Montalbano was covered in sweat; the discomfort he felt irritated him, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“I don’t see anything strange about that.”
“Oh, no? What about the label of the briefs?”
“Yes, I can see it. So?”
“You shouldn’t be able to see it. This kind of brief—and if you come into my husband’s bedroom, I’ll show you others—has the label on the back and on the inside. If you can see them, as you can, it means they were put on backwards. And you can’t tell me that Silvio when getting dressed that morning put them on that way and never noticed. He took a diuretic, you see, and had to go to the bathroom many times a day and could have easily put them properly back on at any point of the day. And this can mean only one thing.”
“What’s that?” the inspector asked, stunned by the woman’s lucid, pitiless analysis, which she made without shedding a tear, as though the deceased were a casual acquaintance.
“That he was naked when they surprised him, and that they forced him to get dressed in a hurry. And the only place he could have been naked was in the little house at Capo Massaria. That is why I gave you the keys. I repeat, it was a criminal act against my husband’s public image, but only half successful. They wanted to make him out to be a pig, so they could feed him to the pigs at any moment. It would have been better if he hadn’t died; forced to cover himself, he would have done whatever they asked. The plan did, however, succeed in part: all my husband’s men have been excluded from the new leadership. Rizzo alone escaped; actually, he gained by it.”
“And why did he?”
“That is up to you to discover, if you so desire. Or else you can stop at the shape they’ve given the water.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“I’m not Sicilian; I was born in Grosseto and came to Montelusa when my father was made prefect here. We owned a small piece of land and a house on the slopes of the Amiata and used to spend our summers there. I had a little friend, a peasant boy, who was younger than me. I was about ten. One day I saw that my friend had put a bowl, a cup, a teapot, and a square milk carton on the edge of a well, had filled them all with water, and was looking at them attentively.
“ ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. And he answered me with a question in turn.
“ ‘What shape is water?’
“ ‘Water doesn’t have any shape!’ I said, laughing. ‘It takes the shape you give it.’ ”
At that moment the door to the library opened, and an angel appeared.
11
The angel—Montalbano at that moment didn’t know how else to define him—was a young man of about twenty, tall, blond, very tanned, with a perfect body and an ephebic aura. A pandering ray of sun had taken care to bathe him in light in the doorway, accentuating the Apollonian features of his face.
“May I come in,
zia
?”
“Come in, Giorgio, come in.”
While the youth moved toward the sofa, weightlessly, his feet seeming not to touch the ground but merely to glide across the floor, navigating a sinuous, almost spiral path, brushing past objects within reach or, more than brushing, lightly caressing them, Montalbano caught a glance from the signora that told him to put the photograph he was holding in his pocket. He obeyed, while the widow quickly put the other photos back in the yellow envelope, which she placed beside her on the sofa. When the young man came near, the inspector noticed that his blue eyes were streaked with red, puffy from tears, and ringed with dark circles.
“How do you feel,
zia
?” he asked in an almost singing voice, then knelt elegantly beside the woman, resting his head in her lap. In Montalbano’s mind flashed the memory, bright as if under a floodlight, of a painting he had seen once—he couldn’t remember where—a portrait of an English lady with a grey-hound in the exact same position as the one the young man had assumed.
“This is Giorgio,” the woman said. “Giorgio Zìcari, son of my sister Elisabetta and Ernesto Zìcari, the criminal lawyer. Perhaps you know him.”
As she spoke, the woman stroked his hair. Giorgio gave no indication of having understood what was said. Visibly absorbed in his devastating grief, he didn’t even bother to turn toward the inspector. The woman, moreover, had taken care not to tell her nephew who Montalbano was and what he was doing in their house.
“Were you able to sleep last night?”
Giorgio’s only reply was to shake his head.
“I’ll tell you what you should do. Did you notice that Dr. Capuano’s here? Go talk to him, have him prescribe you a strong sedative, then go back to bed.”
Without a word, Giorgio stood up fluidly, levitated over the floor with his curious, spiral manner of movement, and disappeared beyond the door.
