The Track of Sand (18 page)

In view of the fact that he had practically fasted the previous day, he decided to compensate.

“Enzo, I’ve got a really big appetite.”

“Glad to hear it, Inspector.What can I bring you?”

“You know what I say? I think I’d have trouble deciding.”

“Leave it to me, sir.”

After eating and eating, at a certain point he realized a wafer-thin mint would have been enough to make him explode, like that character in Monty Python’s
The Meaning of Life
, a film he had found very funny. But it also occurred to him that it was his nervous agitation that had made him eat so much.

After strolling along the jetty for a good half hour, he returned to the office, but he still felt too much ballast in the hold. Fazio was waiting for him.

“Any news last night?” was the first thing he asked the inspector.

“Nothing. And what have you been doing?”

“I went to Montelusa Hospital.And I wasted the whole morning. Nobody wanted to tell me anything.”

“Why not?”

“Privacy laws, Chief. And on top of that, I had no written authorization.”

“So you’ve got nothing to show for it?”

“Who ever said that?” said Fazio, pulling a small sheet of paper out of his pocket.

“Where’d you get this information?”

“From a cousin of the uncle of a cousin of mine, who I found out works at the hospital.”

Family relations, even those so distant that they would no longer be considered such in any other part of Italy, were often, in Sicily, the only way to obtain information, expedite a bureaucratic procedure, find the whereabouts of a missing person, land a job for an unemployed son, pay less taxes, get free tickets to movies, and so many other things that it was probably safer not to reveal to people who were not family.

“So, Gerlando Gurreri, born in Vigàta on—” Fazio began, reading from his little piece of paper.

Montalbano cursed, leapt to his feet, leaned forward over the desk, and snatched the paper out of his hands. And, as Fazio stood there in shock, he rolled it up into a little ball and tossed it into the wastebasket. He couldn’t stand to listen to these records-office litanies Fazio was so fond of, which reminded him of nothing so much as the intricate genealogies of the Bible: Japhet, son of Joseph, begat fourteen children, Rachel, Ibrahim, Lot, Axanagor . . .

“How am I gonna go on now?” asked Fazio.

“You can tell me what you remember.”

“But, when I’m done, can I have my piece of paper back?”

“All right.”

Fazio seemed reassured.

“Gurreri is forty-six years old, and married with . . . now I don’t remember. I had it written down on that paper. He lives in Vigàta at Via Nicotera 38—”

“Fazio, I’m telling you for the last time: Forget the vital statistics.”

“Okay, okay. Gurreri was treated at Montelusa Hospital in early February 2003. I don’t remember the exact date, ’cause I had it written down on—”

“Fuck the exact date. And if you dare try again to remember something you’d written down, I’m going to take that little piece of paper out of the wastebasket and make you eat it.”

“All right, all right. Gurreri was unconscious and brought in by a guy whose name I can’t remember but had written down on—”

“Now I’m gonna shoot you.”

“I’m sorry, it just slipped out. This guy worked with Gurreri at Lo Duca’s stable. He stated that Gurreri had been accidentally struck by a heavy iron bar, the one used to bolt the door to the stable.To make a long story short, the doctors were forced to drill a hole in his skull, or something like that, because a huge hematoma was pressing against his brain. The operation was a success, but Gurreri was left disabled.”

“How so?”

“He started suffering lapses of memory, fainting spells, sudden fits of anger, things like that. I was told Lo Duca paid for specialized care, but you couldn’t really say there was any improvement.”

“Actually the situation got worse, if anything, the way Lo Duca tells it.”

“So that’s as far as the hospital’s concerned. But there are other things as well.”

“Such as?”

“Before going to work for Lo Duca, Gurreri had a few years of jail time under his belt.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You bet. Burglary and attempted murder.”

“Not bad.”

“This afternoon I’m going to try to find out what people in town say about him.”

“Good. Get going.”

“’Scuse me, Chief, but could I retrieve my little piece of paper?”

The inspector headed off to Montelusa at four-thirty. After he’d been on the road for ten minutes or so, somebody behind him honked the horn. Montalbano pulled over to let the guy pass, but the other moved along slowly, pulled up beside him, and said:

“You’ve got a flat tire, you know.”

Matre santa!
What was he going to do now? He had never managed to change a tire in his life! Luckily, at that moment he spotted a car of carabinieri driving by. He raised his left arm, and they pulled over.

“You need anything?”

“Yes, thank you.Thank you very very much.The name’s Galluzzo, a surveyor by trade. If you would be so kind as to change my rear left tire for me . . .”

“You don’t know how to do it?”

“Yes, I do, but unfortunately I have only limited mobility in my right arm and can’t lift heavy objects.”

“We’ll take care of it.”

He arrived at Giarrizzo’s office ten minutes late.

“Sorry I’m late, sir, but the traffic . . .”

