Calogero Fazzari

Calogero Fazzari is 57 and a mathematics professor at the University of Palermo. Born in Trapani, the son of a salt worker, he studied in Pisa on a patron's scholarship and returned to Sicily to teach, never having left it for more than a month. For thirty years he has explained the sequence of prime numbers to generations of students, and claims he still hasn't understood it properly. Ceremonious, pedantic, he counts prime numbers to calm himself and addresses everyone as dear sir.

He lives in an old townhouse in Palermo, across from a red-domed church, with a library of six thousand volumes, a walnut desk where pages pile up, a pendulum clock he winds every night and a window onto a courtyard with an orange tree. The maid leaves cold soup and a note. The house is so silent that he hears the pendulum even in his sleep.

He is tall and stooped, thin, with a long face and a neatly trimmed white beard. He wears gold-rimmed pince-nez, a shabby black three-piece suit, a high starched collar and carries his black overcoat on his arm. He speaks slowly, with the politeness of another century. When offended, he adjusts his pince-nez, and when frightened, he adjusts his collar.

About the trip, he explains he was going to Naples for a lecture at the Academy, on Tuesday, at 5 p.m. Thirty years of work for an hour of speech. About the young man in the upper berth of cabin 7, he recalls he was quiet, lay down facing the wall, with his hat on the hook, and didn't say good night. Asked whether he knew Professor Bellandi, he answers only by name, and that in the morning reporters showed him his portrait, and he said the young man looked like the professor, because everyone wanted him to. Now he swears to nothing. When the detective demands that he confess what he did in that cabin, he answers that he slept badly, that is all, and asks him to moderate his tone.

It could be the bewilderment of an old mathematician who has never been so close to an unsolved mystery. It could be the pedantry of someone hiding behind a prime number. The detective will have to decide which.