A Beam of Light

by Andrea Camilleri

  “Did she pour her heart out to you?”

  “Not really. She said she was crying in anger, not sorrow, because her best friend’s husband had prevented her from seeing her. When I asked why, she said that the husband was jealous of their friendship. And that it was he who had put his wife in the hospital with the beating he’d given her.”

  “Did she say why he did it?”

  “He was jealous, again. But of another man.”

  “So it took you two hours to get this brilliant result?”

  “No, the real upshot was that tomorrow, at four p.m., I’m going to her house. She wants some legal advice from me. And so I started telling her about a court case I was involved in, something I made up on the spot.”

  “What kind of case?”

  “A complicated criminal case in which I come off as an unscrupulous lawyer.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because I had the impression that La Bonifacio wasn’t looking for an honest lawyer.”

  He’d just got home and was opening the French doors to the veranda when Marian rang.

  “Hello, my dear Inspector. How are you?”

  “Well, and you?”

  “Today was a boring day. Lethally boring.”

  “Why?”

  “I spent the whole day waiting for Lariani’s phone call.”

  “And did he call you in the end?”

  “Yes, he finally deigned to call at seven. He told me he found what I was looking for.”

  “That doesn’t seem like such bad news.”

  “Wait before you say anything. He added that the picture was not in Milan and that I wouldn’t be able to see it for another three days. He made me an offer.”

  “What kind of offer?”

  “That while waiting I should come to Switzerland and stay with him at a chalet of his to pass the time. In the end I was convinced.”

  Montalbano felt his blood run cold.

  “You accepted?”

  “No, silly. I was convinced that that was a good way to make the time go by.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll explain. Tomorrow I’m getting on a plane to Palermo to come back and spend two days with you in Vigàta. And then I’ll go back to Milan. What do you think?”

  Hearing these words, he felt torn. On the one hand, he would have liked to start jumping for joy; on the other, he felt quite uneasy.

  “So, are you going to answer?”

  “Look, Livia, normally I would be overjoyed, as you can imagine. But the fact is that at the moment I’m extremely busy. I would only be able to see you in the evening, and there’s no guarantee that . . .”

  He had the impression that the call had been cut off.

  “Hello? Hello?” he started yelling.

  Whenever his phone connection was cut off he felt as if some limb had been suddenly amputated.

  “I’m still here and my name hasn’t changed,” said Marian in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from a polar ice floe.

  He didn’t understand a word she said.

  “What that’s supposed to mean, that your name hasn’t changed?”

  “You called me Livia!”

  “I did?!”

  “Yes, you did!”

  He felt annihilated.

  “I’m sorry” was all he managed to say.

  “And you think that’s enough to make up, saying you’re sorry?”

  He didn’t know how to answer.

  “Okay, don’t worry, I won’t come down,” said Marian.

  “I didn’t tell you not to come, I was just trying to explain that—”

  “Okay, okay, end of subject. I’ll be out late tonight, I’m going to dinner with a girlfriend. I’ll call you tomorrow. Good night, Inspector.”

  Good night, Inspector. Curt, dry. With no “my dear.”

  His appetite was gone. He went and sat down on the veranda with a bottle of whisky and a pack of cigarettes at his side.

  But as soon as he sat down he had to get back up because the phone was ringing. It must be Livia.

  Remember that name well, Montalbà: Livia. Don’t fuck up again. Once is more than enough.

  “Hello?”

  “Excuse me for a minute ago. I acted foolishly.”

  “I . . .”

  “No, don’t say anything, because when you speak, you only get yourself into trouble. I just wanted to wish you good night again. Good night, my dear Inspector. Till tomorrow.”

  He hung up, took one step, and the phone rang again.

  “Hello?”

  “How is it that the phone is busy every evening?”

  “And why do you call me only when the phone is busy?”

  “What kind of argument is that?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m tired. I have two investigations ongoing, and—”

  “I understand. Well, owing to a number of circumstances that would take too long to explain, I suddenly have three free days. What do you say I come down to be with you?”

  He balked. He hadn’t expected this. How was it that all these women suddenly had all this free time?

  “It might be a good opportunity to talk things over calmly,” Livia continued.

  “To talk what over?”

  “Us.”

  “Us? Do you have something to say about it?”

  “No, I don’t, but I can sense, in my bones, that you have something to tell me.”

  “Listen, Livia, I should warn you that at the moment I’m extremely busy during the day. I don’t have a free moment. We would only be able to talk in the evening. But I don’t think I would be in the right condition to—”

  “To tell me you don’t love me anymore?”

  “No, of course not, what are you saying? I would be tired, agitated . . .”

  “I get the drift. No need to waste any more breath.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m not coming, since you don’t want me.”

  “Jesus Christ, Livia, I didn’t say I didn’t want you. I was merely informing you, in all sincerity, that I wouldn’t be able—”

  “Or willing . . .”

