“And what did you do?”
“Well, see, I had to leave for NewYork two days later . . .
I was away for a month. When I got back, I phoned Papa and asked him if he still needed my help, and he said no. Then we saw each other in person, but he never brought up the subject again.” “Did you have any idea what this dangerous business was that your father was referring to?”
“At the time I thought it had to do with the business he’d wanted to reopen in spite of the fact that I was strongly against it. We even quarreled over it. On top of that, Mama had mentioned he was involved with another woman and was being forced to spend a lot of money—” “Stop right there. So you were convinced that the help your father was asking you for was actually some sort of loan?”
“To be perfectly frank, yes.”
“And you refused to get involved, despite the desperate, disturbing tone of the letter.”
“Well, you see—”
“Do you make a good living, Doctor?”
“I can’t complain.”
“Tell me something: why did you want me to see the letter?”
“Because the murder put everything in a whole new light. I thought it might be useful to the investigation.”
“Well, it’s not,” Montalbano said calmly. “Take it back and treasure it always. Do you have any children, Doctor?”
“A son, Calogerino. Four years old.”
“I hope you never need him for anything.”
“Why?” asked Dr. Antonino Lapecora, bewildered.
“Because, if he’s his father’s son, you’re screwed, sir.”
“How dare you!”
“If you’re not out of my sight in ten seconds, I’ll have you arrested for the first thing I can think of.” The doctor fled so quickly he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting on.
Aurelio Lapecora had desperately asked his son for help, and the guy decided to put an ocean between them.
o o o
Until thirty years ago, Villaseta consisted of some twenty houses, or rather cottages, arranged ten on each side of the provincial road between Vigata and Montelusa. In the boom years, however, the frenzy of construction (which seemed to be the constitutional foundation of our country: “Italy is a Republic founded on construction work”) was accompanied by a road-building fever, and Villaseta thus found itself at the intersection of three high- speed routes, one superhighway, one so-called link, two provincial roads, and two interprovin-cial roads. Several of these roads, after a few kilometers of picturesque landscape with guardrails appropriately painted red where judges, policemen, carabinieri, financiers, and even prison guards had been killed, often surprised the unwary traveler by suddenly ending inexplicably (or all too explicably) against a hillside so desolate as to feed the suspicion that it had never been trod by human foot. Others instead came to an abrupt halt at the seashore, on beaches of fine blond sand with not a single house as far as the eye could see, not a single boat on the horizon, promptly plunging the unwary traveler into the Robinson Crusoe syndrome.
Having always followed its primary instinct to build houses along any road that might appear,Villaseta thus rapidly turned into a sprawling, labyrinthine town.
“We’ll never find this Via Garibaldi!” complained Fazio, who was at the wheel.
“What’s the most outlying area of Villaseta?” inquired the inspector.
“The one along the road to Butera.”
“Let’s go there.”
“How do you know Via Garibaldi is that way?”
“Trust me.”
He knew he wasn’t wrong. He had learned from personal experience that in the years immediately preceding the aforementioned economic miracle, the central area of every town or city had streets named, as dutiful reminders, after the founding fathers of the country (such as Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour), the old politicians (Orlando, Sonnino, Crispi), and the classic authors (Dante, Petrarch, Carducci; Leopardi less often). After the boom, the street names changed. The fathers of the country were banished to the outskirts, while the town centers now featured Pasolini, Pirandello, De Filippo, Togli-atti, De Gasperi, and the ever-present Kennedy ( John, not Bobby, although Montalbano, in a lost village in the Nebrodi Mountains, once ended up in a “Piazza F.lli Kennedy,” that is, a “Kennedy Brothers Square”).
o o o
In reality, the inspector had guessed right on the one hand and wrong on the other. Right insofar as the centrifugal shift of street names had indeed occurred along the road to Butera; wrong insofar as the streets of that neighborhood, if you could call it a neighborhood, were named not after the fathers of the country, but, for reasons unknown, after Verdi, Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti. Discouraged, Fazio decided to ask for directions from an old peasant astride a donkey laden with dried branches. Except that the donkey decided not to stop, and Fazio was
