“Me? No, I have a brother named Antonio.”
“All right, then, you can go.”
The sailor felt lost.
“What about the complaint?”
“Which one?”
“The one from the tavern’s owner.”
“We never received it.”
“Then why did you call me in?”
“There was another complaint.”
“There was?”
“Yes, by a certain Vanna Digiulio against her brother, Mario. But since you claim you have no sisters-”
“I don’t
“Then it’s clearly a case of two people with the same name. Good day, my friend.”
The inspector was certain it wasn’t Digiulio who had informed Vanna of the yacht’s change of course. He absolutely needed to speak to the other crew members. He called Fazio, who still seemed offended for having been excluded from the questioning.
“Have a seat.”
Montalbano stared at him for a moment. Should he tell him about Vanna or not? Now that the whole business seemed to have taken on a new meaning, wasn’t it better to have Fazio as an ally?
“Do you remember when, the other day, it rained so hard that the road collapsed?”
“Yessir.”
“Do you remember that pathetic creature I brought into the station, whose name was Vanna Digiulio?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, you know what? Her name wasn’t actually Vanna Digiulio, and she wasn’t a pathetic creature but a sly little bitch who made a great big monkey out of me.”
Fazio looked stunned.
“Really?” he said.
Montalbano told him the whole story.
“And what do
“Several things seem clear to me. One, that the moment I introduced myself to her as Inspector Montalbano, the girl-whom we’ll keep calling Vanna for the sake of convenience-started sneezing and didn’t stop.”
Fazio balked.
“Wait a second. What’s that got to do with it?”
“It’s got everything to do with it. I would bet my family jewels that those sneezes were faked. She did it to buy time to decide whether she should tell me what she wanted to tell me. And then she immediately put me, indirectly, on the trail of the yacht.”
“Why?”
“I could venture a guess. She did it for future reference.”
“What do you mean?”
“If anything bad happened to her, she had given me sufficient information as to who to put the squeeze on.”
“But Vanna never even showed her face to the people on the yacht.”
“That’s true. Because, in my opinion, something unexpected happened.”
“And what was that?”
“The yacht brought a corpse aboard. Which meant the presence of the police, the Harbor Office, the coroner, the Forensics department… Too many people, in short. And so she decided to disappear. Make sense to you?”
“Sure. But the fact remains that we still don’t know what she had come to do.”
“And that’s why it’s important to find out who she was in contact with. Someone at the Harbor Office? I don’t think so. Mario Digiulio of the
“Meaning?”
“We need to talk to the other crew members, but we can’t use the same set-up we did with Digiulio. You need to find a way to approach the North African, what’s his name…”
“Shaikiri.”
“Right, but his friends call him Zizi. Try to see what you can find out from him. See if you can get him drunk… Do they ever come ashore?”
“Are you kidding? They’ve been hanging out all over town.”
“Well, find a way to get friendly with him.”
At that moment Mimi Augello appeared. Sharply dressed and smiling.
“And where have you been?”
“What? You mean Catarella didn’t tell you? Yesterday I took Beba and the kid to her parents’ place. Can’t you see the look on my face? I slept like a god last night! Finally!”
Montalbano just sat there in silence, staring at him.
“What’s wrong?” Augello asked.
“I’ve just had an idea.”
“Well, that’s news! Does it concern me?”
“Yes it does. Do you feel up to wooing a fifty-year-old woman who looks forty?”
Mimi didn’t hesitate for a second.
“I can try,” he said.
6
He went to Enzo’s to eat, feeling rather satisfied at finding, he thought, a key to understanding a little about the behavior of the girl who called herself Vanna. He was now almost convinced that she had acted the way she did as part of a precise plan she had devised in her head when she learned that he was Inspector Montalbano.
Therefore it wasn’t just a silly game, but something serious. Quite serious.
At any rate, he felt-even if he didn’t exactly know why-that he was acting the way she would have wanted him to.
On the other hand, he had nothing to congratulate himself about when it came to the corpse in the dinghy. Things were practically still at square one. The inability to identify the corpse was paralyzing everything. Whoever had smashed the guy’s face in had achieved his purpose.
And if the guy was a foreigner, there was no point searching all the hotels and inns in Vigata, Montelusa, and environs. That wouldn’t only take a lot of time, but the question would remain unchanged: How do you identify someone without papers who no longer has a face?
And if by chance he was a local, how come nobody had reported him missing?
In the trattoria, the inspector did find some consolation. Fish was back on Enzo’s menu, and to make up for his forced abstinence of the day before, Montalbano gorged himself. He ordered a mixed fry of mullet and calamari that could have fed half the staff at the station.
As a result, a walk along the jetty to the lighthouse became an absolute necessity. This time, too, he went out of his way, passing by the
