Montalbano discovers Luparello’s pistol is missing

Salvo Montalbano discovers that the loaded pistol once kept in Silvio Luparello’s seaside house is missing just as the reported method of Pietro Rizzo’s execution makes that weapon newly significant. The discovery turns a private object into a possible link between two deaths, while forcing Montalbano to recognize that he had overlooked the danger during his earlier visits.

The Missing Pistol

At San Giusippuzzu, Montalbano reaches a heavily controlled crime scene after passing successive military and police checkpoints. The authorities are treating Rizzo’s killing as a ruthless execution. Jacomuzzi describes the killer kicking Rizzo, making him kneel, then shooting him at the base of the neck. That detail strikes Montalbano physically: a pang shoots through his own neck, echoing the injury he associates with the neck brace he found at the abandoned factory. The method of the killing gives his suspicions a concrete direction.

Montalbano drives at speed to the Capo Massaria house, reaching it so urgently that he leaves his car running with its door open. In the bedside-table drawer where he had found Luparello’s loaded 7.65 pistol, the weapon is gone. He curses himself for failing to check it on either of his two later visits with Ingrid. Even after noticing the gate open on one occasion, he had reassured himself that he must have left it that way. The empty drawer overturns that easy explanation: the pistol has been removed, and Montalbano has no account of when or by whom.

The Weapon’s Later Significance

Montalbano’s discovery acquires its full meaning only when he reconstructs what happened after Pietro Rizzo’s political maneuvering: Rizzo had gained leverage over Cardamone and achieved his political objective, but underestimated Giorgio Zicari’s response. Overwhelmed by grief, Giorgio Zicari went to the house at Capo Massaria, took Silvio Luparello’s pistol, found Rizzo, beat him, and shot him at the base of the skull. The missing weapon thus supplies the link between the empty drawer and the killing whose execution-style details had troubled Montalbano.

Montalbano does not arrest Giorgio Zicari or tell his colleagues what he has inferred. The police in Montelusa instead consider the Mafia a plausible explanation for Rizzo’s death. By withholding the truth, Montalbano leaves the missing pistol’s evidentiary trail unresolved in the official account, even though he understands how it connects the two deaths.

The Wider Evidentiary Chain

The empty pistol drawer belonged to a larger pattern of clues around The Capo Massaria house and the abandoned Sicilchim factory. At the factory, Salvo Montalbano found a brand-new leather handbag with its owner’s initials torn away but still impressed in the leather as I and S. Two large stones had been placed inside it, apparently to give it weight when thrown over the wall. In the house, he later recognized the same scent among the women’s clothes in Silvio Luparello’s wardrobe. These traces connected the secluded house to the discarded bag and to Ingrid Sjostrom, but they did not by themselves establish who had carried or planted it.

That uncertainty matters to the missing-pistol discovery: Montalbano was not confronting an isolated disappearance, but a case in which objects could be made to suggest a story before their movement was understood. The bag pointed toward Ingrid; the pistol’s absence, considered alongside the manner of Pietro Rizzo’s death, pointed toward a different chain of events. The distinction between what an object directly established and what it merely invited the police to conclude shaped Montalbano’s private reconstruction, while the official explanation remained open to suspicion of a Mafia killing.

After the Discovery

Back home, Montalbano deliberately lets himself drift from room to room, rearranging books, straightening a drawing, putting his desk in order, and cleaning the stove burners. The small domestic tasks stand in sharp contrast to the urgent drive to the house and the empty drawer he has just found. He has no appetite, has skipped the restaurant, and does not even open the refrigerator to see what Adelina has prepared. His return to routine does not resolve the discovery; it marks the pause in which he keeps the case’s implications to himself.