Forty-year-old Nicola Giarrizzo, public prosecutor for the city of Montelusa, was a massive man, nearly six and a half feet tall and nearly six and a half feet wide, who, when he spoke to someone, liked to pace back and forth in the room, with the result that he was continually crashing into a chair one minute, an open window the next, or his own desk the next. Not because his eyesight was defective or because he was distracted, but simply because the space of an office of normal size was insufficient for him. He was like an elephant in a telephone booth.

After the inspector explained the reason for his visit, the prosecutor remained silent for a minute.Then he said:

“I think you’re a little late.”

“For what?”

“For coming to me to express your doubts.”

“But, you see—”

“And even if you’d come to express absolute certainty, you would still be too late.”

“But why, may I ask?”

“Because by now everything that needed to be written has already been written.”

“But I came to talk, not to write.”

“It’s the same thing. At this point, nothing will change anything.There will certainly be some new discoveries, big discoveries, which will come out over the course of the trial, but not until then. Is that clear?”

“Absolutely. And, in fact, I came to tell you—”

Giarrizzo raised a hand and stopped him.

“Among other things, I don’t think your way of going about this is terribly correct. Don’t forget, you, until proved otherwise, are also a witness.”

It was true. And Montalbano absorbed the blow. He stood up, mildly angry. He’d made a fool of himself.

“Well, in that case—”

“What are you doing? Leaving? Are you upset?”

“No, but—”

“Sit down,” said the prosecutor, crashing into the door, which had been left open.

The inspector sat down.

“Can we speak in a purely theoretical mode?” asked Giarrizzo.

What on earth was a “theoretical mode”? For lack of a better option, Montalbano consented.

“All right.”

“So, to repeat, theoretically speaking, rhetorically, that is, let us posit the case of a certain police inspector, whom we shall henceforth call Martinez . . .”

Montalbano didn’t like the name the prosecutor wanted to give him.

“Couldn’t we call him something else?”

“But that’s an utterly insignificant detail! However, if it means so much to you, please propose a name more to your liking,” said Giarrizzo, irritated and crashing into a file cabinet.

D’Angelantonio? DeGubernatis? Filippazzo? Cosentino? Aromatis? The names that came into the inspector’s mind didn’t sound right. So he gave up.

“All right, we can keep Martinez.”

“So, let us posit that this Martinez, who has been conducting, and so on and so forth, the investigation into an individual we shall call Salinas—” Why the hell was Giarrizzo so fixated on Spanish names? “Is Salinas all right with you?—who is accused of having shot a shop owner and so on and so forth, realizes and so on and so forth that the case has a weak link and so on and so forth—”

“Excuse me, but
who
realizes the case has a weak link?” asked Montalbano, whose head was spinning with all the and so on and so forths.

“Martinez, no? The shop owner, whom we’ll call—”

“Alvarez del Castillo,” Montalbano promptly piped in.

Giarrizzo looked a little doubtful.

“Too long. Let’s call him simply Alvarez.The shop owner Alvarez, however—though openly contradicting himself—claims not to recognize Salinas as the gunman.You with me so far?”

“I’m with you.”

“On the other hand, Salinas claims to have an alibi, which, however, he doesn’t want to reveal to Martinez.And so the inspector continues straight down his road, convinced that the reason Salinas doesn’t want to reveal his alibi is that he hasn’t got one. Is the picture clear?”

“Quite. At this point, however, I—I mean, Martinez, begins to doubt: What if Salinas really does have an alibi, and pulls it out at the trial?”

“But this has already occurred to the people in charge of confirming the arrest and bringing the accused to justice!” said Giarrizzo, tripping over a rug and threatening to collapse on top of the inspector, who for a moment feared being squashed to death under the Colossus of Rhodes.

“And how have they resolved the question?”

“With supplementary investigations concluded three months ago.”

“But I never—”

“Martinez wasn’t assigned this task because he’d already done his part. To conclude: Salinas’s alibi is apparently a woman, his mistress, whose company he was in at the moment that Alvarez was shot.”

“I’m sorry, but if Lic—I mean, Salinas really does have an alibi, it means the trial will end in—”

“A conviction!” said Giarrizzo.

“Why?”

“Because when Salinas’s lawyers decide to pull out this alibi, the prosecution will know how to pick it apart. The defense, moreover, is unaware that the prosecution already knows the name of the woman who is supposed to provide this belated alibi.”

“Mind telling me who she is?”

“You? But you, Inspector Montalbano, have nothing to do with this! If anything, it should be Martinez asking that question.”

He sat down, wrote something on a sheet of paper, stood up, and held out his hand to Montalbano, who, bewildered, shook it.

“It was a pleasure to talk to you,” said the prosecutor. “I’ll see you at the trial.”

He got up to leave, crashed into the half-closed door, knocking it partially off its hinges, and went out.

Still stunned, the inspector bent down to look at the sheet of paper on the desk. It had a name written on it:
Concetta Siragusa.