The Pyramid of Mud Page 4

  They sat down in the two armchairs in front of the television, but turned them so as to face each other.

  “Something to drink?”

  “No, thanks. I don’t want to take up any more of your time than is strictly necessary.”

  “Well, I’m going to have a little whisky.”

  “Do you read my magazine?”

  “Yes. Among other things, I think calling it The Lighthouse Guardian was right on the money.”

  “Thanks. As I’m sure you know, I’m a lawyer by trade, with a passion for journalism. And as a journalist I have this nasty habit of looking for skeletons in people’s closets.”

  “In these corrupt times, I wouldn’t call that a nasty habit but a real virtue.”

  “Though a virtue that—as many have given me fully to understand—might cost me dearly. But I’ll get to the point. Have you ever heard mention of a company called Albachiara?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a firm that was founded a year and a half ago for the purpose of building public works. About a month after it was set up, it went on the market—a market already teeming with hardened competitors, mind you. Be that as it may, Albachiara, among other things, won the contract for a school complex in Villaseta. They finished the work in record time and fourteen months later turned over the keys to the complex.”

  “How much did they inflate the costs?”

  “Very little. A negligible percentage. In that respect, they behaved unimpeachably.”

  “So, a perfectly respectable firm, in other words.”

  “In appearance.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A month ago, exactly one week after their inauguration, one of the three buildings was declared unfit for use.”

  “Why?”

  “Two ceilings had collapsed and some rather obvious gashes appeared in the outer walls.”

  “Was anyone injured?”

  “Luckily, no.”

  “Did they open an investigation?”

  “They had no choice but to.”

  “And what was their conclusion?”

  “They found that the construction company was not to blame. The damage to the walls was caused by an underground landslide beneath the building.”

  “I’m sorry, but isn’t it required procedure, before beginning any construction, to check the risk factors in the terrain?”

  “Of course, and it was done.”

  “And they found everything was in order?”

  “Yes. The authorization was signed by Professor Augusto Maraventano, an expert in such matters, though by then he was already ninety years old and senile.”

  “I get it.”

  “It gets even more complicated.”

  “Was Maraventano ever called in for questioning?”

  “That wasn’t possible.”

  “Why?”

  “He died six months ago. And that’s where the story ends: Everyone kissed and made up. Nobody was found guilty.”

  “But, you see—”

  “Wait. Having come this far, I asked myself an entirely logical question.”

  “What?”

  “If the ground is unstable, aren’t the other two buildings also at risk?”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I went to speak with Professor Maraventano’s assistant, an engineer by the name of Riccio, who assured me that the story about the landslip was a lie that Albachiara and the judge had agreed upon. The terrain apparently was extremely solid, from a geological point of view. He showed me the surveys, the studies and analyses, everything. The problem was that nobody—other than me—took the trouble to go and talk to him.”

  “But how could the judge have—”

  “He consulted only the survey report drawn up by someone suggested by Albachiara themselves. And so I arrived at the inescapable conclusion.”

  “And what was that?”

  “That the materials used by Albachiara were not the ones stated in their contract, but something vastly inferior in quality. And, furthermore, that they saved a lot of money in the process of the construction itself, by skirting specific rules concerning stability and safety. I started moving in this direction three days ago, asking around for people’s opinions.”

  “And?”

  Gambardella smiled.

  “And yesterday in my mailbox I found an envelope with the address written in block capitals. That immediately aroused my suspicion, and so I opened it. All it contained was a photo of my son, Ettore, who is six years old, as he was coming out of school.”

  “No message?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you have the photo with you?”

  Gambardella reached into his coat pocket, took out an envelope, and handed it to the inspector. It hadn’t been postmarked, so someone must have slipped it into the mailbox. The photo showed a little boy laughing as he spoke to a friend who was out of the picture frame but for his shoulder.

  “Worth a thousand words,” said Montalbano as he handed him back the envelope. “And what do you intend to do now?”

  “Starting tomorrow, Ettore will go to school in Montelusa and live at my sister’s house.”

  “You think your son will be out of danger in Montelusa?”

  “I’m not that stupid. But, at the moment, I can’t think of . . .”

  “Go ahead and send him to Montelusa for the moment, but don’t let him go to school. Take him to your sister’s place this very evening, and make sure nobody knows about it.”

  “All right.”

  “So you intend to proceed in your investigation?”

  “I think that’s pretty clear.”

  “I want you to know that I’m entirely at your disposal in this affair. You need only tell me how I can—”

  “I just came here to inform you of the threat I’d received. If anything should happen to me or someone in my family, you’ll know where to start your investigation.”

  “I’ll make you an offer.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I can’t take any action, in an official capacity. But if you keep me informed of everything you find out as you go along, it’ll make it easier for me to prevent any dangerous moves on their part.”

