The Terra-Cotta Dog (15 page)

Montalbano fell into a deep sleep in front of the television.

 
 
“Hello, Salvo? Gegè here. Let me talk, and don't interrupt with your usual bullshit. I need to see you. I need to tell you something.”

“Okay, Gegè. Even tonight's okay, if you want.”

“I'm not in Vigàta, I'm in Trapani.”

“So when?”

“What day is today?”

“Thursday.”

“How about Saturday midnight at the usual place?”

“Listen, Gegè, Saturday night I'm having dinner with someone, but I can come anyway. If I'm a little late, wait for me.”

 
 
The phone call from Gegè, who from his tone of voice sounded worried—enough not to tolerate any joking—had woken him up just in time. It was ten o'clock, and he tuned in to the Free Channel. Nicolò Zito, with his intelligent face, red hair, and Red ideas, opened the newscast with the story of a laborer who died at his workplace in Fela, roasted alive in a gas explosion. He listed a series of examples to demonstrate how, in at least ninety percent of the cases, management was blithely indifferent to safety standards. He then moved on to the arrest of some public officials charged with various forms of embezzlement and used this instance to remind viewers of how several different elected governments had tried in vain to pass laws that might prevent the cleanup operation currently under way. His third item was the suicide of the businessman strangled by debts to a loan shark, and here he criticized the government's provisions against usury as utterly inadequate. Why, he asked, were those investigating this scourge so careful to keep loan-sharking and the Mafia separate? How many different ways were there to launder dirty money?

Finally, he came to the news of the two bodies found in the cave, but he approached it from a peculiar perspective, indirectly challenging the angle that Prestìa and TeleVigàta had taken on the story. Somebody, he said, once asserted that religion is the opium of the people; today, instead, one would have to say that the real opium is television. For example:Why had certain people presented this case as a story of two lovers thwarted in their love? What facts authorized anyone to advance such a hypothesis? The two were found nude: what had happened to their clothes? No trace of any weapon was found in the cave. How would they have killed themselves? By starving to death? Come on! Why did the man have a bowl beside him containing coins no longer current today but still valid at the time of their deaths? To pay Charon's toll? The truth, claimed the newsman, is that they want to turn a probable crime into a certain suicide, a romantic suicide. And in our dark days, with so many threatening clouds on the horizon, he concluded, we puff up a story like this to drug people, to distract their attention from the serious problems and divert them with a Romeo-and-Juliet story, one scripted, however, by a soap-opera writer.

 
 
“Darling, it's Livia. I wanted to tell you I've booked our tickets. The flight leaves from Rome, so you'll have to buy a ticket from Palermo to Fiumicino; I'll do the same from Genoa. We'll meet at the airport and board together.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I've also reserved our hotel. A friend of mine has stayed there and said it's really nice without being too fancy. I think you'll like it.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“We leave in two weeks and a day. I'm so happy. I'm counting the days and the hours.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Salvo, what's wrong?”

“Nothing. Why should there be anything wrong?”

“You don't sound very enthusiastic.”

“Of course I am, what do you mean?”

“Look, Salvo, if you wiggle out of this at the last minute, I'll go anyway, by myself.”

“Come on.”

“But what's wrong with you?”

“Nothing. I was sleeping.”

 
 
“Inspector Montalbano? Good evening. This is Headmaster Burgio.”

“Good evening. What can I do for you?”

“I'm very sorry to disturb you at home. I just heard on television about the two bodies that were found.”

“Could you identify them?”

“No. I'm calling about something that was said in passing on TV, but which might be of interest to you. I'm talking about the terra-cotta dog. If you have no objection, I thought I'd come by your office tomorrow morning with Burruano, the accountant. Do you know him?”

“I know who he is. Ten o'clock all right?”

 
 
“Here,” said Livia. “I want to do it here, right away.”

They were in a kind of park, dense with trees. Crawling about at their feet were hundreds of snails of every variety, garden snails, tree snails, escargots, slugs, periwinkles.

“Why right here? Let's get back in the car and in five minutes we'll be home. Around here, somebody might see us.”

“Don't argue, jerk!” Livia shot back, grabbing his belt and trying awkwardly to unbuckle it.

“I'll do it,” he said.

In an instant Livia was naked, while he was still struggling with his trousers, then his underpants.

She's accustomed to stripping in a hurry
, he thought, in a surge of Sicilian jealousy.

As Livia threw herself down on the wet grass, legs spread, caressing her breasts with her hands, he heard, to his disgust, the sound of dozens of snails being crushed under the weight of her body.

“Come on, hurry up,” she said.

Montalbano finally managed to strip down naked, shuddering in the chill air. Meanwhile, a few snails had started slithering over Livia's body.

“And what do you expect to do with that?” she asked critically, eyeing his cock. With a look of compassion, she got up on her knees, took it in her hands, caressed it, and put her lips around it. When she felt he was ready, she resumed her prior position.

“Fuck me to kingdom come,” she said.

When did she become so vulgar?
he wondered, bewildered.

As he was about to enter her, he saw the dog a few steps away, a white dog with its pink tongue sticking out, growling menacingly, teeth bared, a string of slobber dribbling from its mouth. When did it get there?

“What are you doing? Has it gone soft again?”

“There's a dog.”

“What the hell do you care? Give it to me.”

At that exact moment the dog sprang into the air and he froze, terrified. The dog landed a few inches from his head, turned stiff, its color lightly fading, then lay down, its front legs extended, hind legs folded. It became fake, turned into terra-cotta. It was the dog in the cave, the one guarding the dead couple.

Then all at once the sky, trees, and grass disappeared, walls of rock formed around them and overhead, and in horror he realized that the dead couple in the cave were not two strangers, but Livia and himself.

