“So?” Montalbano began.
“You saw the shape the corpse was in?”
“Well, as I was towing it I was afraid his arm would fall off.”
“If you’d dragged it any further, it would have,” said Pasquano. “The poor bastard had been in the water for over a month.”
“So he probably died sometime last month?”
“More or less. Given the state of the body, it’s hard for me to—”
“Did it still have any distinguishing marks?”
“He’d been shot.”
“So why did you tell me there weren’t—”
“Would you let me finish, Montalbano? He had an old gunshot wound in his left leg. The bullet had splintered the bone. It must have happened a few years ago. I only noticed it because the saltwater had eaten the flesh off the bone. He probably had a slight limp.”
“How old do you think he was?”
“About forty. And definitely not a non-European. He will, however, be hard to identify.”
“No fingerprints?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Doctor, why are you so convinced he was murdered?”
“It’s just my opinion, mind you. The body’s covered with wounds from having been dashed repeatedly against the rocks.”
“There aren’t any rocks in the water where I found him.”
“How do you know where he’s from? He’d been sailing a long time before turning himself over to you. What’s more, he’s all eaten up by crabs; he still had two of them in his throat, dead . . . As I was saying, he’s covered with asymmetrical wounds, all of them postmortem. But there are four that
“Where?”
“Around his wrists and his ankles.”
“That’s what it was!” exclaimed Montalbano, jumping out of his chair.
Before falling asleep that afternoon, he’d remembered a detail he couldn’t decipher: the arm, the bathing suit wrapped tightly around the wrist . . .
“It was a cut that went all the way around the left wrist,” the inspector said slowly.
“So you noticed it, too? He had the same thing around the other wrist and the ankles as well. And that, to me, can mean only one thing . . .”
“He’d been tied up.”
“Exactly. But with what? With iron wire. Pulled so tight that it sawed into his flesh. If it had been rope or nylon, the wounds wouldn’t have been so deep as to cut almost down to the bone. And we certainly wouldn’t have found any trace of them. No, before they drowned him, they took the wire off. They wanted to make it look like a routine drowning.”
“Any chance we can get some forensic tests done on him?”
“Maybe. It all depends on Dr. Mistretta. We’d have to order the tests specially from Palermo, to see if there are any traces of metal or rust remaining inside the cuts around the wrists and ankles. But it’d take a long time. And that’s the long and the short of it. It’s getting late.”
“Thanks for everything, Doctor.”
They shook hands. The inspector got back in his car and drove off at a leisurely pace, lost in thought. A car came up behind him and flashed its high beam, reproaching him for going so slowly. When Montalbano pulled over to the right, the other car, a kind of silver torpedo, passed and came to a sudden stop in front of him. Cursing, the inspector slammed on the brakes. In the beam of his headlights, he saw a hand emerge from the torpedo’s window and give him the finger. Seething with rage, Montalbano got out of his car, ready to have it out with the driver. The torpedo’s driver also got out. Montalbano stopped dead in his tracks. It was Ingrid, arms open and smiling.
“I recognized the car,” said the Swede.
How long had it been since they’d last seen each other? Surely at least a year. They embraced long and hard. Ingrid kissed him, then lightly pushed him away, holding him at arm’s length to have a better look.
“I saw you naked on TV,” she said laughing. “You’re still a pretty nice hunk.”
“And you’re more beautiful than ever,” said the inspector in all sincerity.
Ingrid embraced him again.
“Is Livia here?”
“No.”
“Then I’d like to come sit a while on your veranda.”
“Okay.”
“Give me a second. I need to break an engagement.”
