He sat down on the bench, his legs giving out from under him. He had to drink a whole glass of wine to regain a little strength.
He realized that it must also have been late one night—on one of many nights of anguish, torment, and rage—that the other spider, too, the one whose face he’d just glimpsed, had decided to weave a gigantic web.
And with patience, tenacity, and determination, never once turning back, that spider had woven its web to completion. It was a marvel of geometry, a masterpiece of logic.
Yet it was impossible for that web not to contain at least one mistake, however minuscule, one tiny, barely visible im-perfection.
He got up, went inside, and started looking for a magnifying glass that he knew he had somewhere. Ever since Sherlock Holmes, no detective is a true detective if he doesn’t have a magnifying glass within reach.
He opened every last drawer in the house, made a mess of the place—coming across a letter he’d received from a friend six months before and never opened, he opened it, read it, learned that his friend Gaspano had become a grandfather (Shit! But weren’t he and Gaspano the same age?)—searched some more, then decided there was no point in continuing. He could only conclude, apparently, that he was not a true detective. Elementary, my dear Watson. He went back out on the veranda, leaned on the railing, and bent all the way forward until his nose was almost at the center of the spiderweb. Then he recoiled a little, suddenly scared that the lightning-fast spider might bite his nose, mistaking it for prey. He studied the web carefully, to the point that his eyes began to water. No, the web appeared geometrically perfect, but in reality it wasn’t. There were at least three or four points where the distance between one strand and the next was irregular, and there was even one spot where two threads zigzagged for very brief stretches.
Feeling reassured, he smiled. Then his smile turned to laughter. A spiderweb! There wasn’t a single cliché more used and abused to describe a scheme plotted in the shadows. He’d never employed it before. Apparently the cliché had wanted to get back at him for his disdain, becoming a reality and forcing him to take it into consideration.
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16
Two hours later he was in his car on the road to Gallotta, eyes popping because he couldn’t remember where he was supposed to turn. At a certain point he spotted, on his right, the tree with the sign saying fresh eggs painted in red.
The path from the road led nowhere except to the little white die of a cottage where he’d been. In fact it ended there.
From a distance he noticed a car parked in the space in front of the house. He drove up the path, which was all uphill, parked near the other car, and got out.
The door was locked. Maybe the girl was entertaining a client with other intentions than buying fresh eggs.
He didn’t knock, but decided to wait a little. He smoked a cigarette, leaning against his car. As he tossed the butt on the ground, he thought he saw something appear and disappear behind the tiny barred window next to the front door that allowed air to circulate inside when the door was closed. A face, perhaps. The door then opened and a distinguished-looking, chunky man of about fifty came out, wearing gold-rimmed glasses. He was pepper-red with embarrassment.
“Won’t you come in, Inspector?” the woman called from inside.
Montalbano went in. She was sitting on the sofa-cot. Its cover was rumpled and a pillow had fallen to the floor. She was buttoning her blouse, long black hair hanging loose on her shoulders, the corners of her mouth smeared with lip-stick.
“I looked out the window and recognized you at once,” she said. “Excuse me just one minute.”
She stood up and started putting things in order. Like the first time he saw her, she was dressed up.
“How is your husband feeling?” Montalbano asked, glanc-ing at the door to the back room, which was closed.
“How’s he supposed to feel, poor man?”
When she’d finished tidying up and had wiped her mouth with a Kleenex, she asked with a smile:
“Can I make you some coffee?”
“Thank you. But I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“Are you kidding? You don’t seem like a cop. Please sit down,” she said, pulling out a cane chair for him.
“Thanks. I don’t know your name.”
“Angela. Angela Di Bartolomeo.”
“Did my colleagues come to interrogate you?”
“Inspector, I did just like you told me to do. I put on shabby clothes, put the bed in the other room . . . Nothing doing. They turned the house upside down, they even looked under my husband’s bed, they asked me questions for four hours straight, they searched the chicken coop and scared my chickens away and broke three baskets’ worth of eggs . . . And then there was one of ’em, the son of a bitch—pardon my language—who, as soon as we were alone, took advantage . . .” “Took advantage how?”
“Took advantage of me, touched my breasts. At a certain point it got to where I couldn’t take it anymore and I started crying. It didn’t matter that I kept saying I wouldn’t ever do any harm to Dr. Mistretta’s niece ’cause the doctor even gives my husband his medicines for free . . . But he just didn’t want to hear it.” The coffee was excellent.
“Listen, Angela, I need you to try and remember something.”
“I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Do you remember when you said that after Susanna was kidnapped, a car came here one night and you thought it might be a client?”
“Yessir.”
“Okay, now that things have settled down, can you calmly try to remember what you did when you heard that car’s motor?”
“Didn’t I already tell you?”
“You said you got out of bed because you thought it was a client.”
“Yessir.”
“A client who hadn’t told you he was coming, however.”
“Yessir.”
“You got out of bed, and then what did you do?”
“I came in here and turned on the light.” This was the new element, the thing the inspector had been looking for. Therefore she must also have seen something, in addition to what she’d heard.
“Stop right there. Which light?”
“The one outside. The one that’s over the door and when it’s dark it lights up the yard in front of the house. When my husband was still okay, we used to eat outside in the summer-time. The switch is right there, see it?” And she pointed to it. It was on the wall between the door and the little window.
“And then?”
“Then I looked out the window, which was half open.
But the car’d already turned around, I just barely saw it from behind.”
“Do you know anything about cars, Angela?”
“Me?” said the girl. “I don’t know the first thing!”
“But you managed to see the back of the car, you just told me.”
“Yessir.”
“Do you remember what color it was?”
Angela thought about this a moment.
“I can’t really say, Inspector. Might’ve been blue, black, dark green . . . But I’m sure about one thing: it wasn’t light, it was dark.”
Now came the hardest question.
Montalbano took a deep breath and asked it. And Angela answered at once, somewhat surprised at not having thought of it first.
“Oh, yes, that’s true!”
Then she immediately made a face, looking confused.
“But . . . what’s that got to do with it?”
“In fact it’s got nothing to do with it,” he hastened to reassure her. “I asked you because the car I’m looking for looked a lot like that one.”
He got up and held out his hand to her.
“I have to go now.”
Angela also stood up.
“You want a really, really fresh egg?”
Before the inspector could answer, she’d pulled one out of a basket. Montalbano took it, tapped it twice against the table, and sucked out the contents. It had been years since he’d last tasted an egg like that.