He got up to look for a magnifying glass. Finding one, he went back to the table, examined the holes through the glass, and saw that all three were darker around the edges, clearly burnt in some way. Now he understood everything. Then he started to fold the kerchief in such a way that the holes overlapped perfectly, one on top of the other. When this was done, the kerchief was now folded over itself three times and had become a blindfold. So he picked it up, put it over his eyes, and tied it gently behind his head. The three holes were now just one, which corresponded exactly with his temple. The bullet that had entered there had never come out the other side, proof that it had remained inside Emanuele’s brain. Therefore all the blood had to have come out of his mouth and nose.
If that was the way it was, then it was utterly impossible that Emanuele, mentally disabled as he was, would have been capable, all by himself, of inserting the magazine, putting a round in the chamber, folding up the kerchief, blindfolding himself, and finally shooting himself. He could only have done all that, of course, if his suicide had been assisted. Assisted by, of course, his brother, Francesco. An assisted suicide, to protect him from life, through death. Yet another form of protection that hadn’t yet occurred to Montalbano. And possibly Francesco had been assisted by a third party. Maybe the bequest to Sidoti, who hadn’t been mentioned in the first will, could be explained by his presence during the suicide.
He tried very hard to remember what were the exact words the farm manager had used to describe the scene he’d found before him, after hearing the gunshot. Wait . . . He said that upon hearing the shot he’d started running along the boundary wall, gone through the gate, and raced up the allée, and that already halfway down the broad side of the villa he’d spotted Francesco embracing his brother’s lifeless body. Wait . . . There was something wrong in Sidoti’s account. He’d made a mistake without realizing it, because, while from the broad side of the villa one could not see the window of the rear bathroom, one did, however, have a partial view of the wall of the shed. In short, the story the kerchief told was not the same as the story Sidoti had told him.
He absolutely had to go and talk to the man.
He went back out on the veranda to wait for the first rays of dawn.
* * *
At eight o’clock, dressed to the nines, he was about to call the hospital when the telephone rang. It was Laura Infantino.
“Good morning, Inspector, sorry for calling so early. I worked all night with Marchica, and this morning we spoke with the prosecutor. I can now promise you with assurance that the boy’s name, and yours, will not appear in the report of the investigation. I can also tell you that we’ve located the three attackers and will soon make a move on them. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. It was a wonderful gift.”
“Thank you,” said Montalbano.
Hanging up, he immediately rang San Giovanni Hospital. He identified himself, and they granted him permission to visit.
Twenty minutes later, after being shown the way—so as not to get lost as he always did in hospitals—he found himself outside a door.
“As of yesterday we put him in a single room,” said the nurse, “because the chief physician fears he might not make it through the night.”
Montalbano opened the door and went in. The combined smell of medication and death assailed his senses, and momentarily prevented him from stepping towards the bed. All he could see of Sidoti was his bandaged head and a yellowish hand lying on the bedsheet. His eyes were closed. The inspector pulled up a chair and sat down beside him.
“Signor Sidoti,” he said softly.
The dying man seemed not to have heard.
“Signor Sidoti, it’s Montalbano.”
Perhaps it was the name that stirred Sidoti, because he slowly opened his eyes, managed to bring the inspector’s face into focus, and twisted his mouth into a grimace that might have been a smile. Montalbano laid his hand on his, gripped it, and held it tight.
“Thank you,” Sidoti said in a faint voice.
“For what?” Montalbano asked, not understanding.
“I was really hoping you’d come and see me.”
Montalbano said nothing, but only waited in silence.
“I’d promised, for love of Ernesto, to take the secret to the grave with me . . . But now that you’re here, I can tell the truth. Like to a confessor.”
“Did Emanuele shoot himself in front of the shed?” asked Montalbano.
Sidoti shook his head no.
“He didn’t shoot himself,” he said.
Montalbano froze. Everything he’d imagined fell to pieces in his mind, and the fragments began to spin about in a kaleidoscopic vortex before coming back together in an image showing an even more horrifying reality.
“Did his brother, Francesco, shoot him?” he asked, noticing that his own voice was trembling, but not Sidoti’s. The man had found the strength to speak in a clear, steady voice.
“When Francesco was told he wasn’t gonna live much longer, he sort of went crazy. Not for his own sake, but for his brother’s. He kept on repeating to me, ‘I can’t leave him like this, I can’t leave him like this,’ and he started saying, ‘You gotta help me, you gotta help me,’ and he would say it all the time, like he was reciting the rosary, until one day I couldn’t take it anymore and I said, ‘Help you how?’ and he looked at me and said, ‘If I can’t do it, you can take over.’ Every day, every minute, every hour of every day, morning noon and night, he would come over to me, always saying the same things. I started havin’ trouble sleepin’ at night, and then one time, just to make him stop whinin’ and talkin’, I said, ‘Okay.’
“Then one morning he came to me and said it was time. He ordered me to wait for him at the bottom of the stairs, and a short while later him and Emanuele came down the stairs, holding hands. They went outside, and I followed behind. Francesco took him as far as the wall of the shed and asked him: ‘Wanna play blindman’s buff like we used to when we were kids?’ And Emanuele said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ and started laughing. So Francesco took a big kerchief out of his pocket, the kind the peasant ladies wear, folded it up on his knee, and covered his brother’s eyes with it, knotting it behind his head. Then he took the pistol out of his pocket. And at that moment he looked at me in a way that made me understand that he could manage alone. I was just frozen, I couldn’t even talk, but I felt my whole chest tighten like it was in a vise, and then he said to his brother, ‘Okay, I’m gonna count to three, and then I’ll let go of you and you’re gonna come looking for me.’ And he started counting: one, two . . . He was holding his brother tight with his left arm, and then he brought the pistol up to Emanuele’s head. I was keeping my eyes closed. I couldn’t stand it. And then I heard ‘three,’ and the shot. What made me open my eyes again was a sound that didn’t seem human. And I saw Francesco holding his brother in his arms, dead, and wailing like an animal so loud it seemed like he wanted his cry to reach the sun and turn it black. And then he became strong as a bull, and still wailing that desperate cry, he picked up Emanuele’s body and hurled it as far away as he could, and then fell to his knees. Emanuele ended up almost right under the bathroom window. I still couldn’t move. Then, crawling on all fours, Francesco made his way over to his brother, took him in his arms, removed the blindfold, and starting wiping the blood off him.”
