“Look, Judge, I—”
“No, no, my dear Montalbano, no excuses. Among other things, I must tell you that Michela accused you of protecting Mrs. Sclafani.”
“Did she tell you why Mrs. Sclafani would—”
“Yes, jealousy. She also told me that you, Montalbano, have in your possession some letters Sclafani wrote in which she threatens to kill her lover. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“I want to see them at once.”
“Okay, but—”
“I repeat, no excuses. Don’t you realize how you’re acting? You hid from me—”
“Don’t piss outside the urinal, Tommaseo.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll explain. I said don’t piss outside the urinal. I’m not hiding anything from you. It’s just that Elena Sclafani has an alibi for the evening Pardo was killed, and it’s one you’re really going to like.”
“What does that mean, that I’ll really like Sclafani’s alibi?”
“You’ll see. Make sure she goes into great detail. Have a good evening.”
“Inspector Montalbano? It’s Laganà.”
“Good evening, Marshal. What can you tell me?”
“That I’ve had a stroke of luck.”
“In what sense?”
“Last night, entirely by chance, I got wind of a huge operation that’s going to be revealed to the press tomorrow. We’re going to make a big sweep of over four thousand people, including doctors, pharmacists, and representatives, all accused of corruption and graft. So today I called a friend of mine in Rome. Well, it turns out the pharmaceutical firms represented by Angelo Pardo haven’t been implicated.”
“That means Pardo couldn’t have been killed by some rival, or for not making payoffs.”
“Exactly.”
“And what do you make of those four pages covered with numbers I gave you?”
“I turned them over to Melluso.”
“Who’s he?”
“A colleague of mine who knows all about that sort of thing. I’m hoping I’ll have something to tell you tomorrow.”
“Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!”
A high-pitched, piercing, prolonged yell terrorized everyone who was still at the station. It came from the entrance. With a chill running down his spine, Montalbano rushed into the corridor, crashing into Fazio, Mimì, Gallo, and a couple of uniformed policemen.
Inside his closet stood Catarella, back glued to the wall, no longer screaming but rather whimpering like a wounded animal, eyes popping out of his head, pointing with a trembling finger at Angelo Pardo’s open laptop on the little table.
Matre santa!
What could have appeared on the screen to frighten him that way? The devil? Osama bin Laden?
“Everybody stay outside!” Montalbano ordered, going into the closet.
He looked at the monitor. It was blank. There was nothing.
Maybe Catarella’s brain, having so strained itself in the struggle with the passwords, had completely melted. Which, in any case, wouldn’t have taken much.
“Go away!” the inspector yelled to his men.
When he was alone with Catarella, he embraced him. Feeling him trembling, he told him to sit down.
“There’s a good boy,” he murmured, stroking his head.
And, just like a dog, Catarella started to calm down. When he saw him no longer trembling, Montalbano asked him:
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Catarella made a gesture of despair.
“Come on, try to talk. Do you want a little water?”
Catarella shook his head no and swallowed twice.
“It…it…deleted isself, Chief,” he said in a voice about to break into a heartrending wail.
“Come on, speak up. What deleted itself?”
“The third file, Chief. And it deleted the other two, too.”
Therefore everything that might have been of interest in the computer had been lost.
“How is that possible?”
“Oh, iss possible, Chief. There musta been an abortion pogram.”
Abortion? Maybe Angelo Pardo, aside from performing illegal abortions on women, had also found a way to perform them on computers?
“What have abortions got to do with this?”
“Chief, whatta you say when you got a militiry operation going an’ you wanna stop it?”
“I dunno, I guess you could say you abort it.”
“And in’t that what I said? Iss what I said. Iss got an abortion pogram pogrammed to delete what’s asposta be deleted in the abortion pogram pogrammed to be deleted after a week, a month, two months, tree months…You follow?”
“Perfectly. A timed deletion program.”
“Just like you say, Chief. But iss not ’cause of my fault or negleck, Chief! I swear!”
“I know, Cat, I know. Don’t worry about it.”
He patted his head again and went back into his office. Angelo Pardo had taken every possible precaution to make sure nobody ever found out how he got the money he needed to gamble and buy expensive gifts for his girlfriend.
The first thing he did when he got home was attack the salmon. A hefty slice dressed with fresh lemon juice and a special olive oil given him by the person who made it. (“The virginity of this olive oil has been certified by a gynecologist,” said a little ticket that came with it.) After eating he cleared the veranda table and replaced the dish and silverware with a brand-new bottle of J&B and a glass. He knew at last that he held the end of a long thread in his hand.
And if you even think of calling it Ariadne’s thread, I’ll slash your face,
he warned himself. But that thread might in fact lead him, if not to a solution, at least down the right path.
It was Prosecutor Tommaseo who, without knowing it, had handed him the thread. He’d told him that during the last interrogation, Michela had made a scene straight out of a Greek tragedy, screaming that he, Montalbano, didn’t want to take any action against Elena even though he had in his possession the letters in which Elena had threatened to kill Angelo. And while it was absolutely true that he had those compromising letters, there was a small detail that could not be ignored: Michela should not have known this.