“You must forgive him,” the lady said. “Giorgio is without doubt the one who has suffered most, and who suffers most, from the death of my husband. You see, I wanted my own son to study and find himself a position independently of his father, far from Sicily. You can perhaps imagine my reasons for this. As a result, in Stefano’s absence my husband poured all his affection on our nephew, and his love was returned to the point of idolatry. The boy even came to live with us, to the great displeasure of my sister and her husband, who felt abandoned.”
She stood up, and Montalbano did likewise.
“I’ve told you everything I thought I should tell you, Inspector. I know I’m in honest hands. You may call me whenever you see fit, at any hour of the day or night. And don’t bother to spare my feelings; I’m what they call ‘a strong woman.’ In any event, act as your conscience dictates.”
“One question, signora, which has been troubling me for some time. Why weren’t you concerned to make it known that your husband hadn’t returned . . . ? What I mean is, wasn’t it disturbing that your husband didn’t come home that night? Had it happened before?”
“Yes, it had. But, you see, he phoned me Sunday night.”
“From where?”
“I couldn’t say. He said he would be home very late. He had an important meeting and might even be forced to spend the night away.”
She extended her hand to him, and the inspector, without knowing why, squeezed it in his own and then kissed it.
Once outside, having exited by the same rear door of the villa, he noticed Giorgio sitting on a stone bench nearby, bent over, shuddering convulsively.
Concerned, Montalbano approached and saw the youth’s hands open and drop the yellow envelope and the photos, which scattered about on the ground. Apparently, spurred by a catlike curiosity, he had got hold of them when crouching beside his aunt.
“Are you unwell?”
“Not like that, oh, God, not like that!”
Giorgio spoke in a clotted voice, his eyes glassy, and hadn’t even noticed the inspector standing there. It took a second, then suddenly he stiffened, falling backwards from the bench, which had no back. Montalbano knelt beside him, trying in some way to immobilize that spasm-racked body; a white froth was beginning to form at the corners of the boy’s mouth.
Stefano Luparello appeared at the door to the villa, looked around, saw the scene, and came running.
“I was coming after you to say hello. What’s happening?”
“An epileptic fit, I think.”
They did their best to prevent Giorgio, at the height of the crisis, from biting off his tongue or striking his head violently against the ground. Then the youth calmed down, his shudders diminishing in fury.
“Help me carry him inside,” said Stefano.
The same maid who had opened up for the inspector came running at Stefano’s first call.
“I don’t want Mama to see him in this state.”
“My room,” said the girl.
They walked with difficulty down a different corridor from the one the inspector had taken upon entering. Montalbano held Giorgio by the armpits, with Stefano grabbing the feet. When they arrived in the servants’ wing, the maid opened a door. Panting, they laid the boy down on the bed. Giorgio had plunged into a leaden sleep.
“Help me to undress him,” said Stefano.
Only when the youth was stripped down to his boxers and T-shirt did Montalbano notice that from the base of the neck up to the bottom of his chin, the skin was extremely white, diaphanous, in sharp contrast to the face and the chest, which were bronzed by the sun.
“Do you know why he’s not tanned there?” he asked Stefano.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I got back to Montelusa just last Monday afternoon, after being away for months.”
“I know why,” said the maid. “Master Giorgio hurt himself in a car accident. He took the collar off less than a week ago.”
“When he comes to and can understand,” Montalbano said to Stefano, “tell him to drop by my office in Vigàta tomorrow morning, around ten.”
He went back to the bench, bent down to the ground to pick up the envelope and photos, which Stefano had not noticed, and put them in his pocket.
Capo Massaria was about a hundred yards past the San Filippo bend, but the inspector couldn’t see the little house that supposedly stood right on the point, at least according to what Signora Luparello had told him. He started the car back up, proceeding very slowly. When he was exactly opposite the cape, he espied, amid dense, low trees, a path forking off of the main road. He took this and shortly afterward found the small road blocked by a gate, the sole opening in a long dry-wall that sealed off the part of the cape that jutted out over the sea.
