Rounding the Mark (13 page)

Before going out, he looked for a greenish, vaguely Tyrolean-style hat he hardly ever wore and a pair of glasses with plain lenses that he’d used once but couldn’t remember why. At four o’clock he returned to the office and found a small box with calling cards on his desk. He took three and put them in his wallet. He went back outside, opened the trunk to his car, where he kept a Humphrey Bogart-style trench coat, put this on, along with the hat and glasses, and drove off.

Seeing him appear before her in that getup, Ingrid began laughing so hard that tears started running down her cheeks and she had to dash into the café and lock herself in the bathroom.

When she came out, however, the giggles got the better of her again. Montalbano was stone-faced.

“Get in the car, I’ve got no time to waste.”

Ingrid obeyed, making a tremendous effort to refrain from laughing.

“Do you know that gift shop at number 34, Via Palermo?”

“No, why?”

“Because that’s where we’re going.”

“What for?”

“To select a gift for a girlfriend of yours who’s getting married. And I want you to call me Emilio.”

Ingrid literally exploded. Her laughter burst out uncontrollably. She put her head in her hands, and he couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.

“Okay, I’m taking you home,” the inspector said in a huff.

“No, wait a minute, come on.”

She blew her nose twice, wiped away her tears.

“Tell me what I’m supposed to do, Emilio.”

Montalbano explained.

The shop’s sign said:
Cappuccino
, in big letters, and below, in smaller characters,
Silverware
,
Gifts
,
Bridal Registries.
The undoubtedly fancy display windows featured an array of glittering objects of questionable taste. Montalbano tried to open the door, but it was locked. Fear of robberies, apparently. He pushed a button, and somebody opened the door from within. Inside there was only a fortyish woman, petite and well-dressed, but clearly nervous and on the defensive.

“Good afternoon,” she said, but without the welcoming smile usually reserved for clients. “What can I do for you?”

Montalbano was certain she was not an employee but Signora Cappuccino in person.

“Good afternoon,” Ingrid replied. “A friend of ours is getting married, and Emilio and I would like to give her a silver platter as a present. Could I see what you have?”

“Certainly,” said Signora Cappuccino, and she began taking silver platters off the shelves, each one more vulgar than the last, and setting them down on the counter. Montalbano, meanwhile, was looking around “in a clearly suspicious manner,” as the newspapers and police reports like to say. Finally Ingrid called him over.

“Come, Emilio.”

Montalbano approached and Ingrid showed him two platters.

“I can’t decide between these two. Which do you prefer?”

While pretending to waver, the inspector noticed that Signora Cappuccino was stealing glances at him whenever she could. Maybe she’d recognized him, as he was hoping.

“Come on, Emilio, make up your mind,” Ingrid egged him on.

At last Montalbano made up his mind. As Signora Cappuccino was wrapping the platter, Ingrid had a brilliant idea of her own.

“Emilio, look, what a beautiful bowl! Wouldn’t that look good in our dining room?”

Montalbano shot a withering glance at her and muttered something incomprehensible.

“Come on, Emilio, please let’s buy it. I just love it!” Ingrid insisted, her eyes sparkling with amusement from the joke she was playing on him.

“Do you want it?” Signora Cappuccino asked him.

“Some other time,” the inspector said firmly.

Signora Cappuccino then moved over to the cash register and rang up the purchase. When Montalbano reached into the back pocket of his trousers to extract his wallet, it got stuck and all its contents fell to the floor. The inspector bent down to pick up the various bills, cards, and slips of paper.

Then he stood up and with his right foot slid a calling card he’d purposely left on the floor closer to the table supporting the cash register. The sham had been a perfect success. They left.

“You were so mean, Emilio, not to buy me that bowl!” Ingrid said, pretending to be upset when they got in the car. Then, changing her tone: “Was I good?”

“You were great.”

“What are we going to do with the platter?”

“You can keep it.”

“I’m not going to let you off so easily. Tonight we’re eating out. I’m taking you to a place where the fish is out of this world.”

