Pino’s transcript of the call to Rizzo

Pino’s transcript of the call to Rizzo is a handwritten record that turns an uneasy impression into a clue. Made after Pino and Saro Montaperto found Silvio Luparello’s body, it preserves the conversation that they had not initially disclosed to Salvo Montalbano. Its significance lies in the difference between what Pietro Rizzo says and what his reaction seems to imply: the transcript allows Montalbano to recognize that Rizzo’s calm response may have come from advance knowledge of the death and a desire for the body to be found quickly.

Making the Record

Pino writes the transcript during a sleepless night, after repeating to himself the account he had already given his mother. He had described the discovery to her three times over dinner, each time at her request, but the conversation with Pietro Rizzo was among the details he and Saro Montaperto had agreed not to reveal to Montalbano. As Pino reconsiders what he has said, that withheld call becomes the detail his mind keeps returning to.

The setting and method matter. Pino gets up, washes his face, and sits at the small desk in his bedroom. He writes down the conversation word for word, corrects the draft, and tries to recover even its pauses, marking them as if he were preparing a theatrical script. The page is therefore not simply a summary made from memory: Pino treats timing and silence as part of what happened. Yet the completed version does not immediately resolve his unease. Something in the dialogue still seems wrong, though he must leave for Splendour before he can work out why.

Pino’s attention to the call grows from his interest in theatre. He acts in amateur productions and reads plays, and he later explains that he wrote the exchange down because he wanted to study it as a piece of dramatic dialogue. His craft provides a way of noticing a mismatch: a character’s words may be calm, but the situation should make that calmness difficult to believe. The transcript gives him a stable form in which to examine that discrepancy.

From Private Page to Evidence

The page reaches Montalbano when the inspector hands it to Pino at the police headquarters. Pino initially dismisses the suggestion that it is a theatre scene, then falls silent: explaining what it really is would require him to disclose the call. Montalbano identifies it as a transcript of a call one of the two discoverers made to Rizzo just after finding Luparello’s body, before they came to report the discovery to the police. Pino confirms the identification.

That exchange changes the page’s status. What had begun as a private exercise in studying dialogue now records a communication withheld from the investigating inspector. The transcript links the discovery to the immediate response of a man close to the dead politician: Rizzo was Luparello’s secretary, devoted friend, and political ally. Montalbano’s identification also makes clear why the written record matters to the investigation. It fixes the call’s place in the sequence of events—after the body was found, but before the formal report at headquarters—and makes its wording available for scrutiny.

Pino’s account of his reason for writing it is not that he had already solved the mystery. He says that, as a man of the theatre, something about the conversation did not sound right. The page preserves the exchange for examination precisely because his first reaction is an unresolved sense of wrongness, not a complete explanation. Montalbano can therefore use Pino’s detailed record to test the call against the relationship and circumstances it describes.

What the Dialogue Reveals

In Pino’s dramatic reading, the call gives Rizzo several reasons to react with alarm. The callers are telling him that his political chief and close associate has been found dead. Yet, as Pino points out, Rizzo remains composed. He does not ask where the body was found or how Luparello died; he does not ask whether Luparello was shot or killed in a car crash. Instead, he asks why the callers brought the news to him, directs them to call the police, and ends the conversation.

Pino hears in that response a distancing from a man to whom Rizzo was supposedly exceptionally close. In a stage scene, he thinks, such a reaction would fail to convince an audience. The incongruity is not merely that Rizzo sounds calm: it is that his calmness is accompanied by no apparent effort to learn the circumstances of his friend’s death. The transcript makes that absence legible by preserving the questions Rizzo does not ask alongside the practical instruction he does give.

Montalbano rereads the sheet after dismissing Pino and reaches a darker interpretation. The exchange works if the hypothetical dramatic premise is that Rizzo already knew where and how Luparello had died before the call, and wanted the body discovered as quickly as possible. That possibility reverses the apparent meaning of Rizzo’s instruction to contact the police. What sounds like a proper response to unexpected news may instead fit prior knowledge and urgency. The transcript does not, by itself, spell out every part of that explanation; its evidentiary force comes from the peculiar composure and omissions that Montalbano reads in the recorded conversation.

Form, Silence, and Significance

The transcript’s theatrical quality is practical rather than decorative. Pino writes the pauses into the exchange and approaches the call as dialogue that must be tested for whether its reactions make sense. In doing so, he makes silence part of the record. His theatre-minded question is not just what Rizzo said, but whether a man in Rizzo’s position would respond that way if the news were truly new to him.

The page also gives narrative weight to what had been withheld. Pino and Saro had kept both their immediate recognition of the body and the call to Rizzo from Montalbano; the transcript emerges from that concealed part of their discovery. Once Montalbano sees it, the private record becomes a means of reopening the event’s chronology and examining Rizzo’s connection to it. The movement from bedroom desk to headquarters mirrors the movement from private suspicion to investigative evidence.

Its decisive contribution is thus an interpretive one. The transcript does not announce a confession or settle the case on its own. It preserves enough detail—the timing of the call, Rizzo’s controlled manner, his failure to ask how or where Luparello died, and Pino’s notation of the pauses—for Montalbano to recognize a pattern. What initially sounded wrong to Pino as theatre becomes meaningful to the investigation: the call may have been less the response of a man learning of a death than the response of a man waiting for it to be discovered.