“Ah, yes. Have a seat. Got any news for me?”
“You said you wanted to know everything I could find out about Emilio Sclafani and Angelo Pardo. As for the schoolteacher, I have to add a little detail to what I already told you.”
“What’s this little detail?”
“Remember how the schoolteacher sent his wife’s lover to the hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he, too, was sent to the hospital.”
“By whom?”
“A jealous husband.”
“That’s not possible. The guy can’t—”
“Chief, I assure you it’s true. It happened before his second marriage.”
“He was caught in bed with the man’s wife?”
Montalbano couldn’t accept that Elena had told him a lie, a lie so big that it cast everything into doubt.
“No, Chief. The bed’s got nothing to do with it. The teacher lived in a great big apartment building, and two of his windows gave onto the courtyard. You remember that movie …”
Another film? This wasn’t an investigation anymore, it was one of the countless film festivals!
“… the one about a photographer with a broken leg who spends his time looking out his window across the courtyard and finds out some lady’s been killed?”
“Yes.Rear Window,by Hitchcock.”
“Well, the schoolteacher bought himself a powerful set of binoculars, but he only watched the window across from his, where a young bride of about twenty lived, and since she didn’t know she was being watched, she walked around her apartment half naked. Then one day the husband got wise to the teacher’s tricks, went over to his place, and busted his head and his binoculars.”
Montalbano became almost certain that Mr. Sclafani demanded that his wife give him a detailed report of what she did at each of her encounters with her lover. Why hadn’t Elena told him this? Perhaps because this little detail (and what a detail!) cast the schoolteacher in a different light from that of the understanding, impotent husband and brought to the surface all the murk deep down in his soul?
“And what can you tell me about Angelo Pardo?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”
“Chief, nobody had the slightest thing to say against him. As far as the present was concerned, he earned a good living as a pharmaceutical representative, enjoyed life, and had no enemies.”
Montalbano knew Fazio too well to let slide what he’d just said—that is, “as far as the present was concerned.”
“And as far as the past is concerned?”
Fazio smiled at him, and the inspector smiled back. They understood each other at once.
“There were two things in his past. One of these you already know, and it involves that business about the abortion.”
“Skip it, I already know all about it.”
“The other thing goes even further back—to the death of Angelo’s sister’s boyfriend.”
Montalbano felt a kind of jolt run down his spine. He pricked his ears.
“The boyfriend was named Roberto Anzalone,” said Fazio. “An engineering student who liked to race motorcycles as a hobby. That’s why the accident that killed him seemed odd.”
“Why?”
“My dear Inspector, does it seem normal to you that a skilled motorcyclist like that, after a two-mile straightaway, would ignore a curve and keep going, right off a three-hundred-foot cliff?”
“Mechanical failure?”
“The motorbike was so smashed up after the accident, the experts couldn’t make heads or tails of it.” “What about the autopsy?”
“That’s the best part. When he had the accident, Anzalone had just finished eating at a trattoria with a friend. The autopsy showed he’d probably overindulged in alcohol or something similar.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘something similar’? Either it was alcohol or it wasn’t.”
“Chief, the person who did the autopsy was unable to specify. He simply wrote that he found something similar to alcohol.”
“Bah. Go on.”
“The only problem is that the Anzalone family, when they found this out, said that Roberto didn’t drink, and they demanded a new autopsy. Most importantly, the waiter at the trattoria also stated that he hadn’t served wine or any other kind of alcohol at that table.”
“Did they get the second autopsy?”
