“You mean a password?”
“Ain’t dat what I said? And if you don’t got the lass word, y’can’t get in.” “So we’re fucked?”
“Not nicissarily, Chief. He’s gotta have a form wit’ the name ‘n’ sir name o’ the owner, date a boith, name o’ the missus or girlfriend or brother and sister and mother and father, son if you got one, daughter if you got one—”
“All right, I’ll have everything to you today after lunch. Meanwhile take the computer back to the station with you. Who are you going to give the form to?”
“Who’m I sposta give it to, Chief?”
“Cat, you said, ‘He’s gotta have.’ Who’s ‘he’?”
“He’s me, Chief.”
Fazio called him from the study.
5
“I got lucky, Chief. I found a key of my own that seemed like it was made for that lock. Nobody’ll be able to tell that it’s been opened.”
The drawer looked to be in perfect order.
A passport, whose information Montalbano wrote down for Catarella; contracts stating percentages to be earned on products sold; two legal documents from which Montalbano copied down, again for Catarella’s benefit, the names and birth dates of Michela and her mother, whose first name was Assunta; a medical diploma, folded in four, dating from sixteen years ago; a letter from the medical association, from ten years earlier, informing him of his dismissal without explaining how or why; an envelope with a thousand euros in bills of fifty; two mini-albums with photos from a trip to India and another to Russia; three letters from Signora Assunta to her son, in which she complained of her life with Michela and other similar matters—all personal, but all, well, utterly useless to Montalbano. There was even an old declaration concerning the recovery, in the mother’s apartment, of a pistol formerly belonging to Pardo’s father. But there was no trace of the weapon; perhaps Angelo had gotten rid of it.
“But didn’t this gentleman have a bank account?” asked Fazio. “How is it there are no checkbooks anywhere, not even old, used-up ones, or any bank statements?”
No answer to the question was forthcoming, since Montalbano was wondering the same thing.
One thing, however, that puzzled the inspector more than a little, and stumped Fazio as well, was the discovery of a small, dog-eared booklet entitledThe Most Beautiful Italian Songs of All Time.Though there was a television in the living room, there was no sign anywhere of records, CDs, CD players, or even a radio.
“How about the room on the terrace? Did you see any discs, headphones, or a stereo there?”
“Nothing, Chief.”
So why would somebody keep a booklet of song lyrics locked up in a drawer? Most striking was the fact that the book looked like it had been often consulted; two detached pages had been carefully stuck back in place with transparent tape. Moreover, numbers had been written in the narrow margins. Montalbano studied these, and it didn’t take him long to realize that Angelo had jotted down the meter of the lines.
“You can close it back up. By the way, did you say you found a set of keys in the room upstairs?”
“Yeah. Forensics took it.”
“I repeat: I want that wallet, cell phone, and keys this afternoon. What are you doing?”
Instead of reclosing and locking the drawer, Fazio was emptying onto the desk, in orderly fashion, all the things there were inside it.
“Just a second, Chief. I wanna see something.”
When the drawer had been completely emptied, Fazio pulled it entirely out from its runners and turned it over. Underneath, on the bottom, was a chrome-plated, squat, notched key, stuck to the wood by two pieces of tape crossed in an X.
“Well done, Fazio.”
While the inspector was contemplating the key he’d detached, Fazio put everything back into the drawer in the same order as before and locked the drawer with his own key, which he slipped back into his pocket.
“If you ask me, this key opens up a little wall safe some-where,” the inspector surmised.
“If you ask me, too,” said Fazio.
“And you know what that means?”
“It means we need to get down to work,” said Fazio, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.
After two hours spent moving paintings, moving mirrors, moving furniture, moving rugs, moving medicines, and moving books, Montalbano’s pithy conclusion was: “There’s not a goddamn thing here.”
They sat down, exhausted, on the living-room couch. They looked at one another. And they both thought the same thing:
“The room upstairs.”
They climbed the spiral staircase. Montalbano opened the glass door, and they walked onto the terrace roof. The door to the little room had not been put back on its hinges but was only leaning in place with a piece of paper taped to it, forbidding entry and saying that the premises were under legal process. Fazio set the door aside, and they went in.
They had two strokes of luck. First, the room was small, and therefore they didn’t have to break their backs moving too much furniture. Second, the table had no drawers, and so they didn’t waste much time. But the result was exactly the same as that obtained in the apartment downstairs, which the inspector had brilliantly, though perhaps not so elegantly, summed up in few words. The one difference was that they were now sweating profusely,
