The Fourth Secret Read online

  “Yes, before it starts raining.”

  “Sir, be careful not to be recognized. If Verruso gets wind you’re lurking around his crime scene, he’ll cause a huge stink, guaranteed.

  It took him twenty minutes to get to Tonnarello. The last mile of the road was just dirt, riddled with holes. From the top of a hill, he saw the construction site down below: the building, or whatever it was, rose from the middle of a solitary, bleak valley, without any kind of landscaping around it. There were no other buildings, either, nor any cultivated fields: the only things visible were white stones, agaves, and prickly pears. Who the fuck thought of building a house or whatever it was in that desolate chiarchiaro? The place looked better suited to a hospital for infectious diseases or a maximum-security prison. The construction site was completely surrounded by a seven-foot fence composed of horizontal planks nailed to poles planted in the ground at regular intervals. At the center of the side that faced Montalbano, there was an opening in the fence, a rather large one, clearly the entrance used by trucks and the workers. He squinted to see better: there was an opening in a fence, but from one side to the other, there was white-and-red plastic tape, meaning that entry was prohibited. Those were the seals the magistrate had put on the site. However, they weren’t really obstacles. Inside the fence, right next to the opening, there was a small metal shack; it must have been some sort of office. There was another shack on the left-hand side, attached to the fence: it was larger, rather long, probably where the workers changed. He stood there awhile, looking, but he didn’t see any movement: the site was deserted, unless someone was sleeping inside one of the shacks. The black clouds had covered the sky; he could hear thunder from far away. Montalbano went back to his car, drove down the hill, and stopped in front of the opening. There was a big sign that explained they were building an apartment tower and that the owner was a Di Gennaro, Giacomo. The contractor’s license number followed, along with the construction company name, Santa Maria, and its owner, Alfredo Corso, as well as the name of the site’s foreman, Architect Mario Mattia Manfredi. He got out of the car, pulled one piece of tape up with his hand and the other down with his foot. He was inside. He walked to the door of the small shack; it was locked with a chain. And the same went for the bigger shack; only there were two windows, one of which was half open. He started walking around the scaffolding and saw the place where poor Puka had landed: they had drawn the outline of his body on the ground, and the area around the head was dark with blood.

  He looked up: more or less around the fifth floor, a plank was missing from the side of the scaffolding. He looked down and saw it broken in two near the body’s outline. He squatted, looking closely at the spot where the plank had been broken: it looked uneven and didn’t appear to have been tampered with. Although it was an old plank. So they wanted to give the impression that Puka had been walking on the scaffolding, and suddenly a plank gave way, and Puka accidentally fell.

  Wait a second, the inspector thought, if that’s what happened, they should have known that Puka would have ended up on the scaffolding underneath, getting a bad scare but nothing more.

  The dynamics of the accident must have been different, and certainly the murderer must have considered that problem. But there was no way of knowing it without climbing up the scaffolding, all the way to the fifth floor, like a monkey. Are you kidding me? I’ll try to find out what the witnesses told the carabinieri through Fazio, who, I’m sure, has a few spies among their ranks, he told himself.

