“I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. Can you send me the results of the autopsy tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?! Are you crazy? Before Luparello I’ve got that twenty-year-old girl who was raped in a shepherd’s hut and found eaten by dogs ten days later, and then there’s Fofo Greco, who had his tongue cut out and his balls cut off before they hung him from a tree to die, and then—”
Montalbano cut this macabre list short.
“Pasquano, let’s get to the point. When can you get me the results?”
“Day after tomorrow, if in the meantime I don’t have to run all over town looking at other corpses.”
They said good-bye. Montalbano called over the sergeant and his men and told them what they had to do and when to load the body into the ambulance. He had Gallo drive him back to headquarters.
“You can go back afterward and pick up the others. And if you speed, I’ll break your neck.”
~
Pino and Saro signed the sworn statement. In it their every movement before and after they discovered the body was described. But it neglected to mention two important things, which the garbage collectors had been careful not to reveal to the law. The first was that they had almost immediately recognized the dead man, the second that they had hastened to inform the lawyer Rizzo of their discovery. They headed back home, Pino apparently with his thoughts elsewhere, Saro now and again touching the pocket that still held the necklace.
Nothing would happen for at least another twenty-four hours. In the afternoon Montalbano went back to his house, threw himself down on the bed, and fell into a three-hour sleep. When he woke, as the mid-September sea was flat as a mirror, he went for a long swim. Back inside, he made himself a dish of spaghetti with a sauce of sea urchin pulp and turned on the television. Naturally, all the local news programs were talking about Luparello’s death. They sang his praises, and from time to time a politician would appear, with a face to fit the occasion, and enumerate the merits of the deceased and the problems created by his passing. But not a single one of them, not even the news program of the opposition’s channel, dared to mention where and in what circumstances the late lamented Luparello had met his end.
3
Saro and Tana had a bad night. There was no doubt Saro had discovered a secret treasure, the kind told about in tales where vagabond shepherds stumble upon ancient jars full of gold coins or find little lambs covered in diamonds. But here the matter was not at all as in olden times: the necklace, of modern construction, had been lost the day before, this much was certain, and by anyone’s guess it was worth a fortune.
Was it possible nobody had come forward to declare it missing? As they sat at their small kitchen table, with the television on and the window wide open, like every night, to keep the neighbors from getting nosy and gossiping at the sight of the slightest change, Tana wasted no time opposing her husband’s intention to go and sell it that very day, as soon as the Siracusa brothers’ jewelry shop reopened.
“First of all,” she said, “we’re honest people. We can’t just go and sell something that’s not ours.”
“But what are we supposed to do? You want me to go to the foreman and tell him I found a necklace, turn it over to him, and have him give it back to its owner when they come to reclaim it? That bastard Pecorilla’ll sell it himself in ten seconds flat.”
“We could do something else. We could keep the necklace at home and in the meantime tell Pecorilla about it. Then if somebody comes for it, we’ll give it to them.”
“What good will that do us?”
“There’s supposed to be a percentage for people who find things like this. How much do you think it’s worth?”
“Twenty million lire, easy,” Saro replied, immediately thinking he’d blurted out too high a figure.
“So let’s say we get two million. Can you tell me how we’re going to pay for all of Nene’s treatments with two million lire?”
They talked it over until dawn and only stopped because Saro had to go to work. But they’d reached a temporary agreement that allowed their honesty to remain intact: they would hang on to the necklace without whispering a word to anyone, let a week go by, and then, if nobody came forward, they’d pawn it.
When Saro, washed up and ready to leave, went to kiss his son, he had a surprise: Nene was sleeping deeply, peacefully, as if he somehow knew that his father had found a way to make him well.
~
Pino couldn’t sleep that night either. Speculative by nature, he liked the theater and had acted in several well- meaning but increasingly rare amateur productions in and around Vigata. So he read theatrical literature. As soon as his meager earnings would allow him, he would rush off to Montelusa’s only bookstore and buy his fill of comedies and dramas. He lived with his mother, who had a small pension, and getting food on the table was not really a problem. Over dinner his mother had made him tell her three times how he discovered the corpse, asking him each time to better explain a certain detail or circumstance. She’d done this so that she could retell the whole story the next day to her friends at church or at the market, proud to be privy to such knowledge and to have a son so clever as to get himself involved in such an important affair. Finally, around midnight, she’d gone to bed, and shortly thereafter Pino turned in as well. As for sleeping, however, there was no chance of that; something made him toss and turn under the sheets. He was speculative by nature, as we said, and thus, after wasting two hours trying to shut his eyes, he’d convinced himself it was no use, it might as well be Christmas Eve. He got up, washed his face, and went to sit at the little desk he had in his bedroom. He repeated to himself the story he had told his mother, and although every detail fit and it all made sense, the buzz in his head was still there, in the background. It was like the “hot-cold” guessing game: as long as he was reviewing everything he’d said, the buzz seemed to be saying,“You’re cold.” Thus the static must be coming from something he’d neglected to tell his mother. And in fact what he hadn’t told her were the same things he, by agreement with Saro, had kept from Inspector Montalbano: their immediate recognition of the corpse and the phone call to Rizzo. And here the buzz became very loud and screamed, “You’re hot hot hot!” So he took a pen and paper and wrote down word for word the conversation he’d had with the lawyer. He reread it and made some corrections, forcing himself to remember even the pauses, which he wrote in, as in a theatrical script. When he had got it all down, he reread the final draft. Something in that dialogue still didn’t work. But it was too late now; he had to go to Splendor.
~
