As a result Tumminello had to change his story. He said he’d gone to Pardo’s to talk business, but had found him already dead. He knew nothing about the panties stuck in Pardo’s mouth. He also stated quite specifically that when he’d seen him, the zipper of Pardo’s jeans was closed. So that when he heard that Pardo had been found in an obscene pose (that’s exactly how he put it: “an obscene pose”), he, Tumminello, was shocked.
Nobody believed him, of course. Not only had he killed Pardo for having put lethal cocaine into circulation, risking a massacre, but he’d also tried to mislead the investigation. The Sinagras cut him loose, and Tumminello, in keeping with tradition, got the Sinagras off the hook. He claimed that the idea for getting into drugs was his and his alone, just like the idea to enlist the help of Angelo Pardo, who he knew was short on cash; and that of course the Family that had honored him by taking him in like a devoted and respectful son was entirely in the dark about all this. He repeated, however, that when he’d gone to talk to Pardo about the huge fuckup he’d made by cutting the cocaine, he’d found him already dead.
“Isn’t saying you ‘went to talk to him’ a polite euphemism for saying you’d gone to see Pardo to kill him?” the prosecutor had asked him.
Tumminello did not answer.
Meanwhile Marshal Melluso, Lagana’s colleague, had managed to decipher Angelo’s code, and the nine people on his list found themselves in a pretty pickle. Actually there were fourteen names, not nine, but the other five (including the engineer Fasulo, Senator Nicotra, and the Honorable Di Cristoforo) belonged to people who, thanks to Angelo Pardo’s modest talents in chemistry, could no longer be prosecuted.
A week later Livia came to spend three days in Vigata. They didn’t quarrel even once. On Monday morning, at the crack of dawn, Montalbano drove her to Punta Raisi Airport and, after watching her leave, got in the car to drive back to Vigata. Since he had nothing else to do, he decided to take a back road the whole way, one in pretty bad shape, yes, but which allowed him to enjoy for a few kilometers the landscape he loved, the parched terrain and little white houses. He rolled along for three hours, head emptied of thoughts. All at once he realized he was on the road leading from Giardina to Vigata, meaning that he was only a few kilometers from home. Giardina? Wasn’t this the road with the service station where Elena, that Monday evening, had made love to that attendant—what was his name, ah, yes, Luigi?
“Let’s go meet this Luigi,” he said to himself.
He drove even more slowly than before, looking left and right. At last he found the station. A little platform roof, half crowned by lighted fluorescent tubes under which stood three pumps. That was all. He pulled in under the roof and stopped. The attendant’s shelter was made of brick and almost entirely hidden by the trunk of a thousand-year-old Saracen olive tree. It was almost impossible to spot it from the road. The door was closed. He honked, but nobody came out. What was the problem? He got out of the car and went and knocked at the door of the shelter. Nothing. Silence. Turning around to go back to the car, he noticed, at the very edge of the space at the side of the road, the back of a metal rectangle supported by an iron bar. A sign. He went around to the front but couldn’t read it because three-fourths of it was covered by a clump of weeds, which he proceeded to beat down with his feet. The sign had long lost its paint and was half spotted with rust, but the words were still clear: CLOSED MONDAYS
Once, when he was a kid, his father, just to tease him, had told him the moon was made of paper. And since he never doubted what his father told him, he believed it. Now, as a mature, experienced man with brains and intuition, he had once again, like a little kid, believed what two women, one dead and the other alive, had said when they told him the moon was made out of paper.
The rage so clouded his vision that first he nearly ran over a little old lady and then he barely escaped colliding with a truck. When he pulled up in front of Elena’s place, it was past one o’clock. He rang the intercom and she answered.
She was waiting for him in the doorway, wearing gym clothes and smiling.
“Salvo, what a pleasant surprise! Come on in and make yourself at home.”
She went in ahead. From behind, Montalbano noticed that her gait was no longer springy and taut but soft and relaxed. Even the way she sat down in the armchair was almost languid, nonchalant. The cheetah apparently had recently had her fill of fresh flesh and for the moment presented no danger. It was better this way.
“You didn’t forewarn me, so I haven’t made coffee. But it’ll only take a second.”
“No, thanks. I need to talk to you.”
Still the wild animal, she bared all her sharp, white teeth in a cross between a smile and a feline hiss. “About us?”
She was clearly trying to provoke him, but only in jest, without serious intent.
“No, about the investigation.” “Still?”
“Yes. I need to talk to you about your phony alibi.” “Phony? Why phony?”
Only curiosity, almost as though amused. No embarrassment, surprise, fear.
“Because on that fateful Monday evening, you could not have met your Luigi.”
That “your” he tossed in had escaped him. Apparently he still felt a twinge of jealousy. She understood and threw fuel on the fire.
“I assure you I did meet him, and we rather enjoyed ourselves.”
“I don’t doubt that, but it wasn’t on a Monday, because that filling station is closed on Mondays.”
Elena folded her hands, raised her arms over her head, and stretched.
“When did you find out?”
“A few hours ago.”
“Luigi and I could have sworn it would never occur to anyone to check.”
“It occurred to me.”
A lie. Said not to boast, but just to avoid looking like a complete nincompoop in her eyes.
“A bit late, however, Inspector. Anyway, what difference does this great discovery make?”
“It means you don’t have an alibi.”
“Ouf! Didn’t I already tell you I had no alibi? Have you forgotten? I didn’t try to make anything up. But you kept insisting: ‘Careful, if you don’t have an alibi, you’re going to be arrested!’ “What do you want from me? So in the end I got my alibi, just like you wanted.”
Shrewd, alert, intelligent, beautiful. Stray just one millimeter and she’ll take advantage. So now it was his fault that she lied to Tommaseo!
“How did you persuade Luigi? By promising to sleep with him?”
He couldn’t control himself. The thorn of jealousy was making him say the wrong things. The rabbit couldn’t accept being refused by the cheetah.
“Wrong, Inspector. Everything that I said happened to me on Monday actually happened to me the day before, on Sunday. It didn’t take much to persuade Luigi to move our first encounter up one day when he talked to Tommaseo. And I can tell you that if you want to interrogate him, he’ll continue to swear up and down that we met for the first time that goddamned Monday evening. He would do anything for me.”
What was it that made his ears perk? Some small detail, perhaps, some unexpected change in her tone when she said
“that goddamned Monday evening” had suddenly, in a flash, brought something to mind—an idea, an illumination that nearly frightened him.
“You, that evening, went to Angelo’s,” the inspector’s mouth said before the idea had fully taken concrete form in his head.
Not a question but a clear assertion. She shifted position, rested her elbows on her knees, put her head in her hands, and eyed Montalbano long and hard. She was studying him. Beneath that stare, which was weighing his value as a man, brains and balls included, the inspector felt the same unease as when he’d undergone his army physical, standing naked in front of the committee as the doctor measured and manhandled him. Then she made up her mind. Perhaps he’d passed the test.