The telephone rang as he was finally drifting off to sleep, ever so delicately, after what seemed like hours and hours of thrashing about in bed without success. He’d tried every trick in the book, from counting sheep to counting without sheep, from trying to recall the first book of the Iliad to dredging up the opening of Cicero’s Cataline Orations. Nothing doing. There was no way. After “Quo usque tandem, Catilina,” dense fog. This was an insomnia without remedy, as it was not caused by any excessive chowdowns or onslaughts of nasty thoughts.
He turned the light on and looked at the clock: not yet five a.m. Clearly they were calling him from the station; something big must have happened. He got up lazily and went to answer.
There was another phone jack right next to his bedside table, but he hadn’t used it for quite a while because he’d become convinced that having to walk that short distance from one room to the next when woken up in the middle of the night gave him a chance to clear away the cobwebs of sleep still stubbornly clinging to the insides of his brain.
“Hello?”
His voice came out sounding not only ragged, but as though stuck together with glue.
“Riccardino here!” yelled a voice that, unlike his own, was shrill and festive.
He became irritated. How the hell could anyone be shrill and festive at five o’clock in the morning? And there was another detail that could not be ignored: He didn’t know any Riccardino. He opened his mouth to tell the guy to buzz off, but Riccardino didn’t give him time.
“What? Did you forget that we had an appointment? We’re all here already, outside the Bar Aurora, and you’re the only one missing! It’s a little cloudy at the moment, but it’s supposed to be a beautiful day!”
“I’m sorry, I really am . . . just give me ten, fifteen minutes . . . I’ll be right over.”
And he hung up and went back to bed.
Sure, it was a dastardly thing to do; he should have told the truth and said they’d dialed a wrong number. Now those guys would spend all morning waiting outside the Bar Aurora for nothing.
On the other hand, to be fair, it simply wasn’t acceptable for anyone to dial a wrong number at five o’clock in the morning and get away with it.
He no longer felt the least bit sleepy. At least Riccardino had said that it was going to be a nice day. Montalbano felt reassured.
The second phone call came in just a little after six.
“Chief, beckin’ yer partin an’ all, wha’? Did I wake yiz?”
“No, Cat, I was already awake.”
“Are ya rilly rilly sure, Chief? Or are ya sayin’ ’at jess to be p’lite?”
“No, Cat, you needn’t worry. Go ahead and talk.”
“Well, Chief, Fazio called jess now cuz ’e wannit me to say ’e got a call.”
“So why are you calling me?”
“Cuz Fazio said to me be callin’ yiz.”
“Me?”
“Nah, natchoo, Chief, Fazio.”
At this rate, the inspector would never manage to find out what had happened. So he hung up and called Fazio’s cell phone.
“What’s going on?”
“Sorry we had to bother you, Chief, but somebody got shot.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah. Two shots, right in the face. I think you’d better come and have a look.”
“Augello’s not around?”
“Have you forgotten, Chief? He went to his in-laws’ with his wife and Salvuzzo.”
Montalbano realized bitterly that asking whether Mimì Augello was available for service was a sign of the times—or, rather, a sign of time in the singular: his own, personal time and the years now weighing on his shoulders. In the past he would have rigged the deck to keep Augello away from a case, not out of envy or to screw the guy’s career prospects, but just so he wouldn’t have to share the indescribable pleasure of the solitary hunt with him. Now, instead, he would have gladly turned the investigation over to him. Of course if a case fell to him and he had no choice but to take it on, he would still dive right in, as he had always done, but these days, whenever he could, he preferred dodging it from the start.
The truth of the matter was that for a while now, he no longer felt like it. After years and years of practice he’d come to the realization that there was no one more brain-dead than someone for whom the solution to any problem was murder. So much for De Quincey and murder “as one of the fine arts”!
Morons, all of them, both the retailers, who killed out of greed, jealousy, or revenge, and the wholesalers, who massacred in bulk in the name of freedom, democracy, or worse still, in the name of God himself. Sometimes they were shrewd, in fact, and even intelligent, as Sciascia had remarked, but still they always turned out, in one way or another, to be brain-dead.
“Where’d it happen?”
“In the middle of the street, about an hour ago.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Yes.”
“So they saw the killer?”
“Well, they saw him, as far as that goes. But nobody seems able to identify him.”
What else could you expect, on this fine island of ours? You can see, but cannot identify. You’re present, but can’t say anything definite. You saw, but only vaguely, because you forgot your glasses at home. Anyway, nowadays any unlucky wretch claiming that they recognized a killer as he was killing immediately finds his life ruined, not so much by the killer himself seeking revenge as by the police, judges, and journalists who will put him repeatedly through the meat grinder at the police station, in the courtroom, and on television.
“Did they give chase?”
“Is that some kind of joke?”
What else could you expect, on this fine island of ours? Yessir, I was there, but I was unable to give chase because one of my shoes was untied. Yessir, I saw everything, but I couldn’t intervene because I suffer from rheumatism. Anyway, how brave do you have to be to start running, unarmed, after someone who’s just shot someone else and has still at least one more shot in his gun?
“Did you inform the prosecutor, the doctor, and Forensics?”
“Yes, everybody.”
He was stalling, he realized. But there was no dodging this one. And so he asked, reluctantly:
“What’s the name of the street?”
“Via Rosolino Pilo, and it’s near—”
“I know where it is. I’m on my way.”
