A Beam of Light Page 5

  “I remembered that there’s a little window in the back of the house. So I went to look. But I couldn’t see inside because they’d covered it up from the inside with a board.”

  “Do you have any farmhands working for you who—”

  “I do. I’ve got two Tunisians workin’ for me on the Spiritu Santo property. They didn’t know nothin’ about the door. It’s a big property and the part that they work on is pretty far from the little house. An’ I’m sure that whoever put the door there did it at night.”

  “So you have no idea whether they turned the house into a residence or storage facility?”

  “Well, to be honest, I think I do have an idea.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m sure they made a storehouse out of it.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “In front of the house there’s some tire tracks, a lot of ’em, that look like they’re made by a Jeep or somethin’ similar.”

  “Is the door very big?”

  “Just big enough for a big crate to pass through.”

  A thought flashed through Montalbano’s head. A little house. Casuzza in Sicilian. Casuzza district. A crate. A coffin. Tire tracks in the dusty ground. Was there any connection with his dream?

  This was perhaps why he said:

  “I think it’s best if we go and have a look.”

  Then he had second thoughts.

  “Is the house on the part of the property in Vigàta’s territory or in Montelusa’s?” he asked.

  “Vigàta’s.”

  “So it’s in our jurisdiction.”

  “Want me to come too?” asked Augello.

  “No, thanks, I’ll go with Fazio.”

  Then, turning to Intelisano:

  “Think one of our cars can make it out there?”

  “Bah! Maybe with a good driver . . .”

  “All right, then, we’ll go with Gallo. Signor Intelisano, I’m sorry, but you have to come with us.”

  Miraculously, Gallo managed to take them all the way to the little clearing in front of the house. But it was like being on a roller coaster for a whole hour, with your stomach about to come out of your nostrils.

  Montalbano and Fazio looked first at the house and then at Intelisano, who was standing stock-still with his mouth open.

  There was no door. Nothing preventing people from entering. Whoever wanted to go inside could freely do so.

  “Did you dream it?” Fazio asked Intelisano.

  The man shook his head emphatically.

  “There was a door, I tell you!”

  “Look down before speaking,” Montalbano said to Fazio.

  There were a lot of very visible tracks made by large tires, crisscrossing in the dusty ground.

  Montalbano went up to the entrance, where there was supposed to have been a door, and looked carefully around.

  “Signor Intelisano is telling the truth. There was a door here,” he said. “There are recent traces of quick-drying cement between the stones where they’d put the hinges.”

  He went in, followed by Intelisano and Fazio.

  Half the roof was caved in. The entire house consisted of a single, large room, and in the part still protected by the roof there was a great quantity of straw piled up.

  Upon seeing the straw, Intelisano looked puzzled.

  “Was that there before?” Montalbano asked him.

  “No, sir, it wasn’t,” said Intelisano. “The last time I come in here, about two or three months ago, there was nothin’. They brought it here.”

  He bent down and picked up a long piece of metal wire. He looked at it and passed it to the inspector.

  “This is what you use to tie up bales of straw.”

  “Maybe they used the straw to sleep on,” said Fazio.

  Montalbano shook his head.

  “No, I don’t think they brought it here for sleeping,” the inspector rebutted him. “They used it to hide something. If someone had happened to come up here and look inside through the damaged roof, all they would have seen was a pile of straw.”

  The floor was of beaten earth, untiled.

  “Give me a hand removing some of this straw,” Montalbano said to Fazio and Intelisano.

  They pushed some of it aside, to the opposite side of the room.

  Now they could see three broad streaks in the floor, one beside the other.

  “These were made by three crates that were dragged along the ground,” said Montalbano.

  “They must have been pretty heavy,” Fazio added.

  “Maybe we ought to remove all the straw.”

  “All right. You go outside and smoke a cigarette, and I’ll get Gallo and Signor Intelisano to help me,” Fazio advised him.

  “All right. But be careful and pay attention. Anything you see—I dunno, a piece of paper or metal—could be important and help us figure out who was in here.”

  “Gallo!” Fazio called.

  Montalbano went outside and fired up a cigarette. Not knowing what to do to pass the time, he started walking and, without noticing, ended up behind the house. They’d left the board over the little window. Either they’d forgotten to remove it or it had seemed unimportant after they’d emptied the place out.

  About thirty yards away stood eight or nine sickly almond trees that must have originally been part of some orchard rows long since gone.

  There was nothing else around them. Or rather, there was only a desolate landscape quite similar to the one in his dream.

  No, wait a second. Actually, if one looked closely, there were not eight or nine trees, but exactly fourteen.

  Or, more precisely, there were nine whole trees with full trunk and foliage, and five trees with only the trunk remaining.

  The upper parts had not been chopped off piece by piece with an axe. The trees looked as though they had been decapitated with a single blow, clean and precise, because each mane of leaves and branches lay on the ground, whole, some ten yards away from its respective trunk.

  How could that have happened?

  His curiosity aroused, he wanted to understand and went up to the nearest of the decapitated trees.

