“I couldn’t say. He said he would be home very late. He had an important meeting and might even be forced to spend the night away.”
She extended her hand to him, and the inspector, without knowing why, squeezed it in his own and then kissed it.
~
Once outside, having exited by the same rear door of the villa, he noticed Giorgio sitting on a stone bench nearby, bent over, shuddering convulsively.
Concerned, Montalbano approached and saw the youth’s hands open and drop the yellow envelope and the photos, which scattered about on the ground. Apparently, spurred by a catlike curiosity, he had got hold of them when crouching beside his aunt.
“Are you unwell?”
“Not like that, oh, God, not like that!”
Giorgio spoke in a clotted voice, his eyes glassy, and hadn’t even noticed the inspector standing there.
It took a second, then suddenly he stiffened, falling backwards from the bench, which had no back. Montalbano knelt beside him, trying in some way to immobilize that spasm-racked body; a white froth was beginning to form at the corners of the boy’s mouth.
Stefano Luparello appeared at the door to the villa, looked around, saw the scene, and came running.
“I was coming after you to say hello. What’s happening?”
“An epileptic fit, I think.”
They did their best to prevent Giorgio, at the height of the crisis, from biting off his tongue or striking his head violently against the ground. Then the youth calmed down, his shudders diminishing in fury.
“Help me carry him inside,” said Stefano.
The same maid who had opened up for the inspector came running at Stefano’s first call.
“I don’t want Mama to see him in this state.”
“My room,” said the girl.
They walked with difficulty down a different corridor from the one the inspector had taken upon entering. Montalbano held Giorgio by the armpits, with Stefano grabbing the feet. When they arrived in the servants’ wing, the maid opened a door. Panting, they laid the boy down on the bed. Giorgio had plunged into a leaden sleep.
“Help me to undress him,” said Stefano.
Only when the youth was stripped down to his boxers and T-shirt did Montalbano notice that from the base of the neck up to the bottom of his chin, the skin was extremely white, diaphanous, in sharp contrast to the face and the chest, which were bronzed by the sun.
“Do you know why he’s not tanned there?” he asked Stefano.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I got back to Montelusa just last Monday afternoon, after being away for months.”
“I know why,” said the maid. “Master Giorgio hurt himself in a car accident. He took the collar off less than a week ago.”
“When he comes to and can understand,” Montalbano said to Stefano, “tell him to drop by my office in Vigata tomorrow morning, around ten.”
He went back to the bench, bent down to the ground to pick up the envelope and photos, which Stefano had not noticed, and put them in his pocket.
~
Capo Massaria was about a hundred yards past the San Filippo bend, but the inspector couldn’t see the little house that supposedly stood right on the point, at least according to what Signora Luparello had told him. He started the car back up, proceeding very slowly. When he was exactly opposite the cape, he espied, amid dense, low trees, a path forking off of the main road.
He took this and shortly afterward found the small road blocked by a gate, the sole opening in a long drywall that sealed off the part of the cape that jutted out over the sea.
The keys were the right ones. Leaving the car outside the gate, Montalbano headed up a garden path made of blocks of tufa set in the ground. At the end of this he went down a small staircase, also made of tufa, which led to a sort of landing where he found the house’s front door, invisible from the landward side because it was built like an eagle’s nest, right into the rock, like certain mountain refuges.
Entering, he found himself inside a vast room facing the sea, indeed suspended over the sea, and the impression of being on a ship’s deck was reinforced by an entire wall of glass. The place was in perfect order.
There was a dining table with four chairs in one corner, a sofa and two armchairs turned toward the window, a nineteenth-century sideboard full of glasses, dishes, bottles of wine and liqueur, and a television with VCR. Atop a low table beside it was a row of videocassettes, some pornographic, others not. The large room had three doors, the first of which opened onto an immaculate kitchenette with shelves packed with foodstuffs and a refrigerator almost empty but for a few bottles of champagne and vodka. The bathroom, which was quite spacious, smelled of disinfectant. On the shelf under the mirror, an electric razor, deodorants, a flask of eau de cologne. In the bedroom, which also had a large window looking onto the sea, there was a double bed covered with a freshly laundered sheet; two bedside tables, one with a telephone; and an armoire with three doors. On the wall at the head of the bed, a drawing by Emilio Greco, a very sensual nude. Montalbano opened the drawer on the bedside table with the telephone, no doubt the side of the bed Luparello usually slept on. Three condoms, a pen, a white notepad. He gave a start when he saw the pistol, a 7.65, at the very back of the drawer, loaded. The drawer to the other bedside table was empty. Opening the left-hand door of the armoire, he saw two men’s suits. In the top drawer, a shirt, three sets of briefs, some handkerchiefs, a T-shirt. He checked the briefs: the signora was right, the label was inside and in the back. In the bottom drawer, a pair of loafers and a pair of slippers. The armoire’s middle door was