By dint of yelling and cursing and blasting his horn until his ears rang, he managed to carve a path through a crowd of fifty or so people who’d come running to the scene like flies to shit and were now blocking the entrance to Via Rosolino Pilo to anyone, like him, coming from Via Nino Bixio. The root cause of the blockage was a police car parked across the width of the entrance to the street, with beat cops Inzolia and Verdicchio—known on the force as “the table wines”—presiding over the scene. At the far end of the street, which gave onto Via Tukory, the “wild beasts”—that is, beat cops Lupo and Leone—were also standing guard. The police force’s “chicken coop,” on the other hand—that is, Gallo and Galluzzo—were in the middle of the street with Fazio. Also visible in the middle of the street was a body lying on the ground. Not far away were three men leaning against a lowered metal shutter.
From windows, balconies, and terraces, old and young, women and men, toddlers, dogs, and cats looked down, leaning so far out they risked crashing to the pavement, all in hopes of getting a better view of what was happening. And amidst it all, a din of voices, calling, laughing, crying, praying, yelling, a great cacophony just like at the Festa di San Calò. And, as at the festa, there were people snapping photos and others filming the scene with those tiny little cell phones that nowadays even newborns know how to use.
The inspector pulled up to the sidewalk and got out of the car.
At once a lively dialogue started up over his head.
“Look! Look! It’s the inspector!”
“It’s Montalbano!”
“Who? Montalbano? The one from TV?”
“No, the real one.”
Montalbano suddenly felt extremely agitated. Some years back he’d had the brilliant idea to tell a local writer the story of a case he’d conducted, and the guy had immediately spun it into a novel. Since hardly anyone reads anymore in Italy, nothing came of it. And so, being unable to say no to that tremendous pain-in-the-ass of a man, he’d gone ahead and told him about a second case, and then a third and a fourth, which the author then wrote up in his way, using an invented language and working from his imagination. And these novels, go figure, had become the biggest sellers in Italy and were even translated abroad. And then the stories made it onto TV and enjoyed extraordinary success. And as of that moment the music changed. Now everyone recognized Inspector Montalbano and knew who he was, but only as a fictional character on television. It was an unbearable pain in the ass, something that could have come out of a play by another local author, a certain Pirandello.
At least the actor who played him was excellent. He didn’t look the least bit like him, and on top of everything else was a good ten years younger (the bastard!). Otherwise it would have been too much, and Montalbano wouldn’t have been able to walk down the street without being stopped every two steps for an autograph.
“Can’t we do something to make these people stop ogling and enjoying the show? Even crows have more decency!”
“What are we supposed to do, Chief? Fire our guns in the air?”
“And who are those guys?” Montalbano asked, gesturing with his head towards the three men sticking close to the metal shutter.
“Friends of the victim. They were with him when it happened.”
Montalbano looked at them. All in their thirties, all with crew cuts, all in gray sweatsuits, all rather athletic, and all with sunbaked faces. At the moment, however, their sporting air had dispelled, giving way to a kind of mannequin-like stiffness, probably due to fear and shock. Something occurred to the inspector.
“Are they maybe military men?” he asked, hoping.
If they turned out to be soldiers in civvies, he could bow out at once and pass the case on to the carabinieri . . .
“Nah, Chief.”
The dead man was dressed the same way, except that the front part of his sweatshirt had dark streaks and stains from the blood he’d lost, which had formed a puddle on the pavement. His face was gone, blotted out. And in his right hand was a cell phone.
Only then did Montalbano, looking around, notice that there was a sign on the closed shutter. It read: bar aurora.
He felt strangely certain—with a certainty as absolute as it was inexplicable—that the poor bastard who was shot was the same person who had called him on the phone before dawn by dialing a wrong number.
He walked over to the three men, who were huddling closely together as though cold.
“I’m Inspector Montalbano, police. What was the dead man’s name?”
The three athletes were as though asleep on their feet, the pupils in their saucer eyes spinning round and round and up and down like marbles, and surely not seeing anything. They didn’t move, didn’t answer, and couldn’t bring the person standing before them into focus.
“What was his name?” Montalbano repeated, patiently.
At last one of them, clearly making an effort, managed to bring his eyes to a halt on the inspector.
“Riccardo Lopresti,” he said softly.
“Riccardino?” asked Montalbano.
It was as if he’d said a magic word, as if he’d plugged in the cable feeding energy to the three.
Losing at once their spellbound immobility, they regained color, heat, feeling, life, and the power of speech.
“Did you know him?” asked, lips trembling, the man who’d been the first to speak.
Montalbano didn’t answer.
A second man started speaking in a low voice, almost as if praying:
“Riccardino, my God, Riccardino . . .”
The third man said nothing, but started weeping silently, his face in his hands.
A ray of sun, as sudden and sharp as a spotlight, lit up the inspector and the three athletes. Montalbano raised his head. The clouds had opened an eye; the morning gloom was dispelling. Riccardino had been right: It was going to be a beautiful day. Just not for him. But none of it mattered anymore in the least.
At this point the airborne dialogue resumed overhead.
“Wha’ss happenin’? Eh? Wha’ss happenin’?”
“What are they doing?”
It was the people who lived in the same building as the Bar Aurora. Unable to see what the inspector was doing, since he was directly below them, they were asking the people in the building across the street to fill them in.
“The inspector’s talkin’ to tree guys.”
“An’ wha’ss he askin’ ’em?”
“You can’t hear nuttin’ from up here.”
“But can’t this isspector talk a li’l louder like he does on TV?”
“Audio!” commanded some asshole from a window.
“We wanna hear!” protested another.
They were acting as if they were watching TV, and so they wanted to enjoy full audio and video, as if they’d paid for a cable subscription.
Montalbano’s cahonies went into such a vertiginous spin that he was afraid he would achieve liftoff at any moment. Fazio, who knew him inside and out, ...
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