17
From the hallway came the loud voice of Lillo’s mother.
“Wha’d they ask you, my boy? Tell me everything, dear, you must tell your mother everything.”
It occurred to Montalbano that to be orphaned of a Southern Italian mother might not necessarily be a bad thing.
Fazio returned at once, closed the door behind him, sat down, and stared at the inspector.
“What is it? Do you not recognize me or something? Shall I introduce myself? Hello, I’m Inspector Montalbano.”
“You may feel like joking, but I don’t.”
“What’s got into you?”
“What’s got into me is the fact that you still haven’t told me what you’re thinking. Why did you ask Lillo that question about the navy?”
“Fazio, it’s not as if we’ve had a lot of free time. At any rate, here I am. I’ll tell you the conclusions I’ve come to and how I got there.”
It took him about half an hour to tell him the whole story, and when he’d finished he asked:
“So, does that make sense to you?”
“It makes enough sense, Chief, but there are a few things still on shaky ground. For example, there’s no guarantee this Nevia is the killer, just because hers is the only out-of-towner’s name in an address book from three years ago.”
“You’re right,” said the inspector. “But there are also some other things that don’t add up. Elena’s sister-in-law said that she’d broken off all contact with her prior married life. Apparently she was lying, since at least until three years ago, she still had a relationship with someone from that world.”
“And there’s another thing,” said Fazio. “If this murderess, as you call her, got so covered in blood that she needed to take a shower, how was she able to leave the house in all her bloodstained clothes? Being from out of town she would have had to take some kind of public transportation, and she would have been noticed.”
“Unless she came here in her car.”
“But then she wouldn’t have been able to get out of the car until she was back home in Friuli. She couldn’t very well have gone into some roadside restaurant to pee or gotten out to refill the gas tank . . .”
Fazio’s point was a good one, and at that moment Montalbano had an idea. He started looking for something on his desktop. He found a small piece of paper and started pressing buttons on the telephone.
“Meriam, I’m sorry, but I need you again.”
“What is it, Inspector?”
“Could you meet me in half an hour outside Elena’s front door in Via Garibaldi?”
“Certainly.”
“What are looking for?” asked Fazio.
“I’ll tell you when I get back.”
He pulled up outside Elena’s front door, parked the car, got out, and looked around. Meriam wasn’t there yet. He fired up a cigarette and had barely the time to take three drags before Meriam drove up.
“I’ll go and park.”
“I’ll wait for you upstairs,” said the inspector.
He left the front door ajar, climbed the stairs, and headed into Elena’s bedroom.
He stopped in the middle of the room, in front of the white armoire.
“Where are you?” Meriam called.
“In here. In Elena’s bedroom.”
“Hello, Inspector. Have you discovered something?”
“Maybe. But only you can help me. Could you tell me if there are any dresses missing from Elena’s armoire?”
Meriam looked at him inquisitively.
“Do you live alone, Inspector?”
“Yes, why do you ask?”
“Because otherwise you would know that no woman can really tell you exactly what is supposed to be in her wardrobe. So you can imagine how well I’d be able to tell if a dress was missing from Elena’s. She must have owned hundreds.”
“Here’s another way to look at it,” said the inspector. “On the day Elena was killed, when I came here in the afternoon, she was wearing a green dress, but it was a special sort of green . . .”
“Ultramarine,” said Meriam.
“But when she was found dead, she was wearing a different dress, which you would have no way of knowing. Do you think you could find that green dress?”
“Of course. Elena was very orderly.”
She opened the armoire, and Montalbano noticed that Elena arranged her dresses according to color. And there were many green ones, in different shades of green.
Meriam started going through them one by one. A short while later, she said:
“It’s missing. Not here. Maybe it’s in the laundry.” As she was saying this she went into the bathroom to have a look inside the hamper. “No, I can’t find it.”
“Maybe she took it to have it laundered.”
“I can check,” said Meriam, taking her cell phone out of her pocket.
A minute later they had the laundry’s answer: no dress.
“So where could it have gone to?” Meriam asked herself.
Montalbano preferred not to answer.
“Listen, there’s another favor I need to ask of you. Please come with me,” he said as they were about to go downstairs into the tailoring shop. “Remember when I last saw you, I asked you about a piece of fabric that was on the table?”
“Yes, the piece of old fabric.”
“I asked you to go and have a closer look at it, and you did. Could you do the same again?”
Meriam, a bit confused, did as she was asked.
