“Around here, Inspector, everybody minds his own business.”
“Has anyone been living in the villa recently?”
“Not recently, no. But there was somebody there last year.”
“So they rent it out?”
“I guess.”
“Do they use an agency?”
“Inspector, I have no idea. If you want, I can try to find out.”
“No, that’s all right, thanks. You’ve gone to enough trouble as it is.”
When he pulled into the main square in Montechiaro, the town clock rang eleven-thirty. He stopped the car, got out, and headed for a glass door with the word REALTOR over it. Inside there was only a pretty, polite girl.
“No, we don’t handle the villa you’re talking about.”
“Do you know who does?”
“No. You see, the owners of these luxury villas very rarely use agencies, at least not around here.”
“So how do they rent them, then?”
“You know, they’re all rich and they all know each other . . . They just get the word out in their circles . . .”
Crooks also get the word out in their circles
, thought the inspector.
Meanwhile the girl was looking at him and noticed the binoculars and video camera.
“Are you a tourist?”
“How could you tell?” said Montalbano.
After that jaunt over the waves he felt irresistibly hungry, his appetite swelling inside him like a river in spate. Though the surest course would have been to head straight to the Trattoria Da Enzo, he had to take his chances with what awaited him in the refrigerator or the oven in Marinella, since he needed to view what they’d filmed right away. As soon as he got home, he dashed into the kitchen, anxious to see what Adelina’s imagination had cooked up for him. In the oven he found rabbit alla cacciatora, as unexpected as it was ardently desired. While warming it up, he grabbed the phone.
“Torrisi? Montalbano here.”
“Everything go all right, Inspector?”
“I think so. Could you pop over to my place in about an hour?”
When eating alone, one indulges oneself in ways one would never dare in the company of others. Some sit down at the table in their underwear, others stuff themselves in bed or set up in front of the TV. Often the inspector allowed himself the pleasure of eating with his hands. Which is what he did with the rabbit alla cacciatora. Afterwards he had to spend half an hour scrubbing his hands under the kitchen faucet to wash off the grease and the smell.
He went to answer the door. It was Torrisi.
“Let me see what we filmed,” said the inspector.
“Here’s how you do it, Chief. Watch. You flip this switch and . . .”
He performed the procedure as he spoke, but Montalbano wasn’t even listening. He was utterly hopeless in these matters. The first images Tanino had filmed appeared on the television screen.
“What beautiful shots, Inspector!” Torrisi said with admiration. “You’re really good, you know. After only one technical lesson last night . . .”
“Well,” Montalbano said modestly, “it wasn’t hard . . .”
In the footage shot on the first run, the rocks below the villa looked like a bottom row of uneven teeth in a giant mouth, one jutting out, another recessed, one shorter than the rest, one longer, one slanting crosswise, another standing upright. When filmed on the return run, the same mouth of rocks appeared to be missing a tooth, revealing a gap that was not very wide, just enough to allow a dinghy or small motorboat to pass through.
“Stop there.”
Montalbano studied the image carefully. Something about that gap looked odd to him, as though the sea hesitated slightly before entering. In spots, it even looked like it wanted to turn back.
“Can you enlarge?”
“No, Chief.”
When Tanino stopped zooming, one saw the very steep staircase, carved directly into the rock, leading from the villa to the small, natural harbor formed by the rocks.
“Go back a little, please.”
This time he noticed a tall wire fence welded to some metal poles planted in the rocks, preventing anyone from climbing up and seeing what was going on inside the little harbor. Thus not only was the villa built without authorization, but its owners had illegally interrupted the shoreline. There was no way to walk along the water’s edge there, not even by climbing the rocks, since at a certain point one’s path was blocked by an insurmountable barrier of wire fencing. Yet even on this second viewing, he couldn’t figure out why the sea acted so strangely in front of that missing tooth.
“Good enough, Torrisi. Thanks. You can take back your video camera.”
