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the corner of Via Cavour and Piazza Garibaldi. Having fired the shots, the murderer would hardly have come forward into the square where there was a bus with about fifty people on board and a fritter-seller only two paces from the dead man. It was more logical to assume that he had made his get-away down Via Cavour. The time had been six thirty in the morning and the report stated that Nicolosi was to have gone to prune trees at the Fondachello farm, about an hour away on foot. Perhaps, when the killer was running down the street, Nicolosi had come out and recognized him. But how many other people had seen him? The murderer could have counted on Nicolosi's silence, as on that of the fritter-seller and all the others, had he been either a resident or someone well-known in the town; but certainly, in a crime of this sort, he must have been a hired assassin from elsewhere. We learn from America.
    No flights of fancy, the major had warned him. All right, then, no flights of fancy. But Sicily is all a realm of fantasy and what can anyone do there without imagination? Nothing but plain facts, then, which were these: a man called Colasberna had been killed just as he was getting on a bus for Palermo in Piazza Garibaldi at six thirty in the morning. The murderer had shot him from the corner of Via Cavour and Piazza Garibaldi and made his escape down Via Cavour. On the same day, at the same time, a man who lived in the same Via Cavour was leaving home, or just about to. According to his wife, she had been expecting him back in the evening, at about Angelus time as usual, she said, but he had never turned up then, nor for the next five days. At the Fondachello farm they say that they've not seen him; they were expecting him that day but he never appeared. He had vanished, together with his mule and his implements, between the door of his house and the Fondachello farm, some four or five miles apart. He had vanished without a trace.
    If Nicolosi turned out to have a criminal record or to be involved in some way with the underworld, then he might possibly have gone into hiding; or maybe someone had settled a grudge and covered up all trace of him. But if he hadn't; if there were no reason for him to make any premeditated disappearance; if he were not a man to have any direct or indirect accounts to settle with the underworld; then his disappearance could be definitely, without any flight of fancy, connected with the murder of Colasberna.
    The captain did not at that moment take into account a chance of Nicolosi's disappearance being in some way connected with his wife; of it being, in other words, one of those crimes of passion, so useful alike to mafia and police. Ever since the time when, in the sudden silence of the orchestra pit, during Cavalleria Rusticana, the cry of 'Hanno ammazzato cumpari Turiddu!' ('They've killed Turiddu!') first chilled the spines of opera enthusiasts, criminal statistics and number symbols of the lottery in Sicily have had closer links between cuckoldom and violent death. A crime of passion is solved at once: so it is an asset to the police; it is also punished lightly: so it is an asset to the mafia. Nature imitates art; Turiddu Macca, having been killed on the stage by Mascagni's music and Compare Alfio's knife, began to figure on tourist maps - and autopsy tables - of Sicily. Sometimes, though, either by knife or by lupara (luckily no longer by music) the Alfios get the worst of it. At that moment Captain Bellodi did not take this into account; a distraction that was to bring him a minor reprimand.
    Negative reports on Paolo Nicolosi were brought back by Sergeants D'Antona and Pitrone from the Magistrature and the Records Office - no charges outstanding, no previous convictions. The captain was satisfied, but impatient; impatient to hurry over to S. and talk with Nicolosi's wife, with some of the missing man's friends, with the sergeantmajor; to question the people at Fondachello and then, should