"Let's get out of here," said Livia, breathing heavily, "or well get arrested for lewd behavior in public."
On the road to Palermo, the inspector had an idea and made a suggestion.
"Shall we stop in town? I want to show you La Vuccir"
"I've already seen it. In the Guttuso painting."
"That's a shitty painting, believe me. We'll book a hotel room, hang out a little, walk around, go to La Vuccir, get some sleep, and head back to Vig tomorrow morning. I don't have any work to do, in any case, so I can consider myself a tourist."
Once inside the hotel, they failed in their intention to wash up quickly and go out. They did not go out. They made love and fell asleep. Then they woke up and made love again. When they finally left the hotel it was already getting dark.
They went to La Vuccir. Livia was shocked and overwhelmed by the shouts, the exhortations, the cries of the merchants calling out their wares, the speech, the arguments, the sudden brawls, the colors so bright they seemed unreal, painted. The smell of fresh fish mingled with that of tangerines, boiled lamb entrails sprinkled with caciocavallo cheese, a dish called ma, and fritters, all of them fusing into a unique, almost magical whole.
Montalbano stopped in front of a used-clothing shop.
"In my university days, when I used to come here to eat ma and bread, which today would only make my liver burst, this shop was the only one of its kind in the world. Now they sell used clothing, but back then the shelves were empty, all of them. The owner, Don Cesarino, used to sit there behind the counter which was also completely bare and receive clients."
"Clients? But the shelves were all empty."
"They weren't exactly empty. They were, well, full of purpose, full of requests. The man sold stolen goods to order. You'd go to Don Cesarino and say: I need a certain kind of watch; or, I want a painting, say, a nineteenth-century dock scene; or, I need this or that sort of ring. He'd take your order, write it down on a piece of pasta paper, the rough, yellow kind we used to have, he'd negotiate the price and then tell you when to come back. On the appointed date, and not one day later, he would pull the requested merchandise out from under the counter and hand it over to you. All sales were final."
"But what need was there for him to have a shop? I mean, he could have done that sort of business anywhere, in a cafe on a street corner..."
"You know what his friends in La Vuccir used to call him? Don Cesarino u puti, the shop-owner. Because Don Cesarino didn't see himself as a front man, as they might call him today, nor as a receiver of stolen goods. He was a shopkeeper like any other, and his shop for which he paid rent and electricity was proof of this. It wasn't a fae."
"You're all insane."
...
"Like a son! Let me hug you like a son!" said the headmaster's wife, squeezing him to her breast and holding him there.
"You have no idea how worried you had us!" said the husband, echoing her sentiments.
Headmaster Burgio had phoned him that morning to invite him to dinner. Montalbano had declined, suggesting he drop by in the afternoon instead. They showed him into the living room.
"Let's get right to the point," Burgio began," we don't want to take up too much of your time."
"I have all the time in the world, being unemployed for the moment."
"My wife told you, when you were here that time for dinner, that I call her a woman of fantasy. Well, right after you left, she started fantasizing again. We had wanted to call you sooner, but then what happened happened."
"Suppose we let the inspector decide whether or not they're fantasies?" the signora said, slightly piqued, before continuing in a polemical tone: "Shall you speak, or shall I?"
"Fantasies are your domain."
"I don't know if you still remember, but when you asked my husband where you could find Lillo Rizzitano, he answered that he hadn't had any news of him since July 1943. Then something came back to me: that a girlfriend of mine also disappeared during that period. Except that I actually heard from her a while later, but in the strangest way..."
Montalbano felt a chill run down his spine. The two lovers of the Crasticeddru had been murdered very young.
"How old was this friend of yours?"
"Seventeen. But she was a lot more mature than me. I was still a little girl. We went to school together."
She opened an envelope that was on the coffee table, took out a photograph, and showed it to Montalbano.
"This was taken on our last day of school, our final year. She's the first one on the left in the back row, and that's me next to her."
All smiling and wearing the Fascist uniforms of the Giovani Italiane. The teacher was giving the Roman salute.
"Since the situation in Sicily was becoming too dangerous with all the bombing, schools closed on the last day in April, and we were spared the dreaded final exam. We passed or failed solely on the basis of our grades. Lisetta that was my friend's name, Lisetta Moscato moved to a little inland village with her family. She wrote to me every other day, and I still have all her letters, at least the ones that arrived. The mail in those days, you know...My family also moved out; we went all the way to the mainland, to live with one of my fathers brothers. When the war was over, I wrote to my friend at both addresses, the one in the inland village and the one in Vig. But she never wrote back, and this worried me. Finally, in late 46, we returned to Vig, and I looked up Lisetta's parents. Her mother had died, and at first her father didn't want to see me. Then he was rude to me and said Lisetta had fallen in love with an American soldier and gone away with him, against her family's wishes. And he added that as far as he was concerned, his daughter might as well be dead."
"That does seem plausible, frankly," said Montalbano.
"What did I tell you?" the headmaster cut in triumphantly.
"But you see, Inspector, the whole thing was strange just the same, even without counting what happened later. It's strange because, first of all, if Lisetta had fallen in love with an American soldier, she would have let me know in any way possible. And second, because in the letters she sent me from Serradifalco, that was the name of the village where they'd taken refuge, she kept harping on the same theme: the torment she suffered being separated from a mysterious young man with whom she was terribly in love, whose name she would never tell me."
"Are you sure this mysterious lover really existed? Might he not have been some girlish fantasy?"
"Lisetta wasn't the type to indulge in fantasies."
"You know," said Montalbano, "at age seventeen, and even later, you can never swear by matters of the heart."
"Put that in your pipe and smoke it," said the headmaster.
Without saying a word, the signora extracted another photo from the envelope. It showed a young woman in bridal dress, giving her arm to a good-looking boy in a U.S. Army uniform.
"This came to me from New York in early 1947, according to the postmark."
"And this, in my opinion, dispels all doubt," the headmaster concluded.
"Not at all. If anything, it raises doubt."
"In what sense, signora?"
"Because it was the only thing that came in the envelope, only this photograph of Lisetta and the soldier, nothing else, no note, nothing. Not even any writing on the back of the photo; you can see for yourself. So, can you explain to me why a true, intimate friend would send me only a photograph without writing a single word?"
"Did you recognize your friends handwriting on the envelope?"
"The address was typed."
"Ah," said Montalbano.
"And one last thing: Elisa Moscato and Lillo Rizzitano were first cousins. And Lillo really loved her, like a little sister."
Montalbano looked at the headmaster. "He adored her," Burgio admitted.