The Fourth Secret Read Free Page B

What do you want me to tell you? The poor devil’s body shows fractures and wounds that are all compatible with a sixty-foot fall. If the fall wasn’t an accident and somebody pushed him off, it wouldn’t be revealed by any autopsy. Have I made myself clear?”
    He laughed.
    “And in any case, if you need more information, why don’t you call Marshal Verruso? Do you want me to let him know about your investigation?”
    “Thanks,” Montalbano said curtly, turning to walk away. Dr. Pasquano’s voice made him stop to turn back.
    “There is one thing that struck me. And I’ll tell Verruso about it as well. He got a pedicure on a regular basis.”
    Montalbano made a surprised face. Dr. Pasquano opened his arms to mean that that’s how things were and there was nothing he could do about it.
    He thought that, by then, Niccolò Zito must have returned to his office. He didn’t have a cell phone on him, so he stopped at one of those open contraptions that, if you need to call while it’s raining, you’d get soaked, one of those that had two telephones. Naturally, both were occupied. At one of them, a black lady was yelling at the top of her lungs in an incomprehensible language. The other was being used by a seventy-year-old peasant wearing a
coppola
and who was holding the phone as if it were glued to his ear. He wasn’t speaking; he didn’t even make a sound; he just kept nodding. After five minutes, as the black lady’s yelling became more and more angry, the peasant said
“bo”
and continued to listen. That wasn’t going to work. Montalbano got back in his car and stopped in front of another one of those contraptions. Both phones were free. He ran to the first and saw that the red light was on: it was out of order. The second worked, only the inspector, after a quick search, discovered he didn’t have a phone card. As he looked around to see if there was a
tabaccheria
where he could get one a man walked up to the other phone and started to talk. Montalbano felt an uncontrollable rage coming over him. What did that phone have against him? Why was it out of service a few seconds earlier and now, with someone else, was working perfectly? He slammed the receiver so hard that it bounced back. Cursing, the inspector slammed it back in place and got into his car. He was about to leave when he saw that the man using the other phone was now pressing his face against his car window. He was a fifty-year-old man wearing glasses, very skinny and nervous, with an austere air about him.
    “What do you want?”
    “I want you to be more considerate.”
    “Why, what did I do to you?”
    “To me, nothing. But you were about to damage something that belongs to the general public. You almost broke the telephone.”
    He was certainly right. But Montalbano didn’t care for the lecture. If that man wanted to pick a fight, he was going to get one. He opened the door, slowly got out of the car, balanced his weight on his legs, and looked into the eyes of that man who was about the same age.
    “I must warn you before you do anything stupid. I am a marshal in the carabinieri,” he said.
    Montalbano came back to his senses. That was the last thing he needed, a brawl between a police inspector and a carabinieri marshal. And who was going to come and restore order, the border patrol? The best thing was to end things there.
    “My apologies, I got very upset and …”
    “All right, all right, you may go.”
    “Can I ask you something, Marshal?”
    “Go ahead.”
    “How did you manage to make that phone work?”
    “Make it work? I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was cursing because I couldn’t get a dial tone. Only after, did I realize that the red light was on.”
    “And so you were angry, too.”
    “Yes, but I didn’t try to smash the entire phone.”
    “Yes, Inspector, Dr. Zito came to the office, broke a vase, threw some papers on the floor, and then left. When he has a toothache, he becomes more frenzied than