  “All right, then.”

  “One final question. Who have you spoken to?”

  “Three former masons who’d worked on the construction of the schools. One of them, a certain Saverio Piscopo, gave me a tip that might prove valuable.”

  “What did you say his name was?”

  “Saverio Piscopo.”

  Who’d already paid dearly for having talked. They’d put drugs in his boy’s stroller. He chose not to give Gambardella this news.

  “What was the tip?”

  “That initially the site foreman for the school complex was Filippo Asciolla, who was then fired and replaced by someone else. I was told that Asciolla is hopping mad at the Albachiara people. I want to go and talk to him as soon as possible.”

  “Keep me posted on that, and be very careful. Oh, and, listen, do you know the name of the company that is building the new water main for the Voltano, and whose current worksite is in the Pizzutello district?”

  “Where a man was found murdered this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “The company’s called Rosaspina.”

  “What are people saying about this murder?”

  “Since the man hasn’t been identified yet, there’s endless conjecture, and naturally some people suspect some seamy sex story behind it all. For now, though, it’s all just talk.”

  As soon as Gambardella left, Montalbano set the table as the food warmed up in the oven. Then he kicked back and savored it all slowly, especially the pasta ’ncasciata.

  Once he’d cleared the table, he tur
ned on the TV and watched the news on the Free Channel.

  Since he quite purposely had not yet told anyone the dead man’s name, the man was referred to simply as “the anonymous victim.” Nicolò Zito, the news anchor, expressed surprise that no one had filed a missing persons report so far. Because—and here he came to the same conclusion as the inspector—a man who goes out in the pouring rain at five in the morning in his underpants and hops on a bicycle can only live somewhere nearby. And he concluded:

  “With no information forthcoming yet from the police, we shall begin our own investigation this morning, and we shall keep our viewers up to date as it proceeds.”

  Smart guy, Nicolò, you had to admit. But then something occurred to the inspector.

  Nicolò surely wouldn’t take long to figure out that the victim lived in a house near the worksite and was married. And by making this news public, he would put the killers on their guard, effectively helping them to defend themselves. This had to be avoided. But how? The best way would be to fill Zito in and find out exactly how things stood. But that meant he had no time to waste waiting for the prosecutor’s authorization. He had to get moving on his own.

  The telephone rang. At that hour it could only be Livia. He didn’t feel like getting up and answering. Then he made up his mind, but before picking up the receiver he had another moment of hesitation.

  He picked up.

  “How are you feeling?”

  For the past three days Livia had had a fever and a touch of the flu.

  Before that, she’d had stomach problems, and before that, she’d had such pains in her legs that she couldn’t walk . . .

  The truth of the matter was that ever since the death of François, she was no longer the same. She’d changed a lot.

  She seemed to have lost all interest, forgot things, neglected her appearance, was no longer present even to herself.

  Now, just hearing how different her voice sounded, Montalbano felt his heart give a tug. The world around him turned gray and a wave of melancholy swept over him.

  “A little better,” she said.

  A pause, and then:

  “I wish you were here.”

  “I promise I’ll come. As soon as I can.”

  “I feel so alone . . .”

  She no longer had the strength to go to work. She’d taken a leave of absence from her job and hadn’t wanted to come down to Sicily because she thought she would just be a weight around his neck. And now she just stayed holed up at home all day.

  The words came out of his mouth by themselves.

  “Livia, please, I beg you,” he said. “Try to react, do it for us, for both of us. You’re everything to me. When I hear you sound like that, I . . .”

  “I’ll try, Salvo, I promise. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He set down the receiver, took a deep breath, and ran a hand over his face. It was wet.

  4

  Seen by the light of the high beams, on an utterly moonless night with the sky entirely covered by a heavy blanket of clouds blacker than the blackest night, the worksite looked like the perfect set for a German-Expressionist film, with the sharp contrast of lights and darks and the gigantic, deformed shadows looking like projections of monstrous, motionless figures.

  Or one of those other pictures, usually American, about the day after a nuclear catastrophe, when the survivors wander about a landscape they knew perfectly well the day before but now do not recognize, so foreign has it become.

  It was as though nobody had worked at that construction site for many years: the crane, the trucks, the excavators looked just like skeletal scrap metal abandoned centuries earlier on some dead planet.

  All color was gone. One saw nothing that wasn’t the same drab, uniform gray as the mud. Or the “bud,” as Catarella called it. And maybe he wasn’t wrong to do so, because the mud had entered the blood, become an integral part of it. The mud of corruption, of payoffs, of phony reimbursements, of tax evasion, scams, faked balance sheets, secret slush funds, tax havens, bunga bunga . . .

  Maybe, thought Montalbano, it was all a symbol of the situation in which the whole country found itself at that moment.