  That was his last thought. The rain came down brutally, taking the shape of hail that landed on the inspector’s head like so many stones. Cursing, he ran toward the car, passed through the tape sealing off the scene, opened the door, got in, and started it. But he didn’t leave. He didn’t leave because his feet refused to press down on the pedals, and his ass was heavy as a boulder on the seat. His whole body was rebelling; it didn’t want to leave that place. Fine, fine, he told himself. And as if to show his intentions to his feet and his ass, he steered slightly toward the opening. He felt immediately that he was returning to normal. The hail had worsened; it was useless to turn on the windshield wipers, it made no difference. He proceeded blindly, breaking the tape with his car, drove to the bigger shack, all the way to its open window. He got the car as close as he could, mustered up all his courage, got out, climbed, slipped, cursed, muddied himself, climbed on the hood, and jumped through the window. He landed, crushing his shoulder. His eyes teared up from the pain. He got up. He was completely drenched. It was pitch-black inside; the storm had brought the darkness of night at five in the afternoon. There, he had done what he was told, any other suggestions from his body? His body didn’t say anything at all. So why did it lead him there? It felt like being inside a drum played by a hundred hands. It was the hail pounding on the sheet metal. Deaf, blind, in pain, his arms stretched in front of him like a sleepwalker, he moved three steps forward and, for some reason, he got the idea that the inside of the shack was empty. So he started walking back toward the door and slammed his left leg violently against the edge of a wooden bench. The same exact spot he had bruised two days earlier, slipping on the bathroom floor. The pain, almost unbearable, climbed all the way up to his brain. In horror, he discovered he had become deaf. How could it be that a blow to his leg made him lose his hearing? Then he realized that the fish-tank silence that suddenly came over him was caused by a very simple event: it had stopped hailing. He walked to the front door of the shack, reached for the switch, found it, and flipped on the light. There was no risk of somebody seeing the light through the window; no one would venture all the way into that horrible chiarchiaro where the construction site was in such bad weather. The shack was clean, neat. There was a long table, two benches, four chairs. In the back, three stalls: a toilet and two showers. Nailed to the wall without windows, there was a long coat rack. Five pegs held up overalls and clothes with paint stains; above each, was a nail that held up a yellow hard hat; the work shoes were on the floor underneath the clothes. Five of the pegs were occupied, but between the third and the fourth, there was an empty one: no hard hat, no shoes, no clothes. Montalbano got the idea that it must have been Puka’s peg; the carabinieri must have taken his personal effects with them. Now, a subtle music was coming down from the ceiling; it must have started to rain softly, in thin threads, like the hair of an angel. He went to check the two showers but didn’t find anything. As soon as he walked into the toilet, which was very clean, spotless, he felt the urge to pee. Out of habit, he shut the door. When he turned around to get out, he saw that the lightbulb that hung low on an electric wire, created a curious rainbow like reflection on the metal door. He stopped to look and noticed, that just above eye level, there were a few brown stains that came out of a dent shaped like a crescent moon, a dent caused by a metallic object that had violently hit the door. He got close, almost touching them with his nose; there was no doubt, those were bloodstains, left untouched on the metal surface. If the material had been wood, they would have been absorbed. They were rather big stains, enough for any kind of test. But how was he going to collect samples? He needed to go back to his car. He pulled a chair under the window he had come through, stepped onto it, and looked out. It had stopped raining. He started to climb out, and as soon as his body was halfway outside, the hail resumed, worse than before. The bad weather, or whoever was sending it, had ambushed him. Drenched again, he got in the car, grabbed a pocketknife and an old plastic bag from the glove compartment, put them in his pocket, and had a smoke as he waited for the hail to stop. He managed to climb and miraculously balance himself on the hood, but as soon as he leaned forward to reach the window, his feet slipped, both at the same time, and he ended up slamming his chin on the window frame. As he was falling headfirst in the mud between the car and the side of the shack, he took comfort in the thought that he was going to be better off than Puka, that poor devil.

  When he stopped in front of the station and climbed out of what was a moving mo
und of dirt, and not a car, Montalbano was exhausted. Leaving the valley where the construction site was, driving on the dirt road turned swamp, swerving and getting stuck, had cost him all his energy and caused the pain in his shoulder and leg to be almost unbearable. As soon as he recognized the human wreck that had walked in as the inspector, Catarella started to shout, he sounded like a rooster whose neck had been rung.

  “Santa Vergine, sir! Santa Vergine! What happened? You’re all muddied! Even your hair is full of mud!”

  “Calm down, it’s nothing, I’m going to go take a shower.”

