“Catanzaro, he said?”
Ingrid seemed to hesitate, sticking the tip of her tongue between her lips.
“Or was it Cosenza?” Adorable wrinkles appeared on her forehead. “My mistake. I’m sure he said Cosenza.”
That made two! The late Mr. Ernesto D’Iunio kept picking up points of resemblance to the equally late Mr. Ernesto Errera. Without warning, Montalbano got up and kissed Ingrid on the corner of her mouth. She gave him a quizzical look.
“Do you always do that when the person you’re questioning gives you the answer you want to hear?”
“Yes, especially when it’s a man. Tell me something. Did your Nini walk with a limp?”
“Not always. Only in bad weather. But you could hardly tell.”
Dr. Pasquano had been right. Except that there was no way to know whether Errera also limped or not.
“How long did your affair last?”
“Not very long, a month and a half, maybe a little longer. But . . .”
“But?”
“It was very intense.”
Another twinge of groundless jealousy.
“And when did it end?”
“About two months ago.”
Shortly before somebody killed him, therefore.
“Tell me exactly what you did when you broke it off with him.”
“I called him on his cell phone in the morning to tell him I was coming to see him that same evening in Spigonella.”
“Did you always meet in the evening?”
“Yes, late in the evening.”
“So you never, say, went out to eat?”
“No, we never met anywhere but in Spigonella. It was as though he didn’t want to be seen, either with me or without me. That was another thing that bothered me.”
“Go on.”
“Anyway, I called him to say I’d be at his place that evening. But he said there was no way he could see me. Somebody had come unexpectedly, and he needed to talk to this person. The same thing had already happened twice before. So we arranged to meet the following night. Except that I never went. By my own choice.”
“Ingrid, honestly, I don’t understand why, all of a sudden, you—”
“I’ll try to explain, Salvo. Whenever I arrived there in my car, the front gate would be open and I would drive up the driveway to the villa. Then there was a second gate, which would also be open. While I pulled into the garage, Nini, in the dark, would go and close the gates. Then we would go up the stairs—”
“What stairs?”
“The villa has two storeys, right? Nini was renting the upstairs, which you could enter by an external stairway on the side of the house.”
“Let me get this straight. He wasn’t renting the whole villa?”
“No, just the upstairs.”
“And the two floors were not connected?”
“Yes, they were. Or at least that’s what Nini said. There was a door that led to an internal staircase, but the door was locked and the landlord had the key.”
“So you got to know only the upper floor?”
“Right. As I was saying, we would go up the stairs and straight into the bedroom. Nini was a maniac. Before we could ever turn on a light in a room, he had to make sure it couldn’t be seen from outside. Not only were all the shutters closed, but there were heavy curtains over all the windows.”
“Go on.”
“We would get undressed and start making love.”
This time it wasn’t a twinge, but an out-and-out stab wound.
“Who knows why I started having second thoughts about our affair after I couldn’t see him that time? The first thing I noticed was that I had never felt like sleeping with Nini—I mean, spending the night there with him. After making love, I would just lie there, smoking the customary cigarette, staring at the ceiling. Him too. We never talked. We had nothing to say to each other. And those bars over the windows—”
“Bars?”
“Over all the windows. Even on the ground floor. I used to see them even when I couldn’t see them, when the curtains were drawn . . . They made me feel like I was in some kind of prison . . . Sometimes he would get up and go talk over the radio . . .”
