Luparello’s pistol

Luparello’s pistol is a crucial object in the chain connecting the death at the Capo Massaria house to Rizzo’s murder. First encountered in a bedside-table drawer, it becomes conspicuous through its absence: Giorgio retrieves it, and Montalbano’s failure to remove or secure it leaves him implicated in the consequences of what follows.

Discovery and Disappearance

Montalbano had found the pistol in the bedside-table drawer on his first visit to the Capo Massaria house. He later returned twice with Ingrid Sjostrom but did not check whether the weapon was still there. Even when he found the gate open, he reassured himself that he must have left it that way. His assumption turns out to have concealed a consequential oversight: when he rushes back to the house, leaving his car running and its door open, the drawer is empty.

Giorgio’s Use of the Pistol

Montalbano later recounts that Giorgio, overwhelmed by grief and anger, ran to the house, took Luparello’s pistol, tracked down Rizzo, beat him, and shot him at the base of the skull. The weapon thus passes from a concealed presence in the bedroom to the instrument of a second killing. Its route also supplies a concrete connection between the house and Rizzo’s death, which Montalbano’s colleagues in Montelusa instead suspect was the work of the Mafia.

Montalbano’s Responsibility

When Livia asks whether he knew there was a pistol in the house, Montalbano says that he did. Asked whether he left it there, he confirms that he did as well. His admission distinguishes the weapon’s physical role in Giorgio’s crime from Montalbano’s own responsibility: he did not fire it, but knowingly left it accessible and withheld his account of Rizzo’s murder from his colleagues. The pistol is therefore not just a clue to who killed Rizzo; its continued presence exposes the compromise at the heart of Montalbano’s decision to conceal the truth.