screeching his tires even worse than the cops in American movies, as a second shot ended up some thirty yards away.

As soon as he got home, he started reading Elena’s letters to Angelo. All three had the same two-part plot.

Part one consisted of a kind of passionate erotic delirium—clearly, Elena had written the letters right after a particularly steamy encounter—where she remembered, with a wealth of detail, what they had done and how many orgasms she had had during Angelo’s endless tric-troc.

Montalbano stopped, perplexed. Despite his personal experience and his readings of a variety of erotic classics, he didn’t know what “tric-troc” meant. Maybe it was a term from the sort of secret jargon that lovers always invent between themselves.

Part two, on the other hand, was in a completely different tone. Elena imagined that Angelo, when he went on his business trips to the different towns in the province, had girlfriends galore in each place, like those sailors who supposedly have a woman in every port. This drove her mad with jealousy. And she warned him: If she could ever prove that Angelo was cheating on her, she would kill him.

In the first letter, in fact, she claimed she had followed Angelo in her car all the way to Fanara, and she asked him a precise question: Why had he stopped for an hour and a half at Via Liberta 82, seeing that there was neither a pharmacy nor a doctor’s office at that address? Did another mistress of his live there? Whatever the case, Angelo would do well to remember: Any betrayal meant sudden, violent death.

When he finished reading the letter, Montalbano wasn’t entirely convinced. True, these letters proved Michela right, but they didn’t correspond to the Elena he thought he’d met. It was as though they’d been written by a different person.

And anyway, why would Angelo have kept them hidden in the trunk of the Mercedes? Did he not want his sister to read them? Was he perhaps embarrassed by the first part of the letters, which told of his acrobatics between the sheets with Elena? That might explain it. But did it make sense that Elena, who was so attached to money, would murder the person who was giving her a great deal of money, if only in the form of presents?

Without realizing it, he grabbed the telephone.

“Hello, Livia? Salvo here. I wanted to ask you something. In your opinion is it logical for a woman to kill a lover who lavishes her with expensive gifts, just because she’s jealous? What would you do?”

There was a long silence. “Hello, Livia?”

“I don’t know if I would kill a man out of jealousy, but if he woke me up at five o’clock in the morning, I certainly would,” said Livia.

And she hung up.

He got to work a bit late. He hadn’t managed to fall asleep until around six, after tossing and turning with a single thought lodged in his brain—namely, that according to the most elementary rules, he should have apprised Prosecutor Tommaseo of Elena Sclafani’s situation. Whereas he didn’t feel like it. And the problem set his nerves on edge just enough to prevent him from sleeping.

One look at his face sufficed to tell the entire police station that this wasn’t a good day.

In the closet there was somebody else in Catarella’s place. Minnitti, a Calabrese.

“Where’s Catarella?”

“He stayed up all night working at the station, Chief, and this morning he collapsed.”

Maybe he’d taken Angelo Pardo’s computer home with him, because there was no sign of it anywhere. The moment the inspector sat down at his desk, Fazio came in.

“Two things, Chief. The first is that Commendator Ernesto Laudadio came here this morning.”

“And who is Commendator Ernesto Laudadio?”

“You know him well, Chief. He’s the man that called us when he got it in his head you wanted to rape the murder victim’s sister.”

So His Majesty Victor Emmanuel III went by the name of Ernesto Laudadio! And while he was earnestly lauding God, he was busting his fellow man’s balls.

“What’d he come for?”

“He wanted to report a crime committed by persons unknown. Apparently last night somebody tried to force open the victim’s garage door, but thecommendatorefoiled the plot, firing two rifle shots at the unknown man and chasing him away.”

“Did he injure him?”

Fazio answered with another question.

“Are you injured, Chief?”

“No.”

“Then thecommendatoredidn’t injure anyone, thank God. Would you please tell me what you were doing in that garage?”

“I’d gone there earlier to look for the strongbox, since both you and I had forgotten to look there.” “That’s true. Did you find it?”

“No. Then I went back later, because all at once a small detail came back to me.”

He didn’t tell him what this detail was, and Fazio didn’t ask.

“And what was the second thing you wanted to tell me?”

“I got some information on Emilio Sclafani, the schoolteacher.”

“Oh, good, tell me.”

Fazio slipped a hand in his jacket pocket, and the inspector shot him a dirty look.

“If you pull out a piece of paper with the teacher’s father’s name, the teacher’s grandfather’s name, the teacher’s father’s grandfather’s name, I’ll—”

“Peace,” said Fazio, removing his hand from his pocket.

“Will you never rid yourself of this public-records vice?”

“Never, Chief. So anyway: The teacher is a repeat offender.”

“In what sense?”

“I’ll explain. The man’s been married twice. The first time, when he was thirty-nine and teaching at Comisini, with a nineteen-year-old girl, a former pupil of his from theliceo.Her name was Maria Coxa.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“Albanian. But her father was born in Italy. The marriage lasted exactly one year and three months.” “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. At least that’s what people say. After being married a year, the bride realized that it was mighty strange that every evening when her husband lay down beside her, he would say, ‘Good night, my love,’ kiss her on the forehead, and go to sleep. Get the drift?”

