Then why had they freed the girl?
He knelt, reached down, and grabbed the bag, which was heavy, pulled it out, and set it down on the ground. Taking a deep breath, he opened it. It was filled with wads not of bills, but of glossy old magazine clippings.
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The shock sort of pushed him backwards, knocking him down on his ass. Mouth open in astonishment, he began asking himself some questions. What did this discovery mean? That Engineer Peruzzo himself had filled the bag with scrap paper instead of euros? Was Peruzzo, as far as he knew, a man capable of taking the extreme sort of gamble that would endanger the life of his niece? After thinking about this a moment, he concluded that the engineer was indeed capable of this and more. In that case, however, the kidnappers’ actions became inexplicable. Because there were only two possibilities, there was no getting around it: either the kidnappers had opened the bag on the spot, realized they’d been hoodwinked, and decided nevertheless to release the girl, or else they had fallen into the trap—that is, they’d seen Peruzzo put the bag in the well, had no chance to check it immediately and, trusting in appearances, had given the order to free Susanna.
Or had Peruzzo somehow known that the kidnappers wouldn’t be able to open the bag at once and check its contents, and had gambled against time? Wait. Wrong line of reasoning. No one could have prevented the kidnappers from opening the well whenever they saw fit. Since delivery of the ransom did not necessarily mean the immediate release of the girl, against what “time” could Peruzzo have gambled? None whatsoever. No matter which way one looked at it, the engineer’s trick seemed insane.
As he sat there, stunned, questions riddling his brain like machine-gun fire, he heard a strange sort of ringing and couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He decided it must be an approaching flock of sheep. But the sound didn’t come any closer, even though it was very close already. Then he realized it must be his cell phone, which he never used and had only put in his pocket on this occasion.
“Chief, is that you? Fazio here.”
“What is it?”
“Chief, Inspector Minutolo wants me to inform you of something that just happened about forty-five minutes ago. I tried you at the station, at home, and finally Catarella remembered that—” “Okay, fine, tell me what it is.”
“Well, Inspector Minutolo called Luna to find out if he’d heard from Peruzzo. The lawyer said Peruzzo paid the ransom last night and had even explained to him where he’d left the money. And so Inspector Minutolo rushed to the place, which is along the road to Brancato, to conduct a preliminary search.
Unfortunately, the newsmen followed right behind him.”
“In short, what did Minutolo want?”
“He says he’d like you to meet him there. I’ll tell you what’s the quickest way to get—”
But Montalbano had already hung up. Minutolo, his men, and a swarm of journalists, photographers, and cameramen might arrive at any moment. And if they saw him, how would he explain what he was doing there?
Gee, what a surprise! I was just out tilling the fields . . .
He hastily lowered the duffel bag into the well, closed it with the stone slab, ran to the car, started up the engine, began turning the car around, then stopped. If he went back the same way he’d come, he would surely run into Minutolo and the festive caravan of cars behind him. No, he had best continue on to Lower Brancato.
It took him barely ten minutes to get there. A clean little town, with a tiny piazza, church, town hall, café, bank, trattoria, and shoe store. All around the piazza were granite benches, with some ten men sitting on them, all aging, old, or decrepit.
They weren’t talking, weren’t moving at all. For a fraction of a second, Montalbano thought they were statues, splendid examples of hyperrealist art. But then one of them, apparently belonging to the decrepit category, suddenly threw his head backwards and laid it against the back of the bench. He was either dead, as seemed quite likely, or had been overcome by a sudden desire to sleep.
The country air had whetted the inspector’s appetite. He looked at his watch. Just short of one o’clock. He headed towards the trattoria, then stopped short. What if some journalist got the brilliant idea to make his phone calls from Lower Brancato? No question, of course, that there would be any restaurants in Upper Brancato. But he didn’t feel like letting his stomach go empty for too long. The only solution was to run the risk and enter the trattoria in front of him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone come out from behind the counter and stop to stare at him. The man, fat and forty, approached him with a big smile.
“But . . . aren’t you Inspector Montalbano?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Iss a real plisure. I’m Michele Zarco.”
He declaimed his first and last names in the tone of someone known to one and all. But since the inspector kept staring at him without a word, he clarified:
“I’m Catarella’s cussin.”
o o o
Michele Zarco, land surveyor and vice mayor of Brancato, was his salvation. First, he brought him to his house for an informal meal—that is, to eat whatever was available. Nuttin spicial, as he put it. Signora Angila Zarco, a woman of few words, blonde to the point of looking washed out, served them cavatuna in tomato sauce that were eminently respectable, followed by coniglo all’agrodolce—sweet-and-sour rabbit—from the day before. Now, preparing coniglo all’agrodolce is a complicated matter, because everything depends on the right propor-tion of vinegar to honey and on making the pieces of rabbit blend properly with the caponata in which it must cook. Signora Zarco clearly knew how to go about this, and for good measure had thrown in a sprinkling of toasted ground almonds over the whole thing. On top of this, it is well-known that the coniglo all’agrodolce you eat the day it is made is one thing, but when eaten the next day it is something else entirely, because it gains considerably in flavor and aroma. In short, Montalbano had a feast.
Then Vice Mayor Zarco suggested they visit Upper Brancato, just to aid digestion. Naturally they went in Zarco’s car.
After taking a road that consisted of one sharp turn after another and looked like the X-ray of an intestine, they stopped in the middle of a cluster of houses that would have made an Expressionist set-designer’s day. Not a single house stood up straight. They all leaned to the left or the right at angles so extreme that the Tower of Pisa would have looked perfectly per-pendicular by comparison. Three or four houses were actually attached to the hillside and jutted out horizontally, as if they had suction cups holding them in place, hidden in the founda-tions. Two old men walked by talking to each other, but rather loudly, because one was listing sharply to the right, the other to the left. Perhaps they’d been conditioned by the inclina-tions of the houses in which they lived.
“Shall we go back home for coffee? The missus makes a good cup,” said Zarco, when he saw that Montalbano, under the influence of the surroundings, had started walking askew himself.
When Signora Angila opened the door for them, to Montalbano she looked like a child’s drawing: almost albino, her hair braided, her cheeks red. She seemed agitated.