“The doctors can’t explain it. Who are you, sir?”
“The name’s Virduzzo. I’m the accountant at Splendor.”
“Come on in.”
The woman felt reassured. The apartment was a mess, it being all too clear that Saro’s wife was too busy always attending to the little boy to look after the house.
“What do you want with Saro?”
“I believe I made a mistake, on the minus side, on the amount of his last paycheck. I’d like to see the stub.”
“If that’s all you need,” said the woman, “there’s no need to wait for Saro. I can get you the stub myself. Come.”
Montalbano followed her, ready with another excuse to stay until the husband returned. There was a nasty smell in the bedroom, as of rotten milk. The woman tried to open the top drawer of a commode but was unable, having only one free hand to use, as she was holding the baby in her other arm.
“I can do it, if you like,” said Montalbano.
The woman stepped aside, and the inspector opened the drawer and saw that it was full of papers, bills, prescriptions, receipts.
“Where are the payment envelopes?”
At that moment Saro entered the bedroom. They hadn’t heard him come in; the front door to the apartment had been left open. The instant he saw Montalbano rummaging in the drawer, he was convinced the inspector was searching their house for the necklace. He turned pale, started trembling, and leaned against the doorjamb.
“What do you want?” he barely managed to articulate.
Frightened by her husband’s obvious terror, the woman spoke before Montalbano had a chance to answer.
“But it’s Virduzzo, the accountant!” she almost yelled.
“Virduzzo? That’s Inspector Montalbano!”
The woman tottered, and Montalbano rushed forward to support her, fearing the baby might end up on the floor together with his mother. He helped sit her down on the bed. Then he spoke, the words coming out of his mouth without the intervention of his brain, a phenomenon that had come over him before and which one imaginative journalist had once called “that flash of intuition which now and then strikes our policeman.”
“Where’d you put the necklace?” he said.
Saro stepped forward, stiff from struggling to remain standing on his pudding-legs, went over to his bedside table, opened the drawer, and pulled out a packet wrapped in newspaper, which he threw on the bed. Montalbano picked it up, went into the kitchen, sat down, and unwrapped the packet. The jewel was at once vulgar and very fine: vulgar in its design and conception, fine in its workmanship and in the cut of the diamonds with which it was studded. Saro, meanwhile, had followed him into the kitchen.
“When did you find it?”
“Early Monday morning, at the Pasture.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No, sir, just my wife.”
“And has anyone come to ask if you found a necklace like this?”
“Yes, sir. Filippo di Cosmo came. He’s one of Gegè Gullotta’s men.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I said I hadn’t found anything.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Yes, sir, I think so. Then he said that if I happened to find it, I should give it to him right away and not mess around, because it was a very sensitive matter.”
“Did he promise you anything?”
“Yes, sir. A deadly beating if I found it and kept it, fifty thousand lire if I found it and turned it over to him.”
“What did you plan to do with the necklace?”
“I wanted to pawn it. That’s what Tana and I decided.”
“You weren’t planning to sell it?”
“No, sir, it didn’t belong to us. We saw it like something somebody had lent to us; we didn’t want to profit from it.”
“We’re honest people,” said the wife, who’d just come in, wiping her eyes.
“What were you going to do with the money?”
“We wanted to use it to treat our son. We could have taken him far away from here, to Rome, Milan—anywhere there might be doctors who know something.”
They were all silent a few moments. Then Montalbano asked the woman for two sheets of paper, which she tore out of a notebook they used for shopping expenses. Holding out one of the sheets to Saro, the inspector said:
“Make me a drawing that shows the exact spot where you found the necklace. You’re a land surveyor, aren’t you?”
As Saro was sketching, on the other sheet Montalbano wrote:
I the undersigned, Salvo Montalbano, Chief Inspector of the Police Department of Vigàta (province of Montelusa), hereby declare having received on this day, from Mr. Baldassare “Saro” Montaperto, a solid-gold necklace with a heart-shaped pendant, also solid gold but studded with diamonds, found by Mr. Montaperto around the area known as “the Pasture” during the course of his work as ecological agent. In witness whereof,
And he signed, but paused a moment to reflect before adding the date at the bottom. Then he made up his mind and wrote, “Vigàta, September 9, 1993.” Meanwhile Saro had finished. They exchanged sheets.
