Rounding the Mark (22 page)

“Don’t do anything stupid!”

The Jaguar drove past Montechiaro and took the road that led to the coast.

“You drive for a while,” said Ingrid. “I’m bored.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, because soon there won’t be any more cars on the road and you’ll have to turn off the headlights to avoid being spotted. And I can’t drive by moonlight.”

“And second?”

“And second, because you know this road a lot better than I do, especially at night.”

Ingrid turned a moment to face him.

“You know where they’re going?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“To the villa of your former friend Ninì D’Iunio, as he used to call himself.”

The BMW swerved, almost ending up in a field, but Ingrid quickly got it under control. She said nothing. When they got to Spigonella, instead of taking the road the inspector knew, Ingrid turned right.

“That’s not the—”

“I know,” said Ingrid, “but we can’t keep following the Jaguar here. There’s only one road that goes to the promontory and the house. They would definitely see us.”

“And so?”

“So I’m taking us to a spot from where we can see the front of the house. And we’ll get there a little before they do.”

Ingrid stopped the BMW at the edge of a cliff, behind a Moorish-style bungalow.

“Let’s get out. They can’t see our car from here, but we’ll have an excellent view of them.”

They went around the bungalow. On their left they had a clear view of the promontory and the road leading to the villa. Less than a minute later, the Jaguar pulled up to the closed gate. They heard two very brief toots of the horn, followed by a long one. Then the door on the ground floor opened, and against the light they saw the silhouette of a man going to open the gate. The Jaguar drove in, and the man walked back to the house, leaving the gate open.

“Let’s go,” said Montalbano. “There’s nothing more to see here.”

They got back in the car.

“Now, turn on the motor,” said the inspector, “and, with headlights off, we’re going to go to . . . Do you remember that small red-and-white villa where Spigonella begins?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We’re going to take up position there. To go back to Montechiaro, one has to drive by that spot.”

“Who has to drive by that spot?”

“The Jaguar.”

Ingrid barely had time to get to the red-and-white house before the Jaguar went flying by at high speed, skidding at the curve.

Apparently Marzilla wanted to put as much distance as possible between him and the men he’d driven to the villa.

“What should I do?” asked Ingrid.

“Now shalt thou prove thy mettle,” said Montalbano.

“I didn’t get that. What did you say?”

“Follow him. Use your horn, your brights, get up right behind him, pretend you’re going to ram him. You have to terrorize the man at the wheel.”

“Leave it to me,” said Ingrid.

For a stretch she drove on without headlights and at a safe distance; then, when the Jaguar disappeared behind a bend, she accelerated, turned on all available and imaginable headlamps, rounded the bend and started wildly honking the horn.

Seeing that unexpected missile come up behind him must have frightened Marzilla out of his wits.

First the Jaguar zigzagged, then it veered all the way to the right and off the road, thinking the other car wanted to pass it. But Ingrid did not pass him. Riding right on the Jaguar’s tail, she was flashing the brights on and off and continually blasting the horn. Desperate, Marzilla accelerated, but he couldn’t go much faster on that road. Ingrid didn’t let up; her BMW was like a mad dog.

“What now?”

“When you get a chance, pass him, make a U-turn in front of him, and stop in the middle of the road with your brights on.”

“I could even do it right now. Put on your seat belt.”

The BMW leapt forward, roared, passed the other car, drove on a bit, braked, skidded, then spun around on the force of the skid. The Jaguar, too, came to a skidding stop just a few yards away, in the glare of the BMW’s high beam. Montalbano pulled out his pistol, stuck his arm outside the window, and fired a shot in the air.

“Turn off your headlights and come out with your hands up!” he shouted through the half-open car door.

The Jaguar’s lights went off and Marzilla appeared with his hands in the air. Montalbano didn’t move. Marzilla was swaying like a tree in the wind.

“He’s pissing his pants,” Ingrid commented.

Montalbano remained motionless. Slowly, two big tears started to run down the medical worker’s face. He took a step forward, dragging his feet.

“Have pity!”

Montalbano didn’t answer.

“Have pity, Don Pepè! What do you want from me? I did what you wanted!”