  The cut was clean, as though made with a scalpel. But he couldn’t really get a good look, not even on tiptoe.

  And so he took another ten steps and went and looked at a treetop that, in falling, had turned upside down.

  No, it wasn’t a sharp, powerful blade that had chopped the tree in a single cut, but something fiery. You could clearly see the dark brown signs where the wood had burned.

  Suddenly he understood.

  He turned on his heel and started running towards the house. As he rounded the corner he nearly collided with Fazio, who had come running to call him.

  “What’s going on?” Fazio asked.

  “What’s going on?” Montalbano asked at the same time.

  “We found . . .” Fazio began.

  “I found . . .” Montalbano began.

  They stopped.

  “Shall we conjugate all the tenses of the verb ‘to find’?” Montalbano asked.

  “You speak first,” said Fazio.

  “Behind the house I found some trees that had been cut with something that might have been a bazooka or a rocket launcher.”

  “Holy shit,” said Fazio.

  “And what did you want to tell me?”

  “That we found six pages of the Giornale dell’Isola, all with oil stains.”

  “How much you want to bet that it was lubricant for weapons?”

  “I never bet when I know I’ll lose.”

  “There were weapons here, and the people wanted to test them by firing them at the trees. I’d bet the farm on it,” said the inspector.

  “So what do we do now?” asked Fazio.

&nb
sp; “Quick, call the others.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Over to the trees to look for wood chips.”

  They combed the grass and the ground until one o’clock.

  When they’d found about a kilo’s worth of specimens, the inspector said it would suffice and they could go back to town.

  They drove Intelisano home, advising him to remain available and not to talk about the matter with anyone. Then they headed back to headquarters.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Fazio.

  “Bring all the wood chips and newspaper pages into my office, then inform Mimì that we’ll meet back up at four o’clock. I’m going to get in my car and go eat. Come to think of it, let me use your cell phone for a second.”

  He was afraid that, since it was already past two-thirty, Enzo might be closing. And he was so hungry he could hardly see.

  “If I get there in fifteen minutes, can I still get something to eat?”

  “It’s closed!”

  “This is Montalbano!”

  It sounded like the desperate bark of a starving dog.

  “Ah, sorry, Inspector, I didn’t recognize you. Come whenever you like. For you we’re always open.”

  Montalbano was walking through the station’s parking lot, heading for his car, when he heard Catarella calling him.

  “Chief! I gatta phone call f’yiz.”

  Good thing he’d called ahead to Enzo. He followed Catarella back to the switchboard.

  “Chief, ’ere’d happen a be a lady onna line ’oo don’t seem like much of a lady, an’ she wants a talk t’yiz poissonally in poisson.”

  “Did she tell you her name?”

  “She dinna wanna tell me, Chief. ’Ass why I said she din’t seem like much of a lady.”

  “Explain what you mean.”

  “When I ast ’er the name o’ the fimminine individdle in quession she jess started cussin’.”

  “What do you mean ‘cussin’?”

  “Cussin’, Chief. She started takin’ the Madonna’s name in vain, sayin’ Maria—”

  Marian! The inspector snatched the receiver out of Catarella’s hand, pressed the button for the line, then glared at his receptionist, who fled. When he tried to speak, his voice failed.

  “. . . ski?” was all he managed to say.

  “Hi, Inspector, I’m at the airport. We’re about to take off. I told you I’d call you this evening but I couldn’t resist. I wanted to hear your voice.”

  Easier said than done! He still couldn’t utter a single syllable.

  “Well, at least wish me a pleasant journey.”

  “H-hav . . . a p-pleasant j-journey,” he mouthed, feeling like he’d been handicapped since birth.

  “I get it. You have people there and can’t talk. Okay, ciao. I want you.”

  Montalbano set the receiver down and buried his face in his hands. If Catarella hadn’t been in the vicinity, he would have started crying from shame.

  5

  They removed all the mail that was on his desk and piled it up higgledy-piggledy on the little sofa to make room for the wood chips and newspaper pages that they had stuffed into two bags, a jute sack for the chips and a plastic bag for the newspaper.

  Montalbano locked the door to his office after telling Catarella not to disturb him for any phone calls or for any other reason, then sat down to consult with Augello and Fazio.

  Seeing that neither of the two saw fit to open his mouth, the inspector prodded them.

  “You guys do the talking.”

  He’d gone out to eat rather late and had been so hungry he couldn’t hold back. For this reason, and because he’d been unable to take his walk along the jetty for lack of time, he now felt a bit muddled, despite downing three coffees. Not that he felt muddled or anything; he just didn’t feel like talking.

  “Well, in my opinion,” Augello began, “they’ll be back to use the house again. So I think we should set up some surveillance—not a twenty-four-hour watch, mind you, but we should have one of our men passing by often, even at night.”

  “I’m convinced instead that they won’t be using the house again,” said Fazio.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because, first of all, these kinds of improvised depots are always used only once and then abandoned, and, second, because Intelisano asked the two Tunisians working in his fields if they knew anything about the door. In short, the Tunisians were tipped off indirectly that Intelisano had discovered what was going on.”

