'Fantasies are your domain.'
'I don't know if you still remember, but when you asked my husband where you could find Lillo Rizzitano, he answered that he hadn't had any news of him since July 1943. Then something came back to me: that a girlfriend of mine also disappeared during that period. Except that I actually heard from her a while later, but in the strangest way...'
Montalbano felt a chill run down his spine. The two lovers of the Crasticeddru had been murdered very young.
'How old was this friend of yours?'
'Seventeen. But she was a lot more mature than me. I was still a little girl. We went to school together.'
She opened an envelope that was on the coffee table, took out a photograph, and showed it to Montalbano.
'This was taken on our last day of school, our final year. She's the first one on the left in the back row, and that's me next to her.'
All smiling and wearing the Fascist uniforms of the Giovani Italiane. The teacher was giving the Roman salute.
'Since the situation in Sicily was becoming too dangerous with all the bombing, schools closed on the last day in April, and we were spared the dreaded final exam. We passed or failed solely on the basis of our grades. Lisetta that was my friend's name, Lisetta Moscato moved to a little inland village with her family. She wrote to me every other day, and I still have all her letters, at least the ones that arrived. The mail in those days, you know...My family also moved out; we went all the way to the mainland, to live with one of my fathers brothers. When the war was over, I wrote to my friend at both addresses, the one in the inland village and the one in Vig. But she never wrote back, and this worried me. Finally, in late 46, we returned to Vig, and I looked up Lisetta's parents. Her mother had died, and at first her father didn't want to see me. Then he was rude to me and said Lisetta had fallen in love with an American soldier and gone away with him, against her family's wishes. And he added that as far as he was concerned, his daughter might as well be dead.'
'That does seem plausible, frankly,' said Montalbano.
'What did I tell you?' the headmaster cut in triumphantly.
'But you see, Inspector, the whole thing was strange just the same, even without counting what happened later. It's strange because, first of all, if Lisetta had fallen in love with an American soldier, she would have let me know in any way possible. And second, because in the letters she sent me from Serradifalco, that was the name of the village where they'd taken refuge, she kept harping on the same theme: the torment she suffered being separated from a mysterious young man with whom she was terribly in love, whose name she would never tell me.'
'Are you sure this mysterious lover really existed? Might he not have been some girlish fantasy?'
'Lisetta wasn't the type to indulge in fantasies.'
'You know,' said Montalbano, 'at age seventeen, and even later, you can never swear by matters of the heart.'
'Put that in your pipe and smoke it,' said the headmaster.
Without saying a word, the signora extracted another photo from the envelope. It showed a young woman in bridal dress, giving her arm to a good-looking boy in a U.S. Army uniform.
'This came to me from New York in early 1947, according to the postmark.'
'And this, in my opinion, dispels all doubt,' the headmaster concluded.
'Not at all. If anything, it raises doubt.'
'In what sense, signora?'
'Because it was the only thing that came in the envelope, only this photograph of Lisetta and the soldier, nothing else, no note, nothing. Not even any writing on the back of the photo; you can see for yourself. So, can you explain to me why a true, intimate friend would send me only a photograph without writing a single word?'
'Did you recognize your friends handwriting on the envelope?'
'The address was typed.'
'Ah,' said Montalbano.
'And one last thing: Elisa Moscato and Lillo Rizzitano were first cousins. And Lillo really loved her, like a little sister.'
Montalbano looked at the headmaster. 'He adored her,' Burgio admitted.
19
The more he mulled it over, circled round it, snuck up beside it, the more convinced he became that he was on the right track. He hadn't even needed his customary meditative walk to the end of the jetty. Upon leaving the Burgio house with the wedding photo in his pocket, he'd raced off directly to Montelusa.
'Is the doctor in?'
'Yes, but he's busy. I'll let him know you're here,' said the custodian.
Pasquano and his two assistants were standing around the marble table, on top of which lay a naked corpse with eyes agape. And the dead man had good reason to look so wide-eyed, as if in surprise, since the three were drinking a toast with paper cups. The doctor had a bottle of spumante in his hand.
'Come on in, we're celebrating.'
Montalbano thanked the assistant, who handed him a cup, and Pasquano poured him a finger or two of the