“No.”

“Chief, our schoolteacher did not consummate.” “Really?”

“So they say. So his very young wife, who needed to consummate—”

“Went consummating elsewhere.”

‘The husband found..’

“Exactly, Chief. A colleague of the husband’s, a gym

teacher…you get the idea. Apparently the husband found out but

didn’t react. One day, however, he came home at an unexpected time of day and caught his wife trying out a particularly difficult exercise with his colleague. Things got nasty and reversed.” “Reversed?”

“I mean our schoolteacher didn’t touch his wife, but took it out on his colleague and beat him to a pulp. It’s true the gym teacher was stronger and in better shape, but Emilio Sclafani put him in the hospital. He went berserk; something turned him from a patient cuckold into a wild beast.”

“What was the upshot?”

“The gym teacher decided not to press charges, Sclafani split up with his wife, got himself transferred to Montelusa, and got a divorce. And now, in his second marriage, he finds himself in the exact same situation as in the first. That’s why I called him a repeat offender.”

Mimi Augello walked in and Fazio walked out.

“What are you still doing here?” Mimi asked.

“Why, where am I supposed to be?”

“Wherever you want, but not here. In fifteen minutes Liguori’s going to be here.”

The asshole from Narcotics!

“I forgot! I’ll just make a couple of phone calls and run.”

The first was to Elena Sclafani.

“Montalbano here. Good morning, signora. I need to talk to you.”

“This morning?”

“Yes. Can I come by in half an hour?”

“I’m busy until one o’clock, Inspector. If you want, we could meet this afternoon.”

“I could make it this evening. But will your husband be there?”

“I already told you that’s not a problem. At any rate, he’s coming back this evening. Listen. I have an idea. Why don’t you invite me out to dinner?”

They agreed on the time and place.

The second call was for Michela Pardo.

“I’m sorry, Inspector, I was just on my way out. I have to go to Montelusa to see Judge Tommaseo. Fortunately, my aunt was able …What is it?”

“Do you know Fanara?”

“The town? Yes.”

“Do you know who lives at Via Liberta 82?” Silence, no answer. “Hello, Michela?”

“Yes, I’m here. It’s just that you took me by surprise … Yes, I know who lives at 82 Via Liberta.” “Tell me.”

“My aunt Anna, my mother’s other sister. She’s paralyzed. Angelo is—was—very close to her. Whenever he went to Fanara, he always dropped in to see her. But how did you know—”

“Routine investigation, I assure you. Naturally I have many other things to ask you.”

“You could come by this afternoon.”

“I have a meeting with the commissioner. Tomorrow morning, if that’s all right with you.”

He dashed out of the office, got in the car, and drove off. He decided he needed to have another look at Angelo’s apartment. Why? Because. Instinct demanded it.

Inside the front door, he climbed the silent staircase of the dead house and cautiously opened, without a sound, the door to Angelo’s flat, terrified that His Majesty Victor Emmanuel III might burst out of his apartment with a dagger in his hand and stab him in the back. He headed to the study, sat down behind the desk, and started to think.

As usual, he sensed that something didn’t tally but couldn’t bring it into focus. So he got up and started walking around the apartment and fussing about in each room. At one point he even opened the shutter to the balcony off the living room and went outside.

In the street right in front of the building, a convertible had stopped, and two young people, a boy and a girl, were kissing. They had the radio—or whatever it was—at full volume.

Montalbano leapt backwards. Not because he was scandalized by what he saw, but because he finally understood why he’d felt the need to return to the apartment.

He went back to the study, sat down, searched for the right key in Angelo’s set, put it in the lock to the middle drawer, opened this, took out the little book entitledThe Most Beautiful Italian Songs of All Time,and started leafing through it.

All the songs dated back to the forties and fifties. He, Montalbano, probably wasn’t even born when people were singing those songs to themselves. And, more importantly— or so it seemed to him—they had nothing to do with the CDs in the Mercedes, which all had rock music.

8

There were numbers written in the narrow white margin on each page of the booklet. The first time he’d seen them, the inspector had thought they involved some sort of analysis of the meter. Now, however, he realized that the numbers referred to only the first two lines of each song. Next to the linesPale little lady, sweet fifth-floor neighbor From across the way,span>were the numbers 37 and 22, respectively; next toToday the carriage may seem A strange relic from the olden days,span>23 and 29; whileDon’t forget these words of mine Little girl, you don’t know what love isspan>had 26 and 31. And so on down the line for all the other ninety-seven songs in the book. The answer came to him all too easily: Those numbers corresponded to the total number of letters in the respective line of the song. A code, apparently. The hard part was figuring out what it was for. He put the booklet in his pocket.

