“So, Gerlando Gurreri, born in Vigàta on—” Fazio began, reading from his little piece of paper.
Montalbano cursed, leapt to his feet, leaned forward over the desk, and snatched the paper out of his hands. And, as Fazio stood there in shock, he rolled it up into a little ball and tossed it into the wastebasket. He couldn’t stand to listen to these records-office litanies Fazio was so fond of, which reminded him of nothing so much as the intricate genealogies of the Bible: Japhet, son of Joseph, begat fourteen children, Rachel, Ibrahim, Lot, Axanagor . . .
“How am I gonna go on now?” asked Fazio.
“You can tell me what you remember.”
“But, when I’m done, can I have my piece of paper back?”
“All right.”
Fazio seemed reassured.
“Gurreri is forty-six years old, and married with . . . now I don’t remember. I had it written down on that paper. He lives in Vigàta at Via Nicotera 38—”
“Fazio, I’m telling you for the last time: Forget the vital statistics.”
“Okay, okay. Gurreri was treated at Montelusa Hospital in early February 2003. I don’t remember the exact date, ’cause I had it written down on—”
“Fuck the exact date. And if you dare try again to remember something you’d written down, I’m going to take that little piece of paper out of the wastebasket and make you eat it.”
“All right, all right. Gurreri was unconscious and brought in by a guy whose name I can’t remember but had written down on—”
“Now I’m gonna shoot you.”
“I’m sorry, it just slipped out. This guy worked with Gurreri at Lo Duca’s stable. He stated that Gurreri had been accidentally struck by a heavy iron bar, the one used to bolt the door to the stable.To make a long story short, the doctors were forced to drill a hole in his skull, or something like that, because a huge hematoma was pressing against his brain. The operation was a success, but Gurreri was left disabled.”
“How so?”
“He started suffering lapses of memory, fainting spells, sudden fits of anger, things like that. I was told Lo Duca paid for specialized care, but you couldn’t really say there was any improvement.”
“Actually the situation got worse, if anything, the way Lo Duca tells it.”
“So that’s as far as the hospital’s concerned. But there are other things as well.”
“Such as?”
“Before going to work for Lo Duca, Gurreri had a few years of jail time under his belt.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You bet. Burglary and attempted murder.”
“Not bad.”
“This afternoon I’m going to try to find out what people in town say about him.”
“Good. Get going.”
“’Scuse me, Chief, but could I retrieve my little piece of paper?”
The inspector headed off to Montelusa at four-thirty. After he’d been on the road for ten minutes or so, somebody behind him honked the horn. Montalbano pulled over to let the guy pass, but the other moved along slowly, pulled up beside him, and said:
“You’ve got a flat tire, you know.”
Matre santa! What was he going to do now? He had never managed to change a tire in his life! Luckily, at that moment he spotted a car of carabinieri driving by. He raised his left arm, and they pulled over.
“You need anything?”
“Yes, thank you.Thank you very very much.The name’s Galluzzo, a surveyor by trade. If you would be so kind as to change my rear left tire for me . . .”
“You don’t know how to do it?”
“Yes, I do, but unfortunately I have only limited mobility in my right arm and can’t lift heavy objects.”
“We’ll take care of it.”
He arrived at Giarrizzo’s office ten minutes late.
“Sorry I’m late, sir, but the traffic . . .”
Forty-year-old Nicola Giarrizzo, public prosecutor for the city of Montelusa, was a massive man, nearly six and a half feet tall and nearly six and a half feet wide, who, when he spoke to someone, liked to pace back and forth in the room, with the result that he was continually crashing into a chair one minute, an open window the next, or his own desk the next. Not because his eyesight was defective or because he was distracted, but simply because the space of an office of normal size was insufficient for him. He was like an elephant in a telephone booth.
After the inspector explained the reason for his visit, the prosecutor remained silent for a minute.Then he said:
“I think you’re a little late.”
“For what?”
“For coming to me to express your doubts.”
