Excursion to Tindari

unusually nice to him.

The inspector, meanwhile, left the trattoria humming to himself. He had planted a seed. If the ground was fertile (and he had no doubt as to the fertility of Mimi’s ground), that seed would grow. Which meant good-bye Rebecca, or whatever the hell her name was, good-bye transfer request.

“Excuse me, Inspector, but don’t you think you’re being a bit of a stinker?” asked the indignant voice of Montalbano’s conscience.

“Jeez, what a pain in the ass!” was his reply.

In front of the Caffe Caviglione stood its owner, Arturo, leaning against the doorjamb and basking in the sun. He was dressed like a beggar, in stained, threadbare jacket and trousers, despite the four to five billion lire he’d made loan- sharking. A skinflint from a legendary family of skinflints. He once showed the inspector an old sign, yellowed and covered with fly shit, that his grandfather used to display in the cafe at the start of the century: “Anyone sitting at a table must also drink a glass of water. And a glass of water costs two cents.”

“Have a coffee, Inspector?”

They went inside.

“A coffee for the inspector!” Arturo ordered the barman as he dropped into the register the coins Montalbano had extracted from his pocket. The day Arturo decided to offer a few scraps of brioche free of charge would be the day the world witnessed a cataclysm to delight Nostradamus.

“What is it, Artu?”

“I wanted to talk to you about this Griffo business. I know them. In the summer, every Sunday evening, they sit down at a table, always by themselves, and order two pieces of ice-cream cake: cassata for him and hazelnut with cream for her. I saw them that morning.”

“What morning?”

“The morning they left for Tindari. The bus terminus is just down the street, in the piazza. I open at six, give or take a few minutes. Well, the Griffos were already here that morning, standing in front of the closed shutters. And the bus wasn’t supposed to leave until seven! Go figure!”

“Did they have anything to drink or eat?”

“They each had a hot brioche the baker brought to me about ten minutes later. The bus pulled in at six-thirty. The driver, whose name is Filippu, came in and ordered a coffee. Mr. Griffo went up to him and asked if they could board the bus. Filippu said yes, and they left without even saying good-bye. What were they afraid of, missing the bus?”

“Is that everything?”

“Well, yes.”

“Listen, Artu. That kid that was killed, did you know him?”

“Nene Sanfilippo? Until a couple of years ago he used to come in regularly to shoot pool. Then he started showing up a lot less. Only at night.”

“What do you mean, at night?”

“I close at one A.M., Inspector. He’d come in sometimes and buy a few bottles of whisky, gin, that kind of thing. He’d pull up in his car, and there’d almost always be a girl inside.”

“Did you ever recognize anybody?”

“Nah. He probably brought ‘em here from Palermo, or Montelusa, or wherever the hell he found them.”

Pulling up outside the entrance to headquarters, he didn’t feel like going in. A teetering pile of papers to be signed awaited him on his desk; the mere thought of it made his right arm ache. Checking his pocket to make sure he had enough cigarettes, he got back in his car and headed in the direction of Montelusa. Exactly halfway between the two towns was a little country road, hidden behind a billboard, which led to a ramshackle rustic cottage, behind which stood an enormous Saracen olive tree that was easily two hundred years old. It looked like a fake tree, a stage prop, something out of the imagination of Gustave Dore, perhaps an illustration for Dante’s Inferno. The lowest branches dragged and twisted along the ground, unable, try as they might, to hoist themselves skyward, and thus at a certain point of their progress they reconsidered their effort and decided to turn back towards the trunk, creating a kind of elbowlike bend or, in some cases, an out-and-out knot. Shortly thereafter, however, they changed their minds and turned around again, as if frightened at the sight of the powerful though pocked, burnt, time-wrinkled trunk. And in turning around, the branches took a different direction from the one before. They looked just like vipers, pythons, boas, and anacondas that had suddenly metamorphosed into olive branches. And they seemed to despair, forever damned by the sorcery that had frozen them —“crystallized” them, the poet Montale might have said—in an eternity of tragic, impossible flight. The middle branches, having reached more or less one meter in length, were immediately beset by doubt as to whether they should head skyward or turn earthward to rejoin the roots.

When it wasn’t sea air he was after, Montalbano, instead of his customary walk along the eastern jetty, would pay a visit to the olive tree. Straddling one of the lower branches, he would light a cigarette and begin to reflect on problems in need of resolution.

He had discovered that, in some mysterious way, the entanglement, contortion, overlapping, in short, the labyrinth of branches, almost mimetically mirrored what was happening inside his head, the intertwining hypotheses and accumulating arguments. And if some conjecture happened to seem at first too reckless or rash, the sight of a branch tracing an even more far-fetched path than his thought would reassure him and allow him to proceed.

Ensconced amidst the silvery green leaves, he could stay there for hours without moving. His immobility was only interrupted from time to time to make the movements needed to light a cigarette, which he would smoke without ever removing it from his mouth, or to carefully extinguish the butt, which he would rub against the heel of his shoe. He would keep so still that ants, undisturbed, would climb all over his body, creep into his hair, walk across his hands and his forehead. Once he got down from the branch, he would have to shake out his clothes very carefully, and at that moment, along with the ants, a little spider or two, or a few lucky ladybugs, would also come tumbling out.