  There was nothing he could do. Catarella ran up to him, grabbing his arm while he tried to squirm from his grip. They walked down the hall in perfect harmony for both of them had injured their left legs; when they took a step, they both leaned right, in synchrony. Looking at them from behind, Fazio could barely keep from laughing.

  In the bathroom, while he was cleaning up, Catarella held Montalbano by his shoulders; since he couldn’t get him out of there, he started to lose it.

  “Sir, your personal undergarments are soaking wet; you’ll get sick! Sir, should I go get you a cognac?”

  “No.”

  “Sir, please, do it for my sake, take an aspirin! I keep a bottle in my drawer!”

  “Fine, go get it.”

  He went to his office, followed by Fazio.

  “I was beginning to worry.”

  “Did you tell anyone I was at the construction site?”

  “No one. But if you hadn’t shown up, I was going to come look for you in half an hour. Did you find anything?”

  He was about to tell him, but Catarella walked in with a glass of water and the aspirin in one hand and an anise cookie in the other.

  “I don’t want the cookie.”

  “No, sir! It’s absolutely necessary! If you don’t put something in your personal stomach when you take the aspirin, you might get a personal stomachache in your personal stomach!”

  Summoning all the patience he could, Montalbano complied. Only at the end of the whole operation did Catarella leave, relieved.

  “Where’s Augello?”

  “Sir, there was an attempted robbery at the Melluso jewelry store. The owner started shooting like a madman, the two robbers fled since they only had toy guns; from the witnesses’ testimonies, it looks like they were just two kids. Final tally: two wounded bystanders.”

  “Did the jeweler have a permit for the gun?”

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  “Were the robbers foreigners?”

  “No, luckily.”

  In his head, Montalbano approved both the “unfortunately” and the “luckily.” They were more eloquent than any long speech.

  “So?” Fazio asked, unable to contain his curiosity.

  “So I came to a conclusion,” the inspector said, “but I don’t feel like telling you.”

  “And why’s that?” Fazio asked.

  “Because then I’ll have to tell the whole thing again to Mimì, and I don’t feel like doing it.”

  Fazio looked at him, went to the door, shut it, came back, stood in front of the desk, and spoke in dialect.

  “Can I speak to you man to man?”

  “Of course.”

  “You shouldn’t take advantage of the fact that all of us here love you and give in to your every whim. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ll get over this bad mood you’re in for having to eat the anise cookie and tell me what you found at the construction site. And if it bothers you so much to tell the story twice, then I’ll tell it to Augello when he returns.”

  Montalbano gave up. He told him in detail what had happened, what he had done, and what he had found. At the end, he took out the plastic bag from his pocket and handed it to Fazio. The blood had turned into powder, an almost invisible dark layer at the bottom of the bag.

  “You hold on to it, Fazio. It’s important. If this belongs, as I think it does, to Puka, then it’s a crucial piece of evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Evidence of how the Albanian was killed. You see, I think that Puka was ambushed and struck by the murderer while he was in the toilet pissing. Puka was already wearing his work clothes, but not his hard hat. He leaves the door open. The murderer hits him hard on the head with a steel pipe. But as he’s hitting him, he shuts the door behind him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the toilet is visible from the front door, and somebody could be walking by. It is a necessary precaution. Puka falls dead on the toilet bowl, and the murderer drags him out for the staging. There must have been at least one accomplice. Before sounding the alarm for the fake accident, they clean the toilet bowl, but they don’t see the stains on the door because it’s open the whole time.”

  “But how did the blood end up there?”

  “Keep in mind that I found it only by chance, because my eye had been caught by a strange reflection. The murderer hits him a first time, then raises the steel pipe to strike him again. However, there isn’t much room. The pipe hits the closed door, leaving a dent shaped like a crescent; at the same time, the blood that is on the pipe splashes on the door. However, there’s no need for a second blow; Puka’s head is split in two.”

  The door opened and Augello walked in.

  “Fazio told me you went to the construction site. What did you find?”