As he was about to enter the Trattoria da Enzo, Montalbano heard someone call him. He stopped and turned. Elena Sclafani was getting out of a sort of red missile, a convertible, which she had just parked. She was wearing a track suit and gym shoes, her long hair flowing onto her shoulders and held in place only by a light blue headband slightly above her forehead. Her blue eyes were smiling, and her red lips, which looked painted, were no longer pouting.

“I’ve never eaten here before. I’ve just come from the gym, so I’ve got a hearty appetite.”

A wild animal, young and dangerous. Like all wild animals.

And, in the end, like all youth,the inspector thought with a twinge of melancholy.

Enzo sat them down at a table a bit apart from the others. But there weren’t many people there in any case.

“What would you like?” he asked.

“Is there no menu?” asked Elena.

“It’s not the custom here,” said Enzo, looking at her dis-approvingly.

“Would you like a seafood antipasto? It’s excellent here,” said Montalbano.

“I eat everything,” Elena declared.

The look Enzo gave her suddenly changed, turning not only benevolent but almost affectionate. “Then leave it up to me,” he said.

“There’s a slight problem,” said Montalbano, who wanted to cover himself. “What’s that?”

“You suggested we go out to lunch together, and I was happy to accept. But …”

“Come on, out with it. Your wife—” “I’m not married.”

“Something serious?”

“Yes.” “Why was he answering her? “The problem is that when I eat, I prefer not to talk.” She smiled.

“You’re the one who’s supposed to ask the questions,” she said. “If you don’t, then I don’t have to answer. And anyway, if you really must know, when I do something, I like to do only that one thing.”

The upshot was that they scarfed down the antipasto, the spaghetti with clam sauce, and crispy fried mullets, all the while exchanging only inarticulate sounds along the lines ofahm, ohm,anduhm,which varied only in intensity and color. And a few times they saidohm ohmin unison, while looking at each other. When it was over, Elena stretched her legs under the table, half closed her eyes, and heaved a deep sigh. Then, like a cat, she stuck out the tip of her tongue and licked her lips. She very nearly started purring.

The inspector had once read a short story by an Italian author that told of a country where making love in public not only caused no scandal but was actually the most natural thing in the world, whereas eating in the presence of others was considered immoral because it was such an intimate thing. A question came into his head and almost made him laugh. Want to bet that before long, because of age, he would be content to take his pleasure from women merely by sitting at the same table and eating with them?

“So where do we go now to talk?” asked Montalbano.

“Do you have things to do?”

“Not immediately.”

“I’ve got another idea. Let’s go to my place, I’ll make you some coffee. Emilio’s in Montelusa, as I think I already told you. Did you bring your car?”

“Yes.”

“Then just follow me, so you can leave whenever you like.”

Keeping up with the missile was not easy. At a certain point Montalbano decided to forget it. He knew the way, after all. In fact, when he arrived, Elena was waiting for him at the front door, a gym bag hanging from her shoulder.

“That’s a very nice car you’ve got,” said Montalbano as they were going up in the elevator.

“Angelo bought it for me,” the girl said almost indifferently while opening the door, as though she were talking about a pack of cigarettes or something of no importance.

This girl’s trying to pull the rug out from under me,thought Montalbano, feeling angry either because he’d thought of a cliche or because the cliche corresponded exactly with the truth.

“It must have cost him a lot of money.”

“I’d say so. I need to sell it as soon as possible.”

She led him into the living room.

“Why?”

“Because it’s too expensive for my budget. It consumes almost as much gas as an airplane. You know, when Angelo gave it to me, I accepted it on one condition: that every month he would reimburse me for the cost of fuel and the garage. He’d already paid for the insurance.”

“And did he do as you asked?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me something. How did he reimburse you? By check?”

“No, cash.”

Damn. A lost opportunity to find out if Angelo had any other bank accounts.

“Listen, Inspector, I’m going to go make coffee and change clothes. In the meantime, if you want to freshen up …”

She led him into a small guest bathroom right beside the dining room.

He took his time, removing his jacket and shirt and sticking his head under the faucet. When he returned to the living room, she still wasn’t back. She arrived five minutes later with the coffee. She’d taken a quick shower and put on a big sort of housecoat that came halfway down her thigh. And nothing else. She was barefoot. Stretching out from under the red housecoat, her legs, which were naturally long, looked endless. They were sinewy, lively legs, like a dancer’s or an athlete’s. And the best of it—as was immediately clear to Montalbano—was that there was no intent, no attempt to seduce him on Elena’s part. She saw nothing improper in appearing this way in front of a man she barely knew. As though reading his mind, Elena said: “I feel comfortable with you. At ease. Even though that shouldn’t be the case.”

“Right,” said the inspector.

He felt comfortable himself. Too comfortable. Which wasn’t good. Again it was Elena who came back to the matter at hand.

“So, about those questions …”

“Aside from the car, did Angelo give you any other gifts?”

“Yes, and rather expensive ones, too. Jewelry. If you want, I can go get them and show them to you.”

“There’s no need, thanks. Did your husband know?”

