The Fourth Secret Read online

  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?”

  “I want you to be more considerate.”

  “Why, what did I do to you?”

  “To me, nothing. But you were about to damage something that belongs to the general public. You almost broke the telephone.”

  He was certainly right. But Montalbano didn’t care for the lecture. If that man wanted to pick a fight, he was going to get one. He opened the door, slowly got out of the car, balanced his weight on his legs, and looked into the eyes of that man who was about the same age.

  “I must warn you before you do anything stupid. I am a marshal in the carabinieri,” he said.

  Montalbano came back to his senses. That was the last thing he needed, a brawl between a police inspector and a carabinieri marshal. And who was going to come and restore order, the border patrol? The best thing was to end things there.

  “My apologies, I got very upset and …”

  “All right, all right, you may go.”

  “Can I ask you something, Marshal?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How did you manage to make that phone work?”

  “Make it work? I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was cursing because I couldn’t get a dial tone. Only after, did I realize that the red light was on.”

  “And so you were angry, too.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t try to smash the entire phone.”

  “Yes, Inspector, Dr. Zito came to the office, broke a vase, threw some papers on the floor, and then left. When he has a toothache, he becomes more frenzied than Orlando.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He said he was going to drown himself in the sea. He always says that. I don’t think he’ll be back anytime soon, since he asked Dr. Giordano to fill in for him on the newscast. But if I can be of help …”

  Niccolò’s secretary was a sweetheart: a beautiful thirty-year-old woman who had a soft spot for Montalbano.

  “Look, last night, Niccolò aired a good story about accidents in the workplace.”

  “Do you want me to send you a copy?”

  “Yes, but I need something a little more complicated. Niccolò clearly put together a montage of these accidents, drawing from a large number of pictures he must have had at his disposal. Is that right?”

  “Yes, Inspector.”

  “So I would need all the material he has put together, not just the images he showed last night. I know it will take a while and …”

  “Not at all,” the secretary smiled. “The task of collecting all the images of the accidents in the workplace has already been done by Dr. Zito in preparation for the story. We have everything in our archives. All I need to do is make you a copy.”

  “Will that take long?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  When he got to the station, Fazio and Augello were already waiting for him in his office.

  “Before we start talking, I need to make a phone call.”

  He dialed the number.

  “Dr. Pasquano, it’s Montalbano. Doc, please take it easy. Just one question and I’ll let you get back to dismembering another corpse. The others who died in the workplace, were their feet clean?”

  As Fazio and Augello looked at him, confused, Montalbano listened to the answer the doctor howled through the phone, thanked him, and hung up.

  “I’ll explain later,” he said. “Fazio, you go first.”

  “There isn’t much to say, number thirty-eight on Via Madonna del Rosario doesn’t exist. The street ends with number thirty-six, which is a shoe store. The owner is …”

  He stopped and took a piece of paper out of his pocket.

  “… Formica, Vicenzo, son of the late Giovanni and Elisabetta …”

  “Fazio, what the fuck?!”

  Halted midway through that census-reporting impulse that sometimes overcame him, Fazio blushed and put the paper back in his pocket.

  “Nobody knows an Attilio Siracusa. He’s not even one of their clients. I went to the shop across the street, which is an odd number, thirty-one. It’s a barber and they have never heard of this Siracusa, either.”

  “And you, Mimì?”

  “There is only one clerk at the post office window for priority mail. She looks just like a witch. As soon as I saw her, I felt like running away. But she turned out to be a sweet and gentle creature.”

  “Did you fall in love, Mimì?”

  “No, but one never stops marveling at how deceitful appearances really are. You were right, Salvo, there aren’t that many people who use priority mail to send something from Vigata to Vigata. I showed her the envelope and she remembered it well. A little boy had come to send it; he had the form already filled out and the exact change.”

  “And so that’s how we got screwed,” Fazio observed.

  “Did she explain why the letter arrived so late?”

  “Oh yes,” Mimì said. “There was a strike organized by COBAS.”

  “And whoever mailed the envelope didn’t know that,” Montalbano said. “So one thing is certain. The fake Mr. Siracusa wanted to prevent the murder, for this was definitely a murder.”

  “And what’s this business about the feet?” Mimì asked.

  Montalbano explained and then added: “Pasquano told me that the others’ feet were normal. Some dirty, some clean. Puka was the only one who had gotten a pedicure.”

  “I can’t really believe that a construction worker, Albanian or otherwise, goes regularly to get …”

  “Unless,” Montalbano interrupted, “he was just pretending to be a construction worker. What did our esteemed Dr. Augello say just now, overtaken by a surprising bout of originality? That appearances are deceiving. Or rather: not all that glitters is gold. Or even better: the clothes don’t make the man.”

  3

  He polished off a huge plate of fried mullet, managing to reach the concentration of a Hindu Brahmin, the kind that causes you to levitate, only that his kind of concentration went the opposite direction, toward a deep an earthly rooting, that is, he was completely taken by the aromatic smell, the dense taste of that fish, blocking out every other thought or feeling. He even managed to make the outside noise of cars, voices, radios, and blaring televisions disappear, creating for himself a sort of bubble of absolute silence. Once finished, he got up from the table, not only full, not only satisfied, but with a sense of complete contentment. As soon as he walked out the door of the Trattoria San Calogero he almost got run over by a car that missed him only because he jumped back on the sidewalk at the last moment. But the harmony that connected him to the sound of the celestial spheres had been broken. To get out of the bad mood that had hit him as soon as he got back in touch with the world after that heavenly interval, he decided to go for his usual walk on the pier, all the way down to the lighthouse. There he sat on the usual rock, lit a cigarette, and started to think. All right, that whole business started with an anonymous letter that foretold a murder that took
place just as described. It was clear that it was not the murderer challenging the police, a “catch-me-if-you-can type of thing.” No, that anonymous sender wasn’t the murderer, and actually tried to prevent the murder. He had been unlucky; his letter didn’t get there in time. Even unluckier, after all, was that poor Albanian devil, Puka. And he didn’t quite make sense, Montalbano thought. Why? Just because he went for pedicures? But that was a racist thought! Do all Albanians have to be ugly, dirty, and evil? No, the thing that bothered him was that a construction worker, whether Albanian or Finnish, would get a pedicure. But that was even worse: that was a classist thought.

  “Why don’t you go for a pedicure?” Livia had asked him a bit earlier, as she looked at his toenails that had thickened and were now pointing one to Christ and the other to Saint John.

  He didn’t want to go; he thought it was something for the rich or the effeminate. So, in conclusion, that was an investigation born of a prejudice layered over another prejudice!

  He didn’t feel like going back to the station. He felt empty inside. He decided what he was doing wasn’t right, that is, hiding the anonymous letter from the carabinieri marshal. But his cop instincts were like those of a dog: it was hard to let go of the bone after he has sunk his teeth into it. What was he supposed to do?

  He wasted quite some time throwing little stones at a bottle cap floating in the water, but he couldn’t hit it, not even once; a cold breeze had started blowing, covering the waves in lace. From Capo Rossello, he saw two black clouds roll in, clearly bearing bad intentions. He felt he had to do something before the storm came; it was an uncomfortable sensation of urgency, of rush. The only thing to do was give in to his instincts, letting them guide him, following their lead. He went back to the station and called Fazio.

  “Can you check if the construction site is still roped off?”

  It was. That meant none of the workers would be there, just the security guard maybe.

  “What are you doing? Are you going there?”