The Dance of the Seagull im-15

by Andrea Camilleri

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t remember . . .”

  A sort of flash went off in Montalbano’s head. He hesitated a moment, then blurted out a name at random.

  “Manzella?”

  The inspector clearly saw Fazio give a start in surprise.

  “Yes, sir! That’s him! Damn, are you good, Chief!”

  “And what did he want from you?”

  Fazio closed his eyes. It was like a signal, because at that moment the door opened and the dwarf came in.

  “Conversation’s over.”

  Not even in Sing-Sing could the prison guards be so severe and ball-busting.

  “Are you sure your watch is right?” the inspector asked.

  “Down to the split second. Out!”

  He got up and started walking ever so slowly on purpose, just to anger the nurse. When he was in front of her, he asked:

  “When can I come back?”

  “Visitors are allowed every afternoon from four to seven P.M.”

  “And how much time will you give me?

  “Another five minutes.”

  “Could we make that ten?”

  “Seven.”

  Oh, well, better than nothing.

  Signora Fazio was out in the hallway, leaning against the wall.

  “Couldn’t you ask them to give you a chair?”

  “It’s not allowed. But I’m going back in now. Did you manage to talk a little with him?”

  “Yes, but not much. He seemed very weak.”

  “The doctors say there’s nothing to worry about, that he’s getting better by the hour. When are you coming back?”

  “This afternoon at four.”

  When he reached the end of the corridor, he had a choice between going right or left. He stopped, doubtful. Which direction had he come from? He thought he remembered arriving from the left. So he went down that corridor, which not only was endless, but every single door on the ward was closed. Halfway down, he saw an elevator. Should he take it or not? He had no choice, since the architect who’d built the hospital had forgotten to put any staircases in it. The doors opened, he went in and immediately noticed that the panel of buttons was missing the letter T, which meant ground floor. There were only three numbers, in fact: 4, 5, and 6. It must have been a service elevator that went only to those three floors. Meanwhile the door had closed again, and so he pressed button 5. His heart sank at the thought that he would have to struggle again before he found the way out. The elevator stopped, the door opened, and before him stood the same nurse who had shown him the way to Fazio’s room. She must have understood right away that he was lost again, and Montalbano had to suppress the urge to embrace her.

  “Tell me frankly: are you my guardian angel?” he asked her, stepping out of the elevator.

  “Certainly not, but I’ll do my best to help anyway.”

  “Would you show me to the exit?”

  “The best I can do is to show you to the right elevator.”

  “Thank you. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking, if I may?”

  “Angela.”

  “You see? I was right.”

  “And you?”

  “Salvo. Salvo Montalbano. I’m a police inspector.”

  “Oh, great!”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “A police inspector getting lost inside a hospital?”

  “It happens to me all the time. Listen, Angela, I have to come back this afternoon at four o’clock. Will you still be here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you do me a favor?”

  “That depends.”

  “Could you wait for me at the entrance?”

  “Is this a date?”

  “No, just a desperate cry for help.”

  Angela started laughing, and didn’t say yes or no.

  “How’s Fazio?” Gallo asked as the inspector was getting in the car.

  “He’s a little weak, but he’s actually fine. We’ll be coming back this afternoon at four, so I want you to be ready at the station by two-thirty. But for now, no speeding, I mean it.”

  “What do you mean? It was okay on the way here but not on the way back?”

  “No arguments, Gallo. Just do as I say. Actually, give Catarella a buzz and tell him to tell everyone that I went to see Fazio and that he’s doing well. That way, when we get back, nobody will come and bug me for information.”

  “Okay, Chief, here’s the situation,” said Galluzzo, sitting down and pulling a sheet of paper out of his pocket. “Vigàta has two pedicurists and one corn-and-callus specialist, and—”

  “Aren’t they the same thing?”

  “No, sir, they’re not. The Foot Boutique, which is one of the pedicure salons, has one sixty-year-old client, whose name I wrote down right here, with the address. The other shop, called One Foot in Paradise, doesn’t have any male customers.”

  “And what about the corn-and-callus specialist?”

  “He’s got four clients around sixty, whose names and addresses I also took down.”

  “Have you been to Montelusa yet?”

  “Yesterday I wasted a good bit of time waiting for another callus specialist who was out plying his trade. I’m going back now.”

  “All right. Send me Inspector Augello, and leave that sheet of paper with me.”

  Montalbano showed Mimì the sheet as soon as he came in. Augello took it but didn’t look at it.

  “Did you talk to Fazio?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Hardly anything at all. He said that a guy by the name of Manzella, a former dancer he’s known since elementary school, had contacted him.”

  “Wha’d he want?”

  “He wasn’t able to tell me. Too weak. They broke up our meeting. I’m going back this afternoon at four.”

  Mimì decided to look at the sheet of paper.

  “Take my advice, go to the Boutique. I’ve been there a few times myself,” he said.

  “Mimì, I’m not asking you to recommend a pedicurist to me. See that name written next to The Foot Boutique, and the other four written beside the name of the callus specialist? I want you to look up those five clients and talk to them.”

