Giorgio kills Rizzo

Giorgio kills Rizzo in a burst of grief and violence that turns Rizzo’s political maneuvering into a murder investigation. The killing is disclosed retrospectively by Salvo Montalbano: Rizzo had misjudged Giorgio’s reaction to learning of his double betrayal, and Giorgio answered with a pistol taken from Silvio Luparello’s house.

The killing and its discovery

Rizzo’s murder first reaches Montalbano as an abrupt interruption to routine paperwork. After spending an hour signing forms and several more hours writing questionnaires for the public prosecutor’s office, the inspector is confronted by Galluzzo, who bursts into his room visibly upset. Montelusa headquarters has reported that Rizzo has been shot and found beside his car in the San Giusippuzzu district. Montalbano refuses to wait for more information and heads there himself; it is eleven o’clock.

The circumstances behind the shooting emerge later, when Montalbano explains the case to Livia. Rizzo had gained political leverage over Cardamone and achieved his objective, but he failed to anticipate what the scheme would mean to Giorgio. After seeing the photographs and understanding that Rizzo had betrayed both him and Luparello’s memory—the memory Giorgio had tried to protect—Giorgio was devastated. Montalbano describes him as emotionally fragile and swept along by that despair.

Giorgio returned to the house at Capo Massaria, took Luparello’s pistol, and tracked Rizzo down. He beat Rizzo severely, then shot him at the base of the skull. The killing converts a political plot built on manipulation and betrayal into a violent act of personal retribution, while setting the terms of Montalbano’s investigation: the reported murder is clear, but the identity of the killer is not immediately made public.

The machinery of betrayal

The killing’s immediate background lay in the scheme that turned private relationships into political leverage. Salvo Montalbano explains to Livia that Pietro Rizzo suspected a relationship involving Ingrid Sjostrom and Dr Cardamone, then tried to implicate Ingrid. Cardamone accepted the insinuation; Rizzo, who had engineered it, did not expose himself to the same trap. The arrangement left Ingrid burdened with false evidence while Rizzo used the scandal to advance his political objective.

The account Montalbano gives also includes Marilyn and an accomplice, a strange ride in a car, and a staged pantomime inside a parked car at the Pasture. A necklace, a bag, and clothing formed part of the sordid evidence surrounding the plot. These details matter to Giorgio Zicari’s response because the photographs made the betrayal visible: he understood that Rizzo had exploited the affair and compromised the memory Giorgio had tried to preserve. The violence that followed therefore arose from more than political defeat; it answered a calculated exploitation of intimate loyalties and of Giorgio’s devotion to his uncle.

The truth withheld

Montalbano’s knowledge of the killing does not become an arrest. When Livia asks whether he took Giorgio into custody, he makes clear that he did not: he has done more than destroy the false evidence against Ingrid. His colleagues in Montelusa believe the Mafia killed Rizzo, and Montalbano acknowledges that this explanation is not baseless. But he keeps his own conclusion—that Giorgio was the killer—to himself, allowing the credible suspicion of a Mafia murder to stand in place of what he believes happened.

That silence leaves two accounts of Rizzo’s death in circulation: the investigative theory shared by Montalbano’s colleagues and the truth he has disclosed privately to Livia. The killing’s aftermath is thus shaped not only by the violence itself but by Montalbano’s decision to withhold his understanding of it. His response also links this case to his earlier destruction of the false evidence against Ingrid: in both instances, he acts outside the straightforward disclosure of everything he knows, though the evidence establishes no further motive for his silence.

The limits of the reconstruction

The account distinguishes what is established about Rizzo’s death from what Montalbano infers and withholds. Galluzzo brings a concrete report—Rizzo has been shot and found beside his car—while the motive and sequence of the killing reach the reader later through Montalbano’s explanation to Livia. That shift from an official discovery to a private reconstruction makes the murder legible without making its truth public: the Mafia theory remains plausible to the investigators, even as Montalbano keeps Giorgio’s responsibility to himself.