  He stepped on the accelerator, in the sudden, irrational fear that the car might get infected, come to a stop at that accursed place, and turn into another muddy ruin from one moment to the next.

  Had this happened, he would surely have started screaming at once like a frightened child, and it would have taken a long time before he regained the use of his reason.

  He heaved a sigh of relief when his headlights at last lit up the front of the house.

  But they also lit up a car that was parked a bit to one side of the house.

  Want to bet someone had had the same idea as him? But could Zito the journalist have possibly already got so far in his private investigation?

  It took him a moment to realize he couldn’t stop, but he had to pretend to be just driving by, and so he kept on going.

  He did, however, manage to notice distinctly that there was a man and a woman inside the car. They were both sitting in front, and when his high beam shone on them they moved so that their faces would not be seen. She was blond.

  It couldn’t be Zito.

  He passed the old lady’s illegal shop and drove on until the country road gave onto the provincial road to Sicudiana. There was almost no traffic at that hour. He pulled over to the side of the road and stayed in the car.

  He fired up a cigarette and smoked it slowly. Good thing there was almost a whole pack, since, in one way or another, he had at least half an hour to kill.

  Because of the couple in the car, what he had in mind to do had now become a bit more dangerous than expected. For there was a chance—a small one, of course, but a chance—that the blond woman was Inge, Nicotra’s German wife, who was returning home completely unaware that her husband had been murdered and wanted to say, well, one last good-bye to the man accompanying her.

  The half hour, by God’s grace, finally passed. Montalbano started up the car and retraced his path down the same road.

  The car with the couple was gone. Had it actually been an amorous tryst, or had Inge gone straight inside after saying good-bye?

  He got out of the car and stood motionless for a spell, to check whether any car headlights were approaching. On so dark a night one would see the beam from miles away. Luckily there was nothing. Pitch-black in either direction.

  He walked cautiously towards the house.

  There was no light filtering through the shutters in front. He went round the back. The situation seemed the same as that afternoon. Except that the bedroom light was more visible.

  He came back round the front, tiptoeing ever so softly, to avoid making noise, and opened the door on his third try, using a special key he’d been given by an old burglar. Pushing the door gently, and slowly, worried that it might creak, he craned his neck and looked inside.

  The darkness on the ground floor was so dense, so solid, that you could cut it with a knife. Before entering, he took off his shoes, leaving them outside the door.

  Going in, he lit the powerful flashlight he’d brought along and closed the door behind him, guiding it gently with his hand.

  His immediate impression was that there wasn’t anyone in the house. It smelled stuffy, of stale air.

  This meant that the woman in the car was therefore not Inge. The coast was clear, but proceeding carefully, in such situations, was the golden rule.

  The flashlight’s beam revealed that he was in a large room divided into an alcove kitchen in one corner, an eating area, and a third part outfitted as a sitting room. At one end was a closed door, no doubt a bathroom.

  He’d imagined a different scene. Here, instead, everything was in perfect order. The only things that looked out of place were an overturned chair in the middle
of the room and another lying on its side on the floor.

  A clear sign there’d been something of a scuffle, the beginnings of a struggle.

  Then he noticed some muddy footprints left by a pair of shoes and a pair of heavy boots, leading from the door and going straight to the foot of the wooden staircase.

  So two people had come into the house.

  He moved slowly towards the stairs, then started climbing them, trying not to make the slightest sound.

  The staircase led to a corridor with three doors in a row on each side.

  The first room at the top of the stairs was a bedroom. As the light was on, it corresponded with the one he’d seen from the outside.

  He went in.

  The sheets and blankets on the double bed were thrown over to one side and touched the floor.

  A pillow all covered in blood had fallen on the ground.

  It seemed immediately clear to Montalbano that only one person had slept there.

  How to explain the blood? Whose was it?

  The murdered man’s head, which he’d seen with his own eyes, showed no wounds.

  He continued his inspection. The next room was a spacious bathroom, followed by a sort of study. He went over to the other three rooms facing the front of the house. Directly across from the study was a storeroom, then came a bathroom just like the other one, and finally a bedroom with a double bed.

  Here, too, the bed was in a state of chaos, and it was clear that two people had slept in it.

  This left Montalbano bewildered.

  So Nicotra and his wife had a guest.

  Male? Female?

  Then he had an idea, and opened the armoire. There were men’s as well as women’s clothes, the latter a little gaudy. That must therefore have been the master bedroom. He had his confirmation when he went into the bathroom next to it. There were perfumes, creams, makeup.

  He went back into the first room and opened the armoire. Three men’s suits, gray and blue, two woolen sweaters . . . all stuff belonging to a man of a certain age. And shirts, underpants, socks . . .

  He took the suits out, one at a time, thoroughly searching the pockets. No papers, no documents.