Free Rounding the Mark by Andrea Camilleri Page B

around?”
    “Yessir, Chief. Got back just now.”
    “Send him to me.”
     
 
“Can I sit down?” asked Fazio. “With all due respect, my feet are smoking from all the walking I’ve been doing. And I’ve only just started.”
    He sat down, pulled a small stack of photographs out of his jacket pocket, and handed these to the inspector.
    “My friend in forensics got them to me fast,” he said.
    Montalbano looked at them. They showed the face of an ordinary forty-year-old, with long hair in one, a mustache in another, a crewcut in another, and so on. But they were all, well, totally anonymous, inert, not personalized by any light in the eyes.
    “Still looks dead,” said the inspector.
    “What did you expect, for them to bring him back to life?” snapped Fazio. “That’s the best they could do. Don’t you remember the state of the guy’s face? For me they’ll be an enormous help. I gave Catarella copies for comparison with the photo archives, but it’s going to be a long haul, a real pain in the neck.”
    “I’m sure it will,” said Montalbano. “But you seem a little on edge. Anything wrong?”
    “What’s wrong, Chief, is that the work I’ve been doing, and the work still left for me to do, might be all for nothing.”
    “Why?”
    “We’ve been searching the towns along the coast. But who’s to say the man wasn’t killed in some inland town, put in the trunk of a car, driven to some beach, and dumped into the sea?”
    “I don’t think so. Usually when somebody is killed in the countryside or some inland town, they end up inside a well or buried at the bottom of a mountain ravine. In any case, what’s to prevent us from first checking the towns along the coast?”
    “My poor feet, Chief, that’s what.”
     
 
Before going to bed, he phoned Livia. She was glum because she couldn’t come to Vigàta. Montalbano wisely let her vent her feelings, occasionally clearing his throat to let her know he was listening. Then, without a break, she asked:
    “So, what did you want to tell me?”
    “Me?”
    “Come on, Salvo. The other night you said you had something to tell me, but you preferred to wait until I got there. Since now I can’t come, you have to tell me everything over the phone.”
    Montalbano cursed his big mouth. If he’d had Livia right in front of him when telling her of the little boy who’d tried to escape on the wharf, he could have weighed his words, tone, and gestures appropriately, to keep Livia from getting too sad thinking about François. At the slightest change in her expression, he would have known how to steer the drift of the conversation. Over the phone, on the other hand . . . He tried a last-ditch defense.
    “You know what? I really don’t remember what I wanted to tell you.”
    He immediately bit his tongue. That was a stupid thing to say. Even from ten thousand kilometers away, Livia, over the phone line, could immediately tell when he was lying.
    “Don’t even try, Salvo. Come on, tell me.”
    During the whole ten minutes he spoke, Montalbano felt like he was walking through a minefield. Livia did not interrupt him once, and made no comment whatsoever.
    “. . . And so my colleague Riguccio’s convinced it was all for some kind of family reunion, as he calls it, and a successful one,” he concluded, wiping the sweat from his brow.
    Not even the happy ending got a reaction from Livia. The inspector got worried.
    “Livia. Are you still there?”
    “Yes. I’m thinking.”
    The tone was firm; her voice hadn’t cracked.
    “About what? There’s nothing to think about. It’s just a little story like any other, of no importance whatsoever.”
    “Stop talking nonsense. I also understand why you would have preferred to tell me face to face.”
    “Come on, what kind of ideas are you getting in your head? I didn’t—”
    “Never mind.”
    Montalbano didn’t breathe.
    “Of course, it is strange,” Livia said a moment later.
    “What is?”
    “Does it seem