“Then I walked over to you,” said the inspector as he approached her. “And then, all of a sudden, you made a move to get a new roll of fabric. Could you do that for me again?”
“Of course,” said the young woman.
She walked past him, turned her back to him, and reached out to the shelves.
“Okay, thanks, that’s good enough,” said Montalbano.
They went back up and down the stairs, and when they were in the doorway, the inspector said:
“Thank you so much. You’ve been extremely valuable to me, as always. By the way, do you have any news of Dr. Osman?”
“Yes, he’s taking some time off to rest. He said he was going to Tunisia, to an archaeological dig that an old friend of his is working on.”
After she left, Montalbano closed and locked the door this time, retraced his steps up the stairs and back down to the big room, and sat down in the usual armchair.
He started thinking about the movements he and Meriam had made, and as he was reviewing them, it was as if he was seeing them again.
He saw himself come into the big room followed by Meriam, then Meriam went behind the table to look at the fabric.
He saw himself approach Meriam, who then walked in front of him and reached out towards the shelves.
Cut.
The two images disappeared.
Then he and Meriam reappeared and went through the exact same motions.
Cut.
From the top again.
This time the first person entering the big room was Elena, who was speaking, but there was no sound.
She was talking to a woman of almost the same height as her, who was standing behind her.
Then Elena stopped and pointed at the table, and the second woman went and positioned herself in the exact same spot where Meriam had been standing moments before. Elena approached her and spoke again; the woman replied, Elena retorted, the woman spoke again, this time with a sneer; Elena raised her voice, but this time she did not do the same as Meriam; she didn’t pass in front of the woman but turned her back to her and reached out with one arm towards the shelf.
Cut.
He closed his eyes and concentrated deeply. He could feel himself sweating intensely from the effort. Then he felt ready and, keeping his eyes closed to avoid all distraction, he replayed the scene again from the top.
Elena came in.
She spoke to the woman following behind her.
“. . . to show you . . .”
Montalbano managed to grasp only these three words.
The other woman went over to the table and bent down to look at the cloth.
She said something that might have been: “I remember.”
Elena spoke for a long time. But this time there was no voice. Nor could he hear the words of the other woman, who again had a sneer on her face.
Still speaking, Elena then turned her back and reached out towards the shelf.
Darkness.
Montalbano saw only a pair of scissors in the air being thrust violently downwards.
More darkness.
Elena’s bloodied body now conformed perfectly to the chalk outline on the floor.
The images vanished.
He opened his eyes.
Yes, that must be what had happened.
He stood up, turned off the light in the great room, climbed the stairs, walked down the corridor, turned off the light in the corridor, went outside, and locked the front door.
“Find what you were looking for?”
“Yes,” said Montalbano. “Here’s the solution to the puzzle: The murderess—because I no longer have any doubt that it was a woman—after taking a shower, put on the dress that Elena had worn earlier that day and had probably left on the bed.”
“So what do you think you’ll do now?” asked Fazio.
“If my hypothesis is correct,” said the inspector, “this woman came down here from the north. She may have driven in her car, or she may have taken the train, or she may have flown. That’s what you need to find out.”
“Chief, if she came by car or train, we’re screwed,” said Fazio. “Our only hope is that she flew down here and then rented a car.”
“Then we’ll start with the plane hypothesis,” said Montalbano. “I’m giving you ten minutes to inform yourself.”
Fazio shot off like a ball on a tether.
He returned seven minutes later with a smile so big, it was as if he’d seen a choir of angels pass.
“You were right on target, Chief. Nevia Sirch took a plane from Trieste to Trapani on the day Elena was murdered. Her flight landed in the afternoon, and she’d already reserved a car from the car rental, which she returned the following morning, two hours before boarding the flight back to Trieste.”
They’d done it.
“Now I need another favor from you.”
“At your service.”
“Find out more about those flights: departure times, arrival times . . .”
“Why, do you want to go up there?”
“It’ll be a pain in the ass, but that’s the only place I’ll ever find the answer to all of this.”
Fazio stood up and left the room.
Montalbano looked at his watch.
Matre santa! It was already half past two. He grabbed the telephone.
“Enzo! Be sure to leave me a piece of bread.”
“Actually we’re just now sitting down at the table. We’ll wait for you.”
Montalbano was off like a rocket.
While he was eating a sumptuous seafood salad, the inspector noted that the dish was not featured on the menu. For his second course he ate a sort of potpourri of all the leftover fish parts fried up in a skillet, the kind of thing that has you licking your fingers down to the bone. In short, and in conclusion, Enzo’s family treated themselves even better than they did their customers. This was something to bear in mind. It might be better, henceforth, to arrive late at the trattoria more often.
