difference.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Absolutely. The people who killed your parents would eventually have let the wallet and purse turn up, duly cleaned of anything that might lead us to them.”
Davide Griffo looked lost in a memory.
“Mama never went anywhere without that little purse. I used to tease her about it sometimes. I would ask her what treasures she kept hidden in there.”
He was swept away in a surge of emotion, a kind of sob rising up from deep inside his chest.
“I’m sorry. Since I was given back their things, the clothes, the coins Papa had in his pocket, their wedding rings, the house keys ... Well, I came here to ask your permission ... in short, if I can go into the apartment and start to take inventory ...”
“What do you intend to do with the apartment? They owned it, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they made a lot of sacrifices to buy it. When the time is right, I’ll sell it. I don’t have much reason to come back to Vigata anymore.”
Another stifled sob.
“Did your parents own any other property?”
“None whatsoever, as far as I know. They lived on their retirement pensions. Papa had a little passbook with the post office, where he would deposit his and Mama’s pension checks ... But there was very little left to set aside at the end of each month.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen this passbook.”
“It wasn’t there? Did you have a good look where Papa kept his papers?”
“It wasn’t there. I went through all his papers very carefully. Maybe the killers took it along with the wallet and handbag.”
“Why? What are they going to do with a postal passbook they can’t use? It’s a useless piece of paper!”
The inspector stood up. Davide Griffo did the same.
“I have no objection to you going into your parents’ apartment. On the contrary. If you should find anything among those papers that—”
He stopped short. Davide Griffo gave him a questioning glance.
“Please excuse me a minute,” the inspector said, and he left the room.
Cursing under his breath, he had realized that the Griffos’ papers were still at the station, where he’d brought them from his house. In fact, the plastic garbage bag was in the storeroom. It seemed like bad form to return those family mementos to the son in that package. He rifled through the closet, found nothing he could use, no cardboard boxes or even a more decent bag. He resigned himself.
Davide Griffo gave Montalbano a confused look as the inspector set the garbage bag down at his feet.
“I took it from your parents’ place, to put the papers inside. If you want, I could have them brought to you by one of my—”
“No, thanks. I’ve got my car here,” the other said stiffly.
He hadn’t wanted to tell the orphan, as Catarella called him (speaking of whom, how long had he been away now?), but there was a reason one might want to remove the postal passbook. A very plausible reason: to prevent others from knowing the amount on deposit. Indeed the amount in the passbook might even be the symptom of the secret illness that had caused the conscientious doctor to intervene. Just an hypothesis, of course, but one that needed to be verified. He called up Assistant Prosecutor Tommaseo and spent half an hour beating back the bureaucratic resistance the judge kept putting up. Finally Tommaseo promised he would see to the matter at once.
The post office was a stone’s throw from police headquarters. A horrendous building. Begun in the 1940s, when Fascist architecture was rampant, it hadn’t been finished until after the war, when tastes had changed. The office of the director was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor utterly devoid of human beings or objects, frightening in its desolation and loneliness. The inspector knocked on a door on which hung a plastic rectangle with the word: “Director.” Under the plastic rectangle was a sheet of paper with an image of a cigarette struck out by two intersecting red lines. Under this were the words: “Smoking is strictly forbidden.”
“Come in!”
Montalbano went in and the first thing he saw was an actual banner on the wall, repeating the admonition: “Smoking is strictly forbidden.”
Under this was a high-backed armchair in which the director, Cavaliere Attilio Morasco, was sitting. In front of Cavaliere Morasco sprawled an enormous desk, entirely covered with papers. The director himself was a midget who looked like the late King Vittorio Emanuele III, with a crew-cut hairdo that gave him a head like Umberto I, and a handlebar mustache in the manner of the so-called “Gentleman King.” The inspector felt absolutely certain he must be in the presence of a descendant of the House of Savoy, a bastard, one of the many sired by the Gentleman King.
“Are you Piedmontese?” Montalbano blurted out, staring at him.
The other looked flabbergasted.
