The Terra-Cotta Dog (12 page)

“Of course. Somebody had done the cavaliere the favor of moving his car. And by way of thanks, the cavaliere only scolded him for parking it too far away.”

“Were you able to tell who it was that called?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” said Montalbano. And he hung up.

So the kid, having completed his deadly little service in the shelter of some complicitous garage, had also decided, just for fun, to make the cavaliere get a little exercise.

 
 
At the Free Channel studios, Montalbano explained to a polite young woman that he was utterly hopeless when it came to anything electronic. Turning on a television, yes, flipping the channels, turning it off, no problem. As for the rest, utter darkness. With patience and grace, the girl put in the cassette, then started to rewind it, stopping the image every time Montalbano asked. By the time he left the Free Channel offices, the inspector was convinced he'd seen exactly what had aroused his interest. But what had aroused his interest seemed not to make any sense.

10

He stood outside the Trattoria San Calogero, undecided. It was indeed time to eat, and his stomach certainly felt empty; and yet an idea that had come to him while watching the videotape and which demanded to be verified was pushing him to continue on to the Crasticeddru. The scent of fried mullet coming from the restaurant won the duel. He ate a special appetizer of shellfish, then had them bring him two sea perches so fresh they seemed to be still swimming in the sea.

“You're eating without conviction, Inspector.”

“It's true. The fact is, I've got something on my mind.”

“The mind should be forgotten when the Lord in His grace puts such perches in front of you,” Calogero said solemnly, walking away.

 
 
He passed by the office to see if there was any news.

“Jacomuzzi called several times for you,” Germanà informed him.

“If he calls again, tell him I'll get back to him later. Do we have a very powerful flashlight?”

After turning off the main road and stopping near the Crasticeddru, he abandoned the car and decided to proceed on foot. It was a beautiful day, with a light breath of wind that cooled the air and lifted Montalbano's spirits. The ground around the rocky spur was marked by tire tracks apparently left by people who had come up there out of curiosity. The boulder that served as the door had been pulled open several yards, the cave entrance now entirely exposed. As he was about to enter, he stopped, pricking up his ears. From inside came a low murmur occasionally interrupted by some stifled moans. He became alarmed: want to bet they're torturing someone in there? There wasn't time to run back to the car to get his pistol. He bounded inside, simultaneously turning on the powerful flashlight.

“Everybody freeze! Police!”

The two people inside the cave froze, but the greatest chill was felt by Montalbano himself. They were a very young couple, completely nude, making love: she with her hands braced against the wall, arms extended, he glued to her from behind. In the glare of the flashlight they looked like statues, beautiful. The inspector felt his face burning with shame. Turning off the flashlight, he started to withdraw, awkwardly muttering:

“I'm sorry . . . It was a mistake . . . Don't let me bother you.”

They came out less than a minute later. (It doesn't take long to put one's jeans and T-shirt back on.) Montalbano was truly sorry for having interrupted them. In their way, the two youths had been reconsecrating the cave, now that it was no longer a depository of death. The boy passed in front of him, head bowed and hands in his pockets; the girl instead glanced at him a moment, smiling faintly, an amused glint in her eye.

A simple, superficial reconnaissance of the site was all the inspector needed to confirm that what he had noticed in the videotape corresponded to what he was seeing in reality: that while the sides of the cave were relatively smooth and solid, the lower part of the rear wall, that is, the surface opposite the entrance, was quite uneven in texture, with protuberances and recesses, and might at first glance appear sloppily chiseled. But there was nothing chiseled about it. In fact, it consisted of stones stacked one atop and beside the other. Time had since taken care of binding and cementing them, camouflaging them with dust, earth, seeping water, and saltpeter, finally transforming the rough surface into an almost natural wall.

He continued looking very closely, exploring inch by inch, and in the end he no longer had any doubt: at the back of the cave, there must be an opening at least three feet square that had been covered over quite a few years ago.

 
 
“Jacomuzzi? Montalbano here. I absolutely need you to—”

“Do you mind telling me where you've been hiding your ass? I spent the whole morning looking for you!”

“Well, I'm here now.”

“I found a piece of cardboard, from a package or, rather, from a large box, the kind used for shipping.”

“You tell a secret, I tell a secret: I once found a red button.”

“What an asshole you are! I'm not going to say any more.”

“Aw, come on, honeybuns, don't be offended.”

“On this piece of cardboard are some printed letters. I found it under the wooden underframe of the cave; it must have slipped through one of the interstices between the planks.”

“What was that word you said?”

“Underframe?”

“No, after that.”

“Interstices?”

“Yes. My, my, aren't we educated? And so well-spoken! Did you find anything else under this whatever-it-was you called it?”

“Yes. Rusted nails, a button, in fact—but this one was black—a pencil stub and some scraps of paper, but the dampness had turned them all to mush. That piece of cardboard is still in good condition because it apparently had been there only a few days.”

“Send it down to me. Listen, have you got an echo sounder and anyone who might know how to use it?”

“Yes. We used it at Misilmesi just last week to look for three dead bodies, which we eventually found.”

“Could you have it here to me in Vigàta by five o'clock?”

“Are you insane? It's four-thirty! Let's say in two hours. I'll bring it myself, along with the cardboard. But what do you need it for?”

“To sound your little behind.”

 
 
“Headmaster Burgio is here for you. Says if you'll see him, he has something to tell you. It won't take more than five minutes.”

“Show him in.”

Headmaster Burgio had already been retired for ten years or so, but everyone still called him by that title because he'd been headmaster of the Vigàta Business School. He and Montalbano were well acquainted. The headmaster was a very cultured, energetic man, with a keen interest in life despite his age, and he sometimes accompanied the inspector on his restful walks along the jetty. The inspector stood up to greet him.

