Rounding the Mark Read Online Free PDF

hour?”
    Pasquano was appreciative.
    “Because things are not what they seem.”
    “Meaning?”
    “For one, the dead man’s one of us.”
    “Oh.”
    “And secondly, in my opinion, he was murdered. I’ve only done a superficial examination, mind you; I haven’t opened him up yet.”
    “Find any gunshot wounds?”
    “No.”
    “Stab wounds?”
    “No.”
    “Atom-bomb wounds?” asked Montalbano, losing patience. “What is this, Doc, a quiz? Would you just come out with it?”
    “Come by tomorrow morning, and my illustrious colleague Mistretta, who’ll be performing the autopsy, will give you my opinion—which he doesn’t share, mind you.”
    “Mistretta? Why, won’t you be there?”
    “No, I won’t. I’m leaving tomorrow morning to see my sister, who’s not doing so well.”
    Montalbano now understood why Pasquano had phoned him. As a gesture of courtesy and friendship. The doctor knew how much Montalbano detested Dr. Mistretta, an arrogant, presumptuous man.
    “As I was saying,” Pasquano went on, “Mistretta doesn’t agree with me about the case, and I wanted to tell you in private what I thought.”
    “I’ll be right over.”
    “Where?”
    “Over there, to your office.”
    “I’m not at my office, I’m at home. We’re packing our bags.”
    “Then I’ll come to your place.”
    “No, it’s too messy here. Listen, let’s meet at the first bar on Viale Libertà, okay? But don’t make me waste too much time, because I have to get up early tomorrow.”
     
 
He got rid of Fazio, who had grown curious and demanded to know more, then quickly washed up, got in his car, and headed off to Montelusa. The first bar on Viale Libertà tended towards the squalid. Montalbano had been there only once, and that was more than enough. He went inside and immediately spotted Pasquano sitting at a table.
    He sat down beside him.
    “What’ll you have?” asked Pasquano, who was drinking an espresso.
    “Same as you.”
    They sat there in silence until the waiter arrived with the second demitasse.
    “So?” Montalbano began.
    “You saw the shape the corpse was in?”
    “Well, as I was towing it I was afraid his arm would fall off.”
    “If you’d dragged it any further, it would have,” said Pasquano. “The poor bastard had been in the water for over a month.”
    “So he probably died sometime last month?”
    “More or less. Given the state of the body, it’s hard for me to—”
    “Did it still have any distinguishing marks?”
    “He’d been shot.”
    “So why did you tell me there weren’t—”
    “Would you let me finish, Montalbano? He had an old gunshot wound in his left leg. The bullet had splintered the bone. It must have happened a few years ago. I only noticed it because the saltwater had eaten the flesh off the bone. He probably had a slight limp.”
    “How old do you think he was?”
    “About forty. And definitely not a non-European. He will, however, be hard to identify.”
    “No fingerprints?”
    “Are you kidding?”
    “Doctor, why are you so convinced he was murdered?”
    “It’s just my opinion, mind you. The body’s covered with wounds from having been dashed repeatedly against the rocks.”
    “There aren’t any rocks in the water where I found him.”
    “How do you know where he’s from? He’d been sailing a long time before turning himself over to you. What’s more, he’s all eaten up by crabs; he still had two of them in his throat, dead . . . As I was saying, he’s covered with asymmetrical wounds, all of them postmortem. But there are four that are symmetrical, perfectly defined, and circular.”
    “Where?”
    “Around his wrists and his ankles.”
    “That’s what it was!” exclaimed Montalbano, jumping out of his chair.
    Before falling asleep that afternoon, he’d remembered a detail he couldn’t decipher: the arm, the bathing suit wrapped tightly around the wrist . . .
    “It was a cut that went all the way around the left wrist,” the inspector