explosion of gravel. The driver had executed an evasive manoeuvre, turning the car completely round.
When Montalbano stepped out of the house ready to leave, he saw Gallo, the station’s official driver, rejoicing.
‘Look at that’ Chief! Look at them tracks.’ What a -manoeuvre! A perfect one- eighty!’
‘Congratulations,’
Montalbano said gloomily.
‘Should I put on the siren?’ Gallo asked as they were about to set out.
‘Put it in your arse,’ said a surly Montalbano, closing his eyes. He didn’t feel like talking.
Gallo, who suffered from the Indianapolis Complex, stepped on the accelerator as soon as he saw his superior’s eyes shut, reaching a speed he thought better suited to his driving ability. They’d been on the road barely fifteen minutes when the crash occurred. At the scream of the brakes, Montalbano opened his eyes but saw nothing, head lurching violently forward before being jerked back by the safety belt. Next came a deafening clang of metal against metal, then silence again, a fairy-tale silence, with birds singing and dogs barking.
‘You hurt?’ the inspector asked Gallo, seeing him rub his chest
‘No.You?’
‘Nothing. What happened?’
‘A chicken ran in front of me.’
‘I’ve never seen a chicken run in front of a car before. Let’s look at the damage.’
They got out. There wasn’t a soul about. The long skid marks were etched into the tarmac Right at the spot where they began, you could see a small, dark stain. Gallo went up to it, then turned triumphantly around.
‘What did I tell you?’ he said to the inspector. It was a chicken!’
A clear case of suicide.
The car they had slammed into, smashing up its entire rear end, must have been legally parked at the side of the road, though now it was sticking out slightly. It was a bottle-green Renault Twingo, positioned so as to block a unpaved drive leading to a two-storey house with shuttered windows and doors some thirty metres away. The squad car, for its part, had a shattered headlight and a crumpled right bumper.
‘So now what do we do?’
Gallo asked dejectedly.
‘We’re going to go on. Will the car run, in your opinion?’
‘I’ll give it a try.’
Reversing with a great clatter of metal, the squad car dislodged itself from the other vehicle. Nobody came to the windows of the house. They must have been fast asleep, dead to the world. The Twingo had to belong to someone in there, since there were no other homes in the immediate area. As Gallo was trying with his bare hands to bend out the bumper, which was scraping against the tyre, Montalbano wrote down the phone number of the Vigata police headquarters on a piece of paper and slipped this under the Twingo’s windscreen wiper.
When it’s not your day, it’s not your day. After they’d been back on the road for half an hour or so, Gallo started rubbing his chest again, and from time to time he twisted his face in a grimace of pain.
‘I’ll drive’ said the inspector. Gallo didn’t protest.
When they were outside the town of Fela, Montalbano, instead of continuing along the main road, turned onto the road that led to the centre of town. Gallo paid no attention, eyes closed and head resting against the window.
‘Where are we?’ he asked, as soon as he felt the car come to a halt.
We’re at Fela Hospital Get out.’ ‘But it’s nothing, Inspector!’ ‘Get out. I want them to have a look at you.’ ‘Well, just leave me here and keep going. You can pick . me up on the way back.’
‘Cut the shit. Let’s go.’
Between auscultations, three blood pressure exams, X-rays, and everything else in the book, it took them over three hours to have a look at Gallo. In the end they ruled that he hadn’t broken anything; the pain he felt was from having bumped hard into the steering wheel, and the weakness was a natural reaction to the fright he’d had.
‘So now what do we do?’
Gallo asked again, more dejected than ever.
‘What do you think? We keep going. But I’ll drive.’
The inspector had been to Floridia three or four times before. He even remembered where Tamburrano lived, and so he headed towards the Church of the Madonna delle Grazie, which was practically next door to his colleague’s house. When they reached the square, he saw the church hung with black and a throng of people hurrying inside. The service must have started late. Apparently he wasn’t the only one to have things go wrong.
‘I’ll take the car to the police garage in town and have them look at it,’ said Gallo. I’ll come and pick you up afterwards.’
Montalbano entered the crowded church. The service had just begun. He looked around and recognized no one. Tamburrano must have been in the first row, near the coffin in front of the main altar. The inspector decided to remain where he was, near the entrance. He would shake
Tamburrano’s hand when the coffin was being carried out of the church. When the priest finally opened his mouth after the Mass had been going on for some time; Montalbano gave a start.
He’d heard right, he was sure of it.
The priest had begun with the words, ‘Our dearly beloved Nicola has left this vale of tears
Mustering up the courage, he tapped a little old lady on the shoulder.
‘Excuse me, signora, whose funeral is this?’
‘The dear departed Ragioniere Pecoraro. Why?’
‘I thought it was for the Signora Tamburrano.’
‘Ah, no, that one was at the Church of Sant’ Anna.’
It took him almost fifteen minutes to get to the church of Sant’ Anna, practically running the whole way.
Panting and sweaty, he found the priest in the deserted nave.
‘I beg your pardon. Where’s the funeral of Signora Tamburrano?’
‘That ended almost two hours ago,’ said the priest, looking him over sternly.
‘Do you know if she’s being buried here?’ Montalbano asked, avoiding the priest’s gaze..
‘Most certainly not. When the service was over, she was taken in the hearse to Vibo Valentia, where she’ll be entombed in the family vault. Her bereaved husband followed behind in his car.’
So it had all been for naught. He had noticed, in the Piazza della Madonna delle Grazie, a cafe with tables outside. When Gallo returned, with the car repaired as well as could be expected, it was almost two o’clock. Montalbano told him what happened.
‘So now what do we do?’
Gallo asked for the third time, lost in an abyss of dejection.
‘You’re going to eat a brioche with a
Their prayer was answered, the drive home smooth as silk.
‘The car’s still there’
said Gallo when Vigata was already visible in the distance.
The Twingo was exactly the way they’d left it that morning, sticking slightly out from the top of the unpaved drive.
‘They’ve probably already called headquarters,’ said Montalbano.
He was bullshitting: the look of the car and the house with its shuttered windows made him uneasy. .
‘Turn back’ he suddenly ordered Gallo.
Gallo made a reckless U-turn that triggered a chorus of horn blasts. When they reached the Twingo, he executed another, even more reckless, then pulled up behind the damaged car.
Montalbano stepped out in a hurry. What he thought he’d just seen in the rear-view mirror, when passing by, turned out to be true: the scrap of paper with the telephone number was still under the windscreen wiper. Nobody’d touched it.
‘I don’t like it,’ the inspector said to Gallo, who was now standing next to him. He started walking down the drive. The house must have been recently built; the grass in front was still burned from the lime. There was also a stack of new tiles in a corner of the yard. Montalbano carefully examined the shuttered windows. No light was filtering out.
He went up to the front door and rang the doorbell He waited a short while, then rang again. ‘Do you know whose house this is?’ ‘No, Chief.’
What should he do? Night was falling and he could feel the beginnings of fatigue. Their pointless, exhausting day was starting to weigh on him.
