“Motor looks fine to me,” was the officer’s diagnosis.
Then he added with a smile: “Shall we have a look at the gas tank?”
There wasn’t a drop.
“Tell you what, Mr. . . .”
“Martinez, Claudio Martinez. I’m an accountant,” said Montalbano.
No one must ever know that Inspector Montalbano was rescued by the carabinieri.
“All right, Mr. Martinez, you wait here. We’ll go to the nearest filling station and bring back enough gasoline to get you back to Vigàta.”
“You’re very kind.”
He got back in the car, fired up a cigarette, and immediately heard an ear-splitting horn blast behind him. It was the Fiacca-Vigàta bus wanting him to get out of the way. He got out and used gestures to indicate that his car had broken down. The bus driver steered around him with a great show of effort and, once past the inspector’s car, stopped at the same point where the other bus, going in the other direction, had stopped. Four people got off.
Montalbano sat there staring at the bus as it headed towards Vigàta. Then the carabinieri returned.
o o o
By the time he got to the office it was already four o’clock.
Augello wasn’t in. Fazio said he’d lost track of him since morning; Mimì’d stuck his head in at nine and then disappeared. Montalbano flew into a rage.
“Everybody does whatever he pleases around here! Anything goes! Ragonese will turn out to have been right, just wait and see!”
News? Nothing. Oh yes, the widow Lapècora phoned to inform the inspector that her husband’s funeral would be held Wednesday morning. And there was a land surveyor by the name of Finocchiaro who’d been waiting since two to speak to him.
“Do you know him?”
“By sight. He’s retired, an old guy.”
“What’s he want?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. But he seems a tad upset.”
“Let him in.”
Fazio was right. The man looked shaken. The inspector asked him to sit down.
“Could I have some water, please?” asked the land surveyor, whose throat was obviously dry.
After drinking his water, he said his name was Giuseppe Finocchiaro, seventy-five years old, unmarried, former land surveyor, now retired, residing at Via Marconi 38. Clean record, not even a traffic ticket.
He stopped, drank the last gulp of water remaining in the glass.
“On TV today, on the afternoon news, they showed a photograph. A woman and child.You know how they said to inform you if we recognized them?”
“Yes.”
Yes, period. One more syllable, at that moment, might have sparked a doubt, a change of mind.
“I know the woman. Her name’s Karima. The kid I’ve never seen before. In fact I never knew she had a son.”
“How do you know her?”
“She comes to clean my house once a week.”
“What day?”
“Tuesday mornings. She stays for four hours.”
“Tell me something. How much did you pay her?”
“Fifty thousand. But . . .”
“But?”
“Sometimes as much as two hundred thousand for extras.”
“Like blow jobs?”
The calculated brutality of the question made the surveyor first turn pale, then red.
“Yes.”
“So, let me get this straight. She would come to your house four times a month. How often did she perform these
‘extras’?”
“Once a month, twice at the most.”
“How did you meet her?”
“A friend of mine, retired like me, told me about her.
Professor Mandrino, who lives with his daughter.”
“So no extras for the professor?”
“There were extras just the same. The daughter’s a teacher, so she’s out of the house every morning.”
“What day did Karima go to the professor’s house?”
“On Saturday.”
“If you haven’t anything else to tell me, you can go, Mr.
Finocchiaro.”
“Thank you for being so understanding.”
The man stood up awkwardly and eyed the inspector.
“Tomorrow is Tuesday,” he said.
“So?”
“Do you think she’ll come?”
He didn’t have the heart to disappoint him.
“Maybe. If she does, let me know.”
o o o
Then the procession began. Preceded by his howling mother, ’Ntonio, the little boy Montalbano met at Villaseta, who’d been punched because he wouldn’t hand over his food, walked in. He’d recognized the thief in the photo they showed on TV. That was him, no doubt about it. ’Ntonio’s mother, shouting loud enough to wake the dead and hurling curses and expletives, presented her demands to the horrified inspector: thirty years for the thief, life imprisonment for the mother. And in case earthly justice did not agree, from divine justice she demanded galloping consumption for the mother and a long, debilitating illness for the boy.
The son, however, unfazed by his mother’s hysteria, shook his head.
“Do you also want him to die in jail?” the inspector asked him.
“No,” the boy said decisively. “Now that I seen him calm, he looks nice.”
o o o
The “extras” granted Paolo Guido Mandrino, a seventy-year-old professor of history and geography, now retired, consisted of a little bath Karima would give him. On one of the four Saturday mornings when she came, the professor would wait for her under the bedcovers, naked. When Karima ordered him to go take his bath, Paolo Guido would pretend to be very reluctant. And so Karima, yank-ing down the sheets, would force the professor to turn over and would proceed to spank him. When he finally got in the tub, Karima would carefully cover him with soap and then wash him. That was all. Price of the extras: one hundred fifty thousand lire; price of the housecleaning: fifty thousand lire.
o o o
“Montalbano? Listen, contrary to what I told you, I can’t see you today. I have a meeting with the prefect.”
“Just say when, Mr. Commissioner.”
“Well, it’s really not very urgent. Anyway, after what Inspector Augello said on TV—”
“Mimì?!” he yelled, as if he were singing La Bohème.
“Yes. Didn’t you know?”
“No. I was in Mazàra.”
“He appeared on the one o’clock news. He issued a firm, blunt denial. He said Ragonese hadn’t heard correctly.
The man being sought wasn’t a snack thief, but a sneak thief, a dangerous drug addict who went around with dirty syringes for protection in case he got caught. Augello offered apologies for the entire police department. It was very effective. I think maybe Deputy Pennacchio will calm down now.”
o o o
“We’ve already met,” said Vittorio Pandolfo, accountant, as he entered the office.
“Yes,” said Montalbano. “What do you want?” Rude, and he wasn’t just playacting. If Pandolfo was there to talk about Karima, it meant he’d been lying when he said he didn’t know her.
“I came because on TV they showed—”
“A photograph of Karima, the woman you said you knew nothing about. Why didn’t you tell me anything sooner?”
“Inspector, these are delicate matters, and sometimes one feels a little embarrassed. You see, at my age—”
“You’re the Thursday-morning client?”
“Yes.”
“How much do you pay her to clean house?”
“Fifty thousand.”
“And for extras?”
“One hundred fifty.”
Fixed rate. Except that Pandolfo got extras twice a month. But the person being bathed, in this case, was Karima. Afterwards, the accountant would lay her down on the bed and sniff her all over. And now and then, a little lick.
“Tell me something, Mr. Pandolfo. Were you, Lapècora, Mandrino, and Finocchiaro her regular playmates?”
“Yes.”
“And who was it that first mentioned Karima?”
“Poor old Lapècora.”
“And what was his financial situation?”