Because the day before, when Michela asked him if he’d found the letters, he’d said no, just to keep the waters muddy. And he remembered this perfectly clearly—forget about old age and Alzheimer’s (there, that’s what that disease was called!). And Paola the Red had also been present and could testify.
The only person who knew he’d found the letters was Elena, because he’d shown them to her. But the two women didn’t speak. And so? There was only one answer. Michela had gone to the garage to check if the envelope with the three letters was still in the Mercedes’ trunk, and when she saw it was gone, she’d come to the logical conclusion that the inspector had discovered it and taken it.
Wait a second, Montalbano. How could Michela have known the letters were lying hidden under the carpet in the trunk of the Mercedes? She said that Angelo kept his letters in one of the desk’s drawers. Angelo had no logical reason to move them out of the house and into the Mercedes in the garage—hiding them, yes, but making sure they weren’t entirely hidden, so that if anyone looked with any care, that person would find them. Therefore Michela must have moved them. But when? The very night Angelo was found dead, when he, Montalbano, had committed the colossal boner of leaving her alone in her brother’s apartment.
Why had Michela gone to such elaborate lengths?
Why would someone hide something in such a way that it can be discovered as if by chance? To make the discovery seem more significant, of course. Explain yourself better, Salvo.
If he opened the desk drawer, found the letters there, and read them, everything would seem normal. Let’s set the value of the words in those letters at ten. But if he found those letters after driving himself crazy looking for them, because they were hidden, it would mean that the letters were not supposed to have been read, and thus the value of their words climbed to fifty. This lent weight and truth to the death threats; they were no longer the generic statements of a jealous lover.
Compliments to Michela. As an attempt to screw the hated Elena, it was brilliant. But her excessive hatred had betrayed her in front of Tommaseo. It was easy for her to enter the garage, since she had copies of all Angelo’s keys.
Wait a minute. The other night, after the dream about the bath at Michela’s, something about a key had occurred to him. Whose key?
Inspector Montalbano, review everything from the start.
From the very beginning?
From the very beginning.
Could I pour myself another whisky first?
So one fine day, Signora (“excuse me,
Signorina
”) Michela Pardo appears at the station to tell me she’s had no word of her brother, Angelo, for two days. She says she even went into his apartment, since she has a set of keys, but found everything in order. She comes back the same evening. We go to look at the apartment together. Everything still in order. There’s no trace of any sudden departure. When we’re outside the building, about to say good-bye, it occurs to her that we haven’t checked the room Angelo has on the terrace, having rented both room and terrace. We go back upstairs. The glass door giving onto the terrace is locked. Michela opens it with one of her keys. The door to the little room on the terrace is also locked, but Michela tells me she doesn’t have the key to this one. So I break down the door. And I find…
Stop right there, Montalbano. There’s the rub, as Hamlet would say. This is the part of the story that doesn’t make sense.
What sense is there in Michela’s having only the key to the terrace door, which is completely useless if not accompanied by the key to the former laundry room? If she has copies of
all
her brother’s keys, she must also have the one to the room on the terrace. All the more because Angelo used to go there to read or sunbathe, as Michela herself said. He did not go up there to be with his women. What did this mean?
Montalbano noticed that his glass was empty again. He refilled it, stepped off the veranda and onto the sand, and, taking a sip of whisky every few steps, arrived at the water’s edge. The night was dark, but it felt good. The lights of the fishing boats on the horizon line looked like low-lying stars.
He picked up the thread of his argument. If Michela had a key to the little room but told him she didn’t, the lie meant that she wanted him, Montalbano, to break down the door and find Angelo shot dead inside. And this because Michela already knew that her brother’s corpse was in that room. By staging this whole scene, she was trying to make herself appear, to the inspector’s eyes, completely extraneous to the entire event, when in fact she was in it up to her neck.
He returned to the veranda, sat down, poured another whisky. How could things have gone?
Michela says that on Monday, Angelo phoned her to tell her that Elena would be coming over to his place that evening. Thus Michela made herself scarce. But what if, on the other hand, Angelo, seeing that Elena wasn’t coming, and realizing that in fact she wasn’t going to come, called his sister back, and Michela went to see him? Maybe Angelo even told her he was going up to the terrace room to get some air. Then, when Michela showed up, she found her brother murdered. She’s convinced it was Elena, who, having arrived late, had a quarrel with Angelo. Especially since Angelo must have wanted to have sex with the girl, which was all too clear. So she decides to play her ace, to prevent Elena from getting away with it. She locks everything up, goes down into the apartment below, spends the night removing everything that might reveal anything about Angelo’s shady dealings, above all the strongbox, and takes the letters down to the garage, as these will serve as evidence against Elena…
Montalbano heaved a sigh of satisfaction. Michela had all the time in the world to take care of business before reporting her brother missing. And on the night he let her stay in the apartment, she probably slept soundly and happily, since she’d already done everything she needed to do. It was still a colossal boner on his part, but without any immediate consequences.
