“Sometimes,” he confessed.
Having reached the edge of the plateau, they got out of the car. At the bottom of the cliff, the sea foamed white where the waves struck a cluster of rocks, and further down it had completely flooded a small beach. It was an unusual shoreline, with stretches of bristling rocks alternating with flat areas of beach. A solitary villa had been built at the very top of a small promontory. Its vast terrace balcony hung as though suspended over the sea. The stretch of shore below consisted entirely of tall rocks, some of them looking like monoliths, but it had nevertheless been closed off—illegally, of course—to create a private space. There was nothing else to see. They got back in the car.
“Now I’m going to take you to talk to a guy—”
“No,” said the inspector. “There’s no point. You can tell me later what those people said. Let’s go back.”
During the entire drive there and the entire drive back, they didn’t encounter a single automobile. And they didn’t see any parked, either.
In front of a decidedly luxurious villa, they saw a man sitting on a cane chair, smoking a cigar.
“That gentleman,” said Fazio, “is one of the two who said they had seen the man in the photograph. He’s the villa’s caretaker. He told me that about three months ago, he was sitting outside the way he is now, when he saw a car come sputtering up from the left. The car stopped right in front of him and a man got out, the same man as in the photo. He’d run out of gas. So the caretaker offered to go get him a canful from the filling station outside Montechiaro. When he came back with the gas, the man gave him a tip of a hundred euros.”
“So he didn’t see where the guy came from.”
“No. And he’d never seen him before. As for the other guy that recognized him, I was only able to have a brief discussion with him. He’s a fisherman and had a basket full of fish he had to go sell in Montechiaro. He told me he’d seen the man in the picture about three, four months ago, on the beach.”
“Three or four months ago? But that was the middle of the winter! What was he doing there?”
“That’s the same thing the fisherman asked himself. He’d just pulled his boat ashore when he saw the man from the photograph on a rock nearby.”
“On a rock?”
“Yeah, one of those rocks right under the villa with the big terrace.”
“And what was he doing?”
“Nothing. He was looking out at the sea and talking on a cell phone. But the fisherman got a good look at him, ’cause at one point the man turned around and started glaring at him. He had the impression the guy on the rock was trying to tell him something.”
“Like what?”
“Like get the fuck out of here . . . What do I do now?”
“I don’t understand. What are you supposed to do?”
“Should I keep looking, or should I stop?”
“Well, it seems useless to waste any more of your time. You can go back to Vigàta.”
Fazio breathed a sigh of relief. This search hadn’t agreed with him from the start.
“You’re not coming?”
“I’ll be along later. First I need to stop for a few minutes in Montechiaro.”
It was a bald-faced lie; he had nothing whatsoever to do in Montechiaro. For a stretch he followed Fazio’s car, and then, when he’d lost sight of it, he did a U-turn and drove back in the direction he’d come. Spigonella had made an impression on him. Was it possible there wasn’t a living soul besides the cigar-smoking caretaker in that entire residential area? He hadn’t seen any dogs, either, or even a single cat turned feral by the seclusion. It was an ideal location for anyone who wanted to do whatever he pleased—like shack up with a woman in secret, set up a gambling house, or organize an orgy or giant snortfest. One needed only take care to cover the windows with shades that didn’t let a single ray of light filter out, and nobody would ever know what was going on inside. Every villa had enough space around it for cars to enter and park well inside the gate and walls. Once the gate closed, it was as though those cars had never come.
While driving around, he had an idea. He braked, got out, and started walking, looking absorbed, now and then kicking the little white stones he encountered along the road.
The little boy’s long escape, which had begun on the landing wharf in the port of Vigàta, had ended not far from Spigonella. He was almost certain the child was running away from Spigonella when the car ran him down.
The nameless dead man he’d encountered while out for a swim had also been sighted in Spigonella. And in all likelihood he’d been killed in Spigonella. Their two stories seemed to run parallel, even though they weren’t supposed to. The inspector recalled the famous expression coined by a politician killed by the Red Brigades: “parallel convergences.” Was the ultimate point of convergence none other than the ghost town of Spigonella? Why not?
But where to begin? Should he try to find out who owned those villas? This immediately seemed an impossible undertaking. Since every single one of those constructions was strictly unauthorized, there was no point in checking the land registry or town hall. Discouraged, he leaned against an electrical pole. The moment his shoulders touched the wood of the pole, he stepped away as though he’d gotten a shock. Electricity! Of course! All towns had to have electricity, and therefore the homeowners had to submit signed requests to be hooked up. But his enthusiasm was short-lived. He could already imagine the electrical company’s response: Since there were no registered streets or street numbers in Spigonella, and since, in short, there was no such place as Spigonella, the electrical bills were sent to the owners’ regular residential addresses. Sorting out these owners would surely be a long and arduous process. And were he to ask how long, the answer would be so vague as to be almost poetic. What about trying the telephone company? Right!
Aside from the fact that the phone company’s answer would have many points in common with the electrical company’s, what about cell phones? Hadn’t one of the witnesses, the fisherman, stated that when he’d seen the unknown dead man, the guy was talking on a cell phone? Hopeless. No matter which way he turned, he ran into a wall. An idea came to him. He got in the car, turned on the ignition, and drove off. Finding the road wasn’t easy. He drove past the same villa two or three times, and then finally, in the distance, saw what he was looking for. The caretaker was still sitting in the same cane chair, the extinguished cigar in his mouth. Montalbano pulled up, got out, and approached the man.
“Good afternoon.”
“If you say so . . . Good afternoon.”
“I’m a police inspector.”
“I figured. You came by with the other policeman, the one that showed me the photograph.”
Had a sharp eye, this caretaker.
“I wanted to ask you something.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Do you see many immigrants around here?”
The caretaker gave him an astonished look.
“Immigrants? Sir, around here we don’t see no immigrants, emigrants, or even migrants. All we ever see is the people who live here when they come. Immigrants! Hah!”
“Why does that seem so preposterous to you?”
“’Cause around here the private security car passes every two hours. And those guys . . . if they saw an immigrant, they’d kick his ass all they way back to where he came from!”
“So why haven’t I seen any of these security officers today?”
“Because today they’re on strike for half the day.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you for helping make a little of the time go by.”
He got back in the car and left. But when he got to the white-and-red house in front of which he and Fazio had met, he turned around. He knew there was nothing to find there, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave that place. He pulled up again at the edge of the cliff. It was getting dark. Against the still luminous sky, the villa with the enormous terrace looked ghostly. Despite the luxurious homes, the well-tended trees rising above the enclosure walls, and the lush greenery everywhere, Spigonella was a wasteland. Of course, all seaside towns, especially those that depend on vacationers, seem dead in the off-season. But Spigonella must have been already dead at the moment of its birth. In its beginning was its end, to mangle Eliot again. Getting back into his car, this time he finally drove back to Vigàta.