The commendatore raised an imperious hand, and Valente immediately fell silent.
“If that’s what I said, I was wrong. His Excellency knows nothing about all this. Anyway, it’s the sort of bullshit we see every day. The ministry, in Rome, phoned me; they don’t bother His Excellency with this kind of crap.” Obviously the prefect, after getting the phone call from the bogus
“Go on,” Spadaccia urged.
Valente threw up his hands, a halo hovering over his head.
“That’s all,” he said.
Spadaccia, dumbstruck, looked all around as if to verify the reality of what was happening.
“Are you telling me you have nothing more to ask me?”
“That’s right.”
Spadaccia slammed his hand down on the desk with such force that even Montalbano jumped in the next room.
“You think you’ve made an ass of me, but you’ll pay for this, just wait and see!”
He stormed out, fuming. Montalbano ran to the window, nerves taut. He saw the commendatore shoot out the front door like a bullet towards his car, whose driver was getting out to open the door for him. At that exact moment, the door of a squad car that had just pulled up opened, and out came Angelo Prestia, who was immediately taken by the arm by a policeman. Spadaccia and the captain of the fishing boat stood almost face-to- face. They said nothing to each other, and each continued on his way.
The whinny of joy that Montalbano let out now and then when things went right for him terrified Valente, who came running from the next room.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“It worked!”
“Sit down here,” they heard a policeman say. Prestia had been brought into the office.
Valente and Montalbano stayed where they were; each lit a cigarette and smoked it without saying a word to the other.
Meanwhile the captain of the
o o o
They entered with faces like the bearers of black clouds and bitter cargoes. Valente went and sat behind his desk; Montalbano pulled up a chair and sat down beside him.
“When’s this aggravation gonna end?” the captain began.
He didn’t realize that with his aggressive attitude, he had just revealed what he was thinking to Valente and Montalbano: that is, he believed that Commendator Spadaccia had come to vouch for the truth of his testimony. He felt at peace, and could therefore play indignant.
On the desk was a voluminous folder on which Angelo Prestia’s name was written in large block letters— voluminous because it was filled with old memos, but the captain didn’t know this. Valente opened it and took out Spadaccia’s calling card.
“You gave this to us, correct?”
Valente’s switch from the politeness of last time to a more coplike bluntness worried Prestia.
“Of course it’s correct. The commendatore gave it to me and said if I had any trouble after taking the Tunisian aboard I could turn to him. Which I did.”
“Wrong,” said Montalbano, fresh as a spring chicken.
“But that’s what he told me to do!”
“Of course that’s what he told you to do, but as soon as you smelled a rat, you gave that calling card to us instead.
And in doing so, you put that good man in a pickle.”
“A pickle? What kind of pickle?”
“Don’t you think being implicated in premeditated murder is a pretty nasty pickle?”
Prestia shut up.
“My colleague Montalbano,” Valente cut in, “is trying to explain to you why things went as they did.”
“And how did they go?”
“They went as follows: if you had gone directly to Spadaccia and hadn’t given us his card, he would have taken care of everything, under the table, of course. Whereas you, by giving us the card, you got the law involved. So that left Spadaccia with only one option: deny everything.” “What?!”
“Yessirree. Spadaccia’s never seen you before, never heard your name. He made a sworn statement, which we’ve added to our file.”
“The son of a bitch!” said Prestia. Then he asked: “And how did he explain how I got his card?”
Montalbano laughed heartily to himself.
“He suckered you there, too, pal,” he said. “He brought us a photocopy of a declaration he made about ten days