Not a good idea. Montalbano was certain their playacting would yield immediate results, and he preferred to wait in his office.

“How about tomorrow night?”

“All right.”

 
 
“Ahh, Chief, Chief!” shrieked Catarella the moment Montalbano entered the office.

“What is it?”

“I been true the whole archive, Chief. I can’t see no more, I got spots in front o’ my eyeses. There in’t nobody otherwise that looks like the dead swimmer looks. Only Errera. Chief, in’t it possible it’s possibly Errera hisself?”

“Cat, the people in Cosenza told us Errera’s dead and buried!”

“Okay, Chief, but in’t it possible ’e came back to life and then went back to death in the water?”

“Are you trying to give me a headache, Cat?”

“Perish the tot, Chief! What’m I sposta do wit’ dese photos?”

“Leave ’em here on the desk. We’ll give ’em to Fazio later.”

 
 
After two hours of fruitless waiting, an irresistible wave of somnolence came over him. He cleared a space amidst the papers, crossed his arms on the desk, laid his head down on them, and in the twinkling of an eye he was asleep. So deeply, in fact, that when the telephone rang and he reopened his eyes, for a few seconds he didn’t know where he was.

“H’lo, Chief. There’s somebody wants to talk to you poissonally in poisson.”

“Who is it?”

“That’s just it, Chief. He says he don’t wanna say what ’is name is.”

“Put ’im on . . . Montalbano here. Who is this?”

“Inspector, you came to my wife’s shop with a lady this afternoon.”

“I did?”

“Yes, sir, you did.”

“Excuse me, but would please tell me what your name is?”

“No.”

“Well, then, goodbye.”

He hung up. It was a dangerous move. It was possible that Marzilla had used up what courage he had and wouldn’t have the guts to call again. But apparently Marzilla had such a firm bite on the inspector’s bait that he needed to call back immediately.

“Inspector, excuse me for that call a minute ago. But try to understand my position. You came into my wife’s shop, and she recognized you immediately, even though you were in disguise and went by the name of Emilio. On top of that, my wife found one of your calling cards, which had fallen on the floor. You must admit, it’s enough to make a guy nervous!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s obvious you’re investigating something to do with me.”

“If that’s what you’re worried about, you can relax. The preliminary investigation is over.”

“And I can relax, you say?”

“Absolutely. Until tomorrow, at least.”

He could hear Marzilla’s breath stop short.

“What . . . what do you mean?”

“I mean that tomorrow I move on to the next phase. The operative phase.”

“And . . . what’s that mean?”

“You know how these things work, don’t you? Arrests, subpoenas, interrogations, prosecutors, reporters ...”

“But I have nothing to do with any of it!”

“With any of what?”

“But . . . but . . . but . . . I dunno, whatever you’re investigating . . . But then why did you come to the shop?”

“Oh, that? To buy a wedding present.”

“But why were you calling yourself Emilio?”

“The lady I was with likes to call me that. Listen, Marzilla, it’s late. I want to go home. See you tomorrow.”

He hung up. Was it possible to be any meaner? He would have bet his cojones that within the hour Marzilla would come knocking on his door. He could easily find the address by looking him up in the phone book. As he’d suspected, the ambulance man was up to his neck in what happened on the wharf. Somebody must have ordered him to find a way to get the woman and her three kids into the ambulance and then drop them off outside the hospital’s emergency ward. And he’d obeyed.

He got in the car and drove off with all the windows open. He needed to feel some cool, nocturnal sea air on his face.

 
 
An hour later, as he had lucidly foreseen, a car pulled up in front of his house. A car door slammed, then the doorbell rang. Opening the door, he was greeted by a different Marzilla from the one he’d seen in the hospital parking lot. Unshaven and haggard, he had a sickly air about him.

“I’m sorry if I—”

“I was expecting you. Come in.”

