Voice of the Violin

by Andrea Camilleri

  5

  The only things left to examine were the notices of incoming calls. The inspector began with the ones Michela had collected in the little desk in her hotel room. There were about forty of them, and Montalbano arranged them according to the name of the person calling. In the end he was left with three small piles somewhat taller than the rest. A woman, Anna, would call during the day and usually leave word that Michela should call her back as soon as she woke up or when she got back in. A man, Maurizio, had rung two or three times in the morning, but normally preferred the late-night hours and always insisted that she call him back. The third caller was also male, Guido by name, and he phoned from Bologna, also late at night; but, unlike Maurizio, he never left a message.

  The slips of paper the hotel manager had given to Gallo were twenty in number: all calls from the time Michela left the hotel on Wednesday afternoon to the moment the police showed up at the hotel. On Wednesday morning, however, during the hours Mrs. Licalzi devoted to sleep, the same Maurizio had asked for her around ten-thirty, and Anna had done likewise shortly thereafter. Around nine o’clock that evening, Mrs. Vassallo had called looking for Michela, and had rung back an hour later. Anna called back shortly before midnight.

  Around three o’clock Thursday morning, Guido had called from Bologna. At ten-thirty, Anna, apparently unaware that Michela hadn’t returned to the hotel that night, called again; at eleven, a certain Mr. Loconte called to confirm the afternoon appointment. At noon, still on Thursday, a Mr. Aurelio Di Blasi called and continued to call back almost every three hours until early Friday evening. Guido from Bologna had called around two o’clock Friday morning. As of Thursday morning, Anna had started calling frantically and also didn’t stop until Friday evening.

  Something didn’t add up. Montalbano couldn’t put his finger on it, and this made him uncomfortable. He stood up, went out on the veranda, which gave directly onto the beach, took off his shoes, and started walking in the sand until he reached the water’s edge. He rolled up his trouser legs and began wading in the water, which from time to time washed over his feet. The soothing sound of the waves helped him put his thoughts in order. Suddenly he understood what was tormenting him. He went back in the house, grabbed the agenda, and opened it up to Wednesday. Michela had written down that she was supposed to go to dinner at the Vassallos’ house at eight. So why had Mrs. Vassallo called her at the hotel at nine and again at ten? Hadn’t Michela shown up for dinner? Or did the Mrs. Vassallo who phoned have nothing to do with the Vassallos who’d invited her to dinner?

  He glanced at his watch: past midnight. He decided the matter was too important to be worrying about etiquette. There turned out to be three listings under Vassallo in the phone book. He tried the first and guessed right.

  “I’m very sorry. This is Inspector Montalbano.”

  “Inspector! I’m Ernesto Vassallo. I was going to come to your office myself tomorrow morning. My wife is just devastated ; I had to call a doctor. Is there any news?”

  “None. I need to ask you something.”

  “Go right ahead, Inspector. For poor Michela—”

  Montalbano cut him off.

  “I read in Mrs. Licalzi’s agenda that she was supposed to have dinner—”

  This time it was Ernesto Vassallo who interrupted.

  “She never showed up, Inspector! We waited a long time for her. But nothing, not even a phone call. And she was always so punctual! We got worried, we thought she might be sick, we rang the hotel a couple of times, we tried her friend Anna Tropeano, but she said she didn’t know anything. She said she’d seen Michela around six and they’d been together for about half an hour, and that Michela had left saying she was going back to the hotel to change before coming to dinner at our place.”

  “Listen, I really appreciate your help. But don’t come to the station tomorrow morning, I’m full up with appointments. Drop by in the afternoon whenever you want. Good night.”

  One good turn deserved another. He looked up the number for Aurelio Di Blasi in the phone book and dialed it. The first ring wasn’t even over when someone picked up.

  “Hello? Hello? Is that you?”

  The voice of a middle-aged man, breathless, troubled.

  “Inspector Montalbano here.”

  “Oh.”

  Montalbano could tell that the man felt profound disappointment. From whom was he so anxiously awaiting a phone call?

  “Mr. Di Blasi, I’m sure you’ve heard about the unfortunate Mrs.—”

  “I know, I know, I saw it on TV.”

  The disappointment had been replaced by undisguised irritation.

  “Anyway, I wanted to know why, from midday Thursday to Friday evening, you repeatedly tried to reach Mrs. Licalzi at her hotel.”

  “What’s so unusual about that? I’m a distant relative of Michela’s. Whenever she came to Vigàta to work on the house, she would lean on me for help and advice. I’m a construction engineer. I called her on Thursday to invite her here to dinner, but the receptionist said she hadn’t come back that night. The receptionist knows me, we’re friends. And so I started to get worried. Is that so hard to understand?”

  Now Mr. Di Blasi had turned sarcastic and aggressive. The inspector had the impression the man’s nerves were about to pop.

  “No.”

  There was no point in calling Anna Tropeano. He already knew what she would say, since Mr. Vassallo had told him beforehand. He would summon Ms. Tropeano to the station for questioning. One thing at this point was certain: Michela Licalzi had disappeared from circulation around seven o’clock Wednesday evening. She had never returned to the hotel, even though she’d expressed this intention to her friend.