“About the gifts? Yes. Anyway, something like a ring I could easily hide, but a car like that—”

“Why?”

She understood at once. She was dangerously intelligent.

“You’ve never given presents to a lady friend?”

Montalbano felt annoyed. Livia was never, not even by accident, supposed to enter into the tawdry, sordid stories he investigated.

“You’re leaving out one detail.”

“What?”

He deliberately wanted to be offensive. “That those presents were a way of paying you for your services.”

He was prepared for every possible reaction on Elena’s part, except for her to start laughing.

“Maybe Angelo overestimated my ‘services,’ as you call them. I assure you I’m hardly in a class of my own.”

“Then let me ask you again: Why?”

“Inspector, the explanation is very simple. Angelo gave me these gifts over the last three months, starting with the car. I think I’ve already told you that he had lately been overcome by…well,in short,he’d fallen in love with me. He didn’t want to lose me.”

“And how did you feel about it?”

“I think I already told you. The more possessive he became, the more I grew distant. I can’t stand being harnessed, among other things.”

Wasn’t there an ancient Greek poet who wrote a love poem to a young Thracian filly that couldn’t stand being harnessed? But this wasn’t the time for poetry.

Almost against his will, the inspector slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and extracted the three letters he’d brought with him. He set them down on the table.

Elena looked at them, recognized them, and didn’t seem the least bit troubled. She left them right where they were.

“Did you find them in Angelo’s apartment?” “No.”

“Where, then?”

“Hidden in the trunk of his Mercedes.”

Suddenly three wrinkles: one on her forehead, two at the corners of her mouth. For the first time, she seemed genuinely baffled.

“Why hidden?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. But I could venture a guess. Maybe Angelo didn’t want his sister to read them. Certain details might have proved embarrassing to him, as you can imagine.”

“What are you saying, Inspector? There were no secrets between those two!”

“Listen, let’s forget about the whys and wherefores. I found these letters inside a linen envelope hidden under the rug in the trunk. Those are the facts. But I have another question, and you know what it is.”

“Inspector, those letters were practically dictated to me.”

“By whom?”

“By Angelo.”

What did this woman think? That she could make him swallow the first bullshit that came into her head? He stood up abruptly, enraged.

“I’ll expect you at the station at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Elena also stood up. She’d turned pale, her forehead shiny with sweat. Montalbano noticed she was trembling slightly.

“No, please, not the police station.”

She kept her head down, her fists clenched, arms extended at her sides, a little girl grown up too fast, scared of being punished.

“We’re not going to eat you at the station, you know.”

“No, no, please, I beg you.”

A thin, frail voice that turned into little sobs. Would this girl ever be done astonishing him? What was so terrible about having to go to the station? As one does with small children, he put a hand under her chin and raised her head. Elena kept her eyes closed, but her face was bathed in tears.

“Okay, no police station, but don’t tell silly stories.”

He sat back down. She remained standing but drew close to Montalbano until she was right in front of him, her legs touching his knees. What was she expecting? For him to ask her for something in exchange for not forcing her to go to the police station? All at once the smell of her skin reached his nostrils, leaving him slightly dazed. He became afraid of himself.

“Go back to your place,” he said sternly, feeling as if he’d suddenly become a school principal.

Elena obeyed. Now seated, she tugged at the housecoat with both hands, in a vain attempt to cover her thighs a little. But as soon as she let go of the cloth, it climbed back up, worse than before.

“So, what’s this unbelievable story about Angelo himself dictating the letters to you?”

“I never followed him in my car. Among other things, when we started seeing each other, it had been a year since I had a car. I’d had a bad accident that left my car a total wreck. And I didn’t have enough money to buy another, not even a used one. The first of those three letters, the one where I say I followed him to Fanara, dates from four months ago— you can check the date—when Angelo hadn’t given me the new car yet. But just to make the story more believable,Angelo told me to write that he’d gone to a certain house—I no longer remember the address—and that I’d become suspicious.”

“Did he tell you who lived there?”

“Yes, an aunt of his, his mother’s sister, I think.”

She’d recovered her nerve and was now herself again. But why had the inspector’s idea so frightened her?

“Let’s suppose for a minute that Angelo actually did get you to write those letters.”

“But it’s true!”

“And for the moment I’ll believe that. Apparently he had you write them so that someone else would read them. Who?”

“His sister, Michela.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because he told me himself. He would arrange for her somehow to come across them, as if by accident. That’s why I was so surprised when you said he was keeping them hidden in the trunk of the Mercedes. It’s unlikely Michela would ever find them there.”

“What was Angelo trying to get out of Michela by having her read the letters? What, in the end, was the purpose? Did you ask him?”

“Of course.”

“And what was his explanation?”

“He gave me an extremely stupid explanation. He said they were supposed to prove to Michela that I was madly in love with him, as opposed to what she claimed. And I pretended to be satisfied with this explanation, because deep down I didn’t give a damn about the whole thing.”

“You think in fact there was different reason?”

