“Did you know the Griffos?”
“The Griffos? Never seen ‘em before the tour. And after the tour, neither, can’t say as I met ’em even then. The name, yes. I heard ‘em call it out when the driver was calling the roll before leaving, and they said ’Present.‘We didn’t even say hello or talk. Not a peep. They just stayed real quiet and all by themselves, mindin’ their own business. Now I say, Mr. Inspector, these excursions are nice when everybody stays together.You joke, you laugh, you sing songs. But if—”
“Are you sure you never met the Griffos?”
“Where wouldIamet ‘em?”
“I dunno, at the market, the tobacco shop ...”
“My wife does the shopping an’ I don’t smoke. On the other hand ...”
“On the other hand?”
“I used to know a guy named Pietro Giffo. Mighta been a relative, only the r was missing. This Giffo was a traveling salesman, the kind of guy who liked a good joke. One time—”
“Did you by any chance run into the Griffos at any time during the day you spent in Tindari?”
“Me and the wife, we never see anyone from the group when we get to where we’re going. We go to Palermo? I got a brother-in-law there. We go down to Erice? I got a cousin lives there. They roll out the red carpet, invite us to lunch. And Tindari, forget about it! I got a nephew there, Filippo, he come to pick us up at the bus stop, took us to his house, and his wife served us a sfincione for the first course, and for the second—”
“When the driver called roll for the return home, were the Griffos present?”
“Yessir, I heard ‘em answer.”
“Did you notice if they got off the bus at any of the three extra stops the bus made on the way back?”
“I was just telling you, Inspector, what my nephew Filippo gave us to eat. Well, we couldn’t even get up out of our seats, that’s how stuffed we were! On the way back, when we stopped for caffellatte like we planned, I didn’t even want to get off the bus. But then the wife reminded me it was all paid for anyways. What we gonna do, waste our money? So I just had a little spot of milk with two cookies. And immediately I start to feel sleepy. Always happens to me after I eat. Anyways, I nodded off. And it’s a good thing I didn’t have any coffee! ‘Cause, lemme tell you, when I drink coffee—”
“—You can never get to sleep. Once you got back to Vigàta, did you see the Griffos get off the bus?”
“Dear Inspector, at that hour, dark as it was, with me practically not knowing if.my own wife was gettin’ off the bus!”
“Do you remember where you sat?”
“That I do, I remember where we was sittin‘, the wife and me. Right in the middle of the bus. In front of us was the Bufalottas, behind us was the Raccuglias, and beside us the Persicos. We already knew all of them, it was our fifth tour together. The Bufalottas, poor things, they need to take their mind off their troubles. Their oldest boy, Pippino, died when—”
“Do you remember where the Griffos were seated?”
“In the last row, I think.”
“The one with five seats in a row, without armrests?”
“I think so.”
“Good. That’s all, Mr. Zotta, you can go now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re done. You can go home.”
“What? What the hell is this anyway? You trouble a seventy-seven-year-old man and a seventy-five-year-old woman for this kind of bullshit? We got up at six in the morning for this! You think that’s right?”
,When the last of the old folks had left it was nearly one o‘clock, and the police station looked as if it had been the site of a very crowded picnic. Granted, there was no grass in the office, but where are you going to find grass nowadays? That stuff that still manages to grow on the outskirts of town, you call that grass? Four stunted, half-yellowed blades where, if you stick your hand in there, chances are ninety-nine out of a hundred you’ll get pricked by a hidden syringe?
With these fine thoughts, a bad mood was descending again on the inspector when he realized that Catarella, assigned cleanup duty, had come to a sudden halt, broom in one hand and something not clearly identifiable in the other.
“My, my, my! Wouldja look at that!” Catarella muttered, flabbergasted as he eyed what he’d picked up off the floor.
“What is it?”
All at once Catarella’s face turned a flaming red.
“A profellattict, Chief!”
“Used?!” the inspector asked, astonished.
“No, Chief, still in its wrapper.”
There: that was the only difference from the trash left behind at a real picnic. As for everything else, the same depressing filth, tissue paper, cigarette butts, cans of Coca-Cola and orangeade, bottles of mineral water, pieces of bread and cookies, even an ice-cream cone slowly melting in a corner.
As Montalbano had already tabulated from an initial comparison of the answers given to him, Fazio, and Galluzzo—and this, no doubt, was another, if not the main reason for his foul mood—it turned out that they knew not a whit more much about the Griffos than they had before.
The bus had exactly fifty-three seats, not counting the driver’s. The forty passengers had all gathered in the front part of the coach, twenty on one side of the aisle, twenty on the other. The Griffos, on the other hand, had sat in two of the five seats in the final row, on both the outward and return journeys, with the big rear window behind them. They had spoken to no one and no one had spoken to them. Fazio reported that one of the passengers had said to him: “You know what? After a while we forgot all about them. It was as if they weren’t traveling in the same coach with us.”
“But,” the inspector cut in, “we still don’t have the deposition of that couple whose wife is sick. Scimè, I think they’re called.”
Fazio gave a little smile.
“Did you really think Mrs. Scimè was going to miss the party? With all her girlfriends there? No, she came, together with her husband, though she could barely stand up. She had a fever of a hundred and two. I talked to her, Galluzzo talked to the husband. No dice. The lady could have spared herself the strain.”
They looked at each other in dejection.
“A night wasted, and it’s a girl,” commented Galluzzo, quoting the proverbial saying—Nottata persa e figlia fìmmina—of the husband who has spent a whole night beside his wife in labor, only to see her give birth to a baby girl instead of that much-desired son.
“Shall we go eat?” asked Fazio, getting up.
“You two go ahead. I’m going to stay a little while yet. Who’s on duty?”
“Gallo.”
Left to himself, he started studying the sketch Fazio had made of the bus’s layout. There was a small isolated rectangle at the top with the word “driver” written inside, followed by twelve rows of four little rectangles, each bearing the name of its occupant, or left empty when vacant.
Eyeing it, the inspector became aware that Fazio must have resisted the temptation to draw much larger rectangles with the vital statistics of each occupant inside: first and last name, father’s name, mother’s maiden name, etc. In the last row of five seats, Fazio had written “Griffo” in such a way that each of the letters occupied one of the five little rectangles, except for the double f. Apparently he hadn’t managed to find out which of the five places the vanished couple had sat in.
Montalbano started to imagine the journey to himself. After the initial greetings, a few minutes of inevitable silence as people got comfortable, unburdening themselves of scarves, caps, and hats, checking purses or pockets for reading glasses, house keys, etc. Then the first signs of cheer, the first audible conversations, the overlapping phrases ... And the driver asking: Want me to turn on the radio? A chorus of “no” ... And maybe, from time to time, somebody turning around towards the back, towards the last row where the Griffos sat next to each other, immobile and as though deaf, since the eight vacant seats between them and the other passengers formed a kind of barrier against the sounds, the words, the noise, the laughter.