“There is a way to enlarge the image you wanted, Chief. I could print out a copy of the still and give it to Catarella, who then could scan—”
“Fine, fine, you take care of it,” Montalbano cut him off.
“My compliments again on the beautiful shots,” said Torrisi as he went out.
“Thanks,” said the inspector, with the cheek he was able to summon in certain situations. The usurper didn’t even blush.
“Cat, any news from Marzilla?”
“No sir, Chief. But I wanted a tell you that a litter came this morning, addrissed to you poissonally in poisson.”
The plainest of envelopes, with no letterhead. The inspector opened it and pulled out a newspaper clipping. He looked inside the envelope but found nothing else. There was a short article dated Cosenza, March 11. The headline said: FUGITIVE ERRERA’S BODY FOUND. It said:
Yesterday morning around six A.M., Antonio Jacopino, a shepherd, was horrified to discover the remains of a human body when crossing the railroad tracks near Paganello with his flock. Preliminary investigations by the police, who promptly rushed to the scene, point to an apparent mishap. The man is believed to have slid down the embankment, made slippery by recent rainfall, as the 11:00 PM express was passing by on its way to Cosenza. In their statement to police, the conductors stated they noticed nothing unusual when passing that spot. Authorities were able to identify the victim from the documents in his wallet and a wedding ring. His name was Ernesto Errera, a fugitive from justice, convicted by the Court of Cosenza for armed robbery. He had lately been rumored to be active in Brindisi, having taken an interest in trafficking illegal immigrants and working in close contact with the Albanian mafia.
That was all. No signature, no note of explanation. He looked at the postmark: Cosenza. What the hell did it mean? Perhaps there was an explanation. Maybe it was some kind of internal vendetta. In all probability, his colleague Vattiato had mentioned how Montalbano had made an ass of himself when he called up to say he’d found the body of someone already dead and buried, and one of the people present, apparently someone not too fond of Vattiato, had decided to send the inspector the clipping on the sly. Because that short article, if read properly, somewhat undermined the certainty of Vattiato’s position. The anonymous sender of that clipping was actually posing a very simple question: If the man torn to pieces by that train was identified as Ernesto Errera solely on the basis of his identification papers and a wedding ring, how could anyone be absolutely certain that those mortal remains really belonged to Errera? Might it not have been Errera himself who killed someone bearing a vague resemblance to him, put his own wallet in the man’s pocket, his wedding ring on his finger, and then laid him down in the tracks in such a way as to make him unrecognizable once the train had run over him? And why would he have done this? For obvious reasons: so the police and carabinieri would stop looking for him, and he could therefore operate in relative peace in Brindisi.
Yet no sooner had the inspector made these conjectures than they seemed like something out of a novel. He called Augello. Mimì came in with a dark face.
“Not feeling well?”
“Leave me alone, Salvo. I was up all night helping Beba. This has been a very difficult pregnancy. What did you want?”
“Some advice. But I want you to hear something first. Catarella!”
“Yer orders, Chief!”
“Cat, tell Inspector Augello your theory about Errera, the same way you told it to me.”
Catarella puffed himself up.
“I tole the Chief Inspector as how maybe, just maybe, it was possible the dead guy came back to life and then went back to death in the water.”
“Thanks, Cat. You can go now.”
Mimì was looking at him dumbfounded.
“Well?” the inspector prodded him.
“Listen, Salvo. Until a minute ago, I thought your resignation would be a tragedy for all of us. But now, seeing your mental condition, I’m thinking the sooner you go, the better. What is this? So now you’re starting to take the nonsense that passes between Catarella’s ears seriously? Back to death in the water?”
Without saying a word, Montalbano handed him the newspaper clipping.
Mimì read it through twice. Then he set it down on the desk.
“What do you think it means?” he asked.
“That someone wanted to let me know that there’s a chance—a remote one, admittedly—that the body buried in Cosenza is not Ernesto Errera’s,” said Montalbano.
