They talked a little while longer. Montalbano gave him Angelo’s keys, and as Mimi was saying good-bye, the telephone rang.
“Livia, darling?” the inspector asked.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Chief.”
It was Fazio.
“I just learned that Michela Pardo’s been found dead. A suicide. Threw herself off the balcony at her brother’s place.
I’m at the station, but I have to go over there. Do you have the keys to the apartment?”
“Yes. I’ll send them over with Inspector Augello, who happens to be here with me.”
He hung up.
“Michela Pardo committed suicide.” “Poor thing! What’ll we say? That she couldn’t get over the grief?” asked Augello.
“That’s what we’ll say,” said Montalbano.
In the four days that followed, nothing whatsoever happened. Mr. Commissioner postponed his meeting with Montalbano to a date as yet to be determined. Elena never called either.
And this displeased him, in a way. He thought the girl had him in her sights and had put off the attack until the investigation was over. “To avoid any misunderstandings,” as she’d said. Or something similar.
And she was right. If she’d put her powers of seduction to work at the time, Montalbano might have thought she was doing it to gain his friendship and make him an accomplice. But now that even Tommaseo had exonerated her, there was no more possibility of misunderstanding. And so?
Want to bet the cheetah had been eyeing a different prey? And it was he who had misunderstood? He was like a rabbit that sees a cheetah coming after it and starts running away in terror. All at once the rabbit no longer senses the ferocious beast behind it. It turns and sees the cheetah pursuing a fawn.
The question was this: Why, instead of feeling happy, did the rabbit feel a wee bit disappointed?
On the fifth day, Mimi arrested Gaetano Tumminello, a man from the Sinagra family suspected of four other homicides, for the murder of Angelo Pardo.
For twenty-four hours, Tumminello insisted he had never set foot in Angelo Pardo’s apartment. Indeed he swore he didn’t even know where he lived. The alleged murderer’s photograph appeared on television. Then Commendator Ernesto Laudadio, alias HM Victor Emmanuel III, showed up at the station to report that on that Monday evening he hadn’t been able to enter his garage because there’d been a car he’d never seen before parked right in front, whose license-plate number he’d taken down. He’d started honking his horn, and after a brief spell the owner had appeared— none other than, you guessed it, the man shown in the photo on television, there was no mistaking him—whereupon said man, without so much as saying good night, had got back in his car and left.
As a result Tumminello had to change his story. He said he’d gone to Pardo’s to talk business, but had found him already dead. He knew nothing about the panties stuck in Pardo’s mouth. He also stated quite specifically that when he’d seen him, the zipper of Pardo’s jeans was closed. So that when he heard that Pardo had been found in an obscene pose (that’s exactly how he put it: “an obscene pose”), he, Tumminello, was shocked.
Nobody believed him, of course. Not only had he killed Pardo for having put lethal cocaine into circulation, risking a massacre, but he’d also tried to mislead the investigation. The Sinagras cut him loose, and Tumminello, in keeping with tradition, got the Sinagras off the hook. He claimed that the idea for getting into drugs was his and his alone, just like the idea to enlist the help of Angelo Pardo, who he knew was short on cash; and that of course the Family that had honored him by taking him in like a devoted and respectful son was entirely in the dark about all this. He repeated, however, that when he’d gone to talk to Pardo about the huge fuckup he’d made by cutting the cocaine, he’d found him already dead.
“Isn’t saying you ‘went to talk to him’ a polite euphemism for saying you’d gone to see Pardo to kill him?” the prosecutor had asked him.
Tumminello did not answer.
Meanwhile Marshal Melluso, Lagana’s colleague, had managed to decipher Angelo’s code, and the nine people on his list found themselves in a pretty pickle. Actually there were fourteen names, not nine, but the other five (including the engineer Fasulo, Senator Nicotra, and the Honorable Di Cristoforo) belonged to people who, thanks to Angelo Pardo’s modest talents in chemistry, could no longer be prosecuted.
A week later Livia came to spend three days in Vigata. They didn’t quarrel even once. On Monday morning, at the crack of dawn, Montalbano drove her to Punta Raisi Airport and, after watching her leave, got in the car to drive back to Vigata. Since he had nothing else to do, he decided to take a back road the whole way, one in pretty bad shape, yes, but which allowed him to enjoy for a few kilometers the landscape he loved, the parched terrain and little white houses. He rolled along for three hours, head emptied of thoughts. All at once he realized he was on the road leading from Giardina to Vigata, meaning that he was only a few kilometers from home. Giardina? Wasn’t this the road with the service station where Elena, that Monday evening, had made love to that attendant—what was his name, ah, yes, Luigi?
“Let’s go meet this Luigi,” he said to himself.
He drove even more slowly than before, looking left and right. At last he found the station. A little platform roof, half crowned by lighted fluorescent tubes under which stood three pumps. That was all. He pulled in under the roof and stopped. The attendant’s shelter was made of brick and almost entirely hidden by the trunk of a thousand-year-old Saracen olive tree. It was almost impossible to spot it from the road. The door was closed. He honked, but nobody came out. What was the problem? He got out of the car and went and knocked at the door of the shelter. Nothing. Silence. Turning around to go back to the car, he noticed, at the very edge of the space at the side of the road, the back of a metal rectangle supported by an iron bar. A sign. He went around to the front but couldn’t read it because three-fourths of it was covered by a clump of weeds, which he proceeded to beat down with his feet. The sign had long lost its paint and was half spotted with rust, but the words were still clear: CLOSED MONDAYS
Once, when he was a kid, his father, just to tease him, had told him the moon was made of paper. And since he never doubted what his father told him, he believed it. Now, as a mature, experienced man with brains and intuition, he had once again, like a little kid, believed what two women, one dead and the other alive, had said when they told him the moon was made out of paper.