“Yes. To get some breathing room.”

“Could you explain?”

“I’ll try. You see, Inspector, Michela and Angelo were very close. From what I was able to find out, when their mother was all right, Michela would very often sleep at her brother’s place. She would go out with him, and she knew at all times where he was. She controlled him. At some point Angelo must have got tired of this, or at least he needed more freedom of movement. And so my phony but over-leaping jealousy became a good alibi. It allowed him to get around without always having his sister in tow. He had me write the other two letters before going away on a couple of trips, one to Holland, the other to Switzerland. They were probably pretexts for preventing his sister from going along with him.”

Did this explanation for writing the letters hold water? In its twisted, contorted way, like a mad alchemist’s alembic, it did. Elena’s conjecture as to the real purpose proved convincing.

“Let’s set aside the letters for a moment. Since, in our investigation, we have to cast a wide net, we’ve—”

“May I?” she interrupted him, gesturing towards the letters on the coffee table.

“Of course.”

“Go on, I’m listening,” said Elena, taking a letter out of the envelope and beginning to read it.

“We’ve found out a few things about your husband.”

“You mean what happened during his first marriage?” she said, continuing to read.

Let alone the rug. This girl was pulling the ground out from under him.

Without warning, she threw her head backwards and started laughing.

“What do you find so amusing?”

“The tric-troc! What must you have thought?”

“I didn’t think anything,” said Montalbano, blushing slightly.

“It’s that I have a very sensitive belly button, and so …”

Montalbano turned fire red. Ah, so she liked to have her belly button kissed and tongued! Was she insane? Didn’t she realize those letters could send her to jail for thirty years! Tric-troc indeed!

“To get back to your husband …”

“Emilio told me everything,” said Elena, setting down the letter. “He lost his head over a former pupil of his, Maria Coxa, and married her, hoping for a miracle.”

“What sort of miracle, if I may ask?”

“Inspector, Emilio has always been impotent.”

The girl’s frankness was as brutal to the inspector as a stone dropped from the sky straight onto his head. Montalbano opened and closed his mouth without managing to speak.

“Emilio hadn’t told Maria anything. But after a while he couldn’t find any more excuses for covering up his unfortunate condition. And so they made an agreement.”

“Stop just a minute, please. Couldn’t the wife have asked for an annulment or a divorce? Everyone would have said she was right!”

“Inspector, Maria was extremely poor. Her family had gone hungry to put her through school. The agreement was better than a divorce.”

“What did it entail?”

“Emilio agreed to find her a man she could go to bed with. So he introduced her to a colleague of his, the gym teacher, with whom he’d already spoken.”

Montalbano goggled. No matter how much he’d seen and heard in all his years with the police, these intricate matters of sex and infidelity never stopped astonishing him.

“So, in a word, he offered him his wife?”

“Yes, but on one condition: that he be informed beforehand of the meetings between Maria and his colleague.”

“Good God! “Why?”

“Because that way it wouldn’t seem to him like a betrayal.”

Of course. From a certain point of view, Emilio Sclafani’s reasoning made perfect sense. After all, wasn’t a guy named Luigi Pirandello from around there?

“So how do you explain that the gym teacher very nearly lost his life?”

“Emilio was never told about that encounter. It was … well, a secret encounter. And so Emilio reacted like a husband catching his wife committing flagrant adultery.”

The rules of the game.Wasn’t there a play of the same name by the above-mentioned Pirandello?

“May I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure. I don’t feel so prudish with you.”

“Did your husband tell you he was impotent before or after you married him?”

“Before. Me, he told before.”

“And you agreed anyway?”

“Yes. He said I could go with other men if I wanted to. Discreetly, of course, and provided I always informed him of everything.”

“And have you kept your promise?”

“Yes.”

Montalbano had the clear impression that this “Yes” was a lie. But it didn’t seem to be all that important whether Elena met secretly with someone without telling her husband. It was her own business.

“Listen, Elena, I have to be more explicit.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why does a beautiful girl like you, who must have men constantly wooing and desiring her, agree to marry a man who is not rich, much older than her, and can’t even—”

“Inspector, have you ever imagined yourself flailing in the water because your boat has sunk in a storm at sea?”

“I don’t have a very good imagination.”

“Try to make the effort. You’ve been swimming a long time, but you just can’t go any further. You realize you’re going to drown. Then you suddenly find yourself beside some object that might keep you afloat. “What do you do? You grab onto it. And it makes no difference to you whether it’s a plank of wood or a life raft with radar.”

“Was it really that bad?” “Yes.”

Clearly she didn’t want to discuss the subject. It was hard for her. But the inspector couldn’t pretend it didn’t matter. He couldn’t let it slide. He needed to know everything past and present about the people associated with the murder victim. It was his job, even though it sometimes made him feel like someone from the Inquisition. And he didn’t like this one bit.

“How did you meet Emilio?”

“After the scandal in Comisini, Emilio went to live for a while in Fela. There, my father, who’s his second cousin, talked to him about me and my situation, and the fact that he was forced to put me in a special home for minors.”