“How nice to see you! Please sit down.”

“Since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I'd ask if I could talk to you. If I hadn't found you in the office, I would have phoned.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to let you know a few things about the cave where you found those weapons. I'm not sure it'll be of any interest, but—”

“Are you kidding? Tell me everything you know.”

“Well, let me state first that what I'm about to say is based on what I've heard on the local TV and read in the newspapers. It's possible they got a few things wrong. In any case, somebody said that the boulder covering the cave entrance had been made into a door by mafiosi or by whoever was trafficking in weapons. It's not true. This work of . . . let's call it adjustment, was done by the grandfather of a very dear friend of mine, Lillo Rizzitano.”

“How long ago? Do you know?”

“Of course I know. It was around 1941, when oil, flour, and wheat were growing scarce because of the war. At that time, all the land around the Crasto and the Crasticeddru belonged to Giacomo Rizzitano, Lillo's grandfather, who had made a lot of money in America by less-than-legitimate means, or at least that's what people in town said. Anyway, it was Giacomo Rizzitano's idea to seal off the cave by turning that boulder into a door. And inside the cave they kept all sorts of good things, selling them on the black market with the help of his son Pietro, Lillo's father. They were unscrupulous men, who'd been implicated in other affairs which decent people at the time never talked about, including, apparently, some acts of violence. Lillo, on the other hand, had turned out differently. He was sort of literary, he wrote nice poems and read a lot. It was he who first introduced me to Pavese's
Paesi tuoi
, Vittorini's
Conversazione in Sicilia
, and so on. I used to go visit him, usually when his folks weren't there, in a small house right at the foot of the Crasto, on the seaward side.”

“Was it demolished to build the tunnel?”

“Yes. Or, more precisely, the earthmovers working on the tunnel merely got rid of the ruins and foundations, since the house was literally pulverized during the bombings that preceded the Allied landing in 1943.”

“Think you could track down this Lillo friend of yours?”

“I don't even know whether he's dead or alive, or where he's lived since then. I say this because you should bear in mind that Lillo was, or is, four years older than me.”

“Tell me, Mr. Burgio, have you ever been inside that cave?”

“No. I once asked Lillo, but he said no. He had strict orders from his father and grandfather. He was very afraid of them; the fact that he'd even told me the secret of the cave was already a lot.”

 
 
Officer Balassone, despite his Piedmontese name, spoke Milanese dialect and always wore a haggard face worthy of the Day of the Dead.

“L'è el dì di mort, alegher!”
Montalbano thought upon seeing him, reminded of the title of a poem by Delio Tessa.

After half an hour of fussing about with his instrument at the back of the cave, Balassone removed his headset and gave the inspector an even more disconsolate look than usual, if that was possible.

I was wrong,
thought Montalbano,
and now I'm going to look like a stupid shit in Jacomuzzi's eyes
.

Jacomuzzi, for his part, after ten minutes inside the cave, had made it known he suffered from claustrophobia and gone outside.

Maybe because now there aren't any TV cameras pointed at you?
Montalbano thought maliciously.

“So?” the inspector finally asked Balassone, to confirm his failure.

“It's there, behind the wall,” Balassone said mysteriously. He was not only a melancholic, but also a man of few words.

“Would you please tell me—if it's not asking too much—exactly
what
is there behind the wall?” asked Montalbano, who was becoming dangerously polite.

“Would you please have the courtesy to speak Italian?”

The appearance and tone seemed those of an eighteenth-century gentleman of the court. Baldassone had no idea that, if he went on at this rate, he was in line to have his nose rearranged. Luckily for him, he obeyed.

“There's a hollow,” he said, “and it's as big as this cave here.”

The inspector took comfort. He'd seen right. At that moment Jacomuzzi came in.

“Find anything?”

With his immediate superior, Baldassone's tongue suddenly loosened. Montalbano gave him a dirty look.

“Yessir,” said the Piedmontese. “There apparently is another cave behind this one. It's like something I saw once on television. There was this Eskimo's house—what do you call them?—oh, yes, this igloo, and right next to it was another igloo. And the two igloos were connected by a kind of passageway, a short, low corridor. It's the same here.”

“At a rough glance,” said Jacomuzzi, “I'd say the passage between the two caves must date from a good number of years ago.”

“Yessir,” said Baldassone, looking more and more weary. “If any weapons were hidden in the other cave, they'd have to go back as least as far as the Second World War.”

 
 
The first thing Montalbano noticed about the piece of cardboard, which the crime lab had dutifully inserted in a little transparent plastic bag, was that it had the same shape as Sicily. In the middle of it were some letters printed in black: ATO-CAT.

“Fazio!”

“At your service!”

“Get Vinti's to lend you the Jeep and shovels and pickaxes again. We're going back to the Crasticeddru tomorrow, you, me, Germanà, and Galluzzo.”

“This is becoming a bad habit!” Fazio cried out.

 
 
Montalbano felt tired. In the fridge he found some boiled squid and a slice of nicely aged caciocavallo cheese. He set himself up on the veranda. When he had finished eating, he went to look in the freezer, and there he found a tub of lemon ice, which the housekeeper made regularly for him by following a one-two-four formula: one glass of lemon juice, two of sugar, and four of water. A finger-licking delight. Then he decided to stretch out on the bed and finish the novel by Montalbán. He was unable to read even a chapter. Despite his interest, sleep got the better of him. He woke up with a start less than two hours later. He looked at his watch: barely eleven o'clock. As he was putting the watch back on the bedside table, his eye fell on the piece of cardboard, which he'd brought with him. He picked it up and went into the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet in the cold fluorescent light, he studied it closely. Suddenly an idea flashed in his brain. For a moment it seemed as if the bathroom light were growing steadily in intensity, until it exploded in a luminescent burst. He started laughing.