Montalbano still wasn’t moving. Marzilla fell to his knees, hands folded in prayer.

“Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me, Mr. Aguglia!”

So the loan shark who was calling Marzilla and giving him orders was Don Pepè Aguglia, a well-known construction bigwig. They hadn’t needed any wiretaps to find out. Marzilla was now crouching, forehead on the ground, hands over his head. Montalbano finally decided to get out of the car. Which he did very slowly. Hearing his footsteps approach, Marzilla curled up even more, sobbing.

“Look at me, asshole.”

“No, no!”

“Look at me!” Montalbano repeated, kicking him so hard in the ribs that Marzilla’s body was lifted up in the air and fell back down belly up. But he still kept his eyes desperately closed.

“It’s Montalbano! Look at me!”

It took Marzilla a moment to realize that the man standing before him was not Don Pepè Aguglia, but the inspector. He sat up, leaning back on one arm. He must have bitten his tongue, since a little blood trickled out the side of his mouth. He stank. He hadn’t only pissed his pants, he’d also shat himself.

“Oh . . . it’s you? Why did you follow me?” asked Marzilla, stunned.

“Me?” said Montalbano, innocent as a lamb. “It was a mistake. I wanted you to stop, and you started going faster! So I thought you had wicked intentions.”

“What . . . what do you want from me?”

“Tell me what language the two men you drove to the villa were speaking.”

“Arabic, I think.”

“Who told you which roads to take and where you were supposed to go?”

“Just one of the men.”

“Did it seem to you like he’d been here before?”

“Yessir.”

“Could you describe them to me?”

“Only one of them, the guy who spoke. He didn’t have any teeth.”

Jamil Zarzis, Gafsa’s lieutenant, had arrived.

“Do you have a cell phone?”

“Yes. It’s on the front seat of the car.”

“Did anyone call you, or did you call anyone after you dropped the two men off?”

“No sir.”

Montalbano went up to the Jaguar, grabbed the cell phone, and put it in his pocket. Marzilla didn’t breathe.

“Now get back in the car and go home.”

Marzilla tried to stand up, but couldn’t.

“Let me give you a hand,” said the inspector.

He grabbed him by the hair and jerked him to his feet as the man cried out in pain. Then with a violent kick in the back he sent him reeling into the front seat of the Jaguar. Marzilla took a good five minutes to leave, so badly were his hands shaking. Montalbano waited until the red taillights disappeared before going back to Ingrid’s car and sitting beside her.

“I didn’t know you were . . . capable of . . . ,” Ingrid muttered.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know how to put it. Of . . . being so nasty.”

“Me neither,” said Montalbano.

“What did the guy do?”

“He did . . . he gave a shot to a little boy who didn’t want one,” was the best he could come up with.

Ingrid looked completely perplexed.

“So you take revenge on him because you were afraid of getting shots when you were a child?”

Psychoanalyze though she might, Ingrid couldn’t know that in manhandling Marzilla, he had really wanted to manhandle himself.

“Come on, let’s go,” said the inspector. “Take me home. I’m tired.”

16

It was a lie. He did not feel tired. In fact he felt eager to get down to work. But he had to get rid of Ingrid as soon as possible. He didn’t have a minute to lose. He managed to dispatch her without betraying his haste, thanking her and kissing her and promising they’d meet again the following Saturday. Once he was alone at home in Marinella, the inspector turned into one of those high-speed heroes in old slapstick movies, shooting like a rocket from room to room in a desperate search. Where the hell had he put that wet suit after he’d last used it to look for the
ragioniere
Gargano’s car at the bottom of the sea a good two years back? He turned the house upside down and finally found it in an inner drawer of the armoire, properly wrapped in plastic. But what really drove him crazy was that he couldn’t find a pistol holster that he practically never used but which nevertheless had to be somewhere. In fact, it turned out to be in the bathroom, inside the shoe rack, under a pair of slippers he had never dreamed of wearing. Hiding it there must have been a brilliant idea of Adelina’s. The house now looked like it had been ransacked by a bunch of wine-plastered lansquenets. He had probably best not cross paths in the morning with his housekeeper, who would be in a bad mood when she saw how much work he had made for her.