  He wasn’t sleepy, so he lay down in bed with a book, a novel by Marco Denevi, an Argentine writer he liked very much.

  When his eyes started to droop, he closed the book and turned off the light. As he often did before falling asleep, he thought of Livia. Suddenly he was sitting up in bed, wide awake. Jesus, Livia! He hadn’t called her back since the night of the storm, when he’d made it seem as if the line had been cut off. Livia clearly hadn’t believed this, since in fact she’d never called back. He had to set things right at once.

  “Hello? Who is this?” said Livia’s sleepy voice.

  “It’s Salvo, darling.”

  “Oh, let me sleep, for Christ’s sake!”

  Click. Montalbano sat there awhile holding the receiver. It was eight-thirty in the morning when Montalbano walked into the station carrying Michela Licalzi’s papers. After Livia had refused to speak to him, he’d become agitated and couldn’t sleep a wink. There was no need to call in Anna Tropeano; Fazio immediately told him the woman had been waiting for him since eight.

  “Listen, I want to know everything there is to know about a construction engineer from Vigàta named Aurelio Di Blasi.”

  “Everything everything?” asked Fazio.

  “Everything everything.”

  “To me, everything everything means rumors and gossip, too.”

  “Same here.”

  “How much time do I get?”

  “Come on, Fazio, you playing the unionist now? Two hours ought to be more than enough.”

  Fazio glared at his boss with an air of indignation and went out without even saying good-bye.

  In normal circumstances, Anna Tropeano must have been an attractive woman of thirty, with jet-black hair, dark complexion, big, sparkling eyes, tall and full-bodied. On this occasion, however, her shoulders were hunched, her eyes swollen and red, her skin turning a shade of gray.

  “May I smoke?” she asked, sitting down.

  “Of course.”

  She lit a cigarette, hands trembling. She attempted a rough imitation of a smile.

  “I quit only a week ago. But since last night I must have smoked at least three packs.”

  “Thanks for coming in on your own. I really need a lot of information from you.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.�
�

  Montalbano secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Anna was a strong woman. There wasn’t going to be any sobbing or fainting. In fact, she had appealed to him from the moment he saw her in the doorway.

  “Even if some of my questions seem odd to you, please try to answer them anyway.”

  “Of course.”

  “Married?”

  “Who?”

  “You.”

  “No, I’m not. Not separated or divorced, either. And not even engaged. Nothing. I live alone.”

  “Why?”

  Though Montalbano had forewarned her, Anna hesitated a moment before answering so personal a question.

  “I don’t think I’ve had time to think about myself, Inspector. A year before graduating from university, my father died. Heart attack. He was very young. The year after I graduated, my mother died. I had to look after my little sister, Maria, who’s nineteen now and married and living in Milan, and my brother, Giuseppe, who works at a bank in Rome and is twenty-seven. I’m thirty-one. But aside from all that, I don’t think I’ve ever met the right person.”

  There was no resentment. On the contrary, she seemed slightly calmer now. The fact that the inspector hadn’t launched immediately into the matter at hand had allowed her in a sense to catch her breath. Montalbano thought it best to steer clear for a while.

  “Do you live in your parents’ house here in Vigàta?”

  “Yes, Papa bought it. It’s sort of a small villa, right where Marinella begins. It’s become too big for me.”

  “The one on the right, just after the bridge?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I pass by it at least twice a day. I live in Marinella myself.”

  Anna Tropeano eyed him with mild amazement. What a strange sort of cop!

  “Do you work?”

  “Yes, I teach at the liceo scientifico of Montelusa.”

  “What do you teach?”

  “Physics.”

  Montalbano looked at her with admiration. In physics, at school, he’d always been between a D and an F. If he’d had a teacher like her in his day, he might have become another Einstein.

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  Anna Tropeano jumped in her chair and looked at him imploringly: We were getting along so well, why do you want to play cop, which is worse than playing hunting dog?

  Don’t you ever let go? she seemed to be asking.

  Montalbano, who understood what the woman’s eyes were saying to him, smiled and threw up his hands in a gesture of resignation, as if to say:

  It’s my job.

  “No,” replied a firm, decisive Anna Tropeano.

  “Any suspicion?”

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Licalzi customarily returned to her hotel in the wee hours of the morning. I’d like to know—”

  “She was at my house. We had dinner together almost every night. And if she was invited out, she would come by afterwards.”

  “What did you do together?”

  “What do two women friends usually do when they see each other? We talked, we watched television, we listened to music. Sometimes we did nothing at all. It was a pleasure just to know the other one was there.”

  “Did she have any male friends?”

  “Yes, a few. But things were not what they seemed. Michela was a very serious person. Seeing her so free and easy, men got the wrong impression. And they were always disappointed, without fail.”

  “Was there anyone in particular who bothered her a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “So, in short, Mrs. Licalzi was faithful to her husband.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means what I said.”

  “Had you known each other a long time?”

  “No.”