“Perfect,” said the inspector, looking over the detailed drawing.
“Here, however, the date is wrong,” Saro noticed. “The ninth was last Monday. Today is the eleventh.”
“No, nothing wrong there. You brought that necklace into my office the same day you found it. You had it in your pocket when you came to police headquarters to tell me you’d found Luparello dead, but you didn’t give it to me till later because you didn’t want your fellow worker to see. Is that clear?”
“If you say so, sir.”
“Take good care of this statement.”
“What are you going to do now? Arrest him?” asked the woman.
“Why? What’s he done?” asked Montalbano, standing up.
7
Montalbano was well respected at the San Calogero trattoria, not so much because he was police inspector as because he was a good customer with discerning tastes. Today they fed him some very fresh striped mullet, fried to a delicate crisp and drained on absorbent paper. After coffee and a long stroll on the eastern jetty, he went back to the office. Fazio got up from his desk as soon as he saw him.
“There’s someone waiting for you, chief.”
“Who is it?”
“Pino Catalano, remember him? One of the two garbage collectors who found Luparello’s body.”
“Send him right in.”
He immediately noticed that the youth was tense, nervous.
“Have a seat.”
Pino sat with his buttocks on the edge of the chair.
“Could you tell me why you came to my house to put on the act that you did? I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“I did it simply to avoid frightening your mother. If I told her I was a police inspector, she might’ve had a heart attack.”
“Well, in that case, thanks.”
“How did you figure out it was me who was looking for you?”
“I phoned my mother to see how she was feeling—when I left her she had a headache—and she told me a man had come to give me an envelope but forgot to bring it with him. She said he’d gone out to get it but never came back. I became curious and asked her to describe the guy. When you’re trying to pretend you’re somebody else, you should cover up that mole you’ve got under your left eye. What do you want from me?”
“I have a question. Did anyone come to the Pasture to ask if you’d found a necklace?”
“Yes, someone you know, in fact: Filippo di Cosmo.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him I hadn’t found it, which was the truth.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said if I found it, so much the better for me, he’d give me fifty thousand lire, but if I found it and I didn’t turn it over to him, so much the worse. He said the same thing to Saro. But Saro didn’t find it either.”
“Did you go home before coming here?”
“No, sir, I came here directly.”
“Do you write for the theater?”
“No, but I like to act now and then.”
“Then what’s this?”
Montalbano handed him the page he’d taken from the little table. Pino looked at it, unimpressed, and smiled.
“No, that’s not a theater scene, that’s . . .”
He fell silent, at a loss. It occurred to him that if those weren’t lines of dramatic dialogue, he would have to explain what they were, and it wouldn’t be easy.
“I’ll help you out,” said Montalbano. “This is a transcript of a phone call one of you made to Rizzo, the lawyer, right after you found Luparello’s body, before you came here to headquarters to report your discovery. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who made the phone call?”
“I did. But Saro was right beside me, listening.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“Because Luparello was an important person, a big cheese. So we immediately thought we should inform Rizzo. Actually, no, the first person we thought of calling was Deputy Cusumano.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because Cusumano, with Luparello dead, was like somebody who, when an earthquake hits, loses not only his house but also the money he was keeping under the floorboards.”
“Give me a better explanation of why you called Rizzo.”
“Because we thought maybe something could still be done.”
“Like what?”
Pino didn’t answer, but only passed his tongue over his lips.
“I’ll help you out again. You said maybe something could still be done. Something like moving the car out of the Pasture and letting the body be found somewhere else? Were you thinking that’s what Rizzo might ask you to do?”
“Yes.”
“And you would have been willing to do it?”
“Of course! That’s why we called!”
“What did you expect to get out of it?”
