The Potter's Field (26 page)

“Anybody here?”

Behind a bead curtain that concealed a door on the left, a voice called out.

“I'll be right there!”

A man without a hint of hair on his head appeared: short, fat, ruddy, and likeable.

“Can I help you?”

“Hello, the name's Lojacano, I'm with the insurance company, and I need a little information from you, if you'd be so kind. And who are you, if I may ask?”

“I'm Rocco Sudano, I own this place. But at the moment, since it's the low season, I take care of almost everything myself.”

“Listen, was your motel open on this past September the fourth?”

“Of course. That's still high season.”

“Were you here?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember whether that morning, a dark, very attractive women came in after having a minor accident at the bypass?”

Rocco Sudano's eyes started glistening, and his billiardball head even started glowing as if there were a lamp inside it. His mouth broadened into a smile of contentment.

“I certainly do remember! How could I forget? Signora Dolores!” Then, suddenly worried: “Has something happened to her?”

“No, nothing. As I said, I'm with the insurance company. It's about the car accident she had, remember?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you remember by any chance what the lady did for the rest of that day?”

“Well, yes. You don't see a whole lot of women like that, not even in high season! First she went to her room and rested for a couple of hours. She wasn't hurt or anything, just very scared. I even brought her some chamomile tea, and she was lying down...”

He lost himself in the memory, a dreamy look in his eyes, and, without realizing, started licking his lips. Montalbano snapped him out of it.

“Do you remember what time of day she arrived?”

“Uh, it must've been ten, ten-thirty.”

“And what did she do next?”

“She ate in our restaurant, which was still open then, being high season. Then she came down and said she was going to the beach. I saw her again in the evening, but she didn't have dinner here. She went to her room. At seven o'clock the next morning Silvestro, the mechanic, brought her car back. And then she paid and left.”

“One last question. Are there any buses or private coaches linking Lido di Palmi and Gioia Tauro?”

“Yes, during the high season. There's a number of transportation services, which also go farther than just Gioia Tauro and Palmi, naturally.”

“So they were probably still running on September the fourth, right?”

“Around here, the high season lasts until the end of September.”

Montalbano looked at his watch. It was past five.

“Listen, Signor Sudano, I need to rest for a couple of hours. Have you got any rooms available?”

“Any one you want. It's low season.”

He slept like a log for four hours straight. When he woke up, he called Fazio from his cell phone.

“I'm not going to make it back tonight. I'll see you tomorrow morning at the station.”

“All right, Chief.”

“Did you talk to Alfano's friend?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you anything interesting?”

“Yes.”

It must be really interesting, if the words had to be dragged out of Fazio's mouth. Whenever he had something decisive to tell him about a case, he only revealed it in dribs and drabs.

“What did he say?”

“He said that what got Arturo Pecorini to move so suddenly out of Vigàta was the Sinagras.”

Montalbano balked.

“The Sinagras?!”

“Yes indeed, Chief. Don Balduccio himself.”

“And what was the reason?”

“Rumors were starting to circulate in town about an affair between the butcher and Signora Dolores. So Don Balduccio sent word to Pecorini that it was best if he had a change of scene.”

“I see.”

“By the way, Chief, Prosecutor Tommaseo was looking for you.”

“Do you know what he wanted?”

“He talked with Catarella, so go figure. From what I could gather, he said a colleague of his from Reggio had called about a disappearance. He complained that he didn't know anything about the case. He wants to be filled in. I think Tommaseo's colleague was referring to our very own Giovanni Alfano.”

“I think so, too. I'll go and talk to him tomorrow.”

The inspector got out of bed, took a shower, changed clothes, and went to the front desk in the bar. Signor Sudano didn't want to be paid (“It's low season, after all”).

He got in the car and left.

When he got to Villa San Giovanni it was already past ten. He headed for the same trattoria where he had eaten at midday. And he wasn't disappointed the fourth time, either.

At one o'clock in the morning he was back in Sicily.

He traveled the road between Messina and Catania under a sort of rough copy of the Great Flood. The windshield wipers were helpless to wipe away the heavens' waters. He stopped at the Autogrill service areas at Barracca, Calatabiano, and Aci Sant'Antonio, more to fill up on courage than on coffee. When all was said and done, it had taken him three hours to drive a distance that would have taken an hour and a half in normal weather. But once he'd left Catania behind and got on the autostrada for Enna, the deluge not only stopped suddenly, but the stars came out. Taking the Mulinello bypass, he headed in the direction of Nicosia. Half an hour later, he saw on the right a sign indicating the way to Mascalippa. He took that road, a dilapidated mess that here and there still preserved a faded memory of asphalt. As he entered Mascalippa, there wasn't a living soul in the streets. He stopped in the town square, which was exactly the same as he had left it so many years before, got out of the car, and fired up a cigarette. The cold penetrated straight to the bones, and the air smelled of grass and straw. A dog approached him, then stopped short a few steps away, wagging its tail in friendship.

“Come here, Argo,” said Montalbano.

The dog looked at him, turned around, and sauntered off.

“Argo!” he called again.

But the dog vanished around a corner. It was right. It knew it wasn't Argo. The idiot was him, pretending to be Ulysses. He finished his cigarette, got back in his car, and began the journey home to Vigàta.