  Augello balked.

  “Why?”

  “Because Pasquano said that the first body we found at the well had very well-manicured feet.”

  “Maybe he did his own pedicures at home.”

  “And maybe not. If all five of these men are still alive, so much the better for them, and so much the worse for me. But if one of them’s been missing for the past week, then we need to start investigating who he was and what he did. Got that?”

  “Got it.”

  “Best of luck.”

  Now came the hardest part. He reviewed in his mind what he intended to say. He even recited one sentence—the most important—aloud, to hear how it sounded. When he felt properly ready, he reached out, picked up the receiver, and dialed Mr. C’mishner’s number.

  9

  He spoke in a faint, quavering voice, which to him was supposed to sound like that of a man at death’s door.

  “Montalbano here.”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  He audibly took a deep breath, then coughed softly twice.

  “What is it, Montalbano?”

  “I feel really really baa . . .”

  Another little cough.

  “I’m sorry, I’m having these regurgitations.”

  “Montalbano, for heaven’s sake!”

  “You’ll have to excuse me, but Dr. Gruntz performed a Super Scrockson on me. I couldn’t wiggle out of it. I begged him to postpone it, but he wouldn’t hear of it . . . And instead of a double, I got a super! Do you know what that means? He said I urgently needed one.”

  “And what does it mean?”

  “It means the effect of the super lasts double the double, so, until tonight, in other words.”

  “I haven’t understood a thing.” />
  “I’m unable to move.”

  “Are you telling me you can’t come this afternoon?”

  “I’m terribly sorry, but . . .”

  “Listen, Montalbano, you will get here either by your own means, or I’ll send an ambulance to fetch you!”

  “Mr. Commissioner, sir, it’s not a question of an ambulance, but of personal control . . . Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t dare get very far from a . . . er . . . comfort station”—how was it that when telling a lie, he often came up with fancy phrasings like that?—“for more than five minutes. The Super Scrockson is just ghastly, I can’t think of any other word for it. Just imagine, I gave up a button I’d swallowed in 2001! And not just that button, but also—”

  “Fine, I’ll expect you at nine o’clock sharp, tomorrow morning,” said the commissioner, who was clearly about to start throwing up.

  But how on earth could the commissioner swallow a two-bit puerile hoax like that? Perhaps because he considered the inspector a serious man, something of a pain in the ass, perhaps, but certainly not capable of such a thing. Montalbano didn’t know whether to gloat or feel insulted. He left the question hanging and went off to eat.

  As he entered the trattoria, he felt reasonably hungry, owing in part to the fact that he’d liberated himself, however temporarily, from his visit with the commissioner.

  “Listen, I just got a call on behalf of the commissioner,” Enzo said in a conspiratorial tone.

  “Was he looking for me?” Montalbano asked, flabbergasted and angry.

  So the commissioner hadn’t believed him that he was laid up at home, suffering from the effects of the Super Scrockson! Luckily Enzo answered in the negative.

  “No, sir. He’s gonna be comin’ here to eat. He’s got some friends with him who want to eat fresh fish. Reserved a table for six.”

  “When’s he coming?”

  “In about half an hour.”

  Montalbano cursed the saints and shot to his feet as if he’d just sat on a viper. What if the commissioner caught him stuffing his guts with mullet and bream? Not only would he open an investigation, he would have him thrown off the police force! Then he really might have some sort of Super Scrockson performed on him!

  He made an immediate, and unavoidable, decision.

  “I have to go.”

  “And where you gonna eat?”

  “Look, Enzo, I’d rather fast than see the commissioner.”

  “But, Inspector, I can put you in the little room and not let anyone in!”

  “But how am I gonna leave after I’m done?”

  “Don’t you worry about that, I’ll take care of everything. There’s the back door.”

  He’d just finished the spaghetti alle vongole when the door to the little room opened and Enzo poked his head in.

  “They’re here.”

  Then he disappeared, only to return a few minutes later with the mullet. The inspector ate them with greater gusto than usual, precisely because he was enjoying them just a few yards away from the c’mishner, who imagined he was at home shitting his soul out.

  At two-thirty sharp he left for Fiacca with Gallo. But in his own car, since that morning they’d all received a second reminder from the commissioner to economize on gasoline.

  Less than two miles out of town they ran into a roadblock of the carabinieri. There was a line about ten cars long, stopped at the side of the road, the sort of thing that could waste half the day. Gallo pulled up at the end of the line.

  “Should we make ourselves known?” he asked.

  “No,” said Montalbano.

  Given the condition his car was in, if the carabinieri found out they were with the police, they would throw the book at him. He would have to pay a fine that even two months’ pay wouldn’t cover. A little while later, a corporal came up smiling, having seen who was at the wheel.

  “Ciao, Gallo.”

  “Ciao, Tumminello.”

  Montalbano felt reassured. If those two were friends, they wouldn’t lose any time answering their esteemed colleagues’ questions.

  “What’s the checkpoint for?” asked Gallo.

  “We were ordered to look for and arrest a short, fat man with a scar on his left cheek, coming from the direction of Fiacca.”