He came out feeling heavier, to the point that it took him twice as long as usual to reach the flat rock under the lighthouse.
He put a flame to the usual cigarette.
“How’s it going?” he asked the crab staring at him from under the rock.
The crab seemed not to appreciate the question. Not only did it not reply, it disappeared underwater.
Montalbano felt as if he’d drunk an extra glass of wine.
Knowing he was just a few steps away from solving the case made his blood flow faster than usual through his veins. He observed that if the murderess hadn’t made the biggest mistake of her life—that is, forgetting on the table the scrap of scarf she’d used to clean the scissors—the investigation would still be lost at sea.
That scarf was the key to everything.
But if it had also been the motive for the murder, this meant that the unknown woman—or rather, the woman named Nevia Sirch—had had something to do with the death of Franco Guida.
This second hypothesis had yet to be verified.
He therefore had no choice but to take the route he’d already told Fazio he would take: to go to Friuli and talk to Nevia.
He didn’t feel one bit pleased about this choice; but it was his duty to make it.
He decided to smoke a second cigarette. It was a nice day, and he filled his lungs with sea air thinking—and already feeling melancholy about it—that where he was going there wasn’t so much as a hint of sea air.
He started telling himself that if he ran into even the slightest wisp of fog he would be lost. The two or three times in his life that he’d found himself inside a fog bank he’d actually gone into a panic, feeling as if he was the only survivor left on the face of the earth.
A short while later, he sighed long and deep, stood up, and headed back to the office.
“I’ve got all the schedules, Chief,” said Fazio. “As I said, there’s a morning flight, at ten, from Trapani to Trieste, and then the same plane flies back to Trapani in the afternoon.”
“Do you know how long it takes to drive from Trieste to Bellosguardo?”
“About two hours, Chief, if there’s no fog.”
The mere mention of the word “fog” elicited a long sigh from Montalbano.
“So I’m going to have to rent a car at the Trieste airport?” he asked dejectedly.
“Of course,” said Fazio.
Montalbano imagined the scene: him inside a car that stank of car deodorant, lost, with no chance of finding his way, in a secluded mountain pass, maybe even the same one where they’d found Őtzi, the iceman.
“With a driver,” said the inspector.
“What?”
“The car. I want a driver for it. I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket, if I have to.”
“I’ll arrange everything,” said Fazio. “I’ll call some of our colleagues in Trapani. When do you want to leave?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll go to the commissioner’s right now and explain everything. See you back here in about two hours.”
“Please be brief,” Bonetti-Alderighi said brusquely. “I haven’t got much time.”
“I’ll be telegraphic,” said Montalbano. “Found likely killer Elena Biasini. Stop. Request authoriz—”
“Knock it off, Montalbano,” the commissioner snapped, as though bitten by a viper. “This is no time for jokes.”
“But I wasn’t joking, sir. I really didn’t want to waste any of your time . . .”
“Stop being a wise guy and tell me everything in full detail.”
And so the inspector began telling the whole story.
The commissioner sat there without interrupting him even once. When Montalbano had finished, Bonetti said:
“Now go and report all that to the prosecutor.”
“No,” said Montalbano, “I don’t think it’s time for that yet.”
“What do you intend to do, then?”
“I would like authorization to go and talk personally with the suspect in the province of Udine. In the fog.”
“Eh?” said the commissioner, not understanding. “What’s this about fog?”
“Er, nothing, sir. I was speaking metaphorically.”
The commissioner thought about this for a moment, to the point that Montalbano felt he had to prod him a little.
“Is there some problem with that?”
“My good man, the whole thing is starting to look like a violation of territorial jurisdiction. If I don’t have in hand a written and confirmed request based on some minimum of evidence, I can’t ask for a reimbursement of your expenses for travel, accommodation, car rental . . .”
“Tell you what,” said the inspector. “I’ll pay for everything myself, and that’ll be that.”
“I cannot allow you to do that,” the commissioner said firmly.
“Then I request two days’ leave,” the inspector replied with equal firmness.
“I’ll grant you your two days, Montalbano. But you should proceed very carefully. If you need to make an arrest, you’ll have to call the local authorities into action to do it for you.”
“All right,” said the inspector.
“I’ve done everything,” said Fazio. “The people in Trapani already have your reservations. If you give me the authorization from the prosecutor’s office, I’ll pass that on to them right away.”