“Drugs?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you?” “Sixteen.”

“Why did you start?”

“You’re asking me a specific question that has no specific answer. It’s hard to explain why I started. Even to myself. It was probably a combination of things … First of all, my mother’s sudden death, when I wasn’t even ten years old. Then my father’s utter inability to care about anyone, including my mother. Then simple curiosity. The opportunity arises at a moment of weakness. Your boyfriend from school, whom you think you’re in love with, pushes you to try …”

“How long did you stay at the home?”

“A whole year, without interruption. Emilio came to see me three times. The first time with my father, so he could meet me. After that he came alone.”

“And then?”

“I ran away. I got on a train and went to Milan. I met a lot of different men. I ended up with one who was forty. I got stopped twice by the police. The first time they sent me home to my father, since I was a minor. But if living with him was dramatic before, this time it became impossible. So I ran away again. I went back to Milan. When they stopped me the second time …”

She froze, turned pale, started lightly trembling again, and swallowed without speaking.

“That’s enough,” said Montalbano.

“No. I want to explain why…The second time, as the two policemen were taking me to the station in their car, I offered to make a deal with them. You can imagine what. At first they pretended not to be interested. ‘You have to come down to the station,’ they kept repeating. So I kept pleading with them. And when I realized they were getting off on hearing me implore them, since they could do whatever they liked with me, I made a scene, started crying, got down on my knees, right there in the car. Finally they accepted and took me to a secluded place. It was terrible. They used me for hours, as never before. But the worst of it was their contempt, their sadistic desire to humiliate me … In the end one of them urinated in my face.”

“Please, that’s enough,” Montalbano repeated, in a soft voice.

He felt deeply ashamed for being a man. He knew that the girl was not making up her story. This sort of thing had happened before, unfortunately. But now he understood why, at the mere mention of the words “police station,” Elena had nearly fainted.

“Why did the police arrest you?”

“Prostitution.”

She said it with perfect ease, without shame or embarrassment. It was one thing among so many others she had done.

“When we were hurting for money,” she went on, “my boyfriend used to prostitute me. Discreetly, of course. Not on the streets. But there were some raids, and I was caught twice.”

“How did you meet back up with Emilio?”

She gave a little smile that Montalbano didn’t immediately understand.

“Inspector, at this point the story becomes like a comic book, or some feel-good soap opera. Do you really want to hear it?”

“Yes.

“I’d come back to Sicily about six months earlier. On the day of my twentieth birthday, I went into a supermarket with the intention of stealing something just to celebrate. But the moment I looked around, my eyes met Emilio’s. He hadn’t seen me since my days at the juvenile home, but he recognized me at once. And, strangely enough, I recognized him. What can I say? He’s been with me ever since. He saw me through detox, had me taken care of. He’s looked after me for five years with a devotion I can’t put into words. Four years ago he asked me to marry him. And that’s the story.”

Montalbano got up and put the letters back in his pocket.

“I have to go.”

“Can’t you stay a little longer?”

“Unfortunately I have an appointment in Montelusa.” Elena stood up, drew near to him, lowered her head slightly, and for a moment rested her lips on his. “Thanks,” she said.

He’d scarcely entered the station when a sudden scream from Catarella paralyzed him.

“Chief! I screeeewed ‘em!”

“Who’d you screw, Cat?”

“The last word, Chief!”

Standing up in his little closet, Catarella looked like a dancing bear, hopping for joy on one foot, then the other. “I got the last word! I writ it and it disappeared!” “Come into my office.”

“Right like straightaway, Chief! But first I gotta print the files.”

Better get away from there. The people walking in and out of the station were looking at them a bit aghast.

Before entering his office, he stuck his head in Augello’s. And Mimi, oddly, was there. Apparently the kid was feeling okay.

“What did Liguori want this morning?”

“To sensitize us.”

“Which means?”

“We’ve got to aim higher.”

“Meaning?”

“We’ve got to go in deep.” Montalbano suddenly lost patience.

“Mimi, if you don’t start speaking clearly, you know where I’m going to go in deep on you?”

“Salvo, it seems the upper spheres of Montelusa are not pleased with our efforts in the fight against drug dealers.”

“What are they talking about? In the last month we’ve put six dealers behind bars!”

“It’s not enough, according to them. Liguori says what we do is just small potatoes.”

“So what’s big potatoes?”

“Not limiting oneself to arresting a few dealers by chance, but rather acting according to a precise plan, provided by him, of course, which will supposedly lead us to the suppliers.”

“But isn’t that his responsibility? Isn’t he chief of Narcotics? Why’s he coming here breaking our balls? Let him make his plan and, instead of giving it to us, let his own men carry it out.”

“Salvo, apparently, according to his investigations, one of the biggest suppliers is here, in Vigata. So he wants our help.”

Montalbano stood there staring at him, lost in thought.

