“Wh… when? Wh… where?”
“The poor thing! After being on her feet all night she phoned me at six in the morning.”
“And she c… came to y… your place?”
“Salvo, what’s got into you? Have you become a stutterer? No, she had me come to the Harbor Office.”
“My dear Mimi,” he said, standing up suddenly and going over and putting his arms around Augello. “Now go and get some rest, so you’ll be strong for tonight.”
Fazio, who was entering at that very moment, stopped dead in his tracks. What was happening to the inspector to make him go around embracing everybody?
“What do you want?” Montalbano asked him after Augello had gone.
“I’ve come to remind you about calling Dr. Pasquano.”
“I’ve already called him, you know. What do you think, that I’ve gotten so old I’m starting to forget things?”
“What are you talking about, Chief? I didn’t-”
“Look what I can still do.”
And the inspector hopped up, feet together, onto the desktop.
“Upsy daisy!”
Fazio just looked at him, eyes popping out of his head. No doubt about it, the inspector needed to see a doctor.
“Ahh Chief! ’At’d be Dacter Pasquino who-”
“Lemme talk to him.”
“The phones are out of order here, Montalbano. All service has been interrupted.”
“So where are you calling from?”
“I’m calling from a stinking cell phone. But don’t keep me on this gadget for long. What does Mohammed want?”
“Today you were brought a sailor who’d fallen-”
“I worked on him early this morning.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Not over the cell phone. If you can be here in half an hour, I’ll wait for you.”
13
Halfway between Vigata and Montelusa there were two large trucks stopped along the road, one pointing in one direction, the other pointing in the other, so that both lanes, which were rather narrow, were blocked. The only vehicles that managed to pass through were scooters and motorcycles.
The truck drivers must have been old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. They’d got out of their respective cabs and were chatting blithely and laughing, slapping each other on the shoulders from time to time and not giving a damn about blocking traffic. Behind Montalbano, who happened to be right behind the truck pointed in the direction of Montelusa, a long queue of horn-blasting cars had formed.
At any other time Montalbano would have raised hell himself, honking the horn and yelling obscenities, and he would have ended up getting out of the car, spoiling for a fight. Instead he just sat there, a doltish smile on his face, waiting for the truckers to finish at their convenience and leave.
And why was Dr. Pasquano also in a good mood?
After greeting him, the doctor had shown him into his office without uttering a single nasty word or insult as he normally did. He must surely have won at poker the night before at the club.
But was the doctor really in a good mood, or was that just how it seemed to him, Montalbano, given the fact that everything he saw now seemed enveloped in a sort of halo of candied pink?
“So you want to know about the sailor? And why’s that?”
“What do you mean, ‘Why’s that?’ It’s my job.”
“But aren’t you losing your edge with age?”
The inspector ignored this first provocation. He had to be patient and pretend not to have heard, because other, even more stinging insults were surely to follow.
“Can you tell me your thoughts on the matter?”
“To all appearances, an accident.”
“Oh, no you don’t, Doctor! I’m not gonna let you play cat and mouse with me. You can’t say, ‘to all appearances’; you have to tell me what you know for certain.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think the work you do is based on hypotheses, clues, conjectures, and vague stuff like that…”
“Is that what you think of us? But aren’t you aware that there is nothing in the world vaguer than man? And that we, too, proceed by means of conjecture? Do you think we’re like a bunch of little popes who never make a mistake?”
“Doctor, I didn’t come here to discuss the limitations of medical science. If you can’t tell me anything certain, tell me something half-certain.”
Pasquano seemed persuaded.
“I’ll start with a question. Do you smell a rat in this whole affair?”
“Frankly, yes.”
“Are you aware that when someone dies by drowning we normally find a great deal of water in the lungs?”
“Yes, I know. But this guy didn’t have any.”
“Who ever said that? He had plenty of water.”
“So then he died by drowning.”
“But why do you have this bad habit of always jumping to conclusions? Hasn’t old age made you a little more cautious?”
All this talk of old age was starting to get on the inspector’s nerves.
“C’mon, Doctor, get to the point. Did he have water in his lungs or not?”
“Don’t get pissed off, mind you, or I’ll clam up and say no more. There was water there, but not enough to drown him.”
“So how did he die, then?”
“From a powerful blow to the nape of the neck, which killed him instantly. An iron bar. It fits.”
“Fits with what?”
“With a sort of iron hook I noticed sticking out from the wharf about a foot and a half above the water. You hadn’t noticed it?”
“Doctor, when I looked, the hook was covered up by the body.”
“Let me try to explain this a little better. The poor guy, drunk as he was-and he’d had a lot to drink-took a wrong step, fell into the narrow space between the wharf and the broadside of the yacht, smashed his head against the hook, and died.”
“Doctor, now I’m completely confused.”
“That’s natural, given your-”
“What killed him, the hook or the iron bar?”
“The fact that you don’t understand is clearly owing to your age and not to any lack of clarity in my explanation. What I’m saying is that the killers were very clever. They’re trying to make us believe he died when his head struck the hook. But the hook was green with sea moss. Whereas there was no trace of moss around the man’s