  The inspector felt like laughing. And he started talking to the corporal, lips smiling in a way that might be construed as mocking.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but if you’re supposed to stop someone coming from Fiacca, why stop us? We’re going towards Fiacca! Perhaps you should all do an about-face and start checking cars coming from the other direction. Otherwise this is like . . .”

  He stopped himself in time. What the hell had made him open his big mouth? Meanwhile he noticed that Tumminello’s expression had suddenly changed.

  “And who are you?” the carabiniere asked.

  “Ragionier Muscetta, pleasure.”

  “He’s a dear friend of mine who asked me to do him a favor and . . .” Gallo tried to explain.

  But the corporal wasn’t listening and continued:

  “Is this your car, Ragioniere?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please finish your sentence, Ragioniere.”

  The guy was fixated on the ragioniere!

  “What sentence? I didn’t say anything that—”

  “No, you said, ‘Otherwise this is like . . .’ Now please finish.”

  “Well, I just meant that otherwise, it’s like . . . I dunno, it’s like we’re in a topsy-turvy world.”

  “No, you were going to say, ‘Otherwise, this is like one of those carabinieri jokes.’ Isn’t that right?”

  “Come now, I would never dare to—”

  “No, you wouldn’t dare? Not even you, Inspector Montalbano, sir?”

  Montalbano turned to ice.

  “You can go,” said the corporal.

  So the guy had recognized him at once and was only pulling his leg by calling him ragioniere! Meanwhile Tumminello had signaled to his colleagues to let the car through. After they had been driving some ten minutes in silence, Montalbano said:

  “I was of course about to say exactly what the corporal thought. Bright kid, that Tumminello.”

  “He’s someone who’s gonna go far. He’s getting a law degree.”

  They passed another roadblock where, unlike the first one, it was cars coming from Fiacca that were being stopped.

  “You see, I was right!” Montalbano said to Gallo. “The first checkpoint was totally useless.”

  “Chief, don’t you know the story of Michele Misuraca, from about six months ago?”

  “No.”

  “Misuraca caught his married daughter with her lover. Since the husband was off in Germany, it was up to him to do something, and so he shot and killed the girl as her lover ran away. Misuraca got in his car and managed to get out of Fiacca just before the carabinieri put up the roadblocks. But then Misuraca returned and wasn’t stopped by the carabinieri because they were only checking the cars coming out of Fiacca. So Misuraca went back into town without any trouble, tracked down the lover, killed him, then turned himself in.”

  Montalbano made no comment.

  Gallo made up for the time lost at the roadblock, and by a few minutes to four, the inspector found himself in the hospital entrance lobby.

  He took two steps and then stopped, seized by doubt. Was the elevator to the left or the right?

  “Inspector!”

  He turned around. It was Angela, the nurse. The sight of her gladdened his heart.

  “How very kind of you,” he said. “I really wasn’t expecting . . .”

  “Expecting me to come? You’re right, I wasn’t going to, but then I changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “With all the confusion there’s been here, I realized that without me, you’d never find your friend again.”

  “Why, what confusion?”

  “Around one-thirty, after all the visi
tors left, a man, a stranger, was noticed on the fourth floor, poking around suspiciously, opening and closing doors as though looking for someone.”

  “Sort of like me.”

  “Yes, but when a nurse asks you a question, you don’t run away with a gun in your hand.”

  “Did he shoot?”

  “No.”

  “Was he caught?”

  “They gave chase and saw him go out of the hospital, run across the parking lot, and disappear into the countryside.”

  “Was he sort of short and fat?”

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “The carabinieri told me, at a roadblock. And what happened next?”

  “The police had all the fourth-floor patients moved up to the sixth floor, which hadn’t been opened yet and is a lot easier to keep under surveillance.”

  Was it possible the man had come to kill Fazio? Possible, yes. After all, how many mafiosi had been liquidated in their hospital beds? But Montalbano wanted to be sure.

  “Were there any important patients on that ward?”

  “The Honorable Frincanato and Judge Filippone, who are both from the Antimafia Commission. One with a broken leg, the other with a fractured pelvis. The car they were in crashed into a tractor trailer. And they’ve both received death threats.”

  It was well known that there were plenty of doubts circulating about the supposed death threats received by Frincanato, whose statements held as much water as a bucket riddled with buckshot. Wicked rumors even had it that he wrote the anonymous letters himself to seem important. Judge Filippone, for his part, was someone who said yes when the majority said yes, and no when the majority said no. A puppet on strings. Imagine the Mafia risking one of their men to get one of those clowns! Growing worried, Montalbano became convinced that the gunman had come looking for Fazio.

  As soon as the elevator door opened on the sixth floor, the inspector found himself looking at two cops armed with machine guns. He immediately took out his badge, and they let him through. Outside of rooms 8 and 10 were two more cops with machine guns.

  Angela accompanied him as far as room number 14.

  “I wanted to let you know that I inquired and found out that Signor Fazio will be released in three days at the most. Tomorrow he’ll be allowed to get up on his feet for a few hours.”