Rounding the Mark

10

Horrid, windy morning, wan sun smothered by fast-moving dirt-grey clouds. It was more than enough to top off the inspector’s already dark mood. He went in the kitchen, made coffee, drank a first demitasse, smoked a cigarette, did what he had to do, got in the shower, shaved, and put on the same clothes he’d been wearing for two days. Before going out, he went back in the kitchen with the intention of drinking another coffee but only managed to fill the demitasse halfway, because he spilled the other half on his trousers. Without warning, his hand, entirely on its own, had swerved. Cursing as if to a platoon of Turks lined up before him, he undressed, leaving his suit on a chair so that Adelina could clean and iron it. He emptied the pockets of their contents so he could move them all into the suit he was going to put on. To his surprise he found an unopened envelope in the pile. Where did that come from? Then he remembered. It was the letter Catarella had given him, which he said had been personally delivered by Pontius Pilate, the journalist. His first impulse was to toss it into the waste basket, but then, for whatever reason, he decided to read it, since he could always choose not to answer. His eyes ran down to the signature at the bottom: Fonso Spàlato, which could easily translate to Pontius Pilate in Catarellese. The letter was rather brief, already a point in favor of the person who’d written it.

Dear Inspector Montalbano,

I am a freelance journalist. I’ve written for a variety of newspapers and magazines, but belong to no single one. I have done rather extensive investigations into the mafia of the Brenta region and arms smuggling from the former Eastern-bloc countries, and for some time now have been devoting much of my time to illegal immigration in the Adriatic and Mediterranean.

A few evenings ago I caught a glimpse of you on the landing wharf at the port, during a typical arrival of refugees. I know you by reputation and thought we might find it mutually useful to meet and exchange ideas (though not for an interview, heaven forbid: I know how much you hate them).

Please find my cell-phone number at the bottom of the page.

I’ll be staying on the island another two days.

Sincerely,

Fonso Spàlato

The inspector liked the lean style. He decided to call up the journalist as soon as he got to work, assuming, of course, that the man was still around.

The first thing he did when he walked into the station was to call Catarella and Mimì into his office.

“Catarella, listen to me very carefully. A certain Mr. Marzilla is supposed to call me. As soon as he does—”

“ ’Scuse me, Chief,” Catarella interrupted, “what’d you say this Marzilla’s name was? Cardilla?”

Montalbano felt reassured. If Catarella was back to screwing up people’s names, it meant the end of the world was not yet nigh.

“For the love of the Blessed Virgin, why would he be called Cardilla when you yourself just called him Marzilla?!”

“Did I?” asked an astonished Catarella. “Then what’s the man’s name, for Chrissakes?”

The inspector took out a sheet of paper, grabbed a red marking pen, wrote MARZILLA in large block letters on it, and handed it to Catarella.

“Read it.”

Catarella read it correctly.

“Excellent,” said Montalbano. “I want you to hang that piece of paper next to the switchboard. The minute he calls, you’re to put him on the line to me, whether I happen to be here or in Afghanistan. Understand?”

“Yessir, Chief. You go right on ahead to Afghanistan, and I’ll put him on for you.”

“Salvo, why did you have me witness this little vaudeville act?” Augello asked as soon as Catarella left the room.

“Because I want you to ask Catarella, three times in the morning and three times in the afternoon, if Marzilla has called.”

“Mind telling me who this Marzilla is?”

“I’ll tell you if you’ve been a good boy and done your homework.”

Nothing whatsoever happened for the rest of the morning. Or rather, only routine stuff: a call for the police to intervene in a violent family quarrel that turned into an aggressive face-off between the suddenly reunited family on the one hand, and Gallo and Galluzzo, guilty of trying to make peace, on the other; a report filed by the deputy mayor, who came in pale as a corpse, saying he’d found a rabbit with its throat slashed, nailed to his front door; a drive-by shooting at a man standing at a filling station who, unharmed, rushed back into his car and drove off into the void before the pump attendant had time to get his license plate number; the nearly daily holdup at a supermarket. Meanwhile, the journalist Spàlato’s cell phone remained stubbornly turned off. In short, if Montalbano wasn’t entirely fed up, he was close. He rewarded himself with lunch at the Trattoria Da Enzo.

