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Nicotra, who for the previous five days had been staying at his country house between Vigàta and Montereale, taking a modest breather from his normally intense political activity. They’d spoken by telephone on Sunday morning and agreed to meet on Wednesday evening.
    A seventy-year-old widower with no children, Senator Nicotra, a Vigàta native, was sort of a local and national hero. A former minister of agriculture and twice undersecretary, he had skillfully navigated all the different currents of the old Christian Democratic Party, managing to stay afloat even through the most frightful storms. During the horrific hurricane “Clean Hands,” he had turned into a submarine, navigating underwater by means of periscope alone. He resurfaced only when he’d sighted the possibility of casting anchor in a safe port—the one just constructed by a former Milanese real-estate speculator–cum–owner of the top three private nationwide television stations–cum–parliamentary deputy, head of his own personal political party, and finally prime minister. A number of other survivors of the great shipwreck had gone along with Nicotra, and Armando Riccobono was one of these.
    Arriving at the senator’s villa, the honorable Riccobono had knocked a long time at the door to no avail. Alarmed—because he knew that the senator was at home alone—he’d walked around the house and looked inside a window, seeing his friend lying on the floor, either unconscious or dead. Since, given his age, he couldn’t very well climb up through the window and enter, he’d called for help on his cell phone.
    In brief, Senator Nicotra had, as the newspapers like to put it, “died of heart failure” that same Sunday evening after speaking to the Honorable Riccobono. Nobody’d been to see him either Monday or Tuesday. He himself had told his secretary he wanted to be left alone and undisturbed and that, at any rate, he was going to unplug the phone. If he needed anything, he would call for it.
    TeleVigàta, through the pursed lips of their political commentator Pippo Ragonese, was explaining to one and all the vast sweep of Italy’s grief over the loss of the eminent politician. The chief executive—the very same into whose party the senator had fled with all his belongings—had wired a message of condolence to the family.
    “What family?” Montalbano asked himself.
    It was well known that the senator had no family. And it would have been going too far, indeed it was entirely beyond the realm of possibility, for the chief executive to wire a message of condolence to the Sinagra crime family, with whom the senator had apparently had, and continued to have, long and fruitful—but never proven—ties.
    Pippo Ragonese concluded by saying that the funeral would be held the following day, Friday, in Montelusa.
    Turning off the television, the inspector didn’t feel like eating anything. He went and sat out on the veranda for a bit, enjoying the cool sea air, then went to bed.

    The alarm went off at seven-thirty, and Montalbano shot out of bed like a jack-in-the-box. Shortly before eight o’clock, the phone rang.
    “Chief, ohh, Chief! Dr. Latte wit an s at the end jess called!”
    “What did he want?”
    “He said that ’cause that they’re having the furinal services for that sinator that died and seeing as how the c’mishner gotta be there poissonally in poisson, atta furinal, I mean, the c’mishner can’t come to see youse like he said he was gonna do. Unnastand, Chief?”
    “Perfectly, Cat.”
    It was a lovely day, but the moment he set down the phone, it seemed downright heavenly to him. The prospect of not having to meet with Bonetti-Alderighi made him practically idiotic with joy, to the point that he composed a perfectly ignoble couplet—ignoble in terms of both intelligence and meter—for the occasion:

    A dead senator a day
    Keeps the commissioner away.

    Michela had mentioned that Emilio Sclafani, Elena’s husband, taught