  And so began another spat. It lasted fifteen minutes, and by the end of it Montalbano was drenched in sweat.

  On the other hand, perhaps in reaction, he suddenly felt hungry as a wolf.

  In the refrigerator he found a platter of seafood risotto; in the oven, fried calamari rings and shrimp that he had only to heat up.

  He lit the oven and set the table on the veranda.

  While eating he kept thoughts of Livia as well as Marian at a safe distance; otherwise his appetite would quickly vanish.

  He concentrated instead on Sposìto’s attempt to persuade him that the two Tunisians had not fled because the man in the hayloft had recognized him.

  Sposìto must have had a reason for this.

  Was it possible he already had some idea of who this man might be?

  And was he perhaps afraid that Montalbano, if he got wind of this idea, might react in the wrong way? The inspector thought long and hard about this, but couldn’t come up with an answer.

  And in the end he was no longer able to keep his thoughts about his situation at bay.

  One thing was certain: that Livia had provided him with the perfect opportunity to talk face-to-face, and he had recoiled. If Marian were to find out that he’d refused to clear things up with Livia, she would surely have called him a coward.

  But why was he suddenly so uncertain?

  Hadn’t he had other love affairs in recent years? Never had he felt so unable to make up his mind. But, if he really thought about it, even this wasn’t exactly true. He hadn’t mentioned any of those prior affairs to Livia, and that was that.

 
So why, then, did he feel that he couldn’t do the same with Marian?

  Wasn’t it better perhaps, before talking with Livia, to have a serious talk with himself, poissonally in poisson?

  As he reached out to grab the bottle of whisky and pour himself a splash, his elbow struck the ashtray, but he managed to catch it in the air before it fell on the floor and smashed to pieces, being made of glass. It was an ashtray that Livia had bought him and . . .

  At that moment he realized he would never be able to reason freely with himself in that house, where the many years of life spent together with Livia were present in every nook and cranny.

  In the bathroom hung her bathrobe, in the nightstand were her slippers, in the armoire two drawers were full of her underwear and blouses. Half the armoire, in fact, was filled with her clothes . . .

  The glass he was drinking from was bought by her, as were the dishes and cutlery . . .

  And the new sofa, the curtains, the sheets, the clothes-stand, the doormat in the entranceway . . .

  The house oozed Livia. There was no way he could ever come to a decision freely in that house.

  He absolutely had to take at least a twenty-four-hour leave and go far away from Marinella.

  But it wasn’t something he could do right away. He couldn’t just drop the investigations he had under way.

  He went to bed.

  Before falling asleep he remembered a historical figure he’d studied in school, a Roman consul or something similar, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who’d been nicknamed Cunctator, which meant “the procrastinator.”

  He’d already outscored the old Roman.

  The telephone woke him at seven o’clock the next morning.

  “Chief, beckin’ yer partin an’ all, seein’ as how iss rilly oily inna mornin’ an’ all, but Fazio tol’ me as how aspite o’ the oiliness o’ the hour, I’s asposta call yiz an’ tell yiz to call ’im an’ get ready.”

  “Get ready for what?”

  “Get ready meanin’ washin’ up an’ gettin’ dressed.”

  “Why?”

  “Cuz Gallo’s gonna come an’ pick yiz up in so much as they gotta call sayin’ as how there’s a car all boint up wit’ a cataferous copse isside.”

  Half an hour later, he was ready. The doorbell rang as he was downing his last cup of coffee.

  “Why’d they send you? All they had to do was give me the address and I would have come in my own car.”

  “You never woulda found it, Chief. It’s in a godforsaken place called Casa di Dio.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “In the Casuzza district.”

  He felt a little worried. Could the dream be coming true?

  When they got there, he saw that the landscape was exactly like the one he’d dreamt, except that in the place of the coffin there was a burnt-up car.

  The peasant was different—or, more precisely, he wasn’t a peasant at all but a well-dressed thirty-year-old with an alert look about him. He was standing next to a motor scooter. In Catarella’s place there was Fazio.

  The air stank of a mixture of burnt metal, plastic, and human flesh.

  “Don’t get too close; it’s still very hot,” Fazio warned the inspector.

  A body was visible in the passenger’s seat. It was all black and looked like a large piece of charred wood.

  “Have you informed the traveling circus?” the inspector asked Fazio.

  “Already taken care of.”

  This time the reply didn’t bother him. He turned to the young man.

  “Was it you who called us?”

  “Yessir.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Salvatore Ingrassia.”

  “How was it that—”

  “I live in that house right over there.”

  He pointed at it. It was the only one in the area.

  “And since I work at the fish market, I always have to pass this way to go into town.”

  “What time was it when you got home yesterday evening?”

  “It was probably around nine, at the latest.”

  “Do you live alone?”

