IM11 The Wings of the Sphinx (2009) Read Online Free PDF

to go into my office. Wait five minutes, then send her in.”
    The case of Arturo Picarella’s kidnapping had begun a week earlier. A rich, fifty-year-old wholesaler in wood, Picarella had built himself a beautiful villa just outside of town, where he lived with his wife Ciccina, who was famous all over town for throwing furious fits of jealousy, even in public, at her husband, who was equally well-known for his insatiable hunger for women. Their only son, who was married, worked as a bank teller in Canicattì and kept his distance, coming to Vigàta barely once a month to visit.
    One night, around one o’clock, husband and wife were woken up by some noise on the ground floor. At first they heard footsteps, and then a chair being knocked over. Surely some burglars had broken in.
    Then, after ordering his wife not to get out of bed and getting all dressed up, sport coat and shoes included, Picarella armed himself with the revolver he kept in the drawer of his bedside table, went downstairs, and immediately started firing blindly, feeling perhaps empowered to do so by the recent law on self-defense.
    Shortly thereafter, a terrified Signora Ciccina heard the front open and close again. At that point she got up, ran to the window, and saw her husband, hands in the air, being forced into his own car by a masked man pointing a gun at him.
    The car drove off, and Arturo Picarella had been missing ever since.
    Such were the facts as recounted by an agitated Signora Ciccina.
    It should be added that, along with Picarella, some five hundred thousand euros had also disappeared, withdrawn by the wood merchant from his bank the very day before, supposedly to close a deal about which nobody knew anything.
    Ever since that moment, not a morning or evening went by without Signora Picarella coming to the station to ask, each time more angrily, if they had any news of her husband. The kidnapper had never come forth to demand a ransom, and Picarella’s car had not been found.
    Once Mimì Augello and Fazio were assigned the case, however, they immediately formed a precise and very different opinion of how the kidnapping had gone.
    It took them one glance to ascertain that Picarella had made sure to empty the entire cartridge into the ceiling, which looked worse than a colander. Meanwhile the burglar, apparently unarmed since he hadn’t returned fire, didn’t flee, but somehow managed to react and take possession of the firearm.
    The front door, moreover, turned out not to have been forced, nor had the safe that was hidden behind a big photograph of Great-Grandfather Filippo Picarella, founder of the dynasty.
    And why hadn’t the thief taken the three thousand euros that Signora Ciccina had left out on a side table, which her husband had given her that evening to pay a supplier the following day? And why hadn’t he grabbed the solid-gold snuff-box that had belonged to the great-grandfather and lay right there, for all to see, on top of the three thousand euros, holding them down?
    And why, also, did Arturo Picarella—who, according to his wife’s statements, had been sleeping in T-shirt and underpants—get all dressed up very quickly before going downstairs to confront the burglar? By now, with their longstanding experience, Augello and Fazio took for granted that anyone who is woken up in the middle of the night by burglars normally gets straight out of bed and goes to confront the thieves however he may happen to be dressed, in pajamas, underwear, or naked. The wholesaler’s manner of behavior was at the very least extremely odd, if not downright suspicious.
    Augello and Fazio had submitted a report to their superior which came to a conclusion that could in no way be revealed to Signora Ciccina. A conclusion supported, moreover, by ru mors circulating around town, according to which Arturo Picarella had lost his head over a stewardess he had met while flying back from Sweden, where he had gone to buy wood.
    In short, the way Augello