into the suit he was going to put on. To his surprise he found an unopened envelope in the pile. Where did that come from? Then he remembered. It was the letter Catarella had given him, which he said had been personally delivered by Pontius Pilate, the journalist. His first impulse was to toss it into the waste basket, but then, for whatever reason, he decided to read it, since he could always choose not to answer. His eyes ran down to the signature at the bottom: Fonso Spalato, which could easily translate to Pontius Pilate in Catarellese. The letter was rather brief, already a point in favor of the person who’d written it.
The inspector liked the lean style. He decided to call up the journalist as soon as he got to work, assuming, of course, that the man was still around.
The first thing he did when he walked into the station was to call Catarella and Mimi into his office.
“Catarella, listen to me very carefully. A certain Mr. Marzilla is supposed to call me. As soon as he does—”
“ ’Scuse me, Chief,” Catarella interrupted, “what’d you say this Marzilla’s name was? Cardilla?”
Montalbano felt reassured. If Catarella was back to screwing up people’s names, it meant the end of the world was not yet nigh.
“For the love of the Blessed Virgin, why would he be called Cardilla when you yourself just called him Marzilla?!”
“Did I?” asked an astonished Catarella. “Then what’s the man’s name, for Chrissakes?”
The inspector took out a sheet of paper, grabbed a red marking pen, wrote MARZILLA in large block letters on it, and handed it to Catarella.
“Read it.”
Catarella read it correctly.
“Excellent,” said Montalbano. “I want you to hang that piece of paper next to the switchboard. The minute he calls, you’re to put him on the line to me, whether I happen to be here or in Afghanistan. Understand?”
“Yessir, Chief. You go right on ahead to Afghanistan, and I’ll put him on for you.”
“Salvo, why did you have me witness this little vaudeville act?” Augello asked as soon as Catarella left the room.
“Because I want you to ask Catarella, three times in the morning and three times in the afternoon, if Marzilla has called.”
“Mind telling me who this Marzilla is?”
“I’ll tell you if you’ve been a good boy and done your homework.”
Nothing whatsoever happened for the rest of the morning. Or rather, only routine stuff: a call for the police to intervene in a violent family quarrel that turned into an aggressive face-off between the suddenly reunited family on the one hand, and Gallo and Galluzzo, guilty of trying to make peace, on the other; a report filed by the deputy mayor, who came in pale as a corpse, saying he’d found a rabbit with its throat slashed, nailed to his front door; a drive-by shooting at a man standing at a filling station who, unharmed, rushed back into his car and drove off into the void before the pump attendant had time to get his license plate number; the nearly daily holdup at a supermarket. Meanwhile, the journalist Spalato’s cell phone remained stubbornly turned off. In short, if Montalbano wasn’t entirely fed up, he was close. He rewarded himself with lunch at the Trattoria Da Enzo.
Around four o’clock that afternoon, Fazio phoned in. He was calling on his cell phone from Spigonella.
“Chief? I’ve got some news.”
“Let’s have it.”
“At least two people here think they saw the dead guy you found. They recognized him from the photo with the mustache.”
“Do they know what his name was?”
“No.”
“Did he live there?”
“They don’t know.”
“Do they know what he was doing around there?”
“No.”
“Well, what the hell do they know?”
Fazio chose not to answer directly.
“Chief, why don’t you come out here? That way you can assess the situation yourself. You can either take the coastal road, which is always clogged, or you can come by way of Montechiaro, taking the—”
