“The name’s Virduzzo. I’m the accountant at Splendor.”
“Come on in.”
The woman felt reassured. The apartment was a mess, it being all too clear that Saro’s wife was too busy always attending to the little boy to look after the house.
“What do you want with Saro?”
“I believe I made a mistake, on the minus side, on the amount of his last paycheck. I’d like to see the stub.”
“If that’s all you need,” said the woman, “there’s no need to wait for Saro. I can get you the stub myself.
Come.”
Montalbano followed her, ready with another excuse to stay until the husband returned. There was a nasty smell in the bedroom, as of rotten milk. The woman tried to open the top drawer of a commode but was unable, having only one free hand to use, as she was holding the baby in her other arm.
“I can do it, if you like,” said Montalbano.
The woman stepped aside, and the inspector opened the drawer and saw that it was full of papers, bills, prescriptions, receipts.
“Where are the payment envelopes?”
At that moment Saro entered the bedroom. They hadn’t heard him come in; the front door to the apartment had been left open. The instant he saw Montalbano rummaging in the drawer, he was convinced the inspector was searching their house for the necklace.
He turned pale, started trembling, and leaned against the doorjamb.
“What do you want?” he barely managed to articulate.
Frightened by her husband’s obvious terror, the woman spoke before Montalbano had a chance to answer.
“But it’s Virduzzo, the accountant!” she almost yelled.
“Virduzzo? That’s Inspector Montalbano!”
The woman tottered, and Montalbano rushed forward to support her, fearing the baby might end up on the floor together with his mother. He helped sit her down on the bed. Then he spoke, the words coming out of his mouth without the intervention of his brain, a phenomenon that had come over him before and which one imaginative journalist had once called “that flash of intuition which now and then strikes our policeman.”
“Where’d you put the necklace?” he said.
Saro stepped forward, stiff from struggling to remain standing on his pudding-legs, went over to his bedside table, opened the drawer, and pulled out a packet wrapped in newspaper, which he threw on the bed. Montalbano picked it up, went into the kitchen, sat down, and unwrapped the packet. The jewel was at once vulgar and very fine: vulgar in its design and conception, fine in its workmanship and in the cut of the diamonds with which it was studded. Saro, meanwhile, had followed him into the kitchen.
“When did you find it?”
“Early Monday morning, at the Pasture.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No, sir, just my wife.”
“And has anyone come to ask if you found a necklace like this?”
“Yes, sir. Filippo di Cosmo came. He’s one of Gege Gullotta’s men.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I said I hadn’t found anything.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Yes, sir, I think so. Then he said that if I happened to find it, I should give it to him right away and not mess around, because it was a very sensitive matter.”
“Did he promise you anything?”
“Yes, sir. A deadly beating if I found it and kept it, fifty thousand lire if I found it and turned it over to him.”
“What did you plan to do with the necklace?”
“I wanted to pawn it. That’s what Tana and I decided.”
“You weren’t planning to sell it?”
“No, sir, it didn’t belong to us. We saw it like something somebody had lent to us; we didn’t want to profit from it.”
“We’re honest people,” said the wife, who’d just come in, wiping her eyes.
“What were you going to do with the money?”
“We wanted to use it to treat our son. We could have taken him far away from here, to Rome, Milan—
anywhere there might be doctors who know something.”
They were all silent a few moments. Then Montalbano asked the woman for two sheets of paper, which she tore out of a notebook they used for shopping expenses. Holding out one of the sheets to Saro, the inspector said:
