The Fourth Secret (2 page)

“These employers are murderers on the lam,” Niccolò concluded. “When you see them out on the street, remember these images.”

Televigata, instead, was showing Undersecretary Carlo Posacane, who was inaugurating a sort of freeway that connected his hometown of Sancocco (population 313) with a forest of concrete trees whose purpose wasn’t exactly clear. In front of three hundred fellow citizens (the thirteen missing must have voted for the other guy), the undersecretary said he didn’t at all agree with his fellow party member and minister of the Republic, who had said it was necessary to live with the Mafia. No, we have to combat the Mafia. But we have to be careful and avoid generalizations. There were men, irreprehensible gentlemen—the undersecretary said, shaking with disdain—who had always fought for justice, even taking on the government’s duties when it wasn’t there, and had been repaid by the so-called justice with the shameful label of mafioso! This kind of thing, under the new government, would never happen again—the undersecretary concluded in a triumph of applause. Standing next him, Vincenzo Scipione, aka
’u zu Cecè
, a respectable man, responsible for the election of the undersecretary, and owner of the construction company that built the freeway, dried a tear on his cheek, so moved by the speech.

“Catarella!”

In the blink of an eye, Catarella appeared at the door.

“Here I am, sir.”

“Catarella, where is the letter I left here on the table last night?”

“I don’t know, sir. But since they came to dust for prints this morning, they may have misplaced it out of its proper personal place.”

Dusting for prints?! That son-of-a-bitch chief must have finally managed to frame him for something!

“Dusting for what prints, Catarè?” he asked angrily.

“Prints, footprints, handprints, dust, the usual, sir.”

Montalbano swore. Every time the cleaning people came, his desk was mess. In the meantime, Catarella bent down and came up with an envelope in his hands.

“It was on the floor.”

As he walked out of the room, the inspector noticed he was limping worse than the day before.

“Catarè, why don’t you have a doctor look at your leg?”

“Because he left.”

“Go to another then.”

“No, sir, I trust only him. He’s a cousin of mine on my dad’s side, and he’s a very good veterinarian.”

Montalbano paused for a second.

“You prefer a veterinarian?”

“Why, sir, what’s the difference? We’re all animals. But if this keeps up, I’ll go to this old lady who knows what herbs to use.”

It was an anonymous letter written in all caps. It read:

ON THE 13 MORNING THE ALBANEAN CONSTRUCTION WORKER WILL FALL FROM SCAFOLD. THISS TOO BE TRAGEDY IN THE WORK PLACE?

As his forehead started to sweat, he grabbed the envelope and looked for the stamp. The letter had been sent from Vigata on the tenth. A sudden thought gave him the shivers: if he had read it the day before, instead of screwing around wasting time, he might have prevented that tragedy or murder or whatever it was. Then he thought about it again: even if he had opened the envelope immediately, he couldn’t have gotten there in time. Even if Catarella took his sweet time passing it on to him.

“Catarella!”

“Here I am, sir! What’s wrong? You look pale!”

“Catarella, the letter you found just now under the table, do you remember what time they delivered it yesterday morning?”

“Yes, sir, priority mail. Special mail. It was just after nine.”

“And you brought it to me as soon as it got here?”

“Yes, sir, immediately.”

And then he added, a bit resentful: “I don’t keep your personal things lying around waiting.”

And that meant he would have never made it. The letter arrived late; it took three days to travel less than a mile, for that was the distance between the post office and the station. And they call it priority mail! On the envelope, in all caps, was the address of the sender:
ATTILIO SIRACUSA, VIA MADONNA DEL ROSARIO 38
. He called Niccolò Zito on the phone. He wasn’t in his office, the secretary told him. He called his house, talked to Zito’s wife, Taninè, who told him that fortunately her husband had left at the crack of dawn.”

“Why ‘fortunately’?”

“Because his tooth hurts and he kept the whole house awake. It was like Christmas Eve,” Taninè explained.

“Then why doesn’t he go to the dentist?”

“Because he’s scared, Salvo. He could get a heart attack and die as soon as he sees the drill.”

He said good-bye and hung up. He called Catarella and sent him to buy the local paper. He quickly found the article:

DEADLY ACCIDENT IN THE WORKPLACE

Yesterday morning around seven thirty, an Albanian construction worker, age 38, Pashko Puka, a legal resident with a work permit, hired by the Santa Maria construction company owned by Alfredo Corso, fell from a scaffold that had been erected during the construction of an apartment building in Tonnarello, between Vigata and Montelusa. His coworkers, who immediately rushed to his aid, unfortunately discovered he had died. The local magistrate has opened an investigation.

Thank you and come again. Nine lines, including the title, at the bottom of the last column on the right. The page exuded complete indifference toward that unfortunate death, overshadowed by the news of the political crisis in Fela’s town hall and the political crisis in Poggio’s town hall; the announcement that the aqueduct would be shut down for five days at a time instead of the usual four; the preparations in Gibilrossa for the Sant’Isidoro festival. Niccolò Zito did the right thing the previous night when he showed those graphic images of people who died in the workplace. But how many viewers kept looking and how many instead changed the channel, washing those images away with a dancer’s ass or filling their ears with the empty words of the representatives of the new government?

Mimì Augello hadn’t arrived yet. He called Fazio and handed him the paper, pointing at the article. Fazio read it.

“Poor devil!” he said.

Without saying a word, Montalbano handed him the anonymous letter. Fazio read it.

“Fuck!” he said.

Then he had the same thought as the inspector.

“When did we get this?” he asked gloomily.

“Yesterday morning. And I didn’t open it right away. But even if I had, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. It had already happened.”

“What should we do now?” Fazio asked.

“For now, just tell me one thing. Tonnarello is closer to Montelusa than us. We didn’t here about this tragedy, or whatever it is, so I want to know who is investigating it.”

“Inspector, there’s a carabinieri station near there. The man in charge is Maresciallo Verruso. A good man. I’m sure that’s who they called in.”

“Can you check?”

“Two minutes, I’ll make a phone call.”

Just to pass the time, since he was sure that the sender’s name on the envelope was fake, he picked up the phonebook.

There was only one Attilio Siracusa, but he lived in Via Carducci. He dialed the number.

“I wonder who the fuck it is that’s fucking calling this fucking number?”

Clearly, Mr. Siracusa’s vocabulary was rather limited, but quiet expressive.

“This is Inspector Montalbano.”

“And who fucking cares!”

Montalbano decided to fight fire with fire.

“Listen, Siracusa, stop breaking my balls and answer my questions, or else I’ll come over there and kick your ass.”

Mr. Siracusa’s voice suddenly turned kind, submissive, and slightly pleased by the honor.

“Oh, Inspector, it’s you! Please excuse me. I just got home a few hours ago. I was up all night, flying on a damn plane on its way back from India. Look, you won’t believe this, but I left Mumbai the morning of the tenth and … Sorry, but when I start talking … What did you want to ask me?”

“Nothing.”

“Then what the fuck?!” said Mr. Siracusa as the inspector hung up.

Fazio returned.

“Just as I thought, Inspector. Verruso took the call.”

“That means that we’ve been cut out.”

“Well, that’s one way to look at it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We are half in and half out, sir. We’re out because this is not our investigation; we’re in because we know something Verruso doesn’t. And that is, that it wasn’t an accident, but murder. Unless this really was an accident, and Mr. Siracusa is one of those people who can see the future in a crystal ball.”

“And?”

“We have two choices: we can either take the letter, burn it, and pretend we never received it, or muster all our courage—for we’ll need all of it to do something like this—and send the letter to the carabinieri, with our best compliments.”

Montalbano remained silent, lost in his thoughts. At that moment, Augello walked in and immediately understood that something wasn’t right in that room.

“What’s going on here?”

Montalbano explained everything. The result was that Augello also became silent and lost in thought. But after a little while, he decided to talk.

“We could buy ourselves some time without wasting Verruso’s. It’s important that our relationship with the carabinieri be completely transparent.”

“And how do we do that?” Fazio asked.

“We’ll start by conducting a small investigation and we’ll take it from there. If things go well, that is, if we turn up something concrete, we’ll keep investigating and then we’ll figure out what to do with our colleagues when the time comes. However, if we meet a dead end …”

He stopped there and Montalbano finished his sentence: “We’ll send everything to the carabinieri, and they can take it from there. Mimì, can you explain the meaning you give to the word
transparency
?”

“The exact same meaning you give to it,” Mimì replied.

So the inspector divided up the tasks. That business was going to be taken care of by the three of them; there was no reason to make any noise; they had to proceed on the down low, without any rumors reaching the murderer, or worse the carabinieri. Fazio was going to Via Madonna del Rosario 38 to see who lived there and if they knew an Attilio Siracusa. Fazio tried to say something, but the inspector cut him off.

“I know it’s a waste of time. It’s a fake name and address. But we have to do it anyway.”

As for Mimì, he was going to grab the envelope and go to the post office. There must be very few people in Vigata who use priority mail to send something within Vigata. He was going to get the form back, the one you fill out when you send a parcel priority mail, and see if the clerk remembered who came to the counter. While he was there, in an informal capacity and just out of curiosity, he might as well ask them how the fuck a priority envelope took three days to travel less than a mile.

“And what about you?”

“I’m going to Montelusa. I want to speak to Pasquano.”

“So what’s this? Now you’re breaking my balls over other peoples’ deaths?”

“Dr. Pasquano, absolutely not, you see, it’s a statistical survey we’ve been asked to fill out by the ministry and so …”

“A survey about how many Albanian workers fall from scaffolding each year in Italy?”

“No, Doctor, the survey is about …”

“Listen, Montalbano, stop with the bullshit. If you want to ask me something, cut the crap. Tell me what’s going on.”

“You see, Doctor, we’re investigating a theft in a jewelry store in Vigata, where this Puka was allegedly involved, and I repeat allegedly. We think he might have been eliminated by his accomplices, that’s all.”

It worked. Dr. Pasquano didn’t seem angry anymore.

“Well! What do you want me to tell you? The poor devil’s body shows fractures and wounds that are all compatible with a sixty-foot fall. If the fall wasn’t an accident and somebody pushed him off, it wouldn’t be revealed by any autopsy. Have I made myself clear?”

He laughed.

“And in any case, if you need more information, why don’t you call Marshal Verruso? Do you want me to let him know about your investigation?”

“Thanks,” Montalbano said curtly, turning to walk away. Dr. Pasquano’s voice made him stop to turn back.

“There is one thing that struck me. And I’ll tell Verruso about it as well. He got a pedicure on a regular basis.”

Montalbano made a surprised face. Dr. Pasquano opened his arms to mean that that’s how things were and there was nothing he could do about it.

He thought that, by then, Niccolò Zito must have returned to his office. He didn’t have a cell phone on him, so he stopped at one of those open contraptions that, if you need to call while it’s raining, you’d get soaked, one of those that had two telephones. Naturally, both were occupied. At one of them, a black lady was yelling at the top of her lungs in an incomprehensible language. The other was being used by a seventy-year-old peasant wearing a
coppola
and who was holding the phone as if it were glued to his ear. He wasn’t speaking; he didn’t even make a sound; he just kept nodding. After five minutes, as the black lady’s yelling became more and more angry, the peasant said
“bo”
and continued to listen. That wasn’t going to work. Montalbano got back in his car and stopped in front of another one of those contraptions. Both phones were free. He ran to the first and saw that the red light was on: it was out of order. The second worked, only the inspector, after a quick search, discovered he didn’t have a phone card. As he looked around to see if there was a
tabaccheria
where he could get one a man walked up to the other phone and started to talk. Montalbano felt an uncontrollable rage coming over him. What did that phone have against him? Why was it out of service a few seconds earlier and now, with someone else, was working perfectly? He slammed the receiver so hard that it bounced back. Cursing, the inspector slammed it back in place and got into his car. He was about to leave when he saw that the man using the other phone was now pressing his face against his car window. He was a fifty-year-old man wearing glasses, very skinny and nervous, with an austere air about him.

“What do you want?”