Around four o’clock that afternoon, Fazio phoned in. He was calling on his cell phone from Spigonella.

“Chief? I’ve got some news.”

“Let’s have it.”

“At least two people here think they saw the dead guy you found. They recognized him from the photo with the mustache.”

“Do they know what his name was?”

“No.”

“Did he live there?”

“They don’t know.”

“Do they know what he was doing around there?”

“No.”

“Well, what the hell do they know?”

Fazio chose not to answer directly.

“Chief, why don’t you come out here? That way you can assess the situation yourself. You can either take the coastal road, which is always clogged, or you can come by way of Montechiaro, taking the—”

“I know that road.”

It was the same road he’d taken when he went to see the place where the little kid had been killed. He phoned Ingrid, with whom he was supposed to go out to dinner. She immediately apologized and said she couldn’t see him because her husband had invited some friends to dinner without telling her, and she therefore had to play housewife. They arranged that she would come by the station around eight-thirty the following evening. If he wasn’t there, she would wait.

He tried the journalist’s number again, and this time Fonso Spàlato answered.

“Inspector! I was worried you wouldn’t call back.”

“Listen, can we meet?”

“When?”

“Immediately, if you want.”

“That’d be hard for me. I had to fly up to Trieste and have spent the whole day either in airports or in planes running late. Fortunately Mama isn’t as sick as my sister had me believe.”

“I’m happy to hear. So?”

“Let’s do this. If all goes well, I hope to catch a plane to Rome tomorrow and go on from there. I’ll keep you posted.”

At a certain point past Montechiaro, after turning onto the road for Spigonella, the inspector saw the turn for Tricase. At first he hesitated, then made up his mind. He would only lose about ten minutes, at most. He rounded the bend. The peasant was not out working his fields. There was silence, not even a barking dog. The wildflowers at the base of the mound of gravel had wilted.

He had to summon all of his modest driving skills to back the car up that earthquake-riven former goat path and return to the road for Spigonella. Fazio was waiting for him next to his car, which was parked in front of a white and red two-storey villa that looked uninhabited. A rough sea roared below.

“Spigonella starts at this house,” said Fazio. “It’s probably better if we take my car.”

Montalbano got in. Fazio turned on the ignition and began to act as his guide.

“Spigonella sits on a rocky plateau. To reach the sea, you have to go up and down stairways that are cut straight into the rock. It must be murder in summertime. You can also reach the sea by car, by taking the road you just took towards Tricase and then coming up this way from there. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“Tricase, on the other hand, is right on the sea, but it’s been settled differently.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that here in Spigonella these villas were built by people with money—lawyers, doctors, businessmen—whereas in Tricase there’re only little houses, one after another, lived in by little people.”

“But the little houses are just as unauthorized as the villas, aren’t they?”

“Sure, Chief, but I just meant that here every villa is secluded. See over there? High walls, electric gates with dense vegetation behind them . . . It’s hard to see from outside what goes on in there. Whereas the houses in Tricase are out in the open, like they’re talking to one another.”

“Have you become a poet, Fazio?” Montalbano asked.

Fazio blushed.

“Sometimes,” he confessed.

Having reached the edge of the plateau, they got out of the car. At the bottom of the cliff, the sea foamed white where the waves struck a cluster of rocks, and further down it had completely flooded a small beach. It was an unusual shoreline, with stretches of bristling rocks alternating with flat areas of beach. A solitary villa had been built at the very top of a small promontory. Its vast terrace balcony hung as though suspended over the sea. The stretch of shore below consisted entirely of tall rocks, some of them looking like monoliths, but it had nevertheless been closed off—illegally, of course—to create a private space. There was nothing else to see. They got back in the car.

“Now I’m going to take you to talk to a guy—”

“No,” said the inspector. “There’s no point. You can tell me later what those people said. Let’s go back.”

During the entire drive there and the entire drive back, they didn’t encounter a single automobile. And they didn’t see any parked, either.

In front of a decidedly luxurious villa, they saw a man sitting on a cane chair, smoking a cigar.

