“For coming to me to express your doubts.”
“But, you see—”
“And even if you’d come to express absolute certainty, you would still be too late.”
“But why, may I ask?”
“Because by now everything that needed to be written has already been written.”
“But I came to talk, not to write.”
“It’s the same thing. At this point, nothing will change anything.There will certainly be some new discoveries, big discoveries, which will come out over the course of the trial, but not until then. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely. And, in fact, I came to tell you—”
Giarrizzo raised a hand and stopped him.
“Among other things, I don’t think your way of going about this is terribly correct. Don’t forget, you, until proved otherwise, are also a witness.”
It was true. And Montalbano absorbed the blow. He stood up, mildly angry. He’d made a fool of himself.
“Well, in that case—”
“What are you doing? Leaving? Are you upset?”
“No, but—”
“Sit down,” said the prosecutor, crashing into the door, which had been left open.
The inspector sat down.
“Can we speak in a purely theoretical mode?” asked Giarrizzo.
What on earth was a “theoretical mode”? For lack of a better option, Montalbano consented.
“All right.”
“So, to repeat, theoretically speaking, rhetorically, that is, let us posit the case of a certain police inspector, whom we shall henceforth call Martinez . . .”
Montalbano didn’t like the name the prosecutor wanted to give him.
“Couldn’t we call him something else?”
“But that’s an utterly insignificant detail! However, if it means so much to you, please propose a name more to your liking,” said Giarrizzo, irritated and crashing into a file cabinet.
D’Angelantonio? DeGubernatis? Filippazzo? Cosentino? Aromatis? The names that came into the inspector’s mind didn’t sound right. So he gave up.
“All right, we can keep Martinez.”
“So, let us posit that this Martinez, who has been conducting, and so on and so forth, the investigation into an individual we shall call Salinas—” Why the hell was Giarrizzo so fixated on Spanish names? “Is Salinas all right with you?—who is accused of having shot a shop owner and so on and so forth, realizes and so on and so forth that the case has a weak link and so on and so forth—”
“Excuse me, but
“Martinez, no? The shop owner, whom we’ll call—”
“Alvarez del Castillo,” Montalbano promptly piped in.
Giarrizzo looked a little doubtful.
“Too long. Let’s call him simply Alvarez.The shop owner Alvarez, however—though openly contradicting himself—claims not to recognize Salinas as the gunman.You with me so far?”
“I’m with you.”
“On the other hand, Salinas claims to have an alibi, which, however, he doesn’t want to reveal to Martinez.And so the inspector continues straight down his road, convinced that the reason Salinas doesn’t want to reveal his alibi is that he hasn’t got one. Is the picture clear?”
“Quite. At this point, however, I—I mean, Martinez, begins to doubt: What if Salinas really does have an alibi, and pulls it out at the trial?”
“But this has already occurred to the people in charge of confirming the arrest and bringing the accused to justice!” said Giarrizzo, tripping over a rug and threatening to collapse on top of the inspector, who for a moment feared being squashed to death under the Colossus of Rhodes.
“And how have they resolved the question?”
“With supplementary investigations concluded three months ago.”
“But I never—”
“Martinez wasn’t assigned this task because he’d already done his part. To conclude: Salinas’s alibi is apparently a woman, his mistress, whose company he was in at the moment that Alvarez was shot.”
“I’m sorry, but if Lic—I mean, Salinas really does have an alibi, it means the trial will end in—”
“A conviction!” said Giarrizzo.
“Why?”
“Because when Salinas’s lawyers decide to pull out this alibi, the prosecution will know how to pick it apart. The defense, moreover, is unaware that the prosecution already knows the name of the woman who is supposed to provide this belated alibi.”
“Mind telling me who she is?”
“You? But you, Inspector Montalbano, have nothing to do with this! If anything, it should be Martinez asking that question.”
He sat down, wrote something on a sheet of paper, stood up, and held out his hand to Montalbano, who, bewildered, shook it.
“It was a pleasure to talk to you,” said the prosecutor. “I’ll see you at the trial.”
He got up to leave, crashed into the half-closed door, knocking it partially off its hinges, and went out.
Still stunned, the inspector bent down to look at the sheet of paper on the desk. It had a name written on it:
He raced back to Vigàta, went to the station, and said to Catarella as he was passing by:
“Call Fazio on his cell phone.”
He barely had time to sit down before the telephone rang.
“What is it, Chief ?”
“Drop everything you’re doing and come here at once.”
“I’m on my way.”
It was now clear that he and Fazio had gone down the wrong path.
The investigation into Licco’s alibi had been assigned not to him, Montalbano, but surely to the carabinieri, at the instruction of Giarrizzo. And equally surely, the Cuffaros had learned of the existence of this investigation by the men in black.
This meant that, whatever behavior he displayed in court, it would never have the slightest influence on the outcome of the trial.
Therefore all the pressure exerted on him—the ransacking of his house, the attempted arson, the anonymous phone call—had nothing to do with the Licco affair. So what, then, did they want from him?
Fazio listened in absolute silence to the conclusions the inspector had drawn after his chat with Giarrizzo.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said at the end.
“No ‘maybe’ about it.”
“We’ll have to wait and see what their next move is, after they failed to burn down your house.”
Montalbano slapped his forehead.
“They’ve already made their move! I forgot to tell you!”
“What’d they do?”
“I got an anonymous phone call.”
And he repeated the message to Fazio.
“The problem is, you don’t know what it is they want you to do.”
“Let’s hope that their next move, as you say, will give us some idea. Have you managed to find out anything else about Gurreri?”
