Rizzo and Dr Cardamone

Rizzo and Dr Cardamone are connected by an attempted political coercion, not a proven partnership: Rizzo seeks to place the newly elected Angelo Cardamone in his power by weaponizing a fabricated scandal involving Ingrid Sjostrom. The scheme makes private abuse and public reputation instruments in a contest over who will inherit Silvio Luparello’s political influence, but Rizzo’s murder leaves Cardamone’s role in the affair unresolved.

Political succession and antagonism

After Luparello’s death, the party’s provincial secretariat meets unusually quickly and elects Cardamone unanimously. The televised account presents him as a long-standing, open opponent of Luparello within the party: Cardamone favors cautious dialogue with the left, while Luparello had defended the governing coalition and the introduction of forces not yet entangled in political investigations. Cardamone publicly promises not to betray his predecessor’s memory and to devote his work to the renovated party.

The succession changes the stakes for Rizzo. Luparello had spent years building influence from the shadows, cultivating political followers and control over contracts before stepping into public view as a champion of renewal. His death leaves that political inheritance open to contest. In Montalbano’s reconstruction, Rizzo sees Cardamone as the natural successor who would have no reason to cooperate with him; the scandal is meant to overcome that political distance by making Cardamone vulnerable.

Rizzo’s plan for leverage

The plan begins when Rizzo reaches the house at Capo Massaria and hurriedly dresses Luparello’s body, intending to move it from the compromising scene. He finds a necklace on the floor and women’s clothes in a wardrobe, evidence connected to the woman who had just telephoned him. Instead of treating these objects simply as clues to the death, Rizzo recognizes their possible political value: the woman is Ingrid, Cardamone’s Swedish daughter-in-law, and a claim that she was Luparello’s mistress could entangle the new secretary in a scandal.

Rizzo’s scheme depends on turning suspicion into a public narrative. He has Luparello’s body found at the Pasture and arranges matters to suggest that Ingrid accompanied the engineer there. As Montalbano explains it, Rizzo can use the necklace to connect Ingrid with the place and time of Luparello’s death; if the necklace disappears or its discovery fails to serve him, he has a second card in the form of Ingrid’s bag. The staged connection is intended both to disgrace Luparello and to compromise Cardamone through his family relationship with Ingrid.

The timing is part of the pressure. After Rizzo’s two men return to the small house and put things in order, he phones Cardamone at first light and begins playing his cards. The call marks the point where the concealed staging becomes an attempted direct exercise of power: Rizzo is no longer merely shaping what others might believe about the death, but using that story to put political friends and opponents under pressure. His ambition, as Montalbano describes it, is to rise to the top of the party by discrediting the people who might claim Luparello’s political legacy.

Ingrid’s history and the scandal’s human cost

The frame draws force from Ingrid’s real vulnerability, but not from the affair Rizzo wants people to believe. When Montalbano visits her, she recounts that two years earlier, during a trip to Rome with her father-in-law and husband, Cardamone entered her room and threatened her. She says she went along with him to calm him, and that on the return flight he cried and said it would never happen again. Because the family lived in the same palazzo, he later entered her bedroom again while her husband was out. Ingrid wanted to move away, but her husband refused; Cardamone continued kissing and touching her whenever he had the opportunity. She eventually asked Luparello to let her use his house on occasion.

That history exposes the gulf between the public insinuation and Ingrid’s account of coercion. The story Rizzo constructs casts her as a sexually adventurous woman whose presence at the Pasture would fit a lurid political rumor. Her testimony instead describes repeated unwanted advances, constrained choices within a shared family home, and her attempt to find refuge elsewhere. Rizzo’s leverage works by making her reputation—and the credibility of her private account—part of a political weapon aimed at Cardamone.

Rizzo’s death and the unresolved outcome

Montalbano identifies a weakness in Rizzo’s position: although the staged evidence could make Cardamone vulnerable, the same scandal could also make Rizzo vulnerable to retaliation. After Rizzo is murdered, Montalbano remarks that Cardamone is the only person to emerge unscathed and asks whether the murder was providentially fortunate for him. The commissioner rejects the implication, insisting that Cardamone is an honorable man, and Montalbano says he was joking. The exchange raises suspicion as a question but supplies no proof that Cardamone arranged or welcomed Rizzo’s death.

Rizzo’s murder cuts off the direct confrontation that his plan was designed to initiate. The attempted relationship therefore ends not in a demonstrated alliance or successful submission, but in an interrupted act of blackmail whose intended leverage and possible beneficiary remain distinct from any established responsibility for the killing. The contrast is central to the episode: Cardamone is the target Rizzo intends to control, yet after Rizzo’s death he is also the apparent political survivor, a circumstance Montalbano notices without converting it into a finding of guilt.