“No, Fazio. There’s no authorization. I’m going for my own amusement. I just suddenly felt like having a coffee in the central piazza of Bellosguardo.”
“So should I buy you the ticket?”
“Right you are, Fazio. Just one way. ’Cause I might find a good trattoria there and decide to move to Bellosguardo.”
“Okay. Gallo’ll come and pick you up tomorrow morning at seven-thirty.”
Fazio was about to go out, but Montalbano stopped him.
“Everything arranged with the driver?”
“Yes. They even asked whether I wanted a man or a woman.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“A woman, Chief.”
“Well done.”
On top of everything else, Triestine women were famous for being beautiful, so that if and when he got lost in the fog with her, it would be a pleasant experience.
Fazio wouldn’t let him leave the station until he’d signed some urgent documents.
When he got home it was eight p.m.
He decided to call Livia and tell her he had to leave Vigàta for two days to go to Palermo, for a meeting of law enforcement functionaries.
“So you would rule out any chance of coming to see me?”
“Livia, it breaks my heart, but I don’t see how I could manage . . .”
“All right, then, have a pleasant journey and a good night,” Livia said snarkily, hanging up.
The feast he’d eaten late on his lunch break didn’t prevent him from having a peek at what Adelina had made for him.
Luckily he found a rather light dish. For once, his housekeeper had turned her back to the sea and gone into the countryside: a pitaggio of fava beans, peas, and artichokes.
To judge from the aroma, Adelina had outdone herself!
Later, when bringing the first bite to his lips, he awarded Adelina a gold medal for the dish.
When he’d finished eating, he went down to the beach and started walking along the water’s edge.
For an hour he tried to plan his first meeting with the murderess. Was it better to accuse her right off the bat, or to let her stew in her own juices before moving on to direct questioning?
He decided in the end that he would make his moves depending on how the woman reacted once she learned that he was Inspector Montalbano of the Vigàta Police.
At this point he stopped in his tracks, assailed by a very real concern: What if, upon arriving in Bellosguardo—assuming of course that he managed to get there—the woman wasn’t there? Maybe she’d taken a few days’ vacation, and it was anybody’s guess where she’d gone . . . Or maybe she worked somewhere outside of town . . .
The best thing would be to ask around for information. And to find out, first of all, if there was a police or carabinieri station there.
He went back home and sat down in front of the telephone, and the first thing that came to hand was Elena’s little red address book.
Without realizing what he was doing, he dialed the number for Nevia Sirch.
“Hello, who is this?”
He immediately recognized the same voice as the last time.
“Am I speaking with Signora Nevia Sirch?”
“Yes, but who is this?”
“This is Inspector Montalbano. I’m calling from Vigàta.”
He stopped, waiting for her reaction.
“Vigàta? I have a very dear friend in Vigàta,” said the woman, showing no surprise whatsoever.
“That’s precisely why I’m calling. I wanted to talk about her.”
“Why? Has something happened?”
“Unfortunately I have some very bad news.”
“Oh, my God!” said the woman.
“Elena Biasini has been murdered.”
It was as though the person at the other end of the line had vanished into nothingness. No matter how hard he tried to prick up his ears, Montalbano couldn’t hear any breathing. He became convinced they’d been cut off.
“Hello!” he said. “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” the woman replied, practically whispering. Then she immediately said: “Excuse me for just a second.”
Montalbano started counting. He’d reached twenty-five when she returned, and she asked only one question.
“Who did it?”
“We don’t know yet. That’s why I’m calling. The killer seems not to have had any plausible motive.”
“But how . . . how . . . how was she killed?”
“Stabbed to death with a pair of scissors.”
The woman started crying. Audibly, this time.
“You must try to be brave,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Inspector, but it’s such a terrible blow. I can barely stand up. Please wait a second while I get a chair.”
She returned a few moments later.
“And what do you want from me?”
“I’ve been hearing what all the people who were close to Elena have to say, and so I—”
“I’m sorry, but who gave you my phone number?”
“I found it in an old address book of Elena’s . . .”
“Ah . . .” said the woman, adding nothing more.
“I wanted to know if we could meet tomorrow in Bellosguardo, in the afternoon. At three. Would that work for you?”
“I’ll be waiting for you at Via Orta, number 3. But now you’ll have to excuse me, I’m unable to speak anymore,” said the woman, hanging up.
Her behavior seemed perfectly normal. To the point that Montalbano began to wonder whether he’d got it all wrong.