Ingrid got out of the car, walked up to Montalbano, and embraced him. She stayed that way awhile, her head leaning on his chest. Then, without looking back at him, she got back into her car, put it in gear, and left.
~
Right at the entrance to the bridge over the Canneto, a car was stopped, blocking most of the road. A man was standing there, elbows propped against the roof of the car, hands covering his face, lightly rocking back and forth.
“Anything wrong?” asked Montalbano, pulling up.
The man turned around. His face was covered with blood, which poured out of a broad gash in the middle of his forehead.
“Some bastard,” he said.
“I don’t understand. Please explain,” Montalbano got out of the car and approached.
“I was breezing quietly along when this son of a bitch passes me, practically running me off the road.
So I got pissed off and started chasing after him, honking the horn and flashing my high beams. Suddenly the guy puts on his brakes and turns the car sideways.
He gets out of the car, and he’s got something in his hand that I can’t make out, and I get scared, thinking he’s got a weapon. He comes toward me—my window was down—and without saying a word he bashes me with that thing, which I realized was a monkey wrench.”
“Do you need assistance?”
“No, I think the bleeding’s gonna stop.”
“Do you want to file a police report?”
“Don’t make me laugh. My head hurts.”
“Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”
“Would you please mind your own fucking business?”
~
How long had it been since he’d had a proper night of God-given sleep? Now he had this bloody pain at the back of his head that wouldn’t give him a moment’s peace. It continued unabated, and even if he lay still, belly up or belly down, it made no difference, the pain persisted, silent, insidious, without any sharp pangs, which was maybe worse. He turned on the light. It was four o’clock. On the bedside table were still the salve and roll of gauze he’d used on Ingrid. He grabbed them and, in front of the bathroom mirror, rubbed a little of the salve on the nape of his neck—maybe it would give him some relief—then wrapped his neck in the gauze, securing it with a piece of adhesive tape. But perhaps he put the wrap on too tight; he had trouble moving his head. He looked at himself in the mirror, and at that moment a blinding flash exploded in his brain, drowning out even the bathroom light. He felt like a comic-book character with X-ray vision who could see all the way inside of things.
In grammar school he’d had an old priest as his religion teacher. “Truth is light,” the priest had said one day.
Montalbano, never very studious, had been a mischievous pupil, always sitting in the last row.
“So that must mean that if everyone in the family tells the truth, they save on the electric bill.”
He had made this comment aloud, which got him kicked out of the classroom.
Now, some thirty-odd years after the fact, in his mind he asked the old priest to forgive him.
~
“Boy, do you look ugly today!” exclaimed Fazio as soon as he saw the inspector come in to work. “Not feeling well?”
“Leave me alone” was Montalbano’s reply. “Any news of Gambardella? Did you find him?”
“Nothing. Vanished. I’ve decided we’ll end up finding him back in the woods somewhere, eaten by dogs.”
There was something, however, in the sergeant’s tone of voice that he found suspicious; he had known him for too many years.
“Anything wrong?”
“It’s Gallo. He’s gone to the emergency room, hurt his arm. Nothing serious.”
“How’d it happen?”
“With the squad car.”
“Did he crash it speeding?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to spit it out or do you need a midwife to pull the words out of your mouth?”
“Well, I’d sent him to the town market on an emergency, some kind of brawl, and he took off in a hurry—you know how he is—and he skidded and crashed into a telephone pole. The car got towed to our depot in Montelusa and they gave us another.”
“Tell me the truth, Fazio: had the tires been slashed?”
“Yes.”
“And did Gallo check, as I had told him a hundred times to do? Can’t you clowns understand that slashing tires is the national sport in this goddamned country? Tell him he’d better not show his face at the office or I’ll bust his ass.”
He slammed the door to his room, furious.
Searching inside a tin can in which he kept most everything from postage stamps to buttons, he found the key to the old factory and went out without saying good-bye.
