Montalbano sat there pensive.
“Do you remember how Angelo Pardo was built?” he asked.
“Yeah, Chief. About five foot ten, a hundred and seventy-five pounds.”
“Perfectly normal. Do you think a body that size needs a supersize coffin?”
“No, Chief.”
“Tell me something, Fazio. “Where did the funeral procession begin?”
“At Pardo’s mother’s place.”
“Which means they’d already brought him back to Vigata from Montelusa.”
“Yessir, they did that last night.”
“Listen, can you find me the name of the funeral home?”
“I already know it, Chief. Angelo Sorrentino and Sons.” Montalbano stared at him, his eyes like slits. “Why do you already know it?”
“Because the whole thing didn’t make any sense to me. You’re not the only cop around here, Chief.”
“Okay, I want you to call up this Sorrentino and have him tell you the names of the people directly involved in transferring the body from Montelusa to here and then to the funeral. Then summon them to my office for three o’clock this afternoon.”
At Enzo’s he kept to light dishes, since he wouldn’t have time for his customary digestive-meditative walk along the jetty to the lighthouse. “While eating he further reflected on the coincidence that there were wreaths from the Nicotra and Di Cristoforo families, who had also been recently bereft, at Pardo’s funeral. Three people who were in some way linked by friendship had died in less than a week.Wait a minute,he said to himself. It was known high and low that Senator Nicotra was a friend of Pardo’s, but were Nicotra and Di Cristoforo friends with each other? The more one thought about it, the more it seemed that this was perhaps not the case.
After the havoc of “Clean Hands,” Nicotra had gone over to the party of the Milanese real-estate magnate and continued his political career, still supported, however, by the Sinagra family. Di Cristoforo, a former Socialist, had gone over to a centrist party opposed to Nicotra’s. And on several occasions, he had more or less openly attacked Nicotra for his relations with the Sinagras. Thus you had Di Cristoforo on one side and Nicotra and the Sinagras on the other, and their only point in common was Angelo Pardo. It wasn’t the triangle he had at first imagined. So what did Angelo Pardo represent for Nicotra, and what did he represent for Di Cristoforo? Theoretically speaking, if he was a friend of Nicotra’s, he couldn’t also be the same for Di Cristoforo. And vice versa. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. Un-less he does something that suits friends and enemies alike.
“My name is Filippu Zocco.”
“And mine is Nicola Paparella.”
“Were you the ones who brought Angelo Pardo’s body from the Montelusa morgue to Vigata?”
“Yessir,” they said in unison.
The two fiftyish undertakers were wearing a sort of uniform: black double-breasted jacket, black tie, black hat. They looked like a couple of stereotyped gangsters out of an American movie.
“Why wouldn’t the coffin fit into the vault?”
“Should I talk or should you talk?” Paparella asked Zocco.
“You talk.”
“Mrs. Pardo called our boss, Mr. Sorrentino, over to her place, and they decided on the coffin and the time. Then, at sevenP.M.yesterday, we went to the morgue, boxed up the body, and brought ‘im here, to the home of this Mrs. Pardo.”
“Is that your normal procedure?”
“No, sir, Inspector. It happens sometimes, but it’s not normal procedure.”
“What is the normal procedure?”
“We go get the body from the morgue and then take it directly to the church where the funeral’s gonna be held.” “Go on.”
“When we got there, the lady said the coffin looked too low. She wanted it higher.” “And was it in fact low?”
“No, sir, Inspector. But sometimes dead people’s relatives get fixated on dumb things. So we took the body outta the first coffin and put him in another one. But the lady didn’t want it covered. She said she wanted to sit up all night, but not in front of a sealed coffin. She told us to come back next morning round seven to put the lid on. So that’s what we did. We came back this morning and put the lid on. Then at the cemetery—”
“I know what happened at the cemetery. When you went to close the coffin this morning, did you notice anything strange?”
“There was something strange that wasn’t strange, Inspector.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes relatives put things inside the coffin, things the dead person was fond of when he was alive.” “And in this particular case?”
“In this particular case it was almost like the dead man was sitting up.”
“What do you mean?”
“The lady put something big under his head and shoulders. Something wrapped up in a sheet. It was kind of like she put a pillow under him.”
“One last question. Would the dead man have fit inside the first coffin in this position?”
“No,” Zocco and Paparella said, again in unison.
17
“Ah, Inspector! So punctual! Make yourself comfortable,” said Lagana.
As Montalbano was sitting down, the marshal dialed a number.
“Can you come over?” he said into the receiver.
“Well, Marshal, what have you discovered?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather my colleague told you, since he deserves the credit.”
There was a knock at the door. Vittorio Melluso was the spit and image of William Faulkner around the time the writer received the Nobel Prize. The same southern gentleman’s elegance, the same polite, distant smile.
“The code based on that song collection is so hard to understand precisely because it’s rather elementary in conception and created for personal use.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by ‘for personal use.’ “
“Inspector, normally a code is used by two or three people to communicate with one another so that they needn’t fear anyone else understanding what they say. Right?”
“Of course.”
“And so they make as many copies of the code as they will need for the people who need to exchange information. Clear?”
“Yes.”
“I think the code you found is the only copy in existence. It was only used by the person who conceived it, to encrypt certain names, the ones that appear in the two lists that Lagana gave me.”
“Did you manage to understand any of it?”
“Well, I think I’ve figured two things out. The first is that every surname corresponds to a number, the one in the left-hand column. Each number has six digits, whereas the names are of varying length and therefore have varying numbers of letters. This means that each digit does not correspond to a letter. There are probably some dummy digits within each number.”
“Which means?”
“Digits that serve no purpose, other than to throw people off. In other words, it’s a code within a code.” “I see. And what was the second thing?” Lagana and Melluso exchanged a very quick glance. “You want to tell him?” “The credit is all yours,” said Lagana.
“Inspector,” Melluso began, “you gave us two lists. In both of these lists, the numbers on the left, the ones that stand for names, always occur and recur in the same sequence. The numbers on the right, on the other hand, are al-ways different. After studying them closely, I arrived at a conclusion, which is that the figures on the right in the first list indicate sums of money in euros, while the figures on the right in the second list represent quantities. When you com-pare, for instance, the first two numbers on the right-hand side of the two lists, you discover that there’s a precise relationship between the two figures, which corresponds—”
“To the current market price,” the inspector finished his sentence.
Lagana, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Montalbano for the past five minutes, started laughing.