Rounding the Mark

“Did it seem to you like he’d been here before?”

“Yessir.”

“Could you describe them to me?”

“Only one of them, the guy who spoke. He didn’t have any teeth.”

Jamil Zarzis, Gafsa’s lieutenant, had arrived.

“Do you have a cell phone?”

“Yes. It’s on the front seat of the car.”

“Did anyone call you, or did you call anyone after you dropped the two men off?”

“No sir.”

Montalbano went up to the Jaguar, grabbed the cell phone, and put it in his pocket. Marzilla didn’t breathe.

“Now get back in the car and go home.”

Marzilla tried to stand up, but couldn’t.

“Let me give you a hand,” said the inspector.

He grabbed him by the hair and jerked him to his feet as the man cried out in pain. Then with a violent kick in the back he sent him reeling into the front seat of the Jaguar. Marzilla took a good five minutes to leave, so badly were his hands shaking. Montalbano waited until the red taillights disappeared before going back to Ingrid’s car and sitting beside her.

“I didn’t know you were . . . capable of . . . ,” Ingrid muttered.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know how to put it. Of . . . being so nasty.”

“Me neither,” said Montalbano.

“What did the guy do?”

“He did . . . he gave a shot to a little boy who didn’t want one,” was the best he could come up with.

Ingrid looked completely perplexed.

“So you take revenge on him because you were afraid of getting shots when you were a child?”

Psychoanalyze though she might, Ingrid couldn’t know that in manhandling Marzilla, he had really wanted to manhandle himself.

“Come on, let’s go,” said the inspector. “Take me home. I’m tired.”

16

It was a lie. He did not feel tired. In fact he felt eager to get down to work. But he had to get rid of Ingrid as soon as possible. He didn’t have a minute to lose. He managed to dispatch her without betraying his haste, thanking her and kissing her and promising they’d meet again the following Saturday. Once he was alone at home in Marinella, the inspector turned into one of those high-speed heroes in old slapstick movies, shooting like a rocket from room to room in a desperate search. Where the hell had he put that wet suit after he’d last used it to look for the ragioniere Gargano’s car at the bottom of the sea a good two years back? He turned the house upside down and finally found it in an inner drawer of the armoire, properly wrapped in plastic. But what really drove him crazy was that he couldn’t find a pistol holster that he practically never used but which nevertheless had to be somewhere. In fact, it turned out to be in the bathroom, inside the shoe rack, under a pair of slippers he had never dreamed of wearing. Hiding it there must have been a brilliant idea of Adelina’s. The house now looked like it had been ransacked by a bunch of wine-plastered lansquenets. He had probably best not cross paths in the morning with his housekeeper, who would be in a bad mood when she saw how much work he had made for her.

He undressed, put on the wet suit, passed the belt through the holster’s loop, then put only his jeans and jacket back on. Passing in front of a mirror, he caught a glimpse of himself. First he felt like laughing, then he felt embarrassed. He looked dressed up for a movie. What was this, Carnival or something?

“The name’s Bond. James Bond,” he said to his reflection.

He consoled himself with the thought that at this hour he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew. He put the espresso pot on the burner, and when the coffee was ready, he knocked back three cups in a row. Before going out, he looked at his watch. At a rough guess, he would be back in Spigonella by two o’clock in the morning.

He was so lucid and determined that on his very first try he found the road Ingrid had taken, which led to the spot from where one could see the front of the villa. The last hundred yards he had to drive without headlights. His only fear was that he might drive the car straight into the goddamned sea. He pulled up behind the Moorish-style bungalow perched at the edge of the cliff, turned off the motor, grabbed his binoculars, and got out. He leaned forward to look. There was no light visible in the windows. The villa looked uninhabited, and yet there were three men inside. Very carefully, dragging his feet the way people do when they can’t see very well, he advanced to the edge of the cliff and looked below. He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear the sea, which sounded a little rough. With the binoculars he tried to see if there was any activity in the villa’s little harbor, but he could barely make out the darker shapes of the rocks.

To the right, about ten yards away, was a narrow, steep staircase, carved into the stone wall. Negotiating it would have been a task for an alpinist in broad daylight, let alone in the dead of night. But he had no choice; there was no other way to get down to the beach. He went back beside the car, slipped off his jeans and jacket, took out his pistol, opened the car door, threw his stuff inside, grabbed his underwater flashlight, took the keys from the glove compartment, closed the car door without a sound, and hid the keys by wedging them under the right rear tire. He fit the gun into the holster on his belt, slung the binoculars across his chest, and kept the flashlight in his hand. On the very first step, he stopped, trying to get a sense of the stairway’s configuration. He turned the flashlight on for a second and looked. He felt himself begin to sweat inside the wet suit: the steps went down almost vertically.

Flicking the flashlight very quickly on and off from time to