Then he clapped his hands together. “But . . . we can call and check . . .”
Mistretta got up wearily, went over to the phone, dialed a number, then spoke in a voice so soft that all they could hear were the words:
“Hello? Bevilacqua Pharmacy?”
He hung up almost at once.
“You were right, Inspector, she didn’t stop at the phar macy to pay off our outstanding bill . . . And if she didn’t go to the pharmacy, she probably didn’t go anywhere else.” Then all at once, he cried out:
It seemed impossible, but his face, which was pale as could be, somehow managed to turn even paler. Montalbano worried that the man might be having a stroke.
“What’s wrong?”
“Now they won’t believe me!” Mistretta moaned.
“Who won’t believe you?”
“The kidnappers! Because I told a journalist—”
“What journalist? Did you talk to journalists?”
“Yes, but only to one. Inspector Minutolo said I could.”
“But why, for the love of God?”
Mistretta looked at him, befuddled.
“Wasn’t I supposed to? I wanted to send a message to the kidnappers. . . . To say that they were making a terrible mistake, that I haven’t got any money to pay the ransom . . . And now they’re going to find three thousand . . . Can you imagine, a young girl going around with all that money in her pocket?
They’ll never believe me! Poor . . . girl . . . My poor daughter!” Sobbing prevented him from going on, but as far as the inspector was concerned, he’d said more than enough.
“Good day,” Montalbano said.
And he stalked out of the living room, in the grips of an uncontrollable rage. What the hell was Minutolo thinking when he authorized him to make that declaration? He could already imagine how the newspapers, television, and everybody else would embroider the story! The kidnappers now would likely turn nasty, and the person who would suffer the most would be poor Susanna. Assuming there was, in fact, a ransom to be paid. From the garden, he called to the policeman who was reading near the French door.
“Go tell your colleague to hold the gate open for me.” He got in his car, turned on the ignition, waited a few seconds, then took off like Schumacher in a Formula 1 race.
The journalists and cameramen scattered in every direction, cursing.
“What is he, crazy? Is he trying to kill us?” Instead of continuing down the same road he’d come in on, he turned left onto the dirt road where the motorbike had been found. And in fact the road was impassable for a normal vehicle. He had to drive as slowly as possible and continually perform complicated maneuvers to keep the wheels from plunging into huge trenches and hollows of the sort one might find between dunes in the desert. But the worst was yet to come. Less than half a mile before the outskirts of town, the road was cut off by an enormous excavation pit. Apparently one of those “roadworks ahead” that in Italy have the peculi-arity of always lying ahead even when the whole world has passed them by. To get past it, Susanna must have got off her motorbike and walked it around the pit, or else had to make an even wider detour, since those who’d passed through before her had, by dint of going repeatedly back and forth, created a kind of bypass trail through the open countryside. But what did it mean? Why had Susanna taken this route? He had an idea. With a series of maneuvers so exacting and numerous that his injured shoulder began to ache again, he turned the car around and headed back. The dirt road was starting to seem endless when at last he came to the main road and stopped. It was getting dark. He couldn’t make up his mind. It would take at least an hour to do what he wanted to do, which meant that he would return home late, likely sparking a squabble with Livia. And he was in no mood for that. On the other hand, what he wanted to do was merely a routine check, which anyone at the station could do. He started the car back up and drove back to headquarters.
“Summon Inspector Augello to my office at once,” he ordered Catarella.
“Chief, he in’t poissonally here.”
“Who is?”
“Want their names in flabbetical order?”
“Whatever order you like.”
“Okay, there’s Gallo, Galluzzo, Germana, Giallombardo, Grasso, Imbro . . .”
He chose Gallo.
“What can I do for you, Chief?”
“Listen, Gallo, I want you to go back to that dirt road where you took me this morning.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“There’s ten or so little country houses along that road. I want you to stop at every house and ask if anyone knows Susanna Mistretta, or if they saw a girl pass by last night on a motorbike.” “All right, Chief, I’ll get on it first thing in the morning.”
“No, Gallo, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I want you to go there immediately and then ring me at home.”
o o o