He awoke after an untroubled, satisfying sleep. On the road from Mascalippa, his mind had cleared up, and he now knew what he had to do. He phoned Livia before she left for work. At nine o'clock he called Dr. Lattes, the chief of the commissioner's cabinet. And he arrived at the station fresh, calm, and rested, as if he had got a full night's sleep. Whereas, in fact, he had slept barely three hours.

“Ahh Chief Chief! Yest'day Proseccotor Gommaseo called 'n' said—”

“I know already, Fazio told me. Is he in his office?”

“Who? Gommaseo?”

“No, Fazio.”

“Yessir.”

“Send him to me at once.”

Lots of newly arrived mail, gobs of it, covered the whole desktop. He sat down and pushed the envelopes to the far edges to create a bit of space in front of him—not for writing anything, but for resting his elbows.

Fazio came in.

“Close the door, sit down, and tell me the story of Balduccio Sinagra and Pecorini again, in fuller detail.”

“Chief, you told me to talk to Giovanni Alfano's third friend, remember? Well, it was this friend, whose name is Franco Di Gregorio, and who seems like a decent man, who told me the whole story.”

“But the other two didn't even mention it to me.”

“They didn't want to talk about it.”

“And why not?”

“If you'll let me tell it my way, I'll get to that.”

“All right, go on.”

“Let's just say that over two years ago, this fifty-year-old butcher falls head over heels for Dolores Alfano, who used to buy her meat from him. But he doesn't go about it under cover, on the sly—nosirree, he starts sending her a bouquet of roses every morning, buys her gifts, sweets, and even fancy things, plants himself outside her home, waiting for her to come out so he can follow behind her . . . In short, the whole town finds out about it.”

“Is he married?”

“No, he's not.”

“But doesn't he know that Dolores is Alfano's wife, and that Alfano is Balduccio's protégé?”

“He does, he does.”

“Then he's a fool!”

“No, Chief, he's not a fool. He's a cocky, violent man. The kind who says he's not afraid of anything or anyone.”

“A blowhard?”

“No, sir. Arturo Pecorini is a man who doesn't kid around. He's a thug. When he was barely twenty years old he was arrested for murder, then acquitted for lack of evidence. Five years later, another acquittal for attempted murder. After that there are no more serious offenses, aside from a few brawls, since he is a bully, after all. When friends tell him he should be more careful with this Dolores stuff, he replies that he doesn't give a shit about the Sinagras. He says, let 'em try and they'll see.”

“And why didn't Dolores go to the carabinieri the way she did with the other lovesick suitor?”

Fazio grinned.

“Di Gregorio says she didn't do anything because she actually liked the butcher. A lot, in fact.”

“Were they lovers?”

“Nobody can say for certain. But bear in mind that the butcher lived, and still lives, barely twenty yards away from the Alfanos. At night they could do as they pleased; the roads around there have hardly any traffic in the daytime, so imagine at night. But then the story reached Don Balduccio's ears, and he wasn't at all pleased to hear that the butcher was cuckolding a relative of his, a young man he was particularly fond of.”

“What did he do?”

“The first thing he did was call Dolores.”

“What did he say to her?”

“Nobody knows. But Di Gregorio says you can imagine. And he's right. In fact, four days later, Dolores left for Colombia, telling everyone she was going to see her mother, who was unwell.”

“And what about Pecorini?”

“Chief, I'm going to preface this the same way Di Gregorio did for me: This is all only gossip, conjecture, surmise.”

“Let's hear it anyway.”

“Pecorini, when he was twenty, raped a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of very poor parents. Pecorini's father paid the girl's family off, and in return they didn't report it. But the girl got pregnant. And brought a little boy into the world. Who was called Arturo, like his father, and Manzella, like his mother. And, as these things go, Pecorini became fond of his unrecognized son, helped him to study, get his diploma, and find a job. He's thirty years old now, with a degree in accounting, married and with a three-year-old little boy, Carmelo.”

“Come on, Fazio! What is this, the Bible?”

“We're almost there, Chief. One day, when the kid was playing outside the front door of their building, he disappeared.”

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared'?”

“Disappeared, Chief. Vanished. Twenty-four hours later, Arturo Pecorini shut down his butcher shop and left for Catania.”

“And what about the kid?”

“Thirty-six hours later, he was found playing outside the front door of his building.”

“And what'd he say?”

“He said a nice old gentleman, a grandfatherly sort, asked him if he wanted to go for a ride and took him in his car to a beautiful house with lots of toys inside. Three days later he left him in the same place where he'd picked him up.”

“That's Balduccio's style, all right. The old man wanted to carry out the operation himself. Then what happened?”

“Pecorini got the drift of Balduccio's signals and moved out. And so Dolores was allowed to return. But Giovanni Alfano's friends were approached by some of the Sinagra family's men, and they were all given the same advice: that they shouldn't mention this business about the butcher to Giovanni when he returned, because Don Balduccio didn't want him to get upset.”

“But the last time you told me that nowadays Pecorini can come back to town every so often.”

“Yes, he comes for two days a week, Saturday and Sunday. A short while after he moved to Catania, he reopened his butcher shop here and put his brother in charge of it. They say he's completely over Dolores now.”

“All right, then, thanks.”

“Chief, would you explain to me how you knew that the butcher had had an affair with Dolores Alfano?”