“But, you see—”
“And even if you’d come to express absolute certainty, you would still be too late.”
“But why, may I ask?”
“Because by now everything that needed to be written has already been written.”
“But I came to talk, not to write.”
“It’s the same thing. At this point, nothing will change anything.There will certainly be some new discoveries, big discoveries, which will come out over the course of the trial, but not until then. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely. And, in fact, I came to tell you—”
Giarrizzo raised a hand and stopped him.
“Among other things, I don’t think your way of going about this is terribly correct. Don’t forget, you, until proved otherwise, are also a witness.”
It was true. And Montalbano absorbed the blow. He stood up, mildly angry. He’d made a fool of himself.
“Well, in that case—”
“What are you doing? Leaving? Are you upset?”
“No, but—”
“Sit down,” said the prosecutor, crashing into the door, which had been left open.
The inspector sat down.
“Can we speak in a purely theoretical mode?” asked Giarrizzo.
What on earth was a “theoretical mode”? For lack of a better option, Montalbano consented.
“All right.”
“So, to repeat, theoretically speaking, rhetorically, that is, let us posit the case of a certain police inspector, whom we shall henceforth call Martinez . . .”
Montalbano didn’t like the name the prosecutor wanted to give him.
“Couldn’t we call him something else?”
“But that’s an utterly insignificant detail! However, if it means so much to you, please propose a name more to your liking,” said Giarrizzo, irritated and crashing into a file cabinet.
D’Angelantonio? DeGubernatis? Filippazzo? Cosentino? Aromatis? The names that came into the inspector’s mind didn’t sound right. So he gave up.
“All right, we can keep Martinez.”
“So, let us posit that this Martinez, who has been conducting, and so on and so forth, the investigation into an individual we shall call Salinas—” Why the hell was Giarrizzo so fixated on Spanish names? “Is Salinas all right with you?—who is accused of having shot a shop owner and so on and so forth, realizes and so on and so forth that the case has a weak link and so on and so forth—”
“Excuse me, but who realizes the case has a weak link?” asked Montalbano, whose head was spinning with all the and so on and so forths.
“Martinez, no? The shop owner, whom we’ll call—”
“Alvarez del Castillo,” Montalbano promptly piped in.
Giarrizzo looked a little doubtful.
“Too long. Let’s call him simply Alvarez.The shop owner Alvarez, however—though openly contradicting himself—claims not to recognize Salinas as the gunman.You with me so far?”
“I’m with you.”
“On the other hand, Salinas claims to have an alibi, which, however, he doesn’t want to reveal to Martinez.And so the inspector continues straight down his road, convinced that the reason Salinas doesn’t want to reveal his alibi is that he hasn’t got one. Is the picture clear?”
“Quite. At this point, however, I—I mean, Martinez, begins to doubt: What if Salinas really does have an alibi, and pulls it out at the trial?”
“But this has already occurred to the people in charge of confirming the arrest and bringing the accused to justice!” said Giarrizzo, tripping over a rug and threatening to collapse on top of the inspector, who for a moment feared being squashed to death under the Colossus of Rhodes.
“And how have they resolved the question?”
“With supplementary investigations concluded three months ago.”
“But I never—”
“Martinez wasn’t assigned this task because he’d already done his part. To conclude: Salinas’s alibi is apparently a woman, his mistress, whose company he was in at the moment that Alvarez was shot.”
“I’m sorry, but if Lic—I mean, Salinas really does have an alibi, it means the trial will end in—”
“A conviction!” said Giarrizzo.
“Why?”
“Because when Salinas’s lawyers decide to pull out this alibi, the prosecution will know how to pick it apart. The defense, moreover, is unaware that the prosecution already knows the name of the woman who is supposed to provide this belated alibi.”
“Mind telling me who she is?”
“You? But you, Inspector Montalbano, have nothing to do with this! If anything, it should be Martinez asking that question.”
