‘Let’s go,’ he said. Then he added, in a vain attempt at convincing himself, I’m sure they called.’
Gallo gave him a doubtful look, but didn’t open his mouth.
Gallo wasn’t even invited into headquarters. The inspector had sent him immediately home to rest. His second-in-command, Mimi Augello, wasn’t in; he’d been summoned to report to the new commissioner of Montelusa, Luca Bonetti-Alderighi, a young and testy native of Bergamo who in the course of one month had succeeded in creating knife-blade antipathies all around him.
‘The commissioner was upset you weren’t in Vigata,’ said Fazio, the sergeant he was closest to. ‘So Inspector Augello had to go in your place.’
He told Fazio about their accident that morning and asked him if he knew who owned the house. Fazio didn’t, but promised his superior that he’d go to the town hall the following morning and find out.
‘By the way, your car’s in our garage.’
Before going home, the inspector interrogated Catarella.
‘Try hard to remember. Did anyone happen to call about a car we ran into?’ No calls.
‘Let me try and understand a minute,’ Livia said angrily by phone from Boccadasse, Genoa.
‘What’s to understand, Livia? As I said, and now repeat, Francois’s adoption papers aren’t ready yet.
Some unexpected problems have come up, and I no longer have the old commissioner behind me always smoothing everything out. We have to be patient.’
‘You weren’t? Then what were you talking about?’
‘Getting married,, that’s what. We can certainly get married while the problems of the adoption are being worked out. The one thing does not depend on the other.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Montalbano, who was beginning to feel harried and cornered.
‘Now I want a straight answer to the following question’ Livia went on, implacably. ‘Supposing the adoption isn’t possible: what will we do? Will we get married anyway, in your opinion, or won’t we?’
A sudden, loud thunderclap gave him a way out.
‘What was that?’
‘Thunder. There’s a terrible stor—’ He hung up and pulled out the plug.
He couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned, snarling himself up in the sheets. Around two in the morning, he realized it was useless. He got up, got dressed, grabbed a leather bag given to him some time ago by a house burglar who’d become his friend, got in his car and drove off. The storm was raging worse than ever; lightning bolts illuminated the sky. When he reached the Twingo, he slipped his car in under some trees and turned off the headlights. From the glove compartment he extracted a gun, a pair of gloves and a torch. After waiting for the rain to let up, he crossed the road in one bound, went up the drive and flattened himself against the front door. He rang and rang the doorbell but got no answer. He then put on the gloves and pulled a large key ring with a dozen or so variously shaped picklocks out of the leather bag. The door opened on the third try. It was locked with only the latch and hadn’t been dead-bolted. He entered, closing the door behind him. In the dark, he bent over, untied his wet shoes and removed them, keeping his socks on. He turned on the torch, keeping it pointed at the ground. He found himself in a large dining room that opened onto a living room. The furniture smelled of varnish. Everything was new, clean and orderly. A door led into a kitchen that sparkled like something one might see in an advertisement; another door gave onto a bathroom so shiny it looked as if no one had ever used it before. He slowly climbed the stairs to the upper floor. There he found three closed doors. The first one he opened revealed a neat little guest room; the second led into a bigger bathroom than the one downstairs, but unlike it, this one was decidedly messy. A pink towelling bathrobe lay rumpled on the floor, as though the person wearing it had taken it off in a hurry. The third door was to the master bedroom. And the naked, half-kneeling female body, belly resting against the edge of the bed, arms spread, face buried in the sheet that the young, blonde woman had torn to shreds with her fingernails in the final throes of her death by suffocation, must have belonged to the owner of the house.
Montalbano went up to the corpse and, removing a glove, touched it lightly: it was cold and stiff. She must have been very beautiful. The inspector went back downstairs, put his shoes back on, wiped up the wet spot they had made on the floor, went out of the house, closed the door, crossed, the road, got in his car and left. His thoughts were racing as he drove back to Marinella. How to have the crime discovered? He certainly couldn’t go and tell the judge what he’d been up to.
The judge who’d replaced Lo Bianco — on a leave of absence to pursue his endless historical research into the lives of a pair of unlikely ancestors -was a Venetian by the name of Nicolo Tommaseo who was always talking about his ‘irrevocable-prerogatives’. He had a little baby face that he hid under a Belfiore martyr’s moustache and beard. As Montalbano was opening the door to his house, the solution to the problem finally came to him in a flash. And thus he was able to enjoy a brief but god-like sleep.
TWO
He arrived at the office at eight thirty the next morning, looking rested and crisp.
‘Did you know our new commissioner is noble?’ was the first thing Mirni Augello said when he saw him.
Is that a moral judgement or a heraldic fact?’ ‘ ‘Heraldic’
‘I’d already worked out as much from the little dash between his last names. And what did you do, Mimi?
Did you call him count, baron or marquis? Did you butter him up nicely?’
‘Come on, Salvo, you’re obsessed!’
‘Me? Fazio told me you were wagging your tail the whole time you were talking on the phone to the commissioner, and that afterwards you shot out of here like a rocket to go and see him.’
‘Listen, the commissioner said, and I quote: “If Inspector Montalbano is not available, come here at once yourself.” What was I supposed to do? Tell him I couldn’t because my superior would get pissed off?’ ‘What did he want?’
‘He wasn’t alone. Half the province was there. He informed us he intended to modernize, to renovate. He said anyone unable to come up to speed with him should just hang it up. Those were his exact words: hang it up. It was clear to everyone he meant you and Sandro Turri of Calascibetta.’
‘Explain to me how you knew this.’
‘Because when he said “hang it up” he looked right at Turri and then at me.’
‘Couldn’t that mean he was actually referring to you?’
‘Come on, Salvo, everybody knows he doesn’t have a high opinion of you.’
‘And what did his lordship want?’
‘To tell us that in a few days, some absolutely up-to-date computers will be arriving. Every headquarters in the province will be equipped with them. He wanted each of us to give him the name of an officer we thought had a special knack for computer science.
Which I did.’
‘Are you insane? Nobody here knows a damn thing about that stuff. Whose name did you give him?’
‘Catarella,’ said an utterly serious Mimi Augello. The act of a born saboteur.
Montalbano stood: up abruptly, ran over to his second-in-command and embraced him.
‘I know all about the house you were interested in,’ said Fazio, sitting down in the chair in front of the inspector’s desk. ‘I spoke to the town clerk, who knows everything about everyone in Vigata.’ ‘Let’s have it.’
‘Well, the land the house was built on used to belong to a Dr Rosario Licalzi’ ‘What kind of doctor?’
‘A real one, a medical doctor.
He died about fifteen years ago, leaving the plot to his eldest son, Emanuele, also a doctor.’
‘Does he live in Vigata?’
‘No. He lives and works in Bologna. Two years ago, this Emanuele Licalzi married a girl from those parts.
They came to
‘Any idea where the Licalzis are right now?’
‘The husband’s in Bologna.
The lady was last seen in Vigata three days ago, running around town trying to furnish the house. She drives a