“That gentleman,” said Fazio, “is one of the two who said they had seen the man in the photograph. He’s the villa’s caretaker. He told me that about three months ago, he was sitting outside the way he is now, when he saw a car come sputtering up from the left. The car stopped right in front of him and a man got out, the same man as in the photo. He’d run out of gas. So the caretaker offered to go get him a canful from the filling station outside Montechiaro. When he came back with the gas, the man gave him a tip of a hundred euros.”

“So he didn’t see where the guy came from.”

“No. And he’d never seen him before. As for the other guy that recognized him, I was only able to have a brief discussion with him. He’s a fisherman and had a basket full of fish he had to go sell in Montechiaro. He told me he’d seen the man in the picture about three, four months ago, on the beach.”

“Three or four months ago? But that was the middle of the winter! What was he doing there?”

“That’s the same thing the fisherman asked himself. He’d just pulled his boat ashore when he saw the man from the photograph on a rock nearby.”

“On a rock?”

“Yeah, one of those rocks right under the villa with the big terrace.”

“And what was he doing?”

“Nothing. He was looking out at the sea and talking on a cell phone. But the fisherman got a good look at him, ’cause at one point the man turned around and started glaring at him. He had the impression the guy on the rock was trying to tell him something.”

“Like what?”

“Like get the fuck out of here . . . What do I do now?”

“I don’t understand. What are you supposed to do?”

“Should I keep looking, or should I stop?”

“Well, it seems useless to waste any more of your time. You can go back to Vigàta.”

Fazio breathed a sigh of relief. This search hadn’t agreed with him from the start.

“You’re not coming?”

“I’ll be along later. First I need to stop for a few minutes in Montechiaro.”

It was a bald-faced lie; he had nothing whatsoever to do in Montechiaro. For a stretch he followed Fazio’s car, and then, when he’d lost sight of it, he did a U-turn and drove back in the direction he’d come. Spigonella had made an impression on him. Was it possible there wasn’t a living soul besides the cigar-smoking caretaker in that entire residential area? He hadn’t seen any dogs, either, or even a single cat turned feral by the seclusion. It was an ideal location for anyone who wanted to do whatever he pleased—like shack up with a woman in secret, set up a gambling house, or organize an orgy or giant snortfest. One needed only take care to cover the windows with shades that didn’t let a single ray of light filter out, and nobody would ever know what was going on inside. Every villa had enough space around it for cars to enter and park well inside the gate and walls. Once the gate closed, it was as though those cars had never come.

While driving around, he had an idea. He braked, got out, and started walking, looking absorbed, now and then kicking the little white stones he encountered along the road.

The little boy’s long escape, which had begun on the landing wharf in the port of Vigàta, had ended not far from Spigonella. He was almost certain the child was running away from Spigonella when the car ran him down.

The nameless dead man he’d encountered while out for a swim had also been sighted in Spigonella. And in all likelihood he’d been killed in Spigonella. Their two stories seemed to run parallel, even though they weren’t supposed to. The inspector recalled the famous expression coined by a politician killed by the Red Brigades: “parallel convergences.” Was the ultimate point of convergence none other than the ghost town of Spigonella? Why not?

But where to begin? Should he try to find out who owned those villas? This immediately seemed an impossible undertaking. Since every single one of those constructions was strictly unauthorized, there was no point in checking the land registry or town hall. Discouraged, he leaned against an electrical pole. The moment his shoulders touched the wood of the pole, he stepped away as though he’d gotten a shock. Electricity! Of course! All towns had to have electricity, and therefore the homeowners had to submit signed requests to be hooked up. But his enthusiasm was short-lived. He could already imagine the electrical company’s response: Since there were no registered streets or street numbers in Spigonella, and since, in short, there was no such place as Spigonella, the electrical bills were sent to the owners’ regular residential addresses. Sorting out these owners would surely be a long and arduous process. And were he to ask how long, the answer would be so vague as to be almost poetic. What about trying the telephone company? Right!

Aside from the fact that the phone company’s answer would have many points in common with the electrical company’s, what about cell phones? Hadn’t one of the witnesses, the fisherman, stated that when he’d seen the unknown dead man, the guy was talking on a cell phone? Hopeless. No matter which way he turned, he ran into a wall. An idea came to him. He got in the car, turned on the ignition, and drove off. Finding the road wasn’t easy. He drove past the same villa two or three times, and then finally, in the distance, saw what he was looking for. The caretaker was still sitting in the same cane chair, the extinguished cigar in his mouth. Montalbano pulled up, got out, and approached the man.