“The piece you had me read,” said Mimì, “was written by a reporter two or three days after the body’s remains were found. And it doesn’t say whether our Cosenza colleagues did any further, more serious investigation that could have led to a more definite identification. Dental checks, fingerprints, that kind of thing. Which they surely must have done. And if you start digging and trying to find out more about the case, you risk falling into the trap they’ve set for you.”
“What are you talking about?!”
“Do you have any idea who sent you the clipping?”
“Maybe somebody from Cosenza Police who overheard Vattiato ragging me and wanted to give me a chance—”
“Salvo, do you know Vattiato?”
“Not very well. He’s a surly—”
“I worked with him before coming here. He’s a son of a bitch.”
“But why would he send me the article?”
“To arouse your curiosity and make you start asking questions about Errera. So he can have the whole police department of Cosenza laughing at you.”
Montalbano stood up halfway out of his chair, searched through the papers scattered helter-skelter over his desk, and found Errera’s dossier and photos.
“Have another look at these, Mimì.”
Holding the dossier with Errera’s photo in his left hand, Mimì picked up, one by one, the computerized reconstructions of the dead man’s face with his right, comparing each of them closely with the mug shot. Then he shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Salvo. My opinion hasn’t changed. Those are two different people, even though they do look rather alike. Have anything else to tell me?”
“No,” the inspector said brusquely.
Augello became irritated.
“Salvo, I’ve got enough problems of my own to put me on edge. I don’t need you creating more.”
“Explain.”
“You want an explanation? You’re pissed off because I keep insisting that your corpse is not Errera. You’re really something, you know. Am I supposed to say, yes, they’re the same person, just to make you happy?”
He went out, slamming the door behind him.
Not five minutes later, the same door flew open, crashed against the wall, and, on the rebound, closed again.
“Sorry, Chief,” said Catarella’s voice from behind the door.
The door then began to open very slowly, just enough to allow Catarella to slide through.
“Chief, I brought you the ting Torrisi gave me which he said you was poissonally intristed in.”
It was a greatly enlarged image of a detail of the rocks below the villa in Spigonella.
“It can’t come out no better than ’at, Chief.”
“Thanks, Cat, you did an excellent job.”
A glance sufficed to convince him he’d been right.
Between the two tall rocks forming the narrow entrance of the tiny natural harbor, there was a straight, dark line, barely an inch above the water, against which the surf broke. It must have been an iron barrier that could be operated from inside the villa to prevent outsiders from entering the little harbor with any sort of craft. This might not indicate anything suspicious, of course; it might only mean that unannounced visitors were unwelcome. Studying the rocks more closely, he noticed something else that piqued his curiosity, about three feet above the water. He looked and looked until the image began to blur before his eyes.
“Catarella!”
“Yessir, Chief!”
“Get Torretta to lend you a magnifying glass.”
“Right away, Chief.”
He’d guessed right. Catarella returned with a big magnifying glass and handed it to the inspector.
“Thanks, you can go now. And close the door behind you.”
He wouldn’t want to be caught by Mimì or Fazio in a pose typical of Sherlock Holmes.
With the help of the glass, he managed to figure out what he was looking at. There were two small signal lights which, when illuminated at night or in conditions of poor visibility, would precisely mark the boundaries of the entrance, allowing anyone maneuvering a craft to enter without risk of crashing into the rocks. They must certainly have been installed by the villa’s original owner, the American smuggler, and the whole setup must have been very useful to him. Still, subsequent tenants had kept it in working order. He pondered this a long time. Slowly, he began to think he ought perhaps to go and take another, closer look—from the sea, if possible. And, most importantly, on the sly, without telling anyone.
He glanced at his watch. Ingrid would be there at any moment. He took his wallet out of his pocket to see if he had enough money for dinner. Catarella stuck his head inside the door and said, panting:
“Ahh Chief! Miss Ingrid’s ousside, waiting for you!”
Ingrid wanted the inspector to get in her car.