“In what way?”
“Well, he became nervous, never laughed. In fact, he’d pick a fight and make a big to-do over the smallest things.”
“Any idea what might have been the cause?”
“One day I asked him about it. It was a health problem, he said. The first stages of arteriosclerosis, that’s what his doctor told him.”
o o o
The first thing he did in Lapècora’s office was sit down at the typewriter. He opened the drawer to the little secretarial table and found some stationery printed with the old letterhead and yellowed with age. He took out a sheet, reached into his coat pocket, and removed the envelope that Signora Antonietta had given him. He copied its address on the typewriter. A foolproof test if there ever was one. The r’s jumped above the line, the a’s dropped below, and the o was a little black ball. The address on the anonymous letter’s envelope had been written by this same typewriter.
He looked outside. Signora Vasile Cozzo’s housekeeper, standing on a stepladder, was cleaning the windows. He opened the window and called out.
“Hello! Is the signora there?”
“Wait,” said the girl, giving him a dirty look. Clearly she wasn’t very fond of the inspector.
She stepped down from the ladder, disappeared, and a short while later Signora Clementina’s head appeared just above the sill. There was no need for them to raise their voices so much, as they were less than ten yards away from each other.
“Excuse me, signora, but if I’m not mistaken, you told me that, sometimes, the young man, do you remember . . . ?”
“Yes, the young man.”
“You said he used to type sometimes. Is that right?”
“Yes, but he didn’t use the office typewriter. He would bring his own portable.”
“Are you sure? Might it have been a computer?”
“No, it was a portable typewriter.”
What kind of cockamamie way to conduct an investigation was this? He suddenly realized the two of them must look like a couple of old housewives gossiping across their balconies.
After saying good-bye to Clementina, to regain some semblance of dignity in his own eyes he began a detailed search of the office like a true professional, looking for the package the printer had sent. But he never found it; nor did he find a single envelope or sheet of paper with the new letterhead in English.
They’d removed everything.
As for the portable typewriter Lapècora’s bogus nephew used to bring along instead of using the office machine, he thought he’d come up with a plausible explanation for this.
The young man had no use for the keyboard of the old Olivetti. Apparently, he needed one with a different alphabet.
1 0 1
h2> He left the office, got in his car, and drove to Montelusa. At Customs Police headquarters, he asked for Captain Aliotta, who was his friend. They let him in immediately.
“It’s been so long since we spent an evening together!
I’m not blaming you. It’s my fault, too,” said Aliotta, embracing Montalbano.
“Let’s forgive each other and try to rectify the situation soon.”
“Okay. What can I do for you?”
“I need the name of that sergeant of yours I spoke to on the phone last year, the one who gave me that precious information about the supermarket in Vigàta. The case of the weapons traffic, remember?” “Of course. His name’s Laganà.”
“Could I speak with him?”
“What’s it about?”
“He would have to come to Vigàta for half a day at the most, I think. I’d like him to examine the files of a business owned by that guy who was murdered in an elevator.”
“I’ll call him for you.”
Sergeant Laganà was a burly fifty-year-old with a crew cut and gold-rimmed glasses. Montalbano took an immediate liking to him.
He explained in great detail what he wanted from him and gave him the keys to Lapècora’s office. The sergeant looked at his watch.
“I can be in Vigàta at three o’clock this afternoon, if the captain has no objection.”
o o o
Just to be thorough, once the inspector had finished chatting with Aliotta, he asked if he could use his phone and called headquarters, where he hadn’t shown his face since the previous evening.
“Chief, is that really you yourself ?”
“Cat, it’s really me myself. Been any calls?”
“Yessir, Chief. Two for Inspector Augello, one for—”
“Cat, I don’t give a fuck about other people’s phone calls!”
“But you asked me yourself just now!”
“All right, Cat: have there been any phone calls person ally for me myself ?”
By making the necessary linguistic adjustments, maybe he would get a sane answer.
“Yessir, Chief. There was one. But it didn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean, it didn’t make sense?”
“I couldn’t understand anything. But I think they were relatives.”
“Whose relatives?”
“Yours, Chief. They called you by your first name: Salvo, Salvo.”
“Then what?”
“Then they sounded like they were in pain, or sneezing or something. They said: ‘Aiee . . . sha! Aiee . . . sha!’ ”
“Wait, who was ‘they’? Was it a man or a woman?”
“An old woman, Chief.”
Aisha! He dashed out the door, forgetting to say good-bye to Aliotta.
o o o
Aisha was sitting in front of her house, upset and weeping.
No, Karima and François had not shown up; she’d called him for another reason. She stood up and led him inside. The room had been turned upside down; they’d even gutted the mattress. Want to bet they’d taken the bank book? No, that they didn’t find, Aisha said reassuringly.
Upstairs, where Karima lived, it was even worse. Some flagstones had been torn out of the floor; one of François’s toys, a little plastic truck, was in pieces. The photographs were all gone, including the ones advertising Karima’s charms. A good thing I took a few myself, the inspector thought. But they must have made a tremendous racket.
Where had Aisha run off to in the meantime? She hadn’t run off, the old woman explained. The previous day she’d gone to see a friend in Montelusa. It got late, and so she slept over.
A stroke of luck: if they’d found her at home, they would certainly have cut her throat. They must have had keys; neither of the doors, in fact, had been forced. Surely they’d come for the photos; they wanted to erase the very memory of what Karima looked like.
Montalbano told the old woman to gather her things together. He was going to take her himself to her friend’s house in Montelusa. She would have to remain there for a few days, just to be safe. Aisha glumly agreed to go. The inspector explained that while she was getting ready, he was going out to the nearest tobacco shop and would be back in ten minutes at most.
o o o
A short distance before the tobacco shop, in front of the Villaseta elementary school, there was a noisy gathering of ges-ticulating mothers and weepy children. They were laying siege to two municipal policemen from Vigàta who’d been detached to Villaseta and whom Montalbano knew. He drove on, bought his cigarettes, but on the way back, curiosity got the better of him. He pushed through the crowd, invoking his authority, deafened by the shouting.