He undressed, put on the wet suit, passed the belt through the holster’s loop, then put only his jeans and jacket back on. Passing in front of a mirror, he caught a glimpse of himself. First he felt like laughing, then he felt embarrassed. He looked dressed up for a movie. What was this, Carnival or something?

“The name’s Bond. James Bond,” he said to his reflection.

He consoled himself with the thought that at this hour he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew. He put the espresso pot on the burner, and when the coffee was ready, he knocked back three cups in a row. Before going out, he looked at his watch. At a rough guess, he would be back in Spigonella by two o’clock in the morning.

 
 
He was so lucid and determined that on his very first try he found the road Ingrid had taken, which led to the spot from where one could see the front of the villa. The last hundred yards he had to drive without headlights. His only fear was that he might drive the car straight into the goddamned sea. He pulled up behind the Moorish-style bungalow perched at the edge of the cliff, turned off the motor, grabbed his binoculars, and got out. He leaned forward to look. There was no light visible in the windows. The villa looked uninhabited, and yet there were three men inside. Very carefully, dragging his feet the way people do when they can’t see very well, he advanced to the edge of the cliff and looked below. He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear the sea, which sounded a little rough. With the binoculars he tried to see if there was any activity in the villa’s little harbor, but he could barely make out the darker shapes of the rocks.

To the right, about ten yards away, was a narrow, steep staircase, carved into the stone wall. Negotiating it would have been a task for an alpinist in broad daylight, let alone in the dead of night. But he had no choice; there was no other way to get down to the beach. He went back beside the car, slipped off his jeans and jacket, took out his pistol, opened the car door, threw his stuff inside, grabbed his underwater flashlight, took the keys from the glove compartment, closed the car door without a sound, and hid the keys by wedging them under the right rear tire. He fit the gun into the holster on his belt, slung the binoculars across his chest, and kept the flashlight in his hand. On the very first step, he stopped, trying to get a sense of the stairway’s configuration. He turned the flashlight on for a second and looked. He felt himself begin to sweat inside the wet suit: the steps went down almost vertically.

 
 
Flicking the flashlight very quickly on and off from time to time to see whether his foot would land on solid ground or merely plunge into the void, and meanwhile cursing, hesitating, staggering, slipping, grabbing onto roots sticking out from the rock face, regretting that he wasn’t an ibex, deer, or even a lizard, he finally, when the Good Lord saw fit, felt cool sand under the soles of his feet. He’d made it.

He lay down on his back, panting heavily, and watched the stars. He stayed that way for a while, until the bellows in the place of his lungs slowly disappeared. He stood up and looked through the binoculars. The dark shapes of the rocks that broke up the beach and formed the villa’s little harbor looked to be about fifty yards away. He started walking, crouching down and hugging the rock face. Every few steps he would stop, ears pricked, eyes as wide open as possible. Nothing. Total silence. All was still except the sea.

When he was almost behind the rocks, he looked up. All he could see of the villa was a kind of rectangular railing against the starry sky—in other words, the underside of the vast terrace balcony at the point where it jutted out most. From here he couldn’t advance any farther by land. He put the binoculars down on the sand, hooked the underwater flashlight onto his belt, took another step, and was in the water. He didn’t expect it to be as deep as it was, coming immediately up to his chest. He figured this couldn’t be a natural phenomenon; they must have dug into the sand to create a sort of moat, to add another obstacle for anyone on the beach who felt like climbing the rocks. He started swimming slowly, using a breaststroke, girl-style, to avoid even the slightest splashing, following the curve of that arm of the little harbor. The water was cold, and as he drew near the opening, the waves grew increasingly strong, threatening to send him scraping against some jagged rock. As there was now no longer any need to do the breaststroke—since any noise he might make would blend in with the sound of the sea—in four rapid crawl strokes he reached the last rock, the one marking the opening. He was leaning against it with his left hand, to catch his breath a moment, when a wave more powerful than the rest pushed him forward, knocking his feet against a very small natural platform. He climbed up on it, clinging to the rock with both hands. With each new wave he risked slipping, pulled down by the undertow. It was a dangerous spot, but before proceeding he had to get a few things straight.