The Shape of Water

“Please try to understand, Inspector.”

“I don’t understand.”

“For Mama’s sake. It’s been a very trying time for her.”

The young man turned to leave, then suddenly stopped.

“Ah, Inspector, I wanted to inform you so you wouldn’t find yourself in an embarrassing situation. Mama knows how my father died and where he died. How she found out, I have no idea. She already knew two hours after the body was found. Please excuse me.”

Montalbano felt relieved. If the widow knew, he wouldn’t be forced to concoct any pious fictions to hide the indecency of her husband’s death from her.

He went back to enjoying the paintings. At his house in Vigata he had only drawings and prints by Carmassi, Attardi, Guida, Cordio, and Angelo Canevari, to which he had been able to treat himself by docking his meager salary. More than that he couldn’t afford; he could never pay for a painting on the level of these.

“Do you like them?”

He turned about abruptly. He hadn’t heard the signora enter. She was a woman past fifty, not tall, with an air of determination; the tiny wrinkles lining her face had not yet succeeded in destroying the beauty of her features. On the contrary, they highlighted the radiance of her penetrating green eyes.

“Please make yourself comfortable,” she said, then went and sat on the sofa as the inspector took a seat in an armchair. “Such beautiful pictures. I don’t know much about painting, but I do like them. There are about thirty scattered around the house. My husband bought them. Painting was his secret vice, he loved to say. Unfortunately, it wasn’t his only one.”

We’re off to a good start, Montalbano thought, then asked:

“Are you feeling better, signora?”

“Compared to when?”

The inspector stammered, as if he were in front of a teacher asking him difficult questions.

“Well, I—I don’t know, compared to this morning . . . I heard you were unwell today—in the cathedral.”

“Unwell? I was fine, as good as one might feel in such circumstances. No, my friend, I merely pretended to faint. I’m a good actress. Actually, a thought had come into my mind: if a terrorist, I said to myself, were to blow up this church with all of us inside, at least one-tenth of all the hypocrisy in the world would disappear with us. So I had myself escorted out.”

Impressed by the woman’s candor, Montalbano didn’t know what to say, so he waited for her to resume speaking.

“When I was told where my husband had been found, I called the police commissioner and asked him who was in charge of the investigation—if there was any investigation. The commissioner gave me your name, adding that you were a decent man. I had my doubts: are there still any decent men? And so I had my son phone you.”

“I can only thank you, signora.”

“But we’re not here to exchange compliments. I don’t want to waste your time. Are you absolutely certain it wasn’t a homicide?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then what are your misgivings?”

“Misgivings?”

“Yes, my dear, you must have some. There is no other way to explain your reluctance to close the investigation.”

“I’ll be frank, signora. They’re only impressions, impressions I really can’t and shouldn’t allow myself, in the sense that, since we are dealing with a death by natural causes, my duty should lie elsewhere. If you have nothing new to tell me, I shall inform the judge this very evening—”

“But I do have something new to tell you.”

Montalbano was struck dumb.

“I don’t know what your impressions may be,”

the signora continued, “but I’ll tell you what mine are.

Silvio was, of course, a shrewd, ambitious man. If he stayed in the shadows all those years, it was with a specific purpose in mind: to come into the limelight at the right moment and stay there. Now, do you really believe that this man, after all that time spent on patient maneuvers to get where he did, would decide, one fine evening, to go with a woman, surely of ill repute, to a shady place where anyone could recognize him and possibly blackmail him?”

“That, signora, is one of the things that has perplexed me the most.”

“Do you want to be even more perplexed? I said

‘woman of ill repute,’ and I would like to clarify that I didn’t mean a prostitute or any sort of woman for whom one pays. I’m not sure if I’m explaining myself clearly.

Let me tell you something: Right after we got married, Silvio confided in me that he had never been with a prostitute or gone to a licensed brothel when they still existed. Something prevented him. So this leads one to wonder what sort of woman it was who convinced him to have relations with her in that hideous place.”

Montalbano had never been with a prostitute either, and he hoped that no new revelations about Luparello would reveal other points of similarity between him and a man with whom he would not have wanted to break bread.

“You see, my husband quite comfortably gave in to his vices, but he was never tempted by self-destruction, by that ‘ecstasy for baseness,’ as one French writer put it. He consummated his affairs discreetly, in a little house he