Sidoti stopped talking. His breath became a hiss. Montalbano feared those might be Sidoti’s last words. But the man found the strength to say more.
“Go now . . . go . . .” he whispered. “Leave me alone.”
The inspector got up and was releasing his hand from Sidoti’s, which had held his own tight the whole time he’d spoken, but the old farmer clutched it even harder.
“But first you must swear you won’t say anything to Ernesto.”
“I swear,” said Montalbano.
Sidoti’s hand, suddenly drained of streng
th, let him go.
“God keep you,” said the inspector.
He turned his back and rushed out of the room.
Now he understood why Francesco, while still alive, had kept on filming that fragment of wall year after year, always at the same time of the same day of the same month: to preserve forever in his mind, still present, that heartrending moment of pure horror, to let himself sink each time anew into that mire, weeping and despairing, almost as if castigating himself in expiation.
* * *
Two cases, he thought to himself while going out to his car. Both crimes had more or less the same motive: protection. And in both cases, it would be as if he himself had never been involved in them.
On his way back to Vigàta, he crossed paths with four trucks and one bus. The crews of the TV movie were leaving. The carnival was over. The everyday grind would now resume. But first he had to think up a big, whopping lie to tell Engineer Sabatello.
Sidoti had told him the truth.
In his youth, in 1968, he, too, had cried out that telling the truth was a revolutionary act, that the truth must always be told.
No, no . . . For some time now he’d known that the truth was sometimes better kept under wraps, in the darkest darkness, without so much as the glow of a lighted match.
Author’s Note
As usual, the names and events appearing in my novels are the fruit of my imagination, at least as far as I know.
This book, drafted in 2015, was the very first I wrote by dictation. And therefore my infinite thanks go to Valentina, for all her precious help.
A.C.
Notes
involtini . . . tinnirume: Involtini are roulades, and tinnirume is a Sicilian word that roughly translates as “tender stuff,” but refers specifically to preparations of young spring vegetables.
“wit’a woman named Maj, an’ alls I c’n say is my, my, my, oh my”: In Italian, as in Swedish, the name Maj is pronounced the same as “my.”
“the Dicos”: Catarella is mispronouncing the name Digos, an Italian law enforcement agency (whose acronym stands for Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali), specializing in cases of terrorism, organized crime, and other sensitive areas.
“41 bis”: Article 41 bis of the Prison Administration Act is a clause allowing authorities to suspend certain prison regulations for persons convicted of Mafia crimes, terrorism, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and other serious offenses. Fazio’s mention of it here would seem to refer mostly to the Mafia connection. One of the purposes of the provision is to isolate prisoners from other colleagues in crime that might allow them to continue their activities from prison.
Lou Ravi in a crèche: Lou Ravi (“the enraptured one”), called “Lo Spaventato” (“the awestruck one”) in Italian, is the shepherd expressing astonishment in traditional Provençal and Neapolitan crèches.
PIZZA AND SFINCIONE: Sfincione, or sfinciuni, is a Sicilian kind of thick-crust pizza, served with a variety of different toppings.
Maybe if he’d lived a little longer with François . . . : François was a Franco-Tunisian boy, orphaned during an investigation by Montalbano and briefly brought into his home, whom Livia had wanted them to adopt in The Snack Thief (Penguin, 2003). When Montalbano adamantly refused to adopt him, Mimì Augello’s sister took him in and raised him, with her husband, on their farm. François later reappears, now fully grown, in A Beam of Light (Penguin, 2015) as a militant working to overthrow the government of Tunisia.
Ucciardone prison: An old high-security prison in Palermo, famous for holding convicted mafiosi.
“I wasn’t even born!”: Montalbano is lying to the boy. He was born in 1950.
the poet Trilussa’s “La vispa Teresa”: Trilussa, the anagrammatic pseudonym of Carlo Alberto Camillo Mariano Salustri (1871–1950), was a Roman poet who wrote predominantly in the romanesco dialect of that city, often with a humoristic and satirical bent. “La vispa Teresa” (“Precocious Teresa”), written in Italian, not Roman dialect, is a continuation of a poem of the same title (also known by the alternate title “La farfalletta,” or “The Little Butterfly”) by Italian poet Luigi Sailer (1825–1885).
ova a pisciteddru: A kind of omelet with onions, with the option of folding in a little cheese (caciocavallo, pecorino, Parmesan, etc.). (With thanks to Mary Ann Manzella Vitale.)
sarde a beccafico: Sarde a beccafico is a Sicilian specialty named after a small bird, the beccafico (Sylvia borin, “garden warbler” in English), which is particularly fond of figs (beccafico means “fig-pecker”). The headless, cleaned sardines are stuffed with sautéed bread crumbs, pine nuts, sultana raisins, and anchovies, then rolled up in such a way that they resemble the bird when they come out of the oven.
Notes by Stephen Sartarelli
* I.e., Francesco (translator’s note).
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The Safety Net Page 23