‘Have you shrunk?’ asked Mimi upon seeing him.
By the skin of his teeth he managed to dodge the punch Montalbano threw at him, which would have broken his nose.
There was no need for the inspector to say ‘Everybody in my office!’ since they all came in of their own accord. And he gave them the satisfaction they deserved, explaining, in minute detail, how the clouds of suspicion first came to gather over Serravalle and how he met his tragic end. The most intelligent observation was made by Mimi Augello. It’s a good thing he shot himself. It would have been hard to keep him in jail without any concrete proof. A good lawyer could have sprung him in no time.’
‘But the guy killed himself !’ said Fazio.
‘So what?’ Mimi retorted.
It was the same with that poor Maurizio Di Blasi. Who can say he didn’t come out of the cave with his shoe in his hand in the hope that they’d shoot him down, which they did, thinking it was a weapon?’
‘In fact, Inspector, why was he shouting he wanted to be punished?’ asked Germana.
‘Because he’d witnessed the murder and hadn’t been able to prevent it,’ Montalbano concluded.
While the others were filing out of his office, he remembered something, and he knew that if he didn’t get it taken care of at once, by the following day he was liable to have forgotten about it entirely.
‘Gallo, listen. I want you to go down to our garage, get all the papers that are in the Twingo, and bring them up here to me. Also, talk to our chief mechanic and have him draw up an estimate for repairs. Then, if he’s interested in selling it, tell him to go ahead.’
‘Chief, hear me out for jest a minute?’ ‘Come on in, Cat.’
Catarella was red in the face, embarrassed and happy. ‘What’s the matter? Talk.’
‘Got my report card for the first week, Chief. The course runs from Monday to Friday morning. I wanted to show it to you.’
It was a sheet of paper folded in two. All A’s. Under the heading ‘Observations’, the instructor had written, ‘He was first in the class.’
‘Well done, Catarella! You’re the pride of the department!’
Catarella nearly started crying.
‘How many are there in your class?’
‘Amato, Amoroso, Basile, Bennato, Bonura, Catarella, Cimino, Farinella, Filippone, Lo Dato, Scimeca and Zicari. That makes twelve, Chief. If I had my computer here, I’d a done it faster’
Montalbano put his head in his hands.
Was there a future for humanity?
Gallo returned from his visit to the Twingo.
‘I talked to the mechanic.
Said he’d take care of selling it. In the glove compartment I found the registration card and a road map.’
He set it all down on the inspector’s desk, but didn’t leave. He looked even more uneasy than Catarella.
‘What’s the matter?’
Without answering, Gallo handed him a little rectangle of heavy paper.
‘I found this on the front seat, passenger’s side.’
It was a boarding pass for Punta Raisi airport, 10 p.m.
The date on the stub corresponded to Wednesday of the previous week, and passenger’s name was G.
Spina. Why, Montalbano asked himself, did people always use their real initials when assuming a false name? Guido Serravalle had lost his boarding pass in Michela’s car. After the murder, he hadn’t had the time to look for it, or else he thought he still had it in his pocket. That was why, when speaking of it, he had denied its existence and even mentioned the possibility that the passenger hadn’t used his real name. But with the stub now in Montalbano’s hand, they could have traced the ticket back, however laboriously, to the person who actually did take that flight Only then did he realize that Gallo was still standing in front of his desk, a dead-serious expression on his face.
‘If we’d only looked inside the car first…’
Indeed. If only they’d searched the Twingo the day after the body was found, the investigation would have taken the right path. Maurizio would still be alive and the real murderer would be in jail If only…
It had all been, from the start one mistake after another. Maurizio was mistaken for a murderer, the shoe was mistaken for a weapon, one violin was mistaken for another, and this one mistaken for a third. And Serravalle wanted to be mistaken for someone named Spina … Just past the bridge, he stopped the car, but did not get out The lights were on in Anna’s house; he sensed she was expecting him. He lit a cigarette, but halfway through he flicked it out of the window, put the car back in gear, and leftIt wasn’t a good idea to add another mistake to the list.
He entered his house, slipped out of the clothes that made him look like Bagonghi the dwarf, opened the refrigerator, took out ten or so olives, and cut himself a slice of caciocavallo cheese.
He went and sat outside on the veranda. The night was luminous, the sea slowly churning. Not wanting to waste any more time, he got up and dialled the number.
‘Livia? It’s me. I love you.’
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Livia, alarmed.
In the whole time they’d been together, Montalbano had only told her he loved her at difficult, even dangerous, moments.
‘Nothing. I’m busy tomorrow morning; I have to write a long report for the commissioner. Barring any complications, I’ll hop on a plane in the afternoon and come.’
‘I’ll be waiting for you,’
said Livia.
Author’sNote
This fourth investigation of Inspector Montalbano (of which the names, places and situations have been invented out of whole cloth) involves violins. Like his character, the author is not qualified to talk or write about musical instruments (for a while, to the despair of the neighbours, he attempted to study the tenor sax). Therefore all pertinent information has been culled from books on the violin by S. F. Sacconi and F.
Farga.
I also express my gratitude to Dr Silio Bozzi, who saved me from falling into a few technical errors in recounting the investigation.
Notes
page 16 — face that he hid under a Belfiore martyr’s moustache and beard — The martiri di Belfiore were Italian patriots executed by the Austrians between 1851 and 1854 in the Belfiore Valley outside of Mantua in northern Italy during the early phases of Risorgimento, the Italian struggle for unification and independence from foreign occupiers. Inspired by a clergyman, Don Enrico Tazzoli, who met the same end, the ‘martyrs’ all wore moustaches and full beards, and their hirsute faces are a familiar sight in Italian textbooks.
page 29 — ‘Pippo Baudo’ — A famous Italian television personality and MC of variety shows.
Page 35 that more famous Nicolo Tommaseo — Niccolo Tommaseo (b. Srebrenica, 1802 d Florence, 1874) was a well-known Italian philologist and man of letters, author of, among other things, Dictionary of Synonyms and Comment on the Divine Comedy, and editor of a collection of Balkan folk songs and tales. A liberal Catholic by belief, he was a member of the provisional Venetian Republican government constituted in 1848 in defiance of the Austrian occupation. The original text of the Manzoni quote, in Lombard dialect, is ‘Sto Tommaseo ch’eg gha on pe in sagrestia e vun in casin’