The Shape of Water Read online

  The woman didn’t answer immediately. She was thinking it over before making up her mind.

  “No, I believe you, cop. Tell me when and where.”

  They agreed on the place, the Marinella Bar, which at the appointed hour, ten o’clock, would surely be deserted. Montalbano advised her not to tell anyone, not even her husband.

  ~

  The Luparello villa stood at the entry to Montelusa as one approached from the sea. A massive nineteenth-century building, it was surrounded by a high defensive wall with a wrought-iron gate at the center, now thrown open. Montalbano walked down the tree-lined lane cutting through one part of the park and came to the huge, double front door, one half of which was open, the other half draped with a large black bow. He leaned forward to look inside: in the vestibule, which was rather vast, there were some twenty people, men and women, looking appropriately grief-stricken, murmuring in soft voices. He thought it unwise to walk through the crowd; someone might recognize him and start wondering why he was there. Instead, he walked all around the villa and at last found a rear entrance, which was closed. He rang the bell several times before someone came and opened the door.

  “You’ve made a mistake. For condolence visits use the front door,” said a small, alert housekeeper in black pinafore and starched cap, who had classified him at a glance as not belonging to the category of caterers.

  “I’m Inspector Montalbano. Could you tell someone of the family I’m here?”

  “They’ve been expecting you, Inspector.”

  She led him down a long corridor, opened a door, and gestured for him to enter. Montalbano found himself in a large library with thousands of well-kept books neatly arrayed on enormous shelves. There was an immense desk in one corner, and in the corner opposite, a tastefully elegant sitting area with a small table and two armchairs. Only five paintings adorned the walls, and with a shudder of excitement Montalbano immediately recognized the artists: there was a Guttuso portrait of a peasant from the forties, a landscape in Lazio by Melli, a demolition by Mafai, two rowers on the Tiber by Donghi, and a woman bathing by Fausto Pirandello. The selection showed exquisite taste and rare discernment. The door opened, and a man of about thirty appeared: black tie, open face, stylish.

  “It was I who phoned you. Thank you for coming. Mama was very keen on seeing you. I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you.” He spoke with no regional inflection whatsoever.

  “No trouble at all. I simply don’t see of what use I could be to your mother.”

  “That’s what I said to her, too, but she insisted.

  And she wouldn’t give me any hint as to why she wished to inconvenience you.”

  He looked at the fingertips of his right hand as if seeing them for the first time, then discreetly cleared his throat.

  “Please try to understand, Inspector.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “For Mama’s sake. It’s been a very trying time for her.”

  The young man turned to leave, then suddenly stopped.

  “Ah, Inspector, I wanted to inform you so you wouldn’t find yourself in an embarrassing situation. Mama knows how my father died and where he died. How she found out, I have no idea. She already knew two hours after the body was found. Please excuse me.”

  Montalbano felt relieved. If the widow knew, he wouldn’t be forced to concoct any pious fictions to hide the indecency of her husband’s death from her.

  He went back to enjoying the paintings. At his house in Vigàta he had only drawings and prints by Carmassi, Attardi, Guida, Cordio, and Angelo Canevari, to which he had been able to treat himself by docking his meager salary. More than that he couldn’t afford; he could never pay for a painting on the level of these.

  “Do you like them?”

  He turned about abruptly. He hadn’t heard the signora enter. She was a woman past fifty, not tall, with an air of determination; the tiny wrinkles lining her face had not yet succeeded in destroying the beauty of her features. On the contrary, they highlighted the radiance of her penetrating green eyes.

  “Please make yourself comfortable,” she said, then went and sat on the sofa as the inspector took a seat in an armchair. “Such beautiful pictures. I don’t know much about painting, but I do like them. There are about thirty scattered around the house. My husband bought them. Painting was his secret vice, he loved to say. Unfortunately, it wasn’t his only one.”

  We’re off to a good start, Montalbano thought, then asked:

  “Are you feeling better, signora?”

  “Compared to when?”

  The inspector stammered, as if he were in front of a teacher asking him difficult questions.

  “Well, I—I don’t know, compared to this morning . . . I heard you were unwell today—in the cathedral.”

  “Unwell? I was fine, as good as one might feel in such circumstances. No, my friend, I merely pretended to faint. I’m a good actress. Actually, a thought had come into my mind: if a terrorist, I said to myself, were to blow up this church with all of us inside, at least one-tenth of all the hypocrisy in the world would disappear with us. So I had myself escorted out.”

  Impressed by the woman’s candor, Montalbano didn’t know what to say, so he waited for her to resume speaking.

  “When I was told where my husband had been found, I called the police commissioner and asked him who was in charge of the investigation—if there was any investigation. The commissioner gave me your name, adding that you were a decent man. I had my doubts: are there still any decent men? And so I had my son phone you.”

  “I can only thank you, signora.”

  “But we’re not here to exchange compliments. I don’t want to waste your time. Are you absolutely certain it wasn’t a homicide?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then what are your misgivings?”

  “Misgivings?”

