Having settled onto his branch, he asked himself a question fundamental to what direction the investigation would take: Was there any connection between the disappearance of the old couple and the murder of the kid?
Raising his head to let the first drag of smoke go down better, the inspector noticed a branch of the olive tree tracing an impossible path of sharp corners, tight curves, bounds forward and back. At one point it actually looked like an old-fashioned three-lobed radiator.
“No, I won’t fall for it,” Montalbano muttered, rejecting the invitation. There was no need for acrobatics, not yet. For the moment the facts, and only the facts, were enough.
All the residents of Via Cavour 44, including the concierge, unanimously maintained they had never seen the old couple and the kid together. Not even in some chance encounter, as might happen when waiting for the elevator. They kept different hours, led entirely different lives. Come to think of it, how the hell could two unsociable, bad- tempered old bears, who never spoke to a living soul, have any kind of relationship at all with a twenty-year-old with too much money in his pockets who brought a different woman home every other night?
It seemed best, at least for now, to keep the two things separate. And to consider the fact that the two missing persons and the murder victim lived in the same building a pure and simple coincidence. For the moment. Besides, hadn’t he already decided this, without openly saying so? He’d given Mimi Augello Nene Sanfilippo’s papers to study, and thus had implicitly assigned him the murder investigation. It was up to him, the inspector, to look into the Griffos.
Alfonso and Margherita Griffo, who would hole up in their apartment for up to three or four days in a row, as if be sieged by solitude, giving not the slightest sign of being physically at home, not even a sneeze or a cough, nothing, as though rehearsing their eventual disappearance ... Alfonso and Margherita Griffo, who, as far as their son could remember, had been outside of Vigata only once in their lives, to go to Messina. Then one fine day, Alfonso and Margherita suddenly decide to make an excursion to Tindari. Were they devotees of the Madonna? But they never even went to church!
And they were so keen on that excursion!
According to what Arturo Caviglione told him, they showed up an hour before departure time and were the first to get on the still-empty bus. And though they were the sole passengers at that point, with fifty seats at their disposal, they went and chose the decidedly most uncomfortable ones, which were already encumbered by two giant boxes containing Beatrice Dileo’s collection of samples. Did they make that choice out of inexperience, unaware that one feels the sharp turns most keenly in the last row and ends up with a queasy stomach? At any rate, the hypothesis that they chose those seats so they would be more isolated and not have to talk to their fellow passengers didn’t hold water. If one wants to remain silent, one can, even if there are hundreds of people around. So why the last row?
The answer might lie in what Beatrice had told him. The girl had noticed that from time to time, Alfonso Griffo would turn around and look back through the big rear window. From that position, he could watch the cars that were behind them. But he could also, in turn, be seen, say, by a car that was following the bus. To see and be seen: this would not have been possible had he been seated anywhere else in the coach.
After arriving in Tindari, the Griffos didn’t budge. In Beatrice’s opinion, they never got off the bus. They hadn’t joined the others and weren’t seen about town. What, then, was the reason for that excursion? Why was it so important to them?
Again it was Beatrice who had revealed something important. Namely, that it was Alfonso Griffo who had the driver make the final extra stop, barely half an hour from Vigata.
Maybe, until the day before departure, it had never even occurred to the Griffos to go on that excursion. Maybe their intention had been to spend that Sunday the way they had spent hundreds of others. Except that something had happened which forced them, against their will, to make that journey. Not just any journey, but that one. They’d been given some kind of explicit order. But who could have given that order, and what sort of power did he have over the old couple?
“Just to give this some coherence,” Montalbano said to himself, “let’s say it was a doctor that ordered them.”
But he was in no mood for joking.
And we are talking about a doctor so conscientious that he decided to follow the bus with his car, both on the way out and the way back, to make sure that his patients were in their seats the whole time. After it gets dark, and they’re not far outside of Vigata, the doctor flashes his headlights in some special way It’s a prearranged signal. Alfonso Griffo asks the driver to stop. And at the cafe Paradiso, the couple disappear without a trace. Maybe the conscientious doctor asked the elderly pair to get in his car; maybe he urgently needed to check their blood pressure.
At this point Montalbano decided it was time to stop playing Me Tarzan,You Jane and return, as it were, to civilization. As he was shaking the ants out of his clothes, he asked himself one last question: What mysterious illness did the Griffos suffer from, making it necessary for their ever-so-conscientious family doctor to intervene?
Shortly before the descent that led into Vigata, there was a public telephone. Miraculously, it worked. Mr. Malaspina, owner of the tour-bus company, took barely five minutes to answer the inspector’s questions.
No, Mr. and Mrs. Griffo had never gone on any of these tours before.
Yes, they had booked their seats at the last minute, at exactly one P.M. on Saturday afternoon, the deadline for signing up.
Yes, they had paid in cash.
No, the person who made the booking was neither Mr. nor Mrs. Griffo. Toto Bellavia, the employee at the counter, was ready to swear on a stack of Bibles that it was a distinguished-looking man of about forty, calling himself the Griffos’ nephew, who signed them up and paid.
How did Mr. Malaspina happen to be so well informed on the subject? Simple, the whole town was doing nothing but talking about the disappearance of the Griffos, and he’d become curious and decided to inform