The keys were the right ones. Leaving the car outside the gate, Montalbano headed up a garden path made of blocks of tufa set in the ground. At the end of this he went down a small staircase, also made of tufa, which led to a sort of landing where he found the house’s front door, invisible from the landward side because it was built like an eagle’s nest, right into the rock, like certain mountain refuges.
Entering, he found himself inside a vast room facing the sea, indeed suspended over the sea, and the impression of being on a ship’s deck was reinforced by an entire wall of glass. The place was in perfect order. There was a dining table with four chairs in one corner, a sofa and two armchairs turned toward the window, a nineteenth-century sideboard full of glasses, dishes, bottles of wine and liqueur, and a television with VCR. Atop a low table beside it was a row of videocassettes, some pornographic, others not. The large room had three doors, the first of which opened onto an immaculate kitchenette with shelves packed with foodstuffs and a refrigerator almost empty but for a few bottles of champagne and vodka. The bathroom, which was quite spacious, smelled of disinfectant. On the shelf under the mirror, an electric razor, deodorants, a flask of eau de cologne. In the bedroom, which also had a large window looking onto the sea, there was a double bed covered with a freshly laundered sheet; two bedside tables, one with a telephone; and an armoire with three doors. On the wall at the head of the bed, a drawing by Emilio Greco, a very sensual nude. Montalbano opened the drawer on the bedside table with the telephone, no doubt the side of the bed Luparello usually slept on. Three condoms, a pen, a white notepad. He gave a start when he saw the pistol, a 7.65, at the very back of the drawer, loaded. The drawer to the other bedside table was empty. Opening the left-hand door of the armoire, he saw two men’s suits. In the top drawer, a shirt, three sets of briefs, some handkerchiefs, a T-shirt. He checked the briefs: the signora was right, the label was inside and in the back. In the bottom drawer, a pair of loafers and a pair of slippers. The armoire’s middle door was covered by a mirror that reflected the bed. That section was divided into three shelves: the topmost and middle shelves contained, jumbled together, hats, Italian and foreign magazines whose common denominator was pornography, a vibrator, sheets and pillowcases. On the bottom shelf were three female wigs on their respective stands—one brown, one blond, one red. Maybe they were part of the engineer’s erotic games. The biggest surprise, however, came when he opened the right-hand door: two women’s dresses, very elegant, on coat hangers. There were also two pairs of jeans and some blouses. In a drawer, minuscule panties but no bras. The other was empty. As he leaned forward to better inspect this second drawer, Montalbano understood what it was that had so surprised him: not the sight of the feminine apparel but the scent that emanated from them, the very same he had smelled, only more vaguely, at the old factory, the moment he’d opened the leather handbag.
There was nothing else to see. Just to be thorough, he bent down to look under the furniture. A tie had been wrapped around one of the rear feet of the bed. He picked it up, remembering that Luparello had been found with his shirt collar unbuttoned. He took the photographs out of his pocket and decided that the tie, for its color, would have gone quite well with the suit the engineer was wearing at the time of his death.
At headquarters he found Germanà and Galluzzo in a state of agitation.
“Where’s the sergeant?”
“Fazio’s with the others at a filling station, the one on the way to Marinella. There was some shooting there.”
“I’ll go there at once. Did anything come for me?”
“Yes, a package from Jacomuzzi.”
He opened it. It was the necklace. He wrapped it back up.
“Germanà, you come with me to this filling station. You’ll drop me off there and continue on to Montelusa in my car. I’ll tell you what road to take.”
He went into his office, phoned Rizzo, told him the necklace was on its way with one of his men, and added that he should hand over the check for ten million lire to the agent.
As they were heading toward the site of the shooting, the inspector explained to Germanà that he must not turn the package over to Rizzo before he had the check in his pocket and that he was to take this check—he gave him the address—to Saro Montaperto, advising him to cash it as soon as the bank opened, at eight o’clock the following morning. He couldn’t say why, and this bothered him a great deal, but he sensed that the Luparello affair was quickly drawing to a conclusion.