“We were hoping maybe he could find us other jobs or help us win some competition for surveyors, or find us the right job, so we wouldn’t have to work as stinking garbage collectors anymore. You know as well as I do, Inspector, you can’t sail without a favorable wind.”
“Now explain the most important thing: why did you write down that conversation? Were you hoping to blackmail him with it?”
“How? With words? Words are just air.”
“So what was your reason?”
“Well, believe it or not, I wrote down that conversation because I wanted to study it. Something didn’t sound right to me—speaking as a man of the theater, that is.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Let’s pretend that what’s written down is supposed to be staged. I’m the Pino character, and I phone the Rizzo character early in the morning to tell him I’ve just found his boss dead. He’s the guy’s secretary, his devoted friend, his political crony. He’s more than a brother. But the Rizzo character, he keeps cool as a cucumber, doesn’t get upset, doesn’t ask where we found him, how he died, if he was shot, if he died in a car crash, nothing. He only asks why we’ve come to him, of all people, with the news. Does that sound right to you?”
“No. Go on.”
“He shows no surprise, in other words. In fact, he tries to put a distance between himself and the dead man, as if this was just some passing acquaintance of his. And he immediately tells us to do our duty, which is to call the police. Then he hangs up. No, Inspector, as drama it’s all wrong. The audience would just laugh. It doesn’t work.”
Montalbano dismissed Pino and kept the sheet of paper. When the garbage collector left, he reread it.
It did work, and how. It worked marvelously, if in this hypothetical drama—which in the end was not really so hypothetical—Rizzo, before receiving the phone call, already knew where and how Luparello had died and anxiously wanted the body to be discovered as quickly as possible.
Jacomuzzi gaped at Montalbano, astonished. The inspector stood before him, dressed to the nines: dark blue suit, white shirt, burgundy tie, sparkling black shoes.
“Jesus! Going to your wedding?”
“You done with Luparello’s car? What did you find?”
“Nothing of importance inside. But—”
“The suspension was broken.”
“How did you know?”
“My bird told me. Listen, Jacomuzzi.”
He pulled the necklace out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table. Jacomuzzi picked it up, looked at it carefully, and made a gesture of surprise.
“But this is real! It’s worth tens of millions of lire! Was it stolen?”
“No, somebody found it on the ground at the Pasture and brought it in to me.”
“At the Pasture? What kind of whore can afford a piece of jewelry like that? You must be kidding!”
“I want you to examine it, photograph it, do all the little things you usually do. Then bring me the results as soon as you can.”
The telephone rang. Jacomuzzi answered and passed the receiver to his colleague.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Fazio, chief. Come back to town immediately. All hell’s breaking loose.”
“What is it?”
“Contino the schoolteacher’s shooting at people.”
“What do you mean, shooting?”
“Shooting, shooting! He fired two shots from the balcony of his apartment at the people sitting at the café below, screaming something nobody could understand. Then he fired another shot at me as I was coming through his front door to see what was going on.”
“Has he killed anyone?”
“No. He just grazed the arm of a certain De Francesco.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.”
As he traveled the six miles back to Vigàta at breakneck speed, Montalbano thought of Contino the school-teacher. Not only did he know him, there was a secret between them. Six months earlier the inspector had been taking the stroll he customarily allowed himself two or three times a week along the eastern jetty, out to the lighthouse. Before he set out, however, he always stopped at Anselmo Greco’s shop, a hovel that clashed with the clothing boutiques and shiny, mirrored cafés along the
corso
. Among such antiquated items as terracotta dolls and rusty weights to nineteenth-century scales, Greco also sold
càlia e simenza
, a mixture of roasted chickpeas and salted pumpkin seeds. Montalbano would buy a paper cone full of these and then head out. That day, after he had reached the point, he was turning around, right under the lighthouse, when he saw an elderly man beneath him, sitting on a block of the low concrete breakwater, head down, immobile. Montalbano got a better look, to see if perhaps the man was holding a fishing line in his hands. But he wasn’t fishing; he wasn’t doing anything. Suddenly he stood up, quickly made the sign of the cross, and balanced himself on his tiptoes.