Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano mystery series, bestsellers in Italy and Germany, has been adapted for Italian television and translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Japanese, Dutch, and Swedish. He lives in Rome.
Stephen Sartarelli lives in upstate New York.

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Voice of the Violin

Penguin Books

Chapter One

The previous evening, finding some fresh anchovies cooked by Adelina, his houskeeper, in the fridge, he'd dressed them in a great deal of lemon juice, olive oil, and freshly ground black pepper, and wolfed them down. And he'd relished them, until it was all spoiled by a telephone call.

"H'lo, Chief? Izzatchoo onna line?"

"It's really me, Cat. You can go ahead and talk."

At the station they'd given Catarella the job of answering the phone, mistakenly thinking he could do less damage there than anywhere else. After getting mightily pissed off a few times, Montalbano had come to realize that the only way to talk to him within tolerable limits of nonsense was to use the same language as he.

"Beckin' pardon, Chief, for the 'sturbance."

Uh-oh. He was begging pardon for the disturbance. Montalbano pricked up his ears. Whenever Catarella's speech became ceremonious, it meant there was no small matter at hand.

"Get to the point, Cat."

"Tree days ago somebody aks for you, Chief, wanted a talk t' you in poisson, but you wasn't 'ere an' I forgotta reference it to you."

"Where were they calling from?"

"From Florida, Chief."

He was literally overcome with terror. In a flash he saw himself in a sweatsuit jogging alongside fearless, athletic American narcotics agents working with him on a complicated investigation into drug trafficking.

"Tell me something. What language did you speak with them?"

"What langwitch was I asposta speak? We spoke 'Talian, Chief."

"Did they tell you what they wanted?"

"Sure, they tol' me everyting about one ting. They said as how the vice commissioner Tamburino's wife was dead."

He breathed a sigh of relief, he couldn't help it. They'd called not from Florida, but from police headquarters in the town of Floridia near Siracusa. Caterina Tamburrano had been gravely ill for some time, and the news was not a complete surprise to him.

"Chief, izzat still you there?"

"Still me, Cat, I haven't changed."

"They also said the obsequious was gonna be on Tursday morning at nine o'clock."

"Thursday? You mean tomorrow morning?"

"Yeah, Chief."

He was too good a friend of Michele Tamburrano not to go to the funeral. That way he could make up for not having even phoned to express condolences. Floridia was about a three-and-a-half-hours' drive from Vig`ta.

"Listen, Cat, my car's in the shop. I need a squad car at my place, in Marinella, at five o'clock sharp tomorrow morning. Tell Inspector Augello I'll be out of the office until early afternoon? Got that?"

He emerged from the shower, skin red as a lobster. To counteract the chill he felt at the sight of the sea, he'd made the water too hot. As he started shaving, he heard the squad car arrive. Indeed, who, within a ten-kilometer radius, hadn't heard it? It rocketed into the driveway at supersonic speed, braked with a scream, firing bursts of gravel in every direction, then followed this display with a roar of the racing engine, a harrowing shift of gears, a shrill screech of skidding tires, and another explosion of gravel. The driver had executed an evasive maneuver, turning the car completely around.

When he stepped out of the house ready to leave, he saw Gallo, the station's official driver, rejoicing.

"Look at that, Chief! Look at them tracks! What a maneuver! A perfect one-eighty!"

"Congratulations," Montalbano said gloomily.

"Should I put on the siren?" Gallo asked as they were about to set out.

"Put it in your ass," said a surly Montalbano, closing his eyes. He didn't feel like talking.

Gallo, who suffered from the Indianapolis Complex, stepped on the accelerator as soon as he saw his superior's eyes shut, reaching a speed he thought better suited to his driving ability. They'd been on the road barely fifteen minutes when the crash occurred. At the scream of the brakes, Montalbano opened his eyes but saw nothing, head lurching violently forward before being jerked back by the safety belt. Next came a deafening clang of metal against metal, then silence again, a fairy tale silence, with birds singing and dogs barking.

"You hurt?" the inspector asked Gallo, seeing him rub his chest.

"No. You?"

"Nothing. What happened?"

"A chicken cut in front of me."

"I've never seen a chicken cut in front of a car before. Let's look at the damage."

They got out. There wasn't a soul around. The long skid marks were etched into the asphalt. Right at the spot where they began, one could see a small, dark stain. Gallo went up to this, then turned triumphantly around.

"What did I tell you?" he said to the inspector. "It was a chicken!"

A clear case of suicide. The car they had slammed into, smashing up its entire rear end, must have been legally parked at the side of the road, though now it was sticking out slightly. It was a bottle-green Renault Twingo, positioned so as to block a dirt driveway leading to a two-story house with shuttered windows and doors some thirty meters away. The squad car, for its part, had a shattered headlight and a crumpled right fender.

"So now what do we do?" Gallo asked dejectedly.

"We're gonna go. Will the car run, in your opinion?"

"I'll give it a try."

Backing up with a great clatter of metal, the squad car dislodged itself from the other vehicle. Nobody came to the windows of the house this time either. They must have been fast asleep, dead to the world. The Twingo had to belong to someone in there, since there were no other homes in the immediate area. As Gallo was trying with his bare hands to bend out the fender, which was scraping against the tire, Montalbano wrote down the phone number of Vig`ta police headquarters on a piece of paper and slipped this under the Twingo's windshield wiper.

When it's not your day, it's not your day. After they'd been back on the road for half an hour or so, Gallo started rubbing his chest again, and from time to time he twisted his face in a grimace of pain.

"I'll drive," said the inspector. Gallo didn't protest.

When they were outside the town of Fela, Montalbano, instead of continuing along the highway, turned onto the road that led to the center of town. Gallo paid no attention, eyes closed and head resting against the window.

"Where are we?" he asked, as soon as he felt the car come to a halt.

"I'm taking you to Fela Hospital. Get out."

"But it's nothing, Inspector!"

"Get out. I want them to have a look at you."

"Well, just leave me here and keep going. You can pick me up on the way back."

"Cut the shit. Let's go."

Between auscultations, three blood pressure exams, X rays, and everything else in the book, it took them over three hours to have a look at Gallo. In the end they ruled that Gallo hadn't broken anything; the pain he...