Montalbano had decided to change tactics, and Marzilla seemed confused by his politeness. He walked in, unsure, then didn’t so much sit down as collapse into the chair the inspector offered him.

“I’ll do the talking,” said Montalbano. “We’ll waste less time that way.”

The man made a vague gesture of resignation.

“The other evening, at the port, you knew in advance that an immigrant woman with three children would get off the boat and pretend to fall and hurt her leg. Your assignment was to wait there, have the ambulance ready, and not get tied up by some other job—and then to run up, diagnose a broken leg before the doctor could get there, put the woman and her three kids in the ambulance, and head back to Montelusa. Am I right? Answer only yes or no.”

Marzilla managed to answer only after he’d swallowed and run his tongue over his lips.

“Yes.”

“Good. When you got to San Gregorio Hospital, you were supposed to drop the woman and her kids off in front of the emergency room door, without accompanying them inside. You were even lucky enough to get an urgent call to go to Scroglitti, which gave you a good excuse for acting the way you did. Answer.”

“Yes.”

“Was the ambulance driver your accomplice?”

“Yes. I slip him a hundred euros each time.”

“How many times have you done this?”

“Twice.”

“And were there children with the adults both times?”

Marzilla swallowed two or three times before answering.

“Yes.”

“Where do you sit during these runs?”

“It depends. Sometimes in front with the driver, sometimes in back, with the people we’re carrying.”

“And during the run I’m investigating, where did you sit?”

“For a while, in front.”

“Then you went in back?”

Marzilla was sweating. He was in trouble.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Could I have some water?”

“No.”

Marzilla gave him a frightened look.

“If you won’t tell me yourself, I’ll tell you. You had to go in back because one of the kids, the oldest, the six-year-old, wanted at all costs to get out of the car, he wanted to escape. Am I right?”

Marzilla nodded yes.

“What did you do then?”

The medic said something so softly that the inspector didn’t so much hear it as intuit it.

“Gave him a shot? To put him to sleep?”

“No. A sedative.”

“Who held the kid down?”

“His mother. Or whoever she was.”

“And what were the other kids doing?”

“Crying.”

“Was the kid you gave the shot to also crying?”

“No.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was biting his lips. Till they bled.”

Montalbano stood up slowly. He felt a kind of tingling in his legs.

“Please look at me.”

The medic raised his head and looked at him. The first slap, to the left cheek, was so fierce that it turned the man’s head almost completely around; the second caught him just as he was turning back around and cuffed his nose, triggering a stream of blood. The man didn’t even try to wipe it off, letting the blood stain his shirt and jacket. Montalbano sat back down.

“You’re getting my floor all dirty. The bathroom’s down the hall on the right. Go clean yourself up. The kitchen’s across the hall. There should be some ice in the freezer. You know what to do, being a nurse when you’re not torturing small children.”

The whole time the man was fussing about in the bathroom and kitchen, Montalbano tried hard not to think about the scene Marzilla had just described to him, that hell shrunken down to the little space inside the ambulance, the terror in those eyes open wide on the violence . . .

And it was he who had taken that child by the hand and turned him over to the horror. He couldn’t forgive himself . . . It was no use repeating to himself that he’d thought he was doing the right thing . . . He mustn’t think about it, mustn’t give into the rage, if he wanted to continue the interrogation. Marzilla returned. He’d made an ice pack with his handkerchief and held this over his nose with one hand, his head bent slightly backwards. He sat down in front of the inspector without a word.

“Now I’ll tell you why you got so scared when I came to your shop. You had just learned that your bosses had to kill that boy, the one you’d given the shot of sedatives to. Had to cut him down like some wild animal. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“And so you got scared. Because you’re a two-bit hood, a sleazeball, a piece of shit, but you don’t have the stuff to be an accomplice to murder. You can tell me later how you found out that the kid you were involved with was the same one they ran over with their car. Now it’s your turn to talk. But I’ll save you a little breath by telling you that I already know that you’re swimming in debt and need money, a lot of money, to pay off the loan sharks. Now go on.”