“The one outside. The one that’s over the door and when it’s dark it lights up the yard in front of the house. When my husband was still okay, we used to eat outside in the summer-time. The switch is right there, see it?” And she pointed to it. It was on the wall between the door and the little window.
“And then?”
“Then I looked out the window, which was half open.
But the car’d already turned around, I just barely saw it from behind.”
“Do you know anything about cars, Angela?”
“Me?” said the girl. “I don’t know the first thing!”
“But you managed to see the back of the car, you just told me.”
“Yessir.”
“Do you remember what color it was?”
Angela thought about this a moment.
“I can’t really say, Inspector. Might’ve been blue, black, dark green . . . But I’m sure about one thing: it wasn’t light, it was dark.”
Now came the hardest question.
Montalbano took a deep breath and asked it. And Angela answered at once, somewhat surprised at not having thought of it first.
“Oh, yes, that’s true!”
Then she immediately made a face, looking confused.
“But . . . what’s that got to do with it?”
“In fact it’s got nothing to do with it,” he hastened to reassure her. “I asked you because the car I’m looking for looked a lot like that one.”
He got up and held out his hand to her.
“I have to go now.”
Angela also stood up.
“You want a really, really fresh egg?”
Before the inspector could answer, she’d pulled one out of a basket. Montalbano took it, tapped it twice against the table, and sucked out the contents. It had been years since he’d last tasted an egg like that.
o o o
At a junction on the way back, he saw a sign that said monte-reale 18 km. He turned and took this road. Perhaps it was the taste of the egg that made him realize he hadn’t been to Don Cosimo’s shop for quite some time. It was a tiny little place where one could still find things that had long disappeared from Vigata, such as little bunches of oregano, concentrate of sun-dried tomatoes and, most of all, a special vinegar made from strong, naturally fermented red wine. Indeed he’d noticed that the bottle he had in the kitchen had barely two fingers’ worth left. He therefore needed urgently to restock.
It took him an incredibly long time to reach Montereale.
He’d driven at a snail’s pace, in part because he was thinking of the implications of what Angela had confirmed, in part because he enjoyed taking in the new landscape. In town, as he was about to turn onto the little street that led to the shop, he noticed a sign indicating no entry. This was new. It hadn’t been there before. It meant he would have to make a long detour. He was better off leaving the car in the little piazza that was right there, and taking a little walk. He pulled over, stopped, opened the car door, and saw a uniformed traffic cop in front of him.
“You can’t park here.”
“I can’t? Why not?”
“Can’t you read that sign? No parking.”
The inspector looked around. There were three other vehicles parked in the piazzetta. A small pickup, a minivan, and an SUV.
“What about them?”
The cop looked at him sternly.
“They have authorization.”
Why, nowadays, did every town, even if it had only two hundred inhabitants, pretend it was New York City, passing extremely complicated traffic regulations that changed every two weeks?
“Listen,” the inspector said in a conciliatory tone. “I only need to stop a few minutes. I want to go to Don Cosimo’s shop to buy—”
“You can’t.”
“Is it also forbidden to go to Don Cosimo’s shop?” said Montalbano, at a loss.
“It’s not forbidden,” the traffic cop said. “It’s just that the shop is closed.”
“And when will it reopen?”
“I don’t think it will ever open again. Don Cosimo died.”
“Oh my God! When?”