“Mimi, this whole business stinks to me. We need to talk about it, but I don’t have the time right now. I have to take care of something with Catarella and then run off to Montelusa to meet with the commissioner.”

Catarella was waiting for him in the doorway to his office, still dancing like a bear. He came in behind him and set two printed pages down on the desk. The inspector glanced at them and understood nothing. There was a string of six-figure numbers piled one on top of the other, and each of these numbers corresponded to another number. For example: 213452 136000

431235 235000

and so on. He realized that to understand the matter he had to dispatch Catarella, whose little tribal dance was getting on his nerves.

“Well done! My compliments, Catarella!”

Now he changed from a bear into a peacock. But since he had no tail to spread, he raised and extended his arms, fanned out his fingers, and spun around.

“How did you find the password?”

“Ah, Chief, Chief! That dead man is so clever he drove me crazy! The word was the name of the sister, the dead man’s, who’s called Michela, combined in combination wit’ the day, month, an’ year of birth when she’s born—his sister, I mean, the dead man’s—but written wittout numbers, only litters.”

Since, in his delight at having found the solution, Catarella uttered the whole sentence in a single breath, the inspector had trouble understanding, but grasped as much as he needed to.

“I think I remember you saying you needed three passwords… “

“Yessir, Chief, I do. Iss ongoing work.”

“Good, then go on working. And thanks again.”

Catarella staggered visibly.

“You dizzy?”

“A little, Chief.”

“You feel all right?”

“Yessir.”

“So why are you dizzy?”

” ‘Cause you just gave me tanks, Chief.”

He walked out of the room as if he were drunk. Montalbano cast another glance at the two sheets of paper. But since it was already time to go to Montelusa, he slipped them into the pocket holding the little songbook. Which he could have sworn contained the code for making some sense of all those numbers.

“My dear Inspector! How goes it? Everyone doing well at home?”

“Fine, fine, Dr. Lattes.”

“Make yourself comfortable.” “Thank you, Doctor.”

He sat down. Lattes looked at him, and he looked at Lattes. Lattes smiled, and so did he.

“To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?” Montalbano’s jaw dropped.

“Actually, I…the commissioner told me …” “You’re here for the meeting?” Lattes asked in wonderment.

“Well, yes.”

“What? You mean the receptionist there, Cavarella—” “Catarella.”

“—didn’t tell you? I called late this morning to inform you that the commissioner had to leave for Palermo and will expect to see you here tomorrow at this same hour.”

“No, nobody told me anything.”

“But that’s very serious! You must take measures!”

“I will, Doctor, don’t you worry about that.”

What fucking measures could one possibly take against Catarella? It would be like trying to teach a crab to walk straight.

Since he was already in Montelusa, he decided to drop in on his friend Nicold Zito, the newsman. He pulled up in front of the Free Channel studios, and the moment he walked in, the secretary told him Zito had fifteen free minutes before going on the air.

“I haven’t heard from you for a while,” Nicold reproached him.

“Sorry, I’ve been busy.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No, Nicold. I just wanted to see you.”

“Listen, are you giving Giacovazzo a hand in the investigation into Angelo Pardo’s murder?”

It was nice of the Flying Squad captain not to have denied that the investigation had been turned over to him. This spared Montalbano from being besieged by journalists. But it was still hard for Montalbano to have to lie to his friend.

“No, no hand at all. You know what Giacovazzo’s like. Why do you ask?”

“Because nobody can drag a single word out of him.”

Naturally. The captain of the Flying Squad wasn’t talking to journalists because he had nothing to say.

“And yet,” Zito went on, “I think that, considering what’s happening now, he must have some idea.”

“Why, what’s happening now?”

“Don’t you read the papers?”

“Not always.”

“A nationwide investigation has led to the arraignment of over four thousand doctors and pharmacists.”

“Okay, but what’s that got to do with it?”

“Salvo, use your brain! “What did former doctor Angelo Pardo do for a living?”

“He was a representative for pharmaceutical concerns.”

“Exactly. And the charges being leveled at these doctors and pharmacists are collusion and kickbacks.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the doctors let themselves be corrupted by some pharmaceutical informers. In exchange for money or other gifts, these doctors and pharmacists would choose and prescribe medications indicated by the informers. And when they did this, they were handsomely rewarded. You see how it works now?”

“Yes. The informers didn’t limit themselves to informing.”

“Exactly. Of course, not all doctors are corrupt, and not all informers are corrupters, but the phenomenon has proved to be very widespread. And, naturally, some very powerful pharmaceutical firms are also implicated.”

“And you think that may be why Pardo was murdered?”

“Salvo, do you realize what kind of interests are behind a setup like this? But, in any case, I don’t think anything. All I’m saying is that it’s a lead that might be worth pursuing.”

All things considered—the inspector reflected while driving back to Vigata at five miles per hour—the visit to Montelusa had not been in vain. The lead suggested by Nicold hadn’t remotely occurred to him but had to be taken into consideration. But how to proceed? Open up Angelo Pardo’s big datebook—the one with the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of doctors and pharmacists—pick up the receiver, and ask: “Excuse me, but did you by any chance let yourself be corrupted by the pharmaceutical representative Angelo Pardo?”

