Inside his closet stood Catarella, back glued to the wall, no longer screaming but rather whimpering like a wounded animal, eyes popping out of his head, pointing with a trembling finger at Angelo Pardo’s open laptop on the little table.
Matre santa!What could have appeared on the screen to frighten him that way? The devil? Osama bin Laden?
“Everybody stay outside!” Montalbano ordered, going into the closet.
He looked at the monitor. It was blank. There was nothing.
Maybe Catarella’s brain, having so strained itself in the struggle with the passwords, had completely melted. Which, in any case, wouldn’t have taken much.
“Go away!” the inspector yelled to his men.
When he was alone with Catarella, he embraced him. Feeling him trembling, he told him to sit down.
“There’s a good boy,” he murmured, stroking his head.
And, just like a dog, Catarella started to calm down. When he saw him no longer trembling, Montalbano asked him:
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Catarella made a gesture of despair.
“Come on, try to talk. Do you want a little water?”
Catarella shook his head no and swallowed twice.
“It…it…deleted isself, Chief,” he said in a voice about to break into a heartrending wail.
“Come on, speak up. What deleted itself?”
“The third file, Chief. And it deleted the other two, too.”
Therefore everything that might have been of interest in the computer had been lost.
“How is that possible?”
“Oh, iss possible, Chief. There musta been an abortion pogram.”
Abortion? Maybe Angelo Pardo, aside from performing illegal abortions on women, had also found a way to perform them on computers?
“What have abortions got to do with this?”
“Chief, whatta you say when you got a militiry operation going an’ you wanna stop it?”
“I dunno, I guess you could say you abort it.”
“And in’t that what I said? Iss what I said. Iss got an abortion pogram pogrammed to delete what’s asposta be deleted in the abortion pogram pogrammed to be deleted after a week, a month, two months, tree months …You follow?”
“Perfectly. A timed deletion program.”
“Just like you say, Chief. But iss not ‘cause of my fault or negleck, Chief! I swear!”
“I know, Cat, I know. Don’t worry about it.”
He patted his head again and went back into his office. Angelo Pardo had taken every possible precaution to make sure nobody ever found out how he got the money he needed to gamble and buy expensive gifts for his girlfriend.
16
The first thing he did when he got home was attack the salmon. A hefty slice dressed with fresh lemon juice and a special olive oil given him by the person who made it. (“The virginity of this olive oil has been certified by a gynecologist,” said a little ticket that came with it.) After eating he cleared the veranda table and replaced the dish and silver-ware with a brand-new bottle of J&B and a glass. He knew at last that he held the end of a long thread in his hand.And if you even think of calling it Ariadne’s thread, I’ll slash your face,he warned himself. But that thread might in fact lead him, if not to a solution, at least down the right path.
It was Prosecutor Tommaseo who, without knowing it, had handed him the thread. He’d told him that during the last interrogation, Michela had made a scene straight out of a Greek tragedy, screaming that he, Montalbano, didn’t want to take any action against Elena even though he had in his possession the letters in which Elena had threatened to kill Angelo. And while it was absolutely true that he had those compromising letters, there was a small detail that could not be ignored: Michela should not have known this.
Because the day before, when Michela asked him if he’d found the letters, he’d said no, just to keep the waters muddy. And he remembered this perfectly clearly—forget about old age and Alzheimer’s (there, that’s what that disease was called!). And Paola the Red had also been present and could testify.
The only person who knew he’d found the letters was Elena, because he’d shown them to her. But the two women didn’t speak. And so? There was only one answer. Michela had gone to the garage to check if the envelope with the three letters was still in the Mercedes’ trunk, and when she saw it was gone, she’d come to the logical conclusion that the inspector had discovered it and taken it.
Wait a second, Montalbano. How could Michela have known the letters were lying hidden under the carpet in the trunk of the Mercedes? She said that Angelo kept his letters in one of the desk’s drawers. Angelo had no logical reason to move them out of the house and into the Mercedes in the garage—hiding them, yes, but making sure they weren’t entirely hidden, so that if anyone looked with any care, that person would find them. Therefore Michela must have moved them. But when? The very night Angelo was found dead, when he, Montalbano, had committed the colossal boner of leaving her alone in her brother’s apartment.
Why had Michela gone to such elaborate lengths?
Why would someone hide something in such a way that it can be discovered as if by chance? To make the discovery seem more significant, of course. Explain yourself better, Salvo.
If he opened the desk drawer, found the letters there, and read them, everything would seem normal. Let’s set the value of the words in those letters at ten. But if he found those letters after driving himself crazy looking for them, because they were hidden, it would mean that the letters were not supposed to have been read, and thus the value of their words climbed to fifty. This lent weight and truth to the death threats; they were no longer the generic statements of a jealous lover.
Compliments to Michela. As an attempt to screw the hated Elena, it was brilliant. But her excessive hatred had betrayed her in front of Tommaseo. It was easy for her to enter the garage, since she had copies of all Angelo’s keys.
Wait a minute. The other night, after the dream about the bath at Michela’s, something about a key had occurred to him. Whose key?
Inspector Montalbano, review everything from the start.
From the very beginning?
From the very beginning.
Could I pour myself another whisky first?
So one fine day, Signora (“excuse me,Signorina”)Michela Pardo appears at the station to tell me she’s had no word of her brother, Angelo, for two days. She says she even went into his apartment, since she has a set of keys, but found everything in order. She comes back the same evening. We go to look at the apartment together. Everything still in order. There’s no trace of any sudden departure. When we’re outside the building, about to say good-bye, it occurs to her that we haven’t checked the room Angelo has on the terrace, having rented both room and terrace. We go back upstairs. The glass door giving onto the terrace is locked. Michela opens it with one of her keys. The door to the little room on the terrace is also locked, but Michela tells me she doesn’t have the key to this one. So I break down the door. And I find …
Stop right there, Montalbano. There’s the rub, as Hamlet would say. This is the part of the story that doesn’t make sense.
What sense is there in Michela’s having only the key to the terrace door, which is completely useless if not accompanied by the key to the former laundry room? If she has copies ofallher brother’s keys, she must also have the one to the room on the terrace. All the more because Angelo used to go there to read or sunbathe, as Michela herself said. He did not go up there to be with his women. What did this mean?
Montalbano noticed that his glass was empty again. He refilled it, stepped off the veranda and onto the sand, and, taking a sip of whisky every few steps, arrived at the water’s edge. The night was dark, but it felt good. The lights of the fishing boats on the horizon line looked like lowlying stars.