He sat down, wrote something on a sheet of paper, stood up, and held out his hand to Montalbano, who, bewildered, shook it.
“It was a pleasure to talk to you,” said the prosecutor. “I’ll see you at the trial.”
He got up to leave, crashed into the half-closed door, knocking it partially off its hinges, and went out.
Still stunned, the inspector bent down to look at the sheet of paper on the desk. It had a name written on it: Concetta Siragusa.
He raced back to Vigàta, went to the station, and said to Catarella as he was passing by:
“Call Fazio on his cell phone.”
He barely had time to sit down before the telephone rang.
“What is it, Chief ?”
“Drop everything you’re doing and come here at once.”
“I’m on my way.”
It was now clear that he and Fazio had gone down the wrong path.
The investigation into Licco’s alibi had been assigned not to him, Montalbano, but surely to the carabinieri, at the instruction of Giarrizzo. And equally surely, the Cuffaros had learned of the existence of this investigation by the men in black.
This meant that, whatever behavior he displayed in court, it would never have the slightest influence on the outcome of the trial.
Therefore all the pressure exerted on him—the ransacking of his house, the attempted arson, the anonymous phone call—had nothing to do with the Licco affair. So what, then, did they want from him?
Fazio listened in absolute silence to the conclusions the inspector had drawn after his chat with Giarrizzo.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said at the end.
“No ‘maybe’ about it.”
“We’ll have to wait and see what their next move is, after they failed to burn down your house.”
Montalbano slapped his forehead.
“They’ve already made their move! I forgot to tell you!”
“What’d they do?”
“I got an anonymous phone call.”
And he repeated the message to Fazio.
“The problem is, you don’t know what it is they want you to do.”
“Let’s hope that their next move, as you say, will give us some idea. Have you managed to find out anything else about Gurreri?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But what?”
“I need more time. I’d like to confirm it.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Apparently he was recruited about three months ago.”
“By whom?”
“The Cuffaros. Apparently they took on Gurreri to replace Licco.”
“About three months ago, you say?”
“Yes. Is that important?”
“I don’t know yet, but these same three months keep popping up.Three months ago, Gurreri left his house; three months ago, the name of Licco’s mistress was discovered, the one who will provide Licco’s alibi; three months ago, Gurreri is recruited by the Cuffaros . . . Bah, I dunno.”
“If you don’t have anything else to tell me,” said Fazio, standing up,“I’m going to go back and talk to a lady who’s a neighbor of Gurreri’s wife, who hates her guts. She had started telling me something, but then you rang me and I had to drop everything.”
“Had she already told you anything?”
“Yeah. She said Concetta Siragusa, for the last few months—”
Montalbano leapt to his feet, eyes popping.
“What did you say?”
Fazio almost got scared.
“Wha’d I say, Chief ?”
“Repeat it!”
“That Concetta Siragusa, Gurreri’s wife—”
“Holy fucking shit!” said the inspector, falling heavily back into the chair.
“Chief, you’re getting me worried! What is it?”
“Wait, let me recover.”
He fired up a cigarette. Fazio got up and shut the door.
“First, I wanna know something,” said the inspector. “You were telling me the neighbor lady told you that for the last few months, Gurreri’s wife . . . And that’s where I interrupted you. Now continue.”
“The neighbor was telling me that for some time now, Gurreri’s wife has seemed scared of her own shadow.”
“Do you want to know for how long Gurreri’s wife has been scared?”
“Sure. Do you know?”
“For three months, Fazio. Exactly three months.”
“But how do you know these things about Concetta Siragusa?”
“I don’t know anything, but I can easily imagine them. And now I’ll tell you how it all went. Three months ago, someone from the Cuffaro clan approaches Gurreri, who’s a small-time crook, and asks him to join the family.The guy can’t believe it; it’s like getting a work contract with no time limit after years of temps.”
“But wait a second, if I may. What use could the Cuffaros possibly have for someone like Gurreri, who’s not even all there in the head?”