He awoke from the nightmare breathless and sweating, and immediately in his mind he begged Livia's forgiveness for having imagined her as so obscene in the dream. But what was the meaning of that dog? And those disgusting snails slithering all over the place?

That dog had to have a meaning, he was sure of it.

 
 
Before going to the office, he stopped at a kiosk and bought Sicily's two newspapers. Both of them prominently featured the story of the bodies found in the cave; as for the discovery of the weapons, they had prominently forgotten about that. The paper published in Palermo was certain that it had been a love suicide, whereas the one published in Catania was also open to the possibility of murder, while not, of course, discounting suicide, and indeed its headline read: DOUBLE SUICIDE OR DUAL HOMICIDE?—implying some vague, mysterious distinction between “double” and “dual.” On the other hand, no matter what the issue, this newspaper customarily never took a position. Whether the subject was a war or an earthquake, it always liked to play both sides of the fence, and for this had gained a reputation as an independent, freethinking daily. Neither of the two dwelt on the jug, the bowl, or the terra-cotta dog.

The instant Montalbano appeared in the doorway, Catarella asked him what he should say to the hundreds of journalists who were certain to phone, wanting to speak with the inspector.

“Tell them I've gone on a mission.”

“What, you've become a missionary?” quipped the policeman, lightning-quick, chuckling noisily to himself.

Montalbano concluded that he'd been right, the previous evening, to unplug the telephone before going to bed.

13

“Dr. Pasquano? Montalbano here. Just wondering if there's any news.”

“Yes, there certainly is. My wife has a cold and my granddaughter lost a baby tooth.”

“Are you angry, Doctor?”

“I certainly am!”

“With whom?”

“You ask me if there's any news! Well, let me ask you how you can have the gall to ask me anything at nine o'clock in the morning! What do you think, that I've just spent the night opening up those two corpses' bellies like some kind of vulture? I happen to sleep at night! And, at the moment, I'm working on that guy who drowned around Torre Spaccata. Who didn't drown at all, since before being tossed into the sea he'd been stabbed three times in the chest.”

“Shall we make a bet, Doctor?”

“On what?”

“On whether or not you spent the night with those two corpses.”

“All right, all right. You win.”

“What did you find out?”

“Right now I can't tell you much; I still have to look at a few other things. One sure thing is that they were killed by gunshot wounds. He to the head, she to the heart. You couldn't see the woman's wound because his hand was covering it. A textbook execution, while they were sleeping.”

“Inside the cave?”

“I don't think so. They were probably already dead when they were brought there, then were rearranged, still naked and all.”

“Have you managed to establish their ages?”

“I wouldn't want to be wrong, but I'd say they were young, very young.”

“And when did the crime take place, in your opinion?”

“I could venture a guess, which you can take with a pinch of salt. About fifty years ago, more or less.”

 
 
“I'm not here for anyone. No phone calls for the next fifteen minutes,” Montalbano told Catarella. Then he locked the door to his office, returned to his desk, and sat down. Mimì Augello was also sitting there, but stiff as a poker, bolt upright.

“Who goes first?” asked Montalbano.

“I do,” said Augello, “since it was I who asked to talk to you. Because I think it's time I said something.”

“Well, I'm here to listen.”

“Could you please tell me what I've done to you?”

“You? To me? Nothing at all. Why do you ask?”

“Because I feel like I've become a stranger in this place. You don't tell me what you're doing, you keep me at a distance, and I feel insulted. For example, was it right, in your opinion, to keep me in the dark about Tano the Greek? I'm not Jacomuzzi, who shouts these things from the rooftops. I can keep a secret. I didn't find out what happened at my own police station until I heard it at the press conference. Does that seem like the right way to treat someone who's your second-in-command until proved otherwise?”

“But do you realize how sensitive this matter was?”

“It's precisely because I realize it that I'm so pissed off. Because it must mean that for you, I'm not the right person for sensitive matters.”

“I've never thought that.”

“You've never thought it, but you've always done just that. Like with the weapons, which I found out about by accident.”

“Come on, Mimì, I was overwhelmed by the pressure and anxiety. It didn't occur to me to inform you.”

“That's bullshit, Salvo. That's not the real story.”

“Oh, yeah? What's the real story?”

“I'll tell you. You've created a police station in your own image and likeness. Fazio, Germanà, Galluzzo, take anyone you want, they're all just limbs that obey one single head: yours. They never contradict you, never ask questions: they just follow orders. There are two foreign bodies here: Catarella and me. Catarella, because he's too stupid, and me—”

“Because you're too intelligent.”

“See? That's not what I was going to say. You make me out to be arrogant, which I'm not, and you do it maliciously.”

Montalbano looked at him, stood up, put his hands in his pockets, circled round the chair in which Augello was sitting, then stopped.

“It wasn't malicious, Mimì. You really are intelligent.”

“If you seriously believe that, then why do you cut me out? I could be at least as useful to you as the others.”

“That's just it, Mimì. Not
as
useful, but more so. I'm speaking to you quite frankly, since you're making me think seriously about my attitude towards you. And maybe this is what bothers me most.”

“So, just to please you, I ought to dumb myself down a little?”

“Listen, if you want to have it out with me, let's go. That's not what I meant. The fact is that over the course of time, I've realized I'm sort of a solitary hunter—I'm sorry if that sounds idiotic, maybe it's not the right term. Because I do like to go hunting with others, but I want to be the only one to organize the hunt. That's the one necessary precondition for making my brain function properly. An intelligent observation made by someone else merely upsets me—it throws me off, sometimes for a whole day, and can even prevent me from following my own train of thought.”