“Stop using obscenities!” Livia screamed from the kitchen.
“Didn’t Catarella tell you?”
“Catarella didn’t tell me a goddamn thing—”
“Are you going to stop or not?” yelled Livia.
“—all he told me was something about a motorbike being seized, but not by the Carabinieri or the Customs police. Why the fuck—”
“Knock it off, I said!”
“—are you guys bothering me with this stuff? Go see if it was the traffic police!”
“No, Chief. If anything was seized, it was the girl who owned the motorbike.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s been a kidnapping, Chief.”
A kidnapping? In Vigàta?
“Tell me where you are and I’ll come right over,” he said without thinking.
“Chief, it’s too complicated to find your way out here. If it’s all right with you, a squad car’ll be at your place in about an hour. That way you won’t have to tire yourself out by driving.” “Okay.”
He went in the kitchen. Livia had put the coffeepot on the burner and was now spreading the tablecloth over the small kitchen table. To smooth it out, she had to bend all the way forward, so that the inspector’s shirt she was wearing became too short.
Montalbano couldn’t restrain himself. He took two steps forward and embraced her tightly from behind.
“What’s got into you?” Livia asked. “Come on, let go!
What are you trying to do?”
“Guess.”
“You might hurt yo—”
The coffee rose in the pot. Nobody turned off the flame.
The coffee burned. The flame remained lit. The coffee started boiling. Nobody bothered with it. The coffee spilled out of the pot, extinguishing the flame on the burner. The gas continued to flow.
“Doesn’t it smell strangely of gas?” Livia asked languidly a bit later, freeing herself from the inspector’s embrace.
“I don’t think so,” said Montalbano, whose nostrils were filled with the scent of her skin.
“Oh my God!” Livia exclaimed, running to turn off the gas.
Montalbano had scarcely twently minutes to shower and shave. His coffee—a fresh pot had been made in the meantime—he drank on the run, as the doorbell was already ringing. Livia didn’t even ask where he was going or why.
She’d opened the window and lay stretched out, arms over her head, basking in the sunlight.
o o o
In the car Gallo told the inspector what he knew about the situation. The kidnapped girl—since there was no longer any doubt that she had in fact been kidnapped—was named Susanna Mistretta. A very pretty girl, she was enrolled at Palermo University and getting ready to take her first exam. She lived with her father and mother in a country villa about three miles outside of town. That was where they were heading. About a month earlier, Susanna had started going to a girlfriend’s house in the early evening to study, usually driving home on her moped around eight.
The previous evening, when she didn’t come home at the usual time, her father had waited about an hour before calling the girl’s friend, who told him that Susanna had left as usual at eight o’clock, give or take a couple of minutes. Then he’d phoned a boy whom his daughter considered her boyfriend, and the kid seemed surprised, since he’d seen Susanna in the afternoon in Vigàta, before she went to study with her friend, and the girl had told him she wouldn’t be coming with him to the movies that evening because she had to go home to study.
At this point the father started to get worried. He’d tried reaching his daughter several times on her cell phone, but every time the phone was turned off. At a certain point the home phone rang, and the father rushed to pick up, thinking it was Susanna. But it was the brother.
“Susanna has a brother?”
“No, she’s an only child.”
“So, whose brother was it?” Montalbano asked in exasper-ation. Between Gallo’s speeding and the pothole-riven road they were traveling on, his head was not only numb, but the wound in his shoulder was throbbing.
The brother in question was the brother of the father of the kidnapped girl.
“Don’t any of these people have names?” asked the inspector, losing patience, hoping that knowing their names might help him follow the story a little better.
“Of course they do, why wouldn’t they? It’s just that nobody told me what they are,” said Gallo. He went on: “Anyway, the kidnapped girl’s father’s brother, who’s a doctor—” “Just call him the doctor uncle,” Montalbano suggested.
The doctor uncle had called to find out how his sister-in-law was doing. That is, the kidnapped girl’s mother.
“Why? Is she sick?”
“Yessir, Chief. Very sick.”
And so the father told the doctor uncle—
“No, in this case you should say his brother.” Anyway, the father told his brother that Susanna had disappeared and asked him to come to the house to lend a hand with his sick wife, to free him up so he could look for his daughter.
But the doctor had to take care of some obligations first, and it was already past eleven when he arrived.
The father then got in his car and very slowly retraced the route that Susanna normally took to go home. At that hour in winter there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere, and very few cars. He went back and forth along the same route a second time, feeling more and more bereft of hope. At a certain point a motorbike pulled up beside him. It was Susanna’s boyfriend, who had phoned the villa and was told by the doctor uncle that there still was no news. The kid told the father that he planned to scour every street in Vigàta, to see if he could at least find Susanna’s motorbike, which he knew well. The father retraced Susanna’s route from her friend’s house to his own home four more times, occasionally stopping to examine even the spots on the pavement. But he seemed not to notice anything unusual.
By the time he gave up and went home, it was almost three o’clock in the morning. At this point he suggested that his doctor brother phone all the hospitals in Vigàta and Montelusa, telling them who he was. But they all answered in the negative, which on the one hand set their minds at rest, but on the other alarmed them even further. Thus they wasted another hour.
At this point in the story—they’d been driving in the open countryside for a while and were now on a dirt road—
Gallo pointed to a house about fifty yards ahead.
“That’s the villa.”
Montalbano didn’t have time to look at it, however, because Gallo suddenly turned right, onto another dirt road, this one in pretty bad shape.
“Where are we going?”
“To where they found the motorbike.”
It was Susanna’s boyfriend who had found it. After searching in vain up and down the streets of Vigàta, he’d taken a much longer route back to the villa. And there, about two hundred yards from Susanna’s house, he’d spotted the abandoned moped and run to tell the father.
Gallo pulled up, stopping behind the other squad car.
When Montalbano got out, Mimì Augello came up to him.
“I don’t like the smell of this, Salvo. That’s why I had to bother you. But things don’t look good.”
“Where’s Fazio?”
“Inside the house, with the girl’s father. In case the kidnappers call.”
“Mind telling me the father’s name?”
“Salvatore Mistretta.”
“What’s he do?”
“Used to be a geologist. He’s been halfway across the world. Here’s the motorbike.”
It was leaning against a low dry-wall outside a vegetable garden. The bike was in perfect condition, no scratches or scrapes, just a little dusty. Galluzzo was in the garden, seeing if he could find anything of interest. Imbrò and Battiato were doing the same along the dirt road.
“Susanna’s boyfriend . . . what’s his name?”
“Francesco Lipari.”
“Where is he?”
“I sent him home. He was exhausted and worried to death.”
“I was thinking. You don’t think maybe it was Lipari himself who moved the motorbike? Maybe he found it on the ground, in the middle of the road—”