“I know that road.”
It was the same road he’d taken when he went to see the place where the little kid had been killed. He phoned Ingrid, with whom he was supposed to go out to dinner. She immediately apologized and said she couldn’t see him because her husband had invited some friends to dinner without telling her, and she therefore had to play housewife. They arranged that she would come by the station around eight-thirty the following evening. If he wasn’t there, she would wait.
He tried the journalist’s number again, and this time Fonso Spalato answered.
“Inspector! I was worried you wouldn’t call back.”
“Listen, can we meet?”
“When?”
“Immediately, if you want.”
“That’d be hard for me. I had to fly up to Trieste and have spent the whole day either in airports or in planes running late. Fortunately Mama isn’t as sick as my sister had me believe.”
“I’m happy to hear. So?”
“Let’s do this. If all goes well, I hope to catch a plane to Rome tomorrow and go on from there. I’ll keep you posted.”
At a certain point past Montechiaro, after turning onto the road for Spigonella, the inspector saw the turn for Tricase. At first he hesitated, then made up his mind. He would only lose about ten minutes, at most. He rounded the bend. The peasant was not out working his fields. There was silence, not even a barking dog. The wildflowers at the base of the mound of gravel had wilted.
He had to summon all of his modest driving skills to back the car up that earthquake-riven former goat path and return to the road for Spigonella. Fazio was waiting for him next to his car, which was parked in front of a white and red two-storey villa that looked uninhabited. A rough sea roared below.
“Spigonella starts at this house,” said Fazio. “It’s probably better if we take my car.”
Montalbano got in. Fazio turned on the ignition and began to act as his guide.
“Spigonella sits on a rocky plateau. To reach the sea, you have to go up and down stairways that are cut straight into the rock. It must be murder in summertime. You can also reach the sea by car, by taking the road you just took towards Tricase and then coming up this way from there. Got that?”
“Yes.”
“Tricase, on the other hand, is right on the sea, but it’s been settled differently.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that here in Spigonella these villas were built by people with money—lawyers, doctors, businessmen —whereas in Tricase there’re only little houses, one after another, lived in by little people.”
“But the little houses are just as unauthorized as the villas, aren’t they?”
“Sure, Chief, but I just meant that here every villa is secluded. See over there? High walls, electric gates with dense vegetation behind them . . . It’s hard to see from outside what goes on in there. Whereas the houses in Tricase are out in the open, like they’re talking to one another.”
“Have you become a poet, Fazio?” Montalbano asked.
Fazio blushed.
“Sometimes,” he confessed.
Having reached the edge of the plateau, they got out of the car. At the bottom of the cliff, the sea foamed white where the waves struck a cluster of rocks, and further down it had completely flooded a small beach. It was an unusual shoreline, with stretches of bristling rocks alternating with flat areas of beach. A solitary villa had been built at the very top of a small promontory. Its vast terrace balcony hung as though suspended over the sea. The stretch of shore below consisted entirely of tall rocks, some of them looking like monoliths, but it had nevertheless been closed off—illegally, of course—to create a private space. There was nothing else to see. They got back in the car.
“Now I’m going to take you to talk to a guy—”
“No,” said the inspector. “There’s no point. You can tell me later what those people said. Let’s go back.”
During the entire drive there and the entire drive back, they didn’t encounter a single automobile. And they didn’t see any parked, either.
In front of a decidedly luxurious villa, they saw a man sitting on a cane chair, smoking a cigar.
“That gentleman,” said Fazio, “is one of the two who said they had seen the man in the photograph. He’s the villa’s caretaker. He told me that about three months ago, he was sitting outside the way he is now, when he saw a car come sputtering up from the left. The car stopped right in front of him and a man got out, the same man as in the photo. He’d run out of gas. So the caretaker offered to go get him a canful from the filling station outside Montechiaro. When he came back with the gas, the man gave him a tip of a hundred euros.”
“So he didn’t see where the guy came from.”
“No. And he’d never seen him before. As for the other guy that recognized him, I was only able to have a brief discussion with him. He’s a fisherman and had a basket full of fish he had to go sell in Montechiaro. He told me he’d seen the man in the picture about three, four months ago, on the beach.”
“Three or four months ago? But that was the middle of the winter! What was he doing there?”
“That’s the same thing the fisherman asked himself. He’d just pulled his boat ashore when he saw the man from the photograph on a rock nearby.”
“On a rock?”