“Good afternoon.”

“If you say so . . . Good afternoon.”

“I’m a police inspector.”

“I figured. You came by with the other policeman, the one that showed me the photograph.”

Had a sharp eye, this caretaker.

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Go right ahead.”

“Do you see many immigrants around here?”

The caretaker gave him an astonished look.

“Immigrants? Sir, around here we don’t see no immigrants, emigrants, or even migrants. All we ever see is the people who live here when they come. Immigrants! Hah!”

“Why does that seem so preposterous to you?”

“’Cause around here the private security car passes every two hours. And those guys . . . if they saw an immigrant, they’d kick his ass all they way back to where he came from!”

“So why haven’t I seen any of these security officers today?”

“Because today they’re on strike for half the day.”

“Thank you.”

“No, thank you for helping make a little of the time go by.”

He got back in the car and left. But when he got to the white-and-red house in front of which he and Fazio had met, he turned around. He knew there was nothing to find there, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave that place. He pulled up again at the edge of the cliff. It was getting dark. Against the still luminous sky, the villa with the enormous terrace looked ghostly. Despite the luxurious homes, the well-tended trees rising above the enclosure walls, and the lush greenery everywhere, Spigonella was a wasteland. Of course, all seaside towns, especially those that depend on vacationers, seem dead in the off-season. But Spigonella must have been already dead at the moment of its birth. In its beginning was its end, to mangle Eliot again. Getting back into his car, this time he finally drove back to Vigàta.

“Marzilla call, Cat?”

“No, Chief, he din’t. But Pontius Pilate did.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he in’t gonna make the plane, but tomorrow he can, and so tomorrow afternoon he’ll be here in the afternoon.”

The inspector went into his office but didn’t sit down. He immediately made a phone call. He wanted to see if there was any chance of doing something that had occurred to him as he was parking the car in front of the police station.

“Signora Albanese? Good evening, how are you? This is Inspector Montalbano. Can you tell me what time your husband will be done with today’s fishing? Ah, he didn’t go out today? Is he at home? Could I talk to him? Ciccio, what are you doing at home? A touch of the flu? Feeling any better now? All gone? Good, I’m glad. Listen, I wanted to ask you something . . . What’s that? Why don’t I come by for dinner, so we can talk about it in person? I really don’t want to take advantage of you, or put your wife to any trouble . . . What was that? Pasta with fresh ricotta? And a second course of whitebait? I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He was unable to speak for the duration of the meal. From time to time Ciccio Albanese would ask him:

“What was that you wanted to ask me, Inspector?”

But Montalbano didn’t even answer, merely rotating the forefinger of his left hand, gesturing “later, later,” since either his mouth was too full or he simply didn’t want to open it, lest the air dilute the taste he was jealously guarding between his tongue and palate.

When the coffee was served, he decided it was time to talk about what he wanted, but only after complimenting Albanese’s wife on her cooking.

“You were right, Ciccio. The dead man was spotted three months ago at Spigonella. Things must have happened the way you said: first they killed him, then they threw him into the water at Spigonella or nearby. You really are very good, as everyone says.”

Ciccio Albanese absorbed the praise without a blink, as his due.

“What else can I do for you?” was all he said.

Montalbano told him. Albanese thought about it a minute, then turned to his wife.

“Is Tanino in Montelusa or Palermo? Do you know?”

“This morning my sister said he was here.”

Before phoning Montelusa, Albanese felt he needed to explain.

“Tanino is my wife’s sister’s son. He’s studying law in Palermo. His dad has a house in Tricase and Tanino goes there often. He’s got a dinghy and likes to scuba dive.”

The phone call took only about five minutes.

“Tanino’ll expect you at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Now let me explain how you get there.”

“Fazio? Sorry to bother you at this hour, but the other day, I think I saw one of our men with a small video camera and—”

“Yeah, that was Torrisi, Chief. He just bought it. From Torretta.”

Of course! Torretta must have moved the entire Zanzibar bazaar into the Vigàta police headquarters!

“Send Torrisi right over here to Marinella, with the video camera and anything else I might need to operate it.”