  Montalbano looked at her, stood up, and walked over to the window. Anna, almost angrily, lit up another cigarette.

  “I don’t like the tone you’ve assumed in the last part of our dialogue,” the inspector said with his back to her.

  “I don’t either.”

  “Peace?”

  “Peace.”

  Montalbano turned around and smiled at her. Anna smiled back. But only for an instant. Then she raised a finger like a schoolgirl, wanting to ask a question.

  “Can you tell me, if it’s not a secret, how she was killed?”

  “They didn’t say so on TV?”

  “No. Neither the Free Channel nor TeleVigàta said anything. They only said the body had been found.”

  “I shouldn’t be telling you. But I’ll make an exception. She was suffocated.”

  “With a pillow?”

  “No, with her face pressed down against the mattress.”

  Anna began to sway, the way treetops sway in strong wind. The inspector left the room and returned a moment later with a bottle of water and a glass. Anna drank as if she had just come out of the desert.

  “But what was she doing there at the house, for God’s sake?” she asked, as if to herself.

  “Have you ever been to that house?”

  “Of course. Almost daily, with her.”

  “Did she ever sleep there?”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  “But there was a bathrobe in the bathroom, and towels and creams—”

  “I know. Michela put those things there on purpose. Whenever she went there to work on the house, she ended up all covered in dust and cement. So, before leaving, she would take a shower.”

  Montalbano decided it was time to hit below the belt. But he felt reluctant; he didn’t want to injure her too badly.

  “She was completely naked.”

  Anna looked as if a high-voltage charge passed through her. Eyes popping out of her head, she tried to say something but couldn’t. Montalbano refilled her glass.

  “Was she . . . was she raped?”

  “I don’t know. The coroner hasn’t told me yet.”

  “But why didn’t she go back to her hotel instead of going to that goddamned house?” Anna asked herself again in despair.

  “Whoever killed her also took all her clothes, underwear, and shoes.”

  Anna looked at him in disbelief, as though the inspector had just told her a big lie.

  “For what reason?”

  Montalbano didn’t answer. He continued.

  “He even made off with her handbag and everything that was in it.”

  “That’s a little more understandable. Michela used to keep all her jewelry in it, and she had a lot, all very valuable. If the person who suffocated her was a thief—”

  “Wait. Mr. Vassallo told me that when Michela didn’t show up to dinner at his place, they got worried and called you up.”

  “That’s true. I thought she was at their house. When Michela left me, she’d said she was stopping off at the hotel to change clothes.”

  “Speaking of which, how was she dressed?”

  “Entirely in jeans, even her jacket, and casual shoes.”

  “She never went back to the hotel. Somebody or something made her change her mind. Did she have a cell phone?”

  “Yes, she kept it in her bag.”

  “So it’s possible that someone phoned Mrs. Licalzi as she was going back to the hotel. And that as a result of this phone call, she went out to the house.”

  “Maybe it was a trap.”

  “Set by whom? Certainly not by a thief. Have you ever heard of a burglar summoning the owner of the house he’s about to rob?”

  “Did you notice if anything was missing from the house?”

  “Her Piaget, for certain. As for everything else, I’m not sure. I don’t know what things of value she had in the house. Everything looked to be in order, except for the bathroom, which was a mess.”

  “A mess?”

  “Yes. The pink bathrobe was thrown on the floor. S
he’d just finished taking a shower.”

  “Inspector, I find the picture you’re presenting totally unconvincing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the idea that Michela would go to the house to meet a man and be in such a rush to go to bed with him that she would throw off her bathrobe and let it fall wherever it happened to fall.”

  “That’s plausible, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe for other women, but not Michela.”

  “Do you know somebody named Guido who called her every night from Bologna?”

  He’d fired blindly, but hit the mark. Anna Tropeano looked away, embarrassed.

  “You said a few minutes ago that Mrs. Licalzi was faithful,” he continued.

  “Yes.”

  “Faithful to her one infidelity?”

  Anna nodded yes.

  “Could you tell me his name? You see, you’ll be doing me a favor. It’ll save me time. Because, don’t worry, I’ll find out eventually anyway. Well?”

  “His name is Guido Serravalle. He’s an antiques dealer. I don’t know his telephone number or address.”

  “Thanks, that’s good enough. The husband will be here around noon. Would you like to see him?”

  “Me? Why? I don’t even know him.”

  The inspector didn’t need to ask any more questions. Anna went on talking of her own accord.

  “Michela married Dr. Licalzi two and a half years ago. It was her idea to come to Sicily for their honeymoon. But that’s not when we met. That happened later, when she returned by herself with the intention of having a house built. I was on my way to Montelusa one day and a Twingo was coming from the opposite direction, we were both distracted, and we narrowly avoided a head-on collision. We both pulled over and got out to apologize, and we took an immediate liking to each other. Every time Michela came down after that, she always came alone.”

  She was tired. Montalbano took pity on her.

  “You’ve been very helpful to me. Thank you.”

  “Can I go?”

  “Of course.”

  He extended his hand to her. Anna Tropeano took it and held it between both of hers.

  The inspector felt a wave of heat rise up inside him.