  “No, sir, I live with my girlfriend.”

  “And the car wasn’t there when you passed by?”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Did you hear anything unusual during the night—say, some shouts or gunshots . . . ?”

  “The house is too far away.”

  “I can see. But here it must be as silent as the tomb at night, and every little sound . . .”

  “Of course, Inspector, you’re right. And up until eleven o’clock I can assure you I didn’t hear anything.”

  “And so you went to sleep at eleven?”

  The young man blushed.

  “You could put it that way.”

  “What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

  “Stella Urso.”

  “How long have you been together?”

  “Three months.”

  Apparently the couple was too busy with other matters to hear anything, even the bombing of Monte Cassino.

  “When do you think the circus will get here?” he asked Fazio.

  “Forensics and Pasquano should be here in about an hour, an hour and a half. But I doubt Prosecutor Tommaseo will ever get this far.”

  It was well known that a seal or kangaroo could drive a car better than Judge Tommaseo. Who, when at the wheel, never missed a chance to get a piece of a tree or pole.

  So what was the inspector going to do to pass the time? Young Ingrassia must have realized what Montalbano was thinking.

  “If you’d like to come to my place for a cup of coffee . . .”

  “All right, thank you,” said the inspector. “Leave your scooter here, we’ll take the squad car.”

  As they headed off, Montalbano asked Ingrassia:

  “Have you told your girlfriend what you discovered?”

  “Yes, I called her on the cell phone right after calling you. She wanted to come on foot to see, but I told her not to.”

  “Come back and pick us up the moment somebody arrives,” Montalbano said to Gallo when they got to the house.

  The house was very clean inside and in perfect order. Stella was a pretty girl with a pleasant manner.

  When she returned with the coffee, Montalbano asked her the same question he’d asked Ingrassia.

  “Last night, did you hear any shouts or gunshots or . . .”

  He was expecting her to say no, but Stella turned pensive instead.

  “I did hear something.”

  “Then why didn’t I?” said the young man.

  “Because you always fall asleep after . . .”

  The girl stopped, blushing.

  “Please go on, it’s important,” the inspector coaxed her.

  “At some point I got up and went into the bathroom, and that’s when I heard a bang.”

  “What kind of bang?”

  “Like a door slamming in the distance.”

  “So a sharp, sudden noise.”

  “Yes.”

  “Could it have been a gunshot?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never heard one.”

  “Could you tell me, even roughly speaking, what time it was?”

  “I can tell you exactly what time it was because before going into the bathroom I passed through the kitchen to drink a little water and I looked at the clock. It was five past one.”

  They chatted about young Stella’s difficulties finding a job of any kind and the fact that she wouldn’t be in a position to get married and have children until she found one.

  Then Gallo came and picked them up. The Forensics lab had arrived together with Dr. Pasquano, but there was still no news of Tommaseo.

  Luckily the chief of Forensics,
with whom the inspector shared a mutual dislike, had sent his second-in-command, Mannarino, in his place. He and Montalbano exchanged greetings. The inspector looked on as the Forensics team, dressed up as if for a moon landing, got to work around the burnt-out car.

  “Too early to have found anything, I guess?”

  “Actually, we have found something,” said Mannarino.

  “Can you tell me what?”

  “Sure. A bullet shell. In the backseat area, on the floor. Excuse me for just a minute.”

  Mannarino returned to his men.

  Fazio had overheard the whole exchange. He and Montalbano exchanged glances but didn’t say anything. Montalbano went up to a car with Dr. Pasquano sitting inside, angrily smoking a cigarette. It was always best to stay away when the doctor did this, but Montalbano wasn’t worried.

  “Good morning, Doctor.”

  “Good morning, my ass.”

  They were off to a good start.

  “What’s wrong? Did you lose at poker last night?”

  Pasquano was an inveterate poker player but all too often did not have luck on his side.

  “No, it went fine last night. I’m just sick and tired of always waiting around for Tommaseo.”

  “But Tomasseo would be on time if only he never got lost or crashed into trees. You have to feel sorry for him.”

  “Why should I? I can feel sorry for you, who are on the threshold of senility, but not for someone who’s still young.”

  “And why would I be on the threshold of senility?”

  “Because you’re showing the symptoms. Didn’t you notice what you just called Tommaseo?”

  “No.”

  “You called him Tomasseo. Getting people’s names wrong is one of the first signs.”

  Montalbano got worried. Maybe Pasquano was right. Hadn’t he called Marian Livia?

  “But no need for alarm. It’s usually a long process. You still have plenty of time left to screw up.”

  11

  Considering that after another half hour had passed there was still no sign of Tommaseo, and considering that he had run out of cigarettes, and considering that he didn’t know what to do with himself, Montalbano decided it was best to have Gallo drive him back to headquarters.

  After all, he was just wasting his time hanging around there. His presence was utterly useless.