He gave up and went out on the veranda.
He sat down and looked dejectedly at the two pages Catarella had printed up. He never had understood a damn thing about numbers. Back in high school, he remembered, when his friends were already doing abscesses—no, wait, abscesses are something else, something you get in your mouth. So what were they called? Ah, yes. Abscissas. When his schoolmates were doing abscissas and coordinates, he was still having trouble with the multiplication table for the number eight.
On the first page, there was a column of thirty-eight numbers on the left-hand side, which corresponded to a second column of thirty-eight numbers on the right-hand side.
On the second page, there were thirty-two numbers on the left and thirty-two numbers on the right. Thus the sum total of numbers on the left came to seventy, and there were seventy numbers on the right as well. Montalbano congratulated himself on this discovery, while having to admit to himself that the exact same conclusion could have been reached by a little kid in the third grade.
Half an hour later, he made a discovery that gave him as much satisfaction as Marconi surely must have felt when he realized he’d invented the wireless telegraph or whatever it was he invented. That is, he discovered that the numbers in the left-hand columns were not all different but consisted of a group of fourteen numbers each repeated five times. The repetitions were not consecutive but scattered as though at random within the two columns.
He took one of the two numbers in the left-hand column and copied it onto the back of one of the pages as many times as it was repeated. Next to it he wrote down the corresponding numbers from the right-hand column.
213452 136000
213452 80000
213452 200000
213452 70000
213452 110000
It seemed clear to him that while the number on the left was in code, the number on the right was in clear and referred to a sum of money. The total came to 596,000. Not much if it was in lire. But more than a billion lire if it was in euros, as was more likely. So the business dealings between Angelo and Signor 213452 came to that amount. Now, since there were another thirteen numbered gentlemen, and the corresponding numbers for each added up to about the same amount as those examined, this meant that Angelo’s business volume came to over 12, 13 billion lire, or 6, 6.5 million euros. To be kept, however, carefully hidden. Assuming everything conformed to his suppositions. It was not impossible that those figures meant something else.
His eyes started to fog over, having trouble focusing on the numbers. He was getting tired. At this rate, he thought, it would take him three to five years to crack the code of the songs, and by the time it was all over, he would surely be blind and walking around with a white stick and a dog on a harness.
He brought everything back inside, closed the door to the veranda, went out, got in his car, and left. Since he was still a bit early for his appointment with Paola, he crept along at barely five miles per hour, driving everyone who happened to be behind him crazy. Every motorist, when each managed to pass him, felt obliged to insult him. Thus, he was a(n): faggot, according to a trucker; asshole, according to a priest;
cornuto,according to a nice lady;
ba-ba-ba-, according to a stutterer.
But all these insults went in one ear and out the other. Only one really made him mad. A distinguished-looking man of about sixty pulled up alongside him and said: “Donkey!”
Donkey? How dared he? The inspector made a vain attempt to pursue the man, pressing on the accelerator until he was at twenty miles an hour, but then preferred slowing back down to his normal cruising speed.
Arriving at the Promenade, he couldn’t find a parking space and had to drive around a long time before he found a spot very far from the appointed place. “When he finally got there, Paola was already sitting at a table, waiting for him.
She ordered a prosecco. Montalbano joined in.
“This morning, when Carlo heard there was a police inspector on the phone, he got a terrible scare.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Oh, that’s just the way he is. He’s a sweet kid, but the mere sight of, say, a Carabiniere driving beside him deeply upsets him. There’s no explanation for it.”
“Maybe some research into his DNA could come up with an explanation,” said Montalbano. “He probably had a few ancestors who were outlaws. Ask him sometime.”
They laughed. So the man who took up the schoolteacher’s free time on days when she didn’t go to school was named Carlo. End of subject. They moved on to the matter at hand.
“Yesterday evening,” said Paola, “when that business about Angelo dictating the letters to Elena came out, I felt really uncomfortable.”
“Why?”
“Because, despite Michela’s opinion to the contrary, I think Elena was telling the truth.” “How do you know?”
“You see, Inspector, during the time we were together, I wrote Angelo many letters. I used to like to write to him.” “I didn’t find any when I searched the apartment.” “They were returned to me.” “By Angelo?”
“No, by Michela. After her brother and I broke up. She didn’t want them to end up in Elena’s hands.”
Michela really could not stand this Elena.
“You still haven’t told me why you felt uncomfortable.”
“Well, one of those letters was dictated by Angelo.”
A big point for Elena! One which, moreover, could not be cast into doubt, since it was scored by her defeated rival.
“Or, rather,” Paola continued, “he gave me the general outlines. And since we broke up, I’ve never said anything to Michela about this little conspiracy.”
“You could have mentioned it last night.”
“Would you believe me if I said I didn’t have the courage? Michela was so sure that Elena was lying …”
“Can you describe the contents of the letter?”
“Of course. Angelo had to go to Holland for a week, and Michela had made it clear she intended to go with him. So he had me write a letter saying I’d asked for a ten-day leave from school so I could accompany him. It wasn’t true; it was exams time. Like they’re going to give me a ten-day vacation during exams! Anyway, he said he would show his sister the letter, and this would allow him to go alone, as he wished.”
“And if Michela had run into you in Montelusa when Angelo was in Holland, how would you have explained that to her?”
“Angelo and I had thought about this. I would have said that at the last moment the school denied me permission to leave.”
“And you didn’t mind him going away alone?”
“Well, I did, a little, of course. But I realized that it was important for Angelo to liberate himself for a few days from Michela’s overbearing presence.”
“Overbearing?”
“I don’t know how else to define it, Inspector. Words like ‘assiduous,’ ‘affectionate,’ ‘loving’ don’t really give a sense of it. They fall short. Michela felt this sort of absolute obligation to look after her brother, as though he were a little boy.”
“What was she afraid of?”
“Nothing, I don’t think. My explanation for it—there’s nothing scientific about it, mind you, I don’t know a thing about psychoanalysis—but in my opinion it came from a sort of frustrated craving for motherhood that was transferred entirely, and apprehensively, onto her brother.”
She gave her usual giggle.
“I’ve often thought that if I’d married Angelo, it would have been very hard for me to free myself not from my mother-in-law’s clutches—since she, poor thing, counts for nothing—but from my sister-in-law’s.”
She paused. Montalbano realized she was weighing the words she would use to express what she was thinking.
“When Angelo died, I expected Michela to fall apart. Whereas the opposite happened.”