“I’ll get to that.The Cuffaros, however, impose a rather harsh condition on Gurreri.”
“Namely?”
“That Concetta Siragusa, his wife, provide an alibi for Licco.”
This time it was Fazio’s turn to be shocked.
“Who told you that Siragusa is Licco’s mistress?”
“Giarrizzo. But he didn’t tell me her name; he wrote it down on a sheet of paper, which he pretended to leave on his desk.”
“But what’s it mean?”
“It means that the Cuffaros don’t give a flying fuck about Gurreri. It’s his wife they want. Who, at a certain point, is forced to play ball, willy nilly, even though she’s scared out of her wits. At the same time, the Cuffaros tell Gurreri that it’s best if he leaves his home; they’ll take care of finding him a safe place to stay.”
He torched another cigarette. Fazio went and opened the window.
“And since Gurreri, who now feels strong with the Cuffaros behind him, still wants to take revenge on Lo Duca, the family decides to lend him a hand. It’s the Cuffaros, not some loser like Gurreri, who staged the horse operation. So, to conclude: For the past three months, Licco has had the alibi he didn’t have before, and in the meanwhile, Gurreri has had the revenge he wanted. And they all lived happily ever after.”
“And we—”
“And we take it up the you-know-what. But I’ll tell you another thing,” Montalbano continued.
“Tell me.”
“At a certain point, Licco’s lawyers will call Gurreri as a witness.You can bet on that. In one way or another they’ll get him to talk on the stand. And Gurreri will swear that he has always known that his wife was Licco’s mistress, and that this was why he left his home in disgust, fed up with the constant quarrels with Concetta, who wouldn’t stop crying for her beau behind bars.”
“Well, if that’s the way it is—”
“How else could it be?”
“—maybe you’d best go back to Giarrizzo.”
“What for?”
“To tell him what you’ve just told me.”
“I’m not going back there, not even with a gun to my head . . . First of all, because he pointed out to me that it’s improper for me to talk to him. And, secondly, because he has assigned the supplementary investigation to the carabinieri. Let him figure things out with them. Now hurry back and finish your discussion with Concetta’s neighbor.”
At eight o’clock on the dot, the phone rang.
“Chief, that’d be the lady Esther Man.”
Their date! He had completely forgotten about it! What was he going to do now? Should he say yes or no? He picked up the receiver, still undecided.
“Salvo? This is Rachele. Have you overcome your reservations?”
There was an ever so slight note of irony in her voice, which irritated him.
“I still haven’t finished here.”
You want to get wise with me? Then stew in your own juices.
“Think you’ll manage to get away?”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe in an hour or so . . . But that’s probably too late for you to go out to eat.”
He was hoping she would say that, in that case, it was better to meet another evening. Instead, Rachele said:
“Okay, no problem. I can even eat at midnight, if need be.”
O matre santa! How the hell was he going to spend the next hour with nothing to do in the office? Why had he played so hard to get? Most importantly, he was ravenous, eaten alive by his hunger.
“Wait. Can you hold on a second?”
“Of course.”
He set the receiver down on the desk, got up, went over to the window, and pretended to be talking audibly to someone.
“What do you mean, you can’t find it? . . . Put it off till tomorrow morning? . . . Well, all right.”
He turned around to go back to his desk, but then froze. Standing in the doorway was Catarella, who looked at him with an expression between concern and fear.
“You feel okay, Chief ?”
Without saying a word, Montalbano shot out one arm to signal that he should leave the room at once. Catarella disappeared.
“Rachele? Luckily I’ve managed to break free. Where should we meet?”
“Wherever you like.”
“Have you got a car?”
“Ingrid lent me hers.”
How ready Ingrid was to facilitate his encounters with Rachele!
“Why, doesn’t she need it?”
“No, a friend of hers picked her up and will bring her home later.”
He told her where they should meet. Before leaving the room, he picked up the magazine that Mimì Augello had brought him. It might help him rein in Rachele, if their conversation began to take a dangerous turn.