Yet why was Michela so sure that Angelo was up to something shady? The answer was simple. When she learned that her brother was giving extremely expensive presents to Elena, and then later found out that the money had not been taken from their joint account, she became convinced that Angelo held a secret account somewhere with a great deal of money in it, too much for him to have earned honestly. The story Michela told him, Montalbano, about sales bonuses and providing for the family was a lie. The woman was too smart not to have smelled a rat.
But why had she taken away the strongbox? There was an answer to this, too: because she hadn’t managed to find where the second key was hidden, the one found by Fazio stuck to bottom of the drawer. And then, if you really consider…
The consideration began and ended there. Montalbano’s eyes suddenly started to flutter, and his head dropped. The only thing to be taken into serious consideration was the bed.
He had the misfortune of waking up a few minutes before the alarm rang. He realized that Angelo Pardo’s funeral was that morning. The word “funeral” conjured up thoughts of death…He leapt out of bed, raced into the shower, washed, shaved, had a coffee, and got dressed, all with the frenetic rhythm of a Larry Semon silent film—at one point he could even hear the jaunty chords of a piano accompaniment—then went out of the house and finally regained his normal rhythm as soon as he got in the car and began his drive to Vigàta.
Fazio wasn’t at the station, Mimì, summoned by Liguori, had gone to Montelusa, and Catarella was mute, not having yet recovered from the blow dealt him the day before by Pardo’s computer, when all the passwords had suddenly vanished and he had been left standing there gazing at a monitor as empty as the fabled Tartar desert.
A morgue, in short.
Around midmorning the first phone call came in.
“My dear Inspector, the family all well?”
“Excellent, Dr. Lattes.”
“Let’s thank the Blessed Virgin! I wanted to tell you that unfortunately the commissioner can’t see you today. Shall we make it the same time tomorrow?”
“Let’s do indeed, Doctor.”
With thanks to the Blessed Virgin, he’d been spared the sight of Mr. Commissioner’s face for yet another day. Meanwhile, however, he’d become curious to know what his boss wanted to see him about. Certainly nothing important, if he kept postponing with such ease.
Let’s hope he manages to tell me before I retire or he’s transferred
, Montalbano thought.
The second call came right after the first.
“It’s Laganà, Inspector. My friend Melluso, the one I gave those pages to decipher, remember…?”
“Of course I remember. Has he succeeded in figuring out how the code works?”
“Not yet. But meanwhile he’s made a discovery that I thought could be important to your investigation.”
“Really?”
“Yes, but I’d like to tell you about it in person.”
“How about if I come by around five-thirty this afternoon?”
“Fine.”
The third call came at half past noon.
“Montalbano? Tommaseo here.”
“What is it?”
“Elena Sclafani came in to see me at nine o’clock this morning…My God!”
He’d suddenly lost his breath. Montalbano got worried.
“What’s wrong, sir?”
“That woman is so…beautiful, she’s a creature of…of…”
Tommaseo was beside himself. He not only couldn’t breathe, he also couldn’t speak.
“How did it go?”
“Splendidly!” the prosecutor said enthusiastically. “Couldn’t have gone any better!”
Logically speaking, when a prosecutor declares himself satisfied and content with an interrogation, it means the accused got the worse end of things.
“Did you find any incriminating elements?”
“You must be kidding!”
So much for logic. The prosecutor was clearly leaning in Elena’s favor.
“The lady showed up with Traina, the lawyer, who brought along a service-station attendant, a certain Luigi Diotisalvi.”
“The lady’s alibi.”
“Exactly, Montalbano. All we can do at this point is envy Mr. Diotisalvi and open up our own service station in the hope that sooner or later she’ll need refueling, heh, heh, heh.”
He laughed, still stunned by Elena’s appearance.
“The lady was adamant in her wish that her husband should not under any circumstances learn of her alibi,” the inspector reminded him.
“Of course. I made every effort to reassure the lady. The upshot, however, is that we’re back at sea. What are we going to do, Montalbano?”
“Swim, sir.”
At a quarter to one, Fazio returned from the funeral.
“Were there a lot of people?”
“Enough.”
“Wreaths?”
“Nine. And only one pillow, from the mother and sister.”
“Did you take down the names on the ribbons?”
“Yessir. Six were unknown persons, but three were known.”
His eyes started to glisten, a sign that he was about to drop a bomb.
“Go on.”
“One wreath was from Senator Nicotra’s family.”
“Nothing strange about that. You yourself know they were friends. The senator defended him—”
“Another was from the Di Cristoforo family.”
Fazio was expecting the inspector to be surprised. He was disappointed.
“I was already aware they knew each other. It was MP Di Cristoforo who introduced Pardo to the manager of the bank in Fanara.”
“And the third wreath was from the Sinagra family. The same Sinagras we know so well,” fired Fazio.
This time Montalbano was speechless.
“Holy shit!” he said.
For the Sinagras to have come this far out in the open, Angelo Pardo must have been a dear friend indeed. Was it Senator Nicotra who introduced Pardo to the Sinagras? And was Di Cristoforo therefore part of the same clique? Di Cristoforo–Nicotra–Pardo: a triangle whose area equaled the Sinagra family?
“Did you also go to the cemetery?”