  “So what? What makes you think the two Tunisians are complicit in the arms depot? Did a little bird tell you?”

  “Nobody told me. But it’s a possibility.”

  “Since when have you become a racist?” Augello pressed on provocatively.

  Fazio didn’t take offense.

  “Dear Inspector Augello, you know perfectly well I’m not a racist. But I wonder how these weapons smugglers or terrorists—because that’s what we’re dealing with here, there’s no getting around it—how did these people, who are certainly foreigners, come to know that there was a tumbledown house in a godforsaken spot that they could use? Somebody must have told them.”

  “I hate to admit it,” said Augello, “but you’re probably right. There’s total chaos these days in Tunisia and they’re desperately in need of weapons. So do you think we should arrest the two Tunisians and put the screws to them?”

  “It seems to me the only logical thing to do.”

  “Just a second,” Montalbano cut in, finally deciding to open his mouth. “I’m sorry, I’ve come to the conclusion that this investigation, for all its importance, is not for us to conduct.”

  “And why not?” Fazio and Augello resentfully asked in unison.

  “Because we haven’t got the means. It’s as sure as death that there are fingerprints on those pages of newspaper. And it’s as sure as taxes that there’s someone somewhere capable of reading those wood chips and telling us what weapons were used and where they were made. And we don’t have specialists like that. Is that clear? And therefore it’s not up to us. Get over it. This is a job for the counterterrorism unit.”

  Silence ensued. Then Augello said:

  “You’re right.”

  “Good,” said Montalbano. “So, since we’re all in agreement, you, Mimì, gather all this stuff together—wood chips and newspaper—and take it to Montelusa. Ask for a meeting with Hizzoner the C’mishner, tell him everything, and then go, with his solemn blessing, to the counterterrorism department. After you’ve told them the whole story and turned over the bags, wish them a fond farewell and come back here.”

  Mimì looked doubtful.

  “But wouldn’t it be better if Fazio went, since he was actually there when the newspaper and chips were found?”

  “No, I would rather that Fazio got immediately down to work.”

  “Doing what?” asked Fazio.

  “Go back to Intelisano and talk to him. Try to find out as much as you can about the two Tunisians. No one’s saying we can’t conduct a parallel investigation. But be careful: for the time being, nobody at the commissioner’s office must know that we’re moving on this too.”

  Fazio smiled in satisfaction.

  Around seven o’clock, Catarella rang.

  “Chief, ’ere’d be Pasquali ’oo’d be the son o’ yer cleanin’ lady Adelina ’oo says ’at if ya got the time ’e’d like to talk t’yiz poissonally in poisson.”

  “Is he on the line?”

  “Nossir, ’e’s onna premisses.”

  “Then send him in.”

  Pasquale doffed his cap as he entered.

  “Good to see you, ’Spector.”

  “Hello, Pasqualì. Have a seat. Everything all right with the family?”

  “Everything’s fine, thanks.”

 
“You got something for me?”

  “Yeah. But first I need to know the exact time and place of the mugging. I think you said Vicolo Crispi, right?”

  “Right. But wait just a second.”

  Montalbano got up, went into Fazio’s room, grabbed the written report of di Marta’s testimony, and wrote a telephone number down on a scrap of paper. Then he went back to his office, turned on the speakerphone, and dialed a number.

  “I want you to hear this, too,” he said to Pasquale.

  “Hello?” said a young woman’s voice.

  “Inspector Montalbano here, police. I’d like to speak with Loredana di Marta.”

  “This is she.”

  “Good evening, signora. I’m sorry to bother you, but I need a little more information on the armed robbery of which you were the victim.”

  “Oh, God, no! I wouldn’t want . . . I feel so . . .”

  She seemed quite troubled.

  “I know, signora, that you—”

  “But didn’t my husband tell you everything?”

  “Yes, signora, but you were the person who was robbed, not your husband. Understand?”

  “But what can I add to what he’s already told you?”

  “Signora, I realize that talking about this ugly incident is very painful for you. But you have to understand that I can’t help but—”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll try to control myself. What is it you want to know?”

  “Exactly how many nights ago did the attack take place?”

  “Three.”

  “What time was it?”

  “Well, purely by chance, right before I noticed the man lying on the ground and pulled over, I’d looked at the clock in the car. It was four minutes past midnight.”

  “Thank you for your courtesy and understanding. And now that you’ve told me when it happened, can you tell me where?”

  “What? I think I’ve told you that over and over! In Vicolo Crispi, because I had to go and deposit—”

  “Yes, I know, but where on Vicolo Crispi? Can you be more precise?”

  “What do you mean, where?”

  “Signora, Vicolo Crispi is not very long, right? I think I remember there’s a bakery, a fabric sto—”

  “Oh, I see. Just bear with me for a second. Okay. If I remember correctly . . . yes, that had to have been it, right between the fabric store and the Burgio jewelry shop. Just a few steps away from the night-deposit box.”