That approach surely would not get any results. Maybe he needed to ask for a helping hand from the people who knew all about this sort of investigation.

Back in his office, he called the headquarters of the Customs Police of Montelusa.

“Inspector Montalbano here. I’d like to speak with Captain Aliotta.”

“I’ll put the major on right away.”

Apparently he’d been promoted.

“My dear Montalbano!”

“Congratulations. I didn’t know you’d been promoted.” “Thanks. That was already a year ago.” An implicit reproach. Translation:So,cornuto,it’s been a year since I last heard from you.

“I wanted to know if Marshal Lagana is still on the job.” “For a little while yet.”

“He once helped me out in a big way, and I was wondering if I could ask him for his help again, with your permission, of course…”

“Absolutely. I’ll put him on. He’ll be delighted.”

“Lagana? How’s it going? …Listen, could I have half an hour ofyour time? Yes?…You don’t know how grateful I am …No, no,I’ll come to you, in Montelusa. Is tomorrow evening around six-thirty all right?”

The moment he hung up, Mimi Augello walked in with a dark look on his face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Beba called and said Salvuccio seems a bit agitated.”

“You know something, Mimi? It’s you and Beba who are agitated, and if you keep getting agitated like this, you’re going to drive the kid insane. For his first birthday, I’m going to buy him a tiny little straitjacket made to measure, so he can get used to it from an early age.”

Mimi didn’t appreciate the remark. His face went from dark to downright black.

“Let’s talk about something else, all right? “What did the commissioner want?”

“We didn’t meet. He had to go to Palermo.”

“Explain to me why this business of Liguori coming here smells fishy to you.”

“Explaining a sensation is not easy.”

“Try.”

“Mimi, Liguori descends on us after Senator Nicotra dies in Vigata—from drugs, though we’re not supposed to say so. You yourself thought the same thing, if I remember correctly. Two others died before Nicotra, but they race over here only after the senator dies. My question is, for what purpose?”

“I don’t understand,” said Augello, confused.

“I’ll be clearer. These guys want to find out who it was that sold the, let’s say, ‘tainted’ stuff to the senator, to prevent other people, bigwigs like the senator, from coming to the same end. They’ve obviously been put under pressure.”

“And don’t you think they’re right to do what they’re doing?”

“Absolutely right. It’s just that there’s a problem.” What?”

“Officially, Nicotra died of natural causes. Therefore whoever sold him the stuff is not responsible for his death. If we arrest him, it will come out that the guy sold his drugs not only to the senator but to a whole slew of the senators’ playmates—politicos, businessmen, and other high rollers. A scandal. A big mess.”

“And so?”

“And so, when we arrest him and all hell breaks loose, we’ll get swept up in it, too. We who arrested him, not Liguori and company. People will come and tell us we should have proceeded more cautiously, others will accuse us of acting like the judges in Milan, all Communists seeking to destroy the system … In short, the commissioner and Liguori will have covered their asses, whereas ours will look like the Mont Blanc Tunnel.”

“So what should we do?”

“We? Mimi, Liguori spoke toyou,who are the commissioner’s rising star. I’ve nothing to do with it.” “Okay. What should I do?” “Stick to the finest tradition.” “Which is?”

“Armed conflict. You were getting ready to arrest the guy when he opened fire. You reacted and were forced to kill him.”

“Get out of here!”

“Why?”

“First of all, because that kind of reaction is not my style and, second, because nobody’s ever heard of a drug dealer, even a big fish, trying to avoid arrest by shooting his way out.”

“You’re right. So, still in keeping with tradition, you arrest him but don’t immediately turn him over to the judge. You discreetly let everyone know that you’re keeping him here for two days. On the morning of the third day, you have him transferred to prison. Meanwhile the others will have had all the time in the world to get organized, and you’ll only have to sit and wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For the dealer to get served coffee in prison. Good coffee. Like the coffee they gave Pisciotta and Sindona. That way the accused clearly will no longer be able to supply a list of his clients. And they all lived happily ever after. And that’s the end of my story.”

Mimi, who until that moment had been standing, suddenly sat down.

“Listen, let’s think rationally about this.”

“Not now. Think about it tonight. In any case Salvuccio will be keeping you awake. We’ll talk about it again tomorrow morning, with a fresh mind. It’s better this way. Now bug off, ‘cause I’ve got a phone call to make.”

Augello left, doubtful and dazed.

“Michela? Montalbano here. Would you mind if I dropped by your place for five minutes? No, no news. Just for…All right, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

He buzzed the intercom, went in, and climbed the stairs. Michela was waiting for him in the doorway. She was dressed the same way as the first time Montalbano met her.

“Good evening, Inspector. Didn’t you say you couldn’t come by today?”

“I did. But my meeting with the commissioner was canceled, and so …”