  “Yes, my dear, you must have some. There is no other way to explain your reluctance to close the investigation.”

  “I’ll be frank, signora. They’re only impressions, impressions I really can’t and shouldn’t allow myself, in the sense that, since we are dealing with a death by natural causes, my duty should lie elsewhere. If you have nothing new to tell me, I shall inform the judge this very evening—”

  “But I do have something new to tell you.”

  Montalbano was struck dumb.

  “I don’t know what your impressions may be,”

  the signora continued, “but I’ll tell you what mine are.

  Silvio was, of course, a shrewd, ambitious man. If he stayed in the shadows all those years, it was with a specific purpose in mind: to come into the limelight at the right moment and stay there. Now, do you really believe that this man, after all that time spent on patient maneuvers to get where he did, would decide, one fine evening, to go with a woman, surely of ill repute, to a shady place where anyone could recognize him and possibly blackmail him?”

  “That, signora, is one of the things that has perplexed me the most.”

  “Do you want to be even more perplexed? I said

  ‘woman of ill repute,’ and I would like to clarify that I didn’t mean a prostitute or any sort of woman for whom one pays. I’m not sure if I’m explaining myself clearly.

  Let me tell you something: Right after we got married, Silvio confided in me that he had never been with a prostitute or gone to a licensed brothel when they still existed. Something prevented him. So this leads one to wonder what sort of woman it was who convinced him to have relations with her in that hideous place.”

  Montalbano had never been with a prostitute either, and he hoped that no new revelations about Luparello would reveal other points of similarity between him and a man with whom he would not have wanted to break bread.

  “You see, my husband quite comfortably gave in to his vices, but he was never tempted by self-destruction, by that ‘ecstasy for baseness,’ as one French writer put it. He consummated his affairs discreetly, in a little house
he had built, though not in his name, at the tip of Capo Massaria. I found out about it from the customary compassionate friend.”

  She stood up, went over to the desk, rummaged through a drawer, then sat back down holding a large yellow envelope, a metal ring with two keys, and a magnifying glass. She handed the keys to the inspector.

  “Incidentally, he had a mania for keys. He had two copies of each set, one of which he would keep in that drawer; the other he always carried on his person.

  Well, the second copy was never found.”

  “They weren’t in your husband’s pockets?”

  “No. And they weren’t in his engineering studio either. Nor were they found in his other office, the so-called political office. Vanished, evaporated.”

  “He could have lost them on the street. We don’t necessarily know that they were removed from him.”

  “It’s not possible. You see, my husband had six sets of keys. One for this house, one for the country house, one for the house by the sea, one for the office, one for the studio, one for his little house. He kept them all in the glove compartment of his car.

  From time to time he would take out the set he needed.”

  “And none of these sets was found?”

  “No. I gave orders to have all the locks changed.

  With the exception of the little house, of whose existence I am officially unaware. If you wish, you may visit the place. I’m sure you’ll find some revealing vestiges of his affairs.”

  Twice she had said “his affairs,” and Montalbano wished he could console her in some way.

  “Aside from the fact that Mr. Luparello’s affairs do not fall within the scope of my investigation, I have nevertheless questioned some people, and I must say in all sincerity that the answers I’ve received have been rather generic, applicable to anyone.”

  The woman looked at him with the faint hint of a smile.

  “I never did reproach him for it, you know. Practically speaking, two years after the birth of our son, my husband and I ceased to be a couple. And so I was able to observe him calmly and quietly for thirty years, without having my vision clouded by the agitation of the senses. You seem not to understand, please forgive me: in speaking of his ‘affairs,’ my intention was to avoid specifying the sex.”

  Montalbano hunched his shoulders, sinking farther down into the armchair. He felt as if he’d just taken a blow to the head from a crowbar.

  “On the other hand,” the woman continued, “to get back to the subject of greatest interest to me, I am convinced that we are dealing with a criminal act—let me finish—not a homicide, not a physical elimination, but a political crime. An act of extreme violence was done, and it led to his death.”

  “Please explain, signora.”

  “I am convinced that my husband was forced, under the threat of violence or blackmail, to go to that disgraceful place where he was found. They had a plan, but they were unable to execute it in full because his heart gave out under the stress or—why not?—out of fear. He was very ill, you know. He had just been through a very difficult operation.”

  “But how would they have forced him?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps you can help me find out.

  They probably lured him into a trap. He was unable to resist. I don’t know, maybe they photographed him at that place or had him recognized by someone. And from that moment on they had my husband in the palm of their hands; he became their puppet.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “His political adversaries, I think, or some business associates.”

  “You see, signora, your reasoning, or rather your conjecture, has one serious flaw: you have no proof to support it.”

  The woman opened the yellow envelope she’d been holding in her hand all this time and pulled out some photographs, the ones the lab had taken of the corpse at the Pasture.

  “Oh, God,” Montalbano murmured, shuddering.

  The woman, for her part, showed no emotion as she studied them.

  “How did you get these?”

  “I have good friends. Have you looked at them?”

  “No.”