  Montalbano got up.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

  And left.

  4

  Six dead in the workplace in one month just in the province of Montelusa is quite a number. If that was any indication, then how many accidents happen in the whole country? Was anyone keeping track? Yes, every now and then, somebody did, and then the contrite face of a newscaster would announce to the entire world how that was certainly a high number, however, it was within the average of the European Union. And now on to sports. Thank you and come again. But what was the European Union average? Could they please tell us? No, sir, they would never say, because this story of the “European Union average” had become not only a good alibi, but also a source of great consolation. Unemployment had climbed four percent? Nothing to worry about, it was only slightly higher than the E.U. average. Have no fear; the government would find a solution. And, in fact, there was a minister who was thinking about increasing the speed limit to at least eighty miles an hour in order to make Italy more competitive in respect to the other countries of this beautiful Europe designed only to please the banks. But come to think of it, why did he call them accidents? No, Niccolò Zito was right: they were murders and they should be considered as such. These thoughts went through his mind as he was polishing off a plate of tender baby octopus Adelina had prepared for him, but his appetite little by little disappeared. He got up, cleared the table, and drank some coffee to remove that bitter taste from his mouth. Then he played the tape Niccolò’s secretary had sent him, laying on the couch.

  The first death was a poor devil who fell into a septic tank. The second was a father of three who was burned alive. The third had been caused by a cable that held a steel beam, which snapped and crushed the man underneath it. The fourth was something less elaborate, that is to say, the usual, trivial fall from a scaffold. The fifth was definitely more creative: a construction worker buried in cement poured by a coworker who hadn’t seen him. What was the title of that novel by that Italian-American writer, Pietro Di Donato, in which there was a story similar to this one? Oh, yes, Christ in Concrete. They even made a good movie out of it. The sixth and last was Puka’s.

  His stomach, after looking at that sort of massacre, had turned into a pulp. He needed a break. He walked out on the patio; the evening was a beauty. He went down to the beach, walked a bit along the shore, slowly, one step at a time. He walked for a good half hour; the salty air slowly revived him. He went back home, turned on the TV, and watched and rewatched the parts that showed Puka dead. But during his walk, he must have caught a li
ttle draft, and his shoulder started to hurt. He watched and rewatched the tape a dozen times, forward and backward, frame by frame, until he became bleary-eyed. There was nothing out of place. Was it supposed to look like an accident? It looked like an accident. He compared Puka’s scenes with those of another construction worker who had fallen from a scaffold; his name was Antonio Marchica. There, if there was something that could be said about Puka’s body, the way in which his legs and arms were placed, was that they looked exactly like you would expect them to be. Puka was positioned like a film director would have imagined. Marchica’s arms, for instance, were hidden, under his body. Instead, Puka’s right arm made a nice arch over his head, while the other one ran parallel to his body, at a slight angle. Marchica’s face was invisible, since it was pointed to the ground; instead you could see Puka’s profile, with his head wound facing out. Montalbano wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a recorded voice shouting: “Quiet on the set! Action!” But then he asked himself: If you hadn’t received an anonymous letter warning you, would you have sensed the same artificial, theatrical staging?” He didn’t know how to answer the question. He looked at his watch; it was two in the morning. He turned off the TV and went to the bathroom. Now his shoulder was hurting a lot, and he rummaged through the medicine cabinet to look for the cream that Ingrid had once put on that very shoulder, relieving the pain. Naturally, he couldn’t find it. He went to bed and after tossing and turning for a while, trying to find a position that didn’t affect his shoulder, he finally fell asleep.

  He and Livia were at the edge of the cliff, looking at the sea below them. All of a sudden, they heard a violent crack.

  What was that? Livia asked herself, scared.

  And at the same time, they realized they weren’t at the edge of a cliff, but rather on a scaffold made of steel pipes and wooden planks. And it was the plank on which they were standing that had made that sinister noise.