“I’m the one who should apologize, Chief. I provoked you.”
Montalbano went and sat back down behind his desk. They looked each other long in the eye. Then Fazio spoke.
“Chief, for a while now, it’s been unlivable around here.”
“You mean Augello?”
“Yeah, Chief. I see you’ve caught on. He’s completely changed. He used to be a cheerful, happy-go-lucky guy, whereas now he’s always gloomy, he takes offense at the smallest things, he criticizes everything and insults everyone. Vaccarella wanted to go to the union for help, but I managed to talk him out of it. But things can’t go on like this much longer. You have to intervene, Chief, and find out what’s up with him. Maybe his marriage is going bad or something . . .”
“Why didn’t you say anything to me earlier?”
“Chief, nobody likes to rat on people around here.”
“And what happened with Catarella?”
“He didn’t put a call through to Inspector Augello, because he thought he wasn’t back in his office yet. Then she called again and Catarella put her through to Augello.”
“Why do you say ‘she’?”
“Because Catarella said it was a woman.”
“Name?”
“Catarella said that both times she called she said only, ‘Inspector Augello, please.’”
“Then what happened?”
“Augello came out of his office looking like he was crazy and grabbed Catarella by the collar, pushed him up against the wall, and screamed, ‘Why didn’t you put the first call through to me?’ It’s a good thing I was there to pull him back. And it’s a good thing there wasn’t anyone else, or there would have been trouble. They would surely have reported it to the union.”
“But he’s never done anything like that when I’m around.”
“When you’re around, Chief, he controls himself.”
So that was how it was. Mimi no longer confided in him, Catarella neither, Fazio had snapped at him . . . An uneasy situation that had been dragging on for some time without his even noticing. Once upon a time he was attuned to the slightest change of mood in his men and became immediately concerned and wanted to know the reason. Now he didn’t even notice anymore. He had, of course, noticed the change in Mimi, but that was only because it was so obvious that it would have been impossible not to notice. What was wrong with him? Was he tired? Or had old age made his antennae less sensitive? If so, then the time had come to pick up his walking papers. But first he had to resolve the problem of Mimi.
“What were the two things you wanted to tell me?” he asked.
Fazio seemed relieved to change the subject.
“Well, Chief, since the start of the year, in Sicily, there’s been eighty-two missing persons reported, thirty of whom were women. Which means fifty-two were men. I’ve done a little sifting. Mind if I look at some notes?”
“As long as you don’t start reading me vital statistics, fine.”
“Of these fifty-two, thirty-one are non-Europeans with their papers in order who didn’t show up to work from one day to the next and didn’t go back to their place of residence either. Of the remaining twenty-one, ten are children. Which leaves eleven. Of these eleven, eight are between seventy and almost ninety years old. All of them are no longer all really there, the kind that might leave the house and not be able to find the way back.”
“Which leaves us with how many?”
“Three, Chief. Of these three—all of whom are around forty—one is five foot two, the second is six foot four, and the third has a pacemaker.”
“And so?”
“And so none of these reports concerns our corpse.”
“And now, what should I do to you?”
Fazio looked flummoxed.
“Why should you want to do something to me, Chief?”
“Because you wasted so many words. Didn’t you know that wasting words is a crime against humanity? You could have simply said to me: ‘Look, none of the people who have been reported missing corresponds to our body in the bag.’ That would have synthesized the whole thing, and we both would have saved something: you, your breath, and me, my time. Don’t you agree?”
Fazio shook his head negatively.
“With all due respect, sir, no.”
“And why not?”
“My dear Inspector, no ‘synthesis,’ as you call it, could ever give a sense of all the work that went into arriving at that synthesis.”
“All right, you win. And what was the other thing?”
“Do you remember when I was telling you what I’d found out about Dolores Alfano, I said there was something somebody had told me but I couldn’t remember what it was?”