  “You were wrong not to,” and she chose a photo and handed it to Montalbano along with the magnifying glass. “Now, take a good look at this one. His trousers are pulled down, and you can just get a glimpse of the white of his briefs.”

  Montalbano was covered in sweat; the discomfort he felt irritated him, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  “I don’t see anything strange about that.”

  “Oh, no? What about the label of the briefs?”

  “Yes, I can see it. So?”

  “You shouldn’t be able to see it. This kind of brief—and if you come into my husband’s bedroom, I’ll show you others—has the label on the back and on the inside. If you can see them, as you can, it means they were put on backwards. And you can’t tell me that Silvio when getting dressed that morning put them on that way and never noticed. He took a diuretic, you see, and had to go to the bathroom many times a day and could have easily put them properly back on at any point of the day. And this can mean only one thing.”

  “What’s that?” the inspector asked, stunned by the woman’s lucid, pitiless analysis, which she made without shedding a tear, as though the deceased were a casual acquaintance.

  “That he was naked when they surprised him, and that they forced him to get dressed in a hurry. And the only place he could have been naked was in the little house at Capo Massaria. That is why I gave you the keys. I repeat, it was a criminal act against my husband’s public image, but only half successful. They wanted to make him out to be a pig, so they could feed him to the pigs at any moment. It would have been better if he hadn’t died; forced to cover himself, he would have done whatever they asked. The plan did, however, succeed in part: all my husband’s men have been excluded from the new leadership. Rizzo alone escaped; actually, he gained by it.”

  “And why did he?”

  “That is up to you to discover, if you so desire. Or else you can stop at the shape they’ve given the water.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not Sicilian; I was born in Grosseto and came to Montelusa when my father was made prefect here.

  We owned a small piece of land and a house on the slopes of the Amiata and used to spend our summers there. I had a little friend, a peasant boy, who was younger than me. I was about ten. One day I saw that my friend had put a bowl, a cup, a teapot, and a square milk carton on the edge of a well, had filled them all with water, and was looking at them attentively.

  “ ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. And he answered me with a question in turn.

  “ ‘What shape is water?’

  “ ‘Water doesn’t have any shape!’ I said, laughing.

  ‘It takes the shape you give it.’ ”

  At that moment the door to the library opened, and an angel appeared.

  11

  The angel—Montalbano at that moment didn’t know how else to define him—was a young man of about twenty, tall, blond, very tanned, with a perfect body and an ephebic aura. A pandering ray of sun had taken care to bathe him in light in the doorway, accentuating the Apollonian features of his face.

  “May I come in, zia?”

  “Come in, Giorgio, come in.”

  While the youth moved toward the sofa, weightlessly, his feet seeming not to touch the ground but merely to glide across the floor, navigating a sinuous, almost spiral path, brushing past objects within reach or, more than brushing, lightly caressing them, Montalbano caught a glance from the signora that told him to put the photograph he was holding in his pocket.

  He obeyed, while the widow quickly put the other photos back in the yellow envelope, which she placed beside her on the sofa. When the young man came near, the inspector noticed that his blue eyes were streaked with red, puffy from tears, and ringed with dark circles.

  “How do you feel, zia?” he asked in an almo
st singing voice, then knelt elegantly beside the woman, resting his head in her lap. In Montalbano’s mind flashed the memory, bright as if under a floodlight, of a painting he had seen once—he couldn’t remember where—a portrait of an English lady with a greyhound in the exact same position as the one the young man had assumed.

  “This is Giorgio,” the woman said. “Giorgio Zìcari, son of my sister Elisabetta and Ernesto Zìcari, the criminal lawyer. Perhaps you know him.”

  As she spoke, the woman stroked his hair. Giorgio gave no indication of having understood what was said.

  Visibly absorbed in his devastating grief, he didn’t even bother to turn toward the inspector. The woman, moreover, had taken care not to tell her nephew who Montalbano was and what he was doing in their house.

  “Were you able to sleep last night?”

  Giorgio’s only reply was to shake his head.

  “I’ll tell you what you should do. Did you notice that Dr. Capuano’s here? Go talk to him, have him prescribe you a strong sedative, then go back to bed.”

  Without a word, Giorgio stood up fluidly, levitated over the floor with his curious, spiral manner of movement, and disappeared beyond the door.

  “You must forgive him,” the lady said. “Giorgio is without doubt the one who has suffered most, and who suffers most, from the death of my husband. You see, I wanted my own son to study and find himself a position independently of his father, far from Sicily.

  You can perhaps imagine my reasons for this. As a result, in Stefano’s absence my husband poured all his affection on our nephew, and his love was returned to the point of idolatry. The boy even came to live with us, to the great displeasure of my sister and her husband, who felt abandoned.”

  She stood up, and Montalbano did likewise.

  “I’ve told you everything I thought I should tell you, Inspector. I know I’m in honest hands. You may call me whenever you see fit, at any hour of the day or night. And don’t bother to spare my feelings; I’m what they call ‘a strong woman.’ In any event, act as your conscience dictates.”