The Terra-Cotta Dog (19 page)

“Be reasonable, Anna. What happened last night was for your own good—”

Anna hung up. Even though he had made her understand a hundred different ways that what she wanted was out of the question, Montalbano, realizing that the girl at that moment was suffering terribly, felt like considerably less than a pig, since pork, at least, can be eaten.

Montalbano easily found the villa upon entering Gallotta, but it did not seem possible to him that anyone could live in that ruin. Half the roof was visibly caved in, which must surely have let in the rain on the third floor. The faint wind in the air was enough to rattle a shutter that remained attached by means not immediately apparent. The outer wall on the upper part of the façade had cracks the width of a fist. The second, first, and ground floors looked in better shape. The surface plaster had long disappeared; the shutters were all broken and flaking, but at least they closed, however askew. There was a wrought-iron gate, half-open and leaning outward, apparently in this position since time immemorial, amid weeds and peaty soil. The yard was an amorphous mass of contorted trees and dense shrubbery, a thick, closely knit tangle. He proceeded up the path of disconnected stones and stopped when he reached the peeling front door. Darkness was already falling. The switch from daylight time to standard time really did shorten the days. There was a doorbell, and he rang it. Or, rather, he pushed it, since he heard no sound whatsoever, not even far away. He tried again before realizing that the doorbell hadn't worked since the discovery of electricity. He rapped on the door with the horse-head knocker, and finally, after the third rap, he heard some shuffling footsteps. The door opened, without any noise from a lock or bolt, only a long wail as of a soul in purgatory.

“It was open. You needed only to push, come inside, and call me.”

It was a skeleton speaking to him. Never in his life had Montalbano seen anyone so thin. Or, rather, he had seen a few such people, on their deathbeds, dried up, shriveled by illness. This man, however, was standing, though bent over in two, and appeared to be alive. He was wearing a priest's cassock whose original black now tended towards green, the once-stiff white collar now a dense gray. On his feet, two hobnailed peasant boots of the kind you couldn't buy anymore. He was completely bald, and his face looked like a death's-head on which somebody, as a joke, had placed a pair of gold eyeglasses with extremely thick lenses, behind which the eyes foundered. Montalbano thought the couple in the cave, who'd been dead for fifty years, had more flesh on their bones than this priest. Needless to say, he was very old.

In ceremonious fashion, the man invited him inside and led him into an enormous room literally crammed with books, not only on the shelves but stacked on the floor in piles that stretched nearly to the lofty ceiling and remained standing by means of some impossible equilibrium. No light entered through the windows; the books amassed on their ledges covered them completely. The furniture consisted of a desk, a chair, and an armchair. The lamp on the desk looked to Montalbano like an authentic oil lantern. The old priest cleared the armchair of books and told the inspector to sit down.

“I cannot imagine how I could be of any use to you, but go ahead and talk.”

“As you were probably told, I'm a police inspector and I—”

“No, nobody told me anything, and I didn't ask. Late last night somebody from the village came and said a man from Vigàta wanted to see me, and I said to have him come at five-thirty. If you're an inspector, you've come to the wrong place. You're wasting your time.”

“Why am I wasting my time?”

“Because I haven't set foot outside this house for at least thirty years. What would I go out for? The old faces have all disappeared and I don't care much for the new ones. Somebody does my shopping every day, and in any case I only drink milk, and chicken broth once a week.”

“You probably heard on television—”

He had barely started the sentence when he interrupted himself; the word “television” had sounded incongruous to him.

“There's no electricity in this house.”

“Well, you've probably read in the papers—”

“I don't read newspapers.”

Why did he keep setting off on the wrong foot? Taking a deep breath, he got a kind of running start and told him everything, from the arms traffic to the discovery of the dead couple in the Crasticeddru.

“Let me light the lamp,” said the old man, “we'll talk better that way.”

He rummaged through some papers on the desktop, found a box of kitchen matches, and lit one with a trembling hand. Montalbano felt a chill come over him.

If he drops it,
he thought,
we'll be roasted alive in three seconds
.

The operation, however, was a success, except that it made matters worse, in that the lamp shed a feeble light over half of the desktop and plunged the side on which the old man sat into total darkness. In amazement Montalbano saw the old man reach out with one hand and seize a small bottle with an odd sort of cork. There were three other such bottles on the desk, two empty and the other full of a white liquid. They weren't regular bottles, actually, but baby bottles, each furnished with a nipple. The inspector felt himself growing stupidly irritated as the old man started sucking.

“You'll have to forgive me. I haven't any teeth.”

“But why don't you drink the milk from a mug or a cup or, I don't know, a glass?”

“Because it gives me more pleasure this way. It's as if I were smoking a pipe.”

Montalbano decided to leave as quickly as possible. Standing up, he took from his jacket pocket two of the photos taken by Jacomuzzi and handed them to the priest.

“Might this have been some sort of burial rite?”

The old man looked at the photos, growing animated and groaning.

“What was inside the bowl?”

“Coins from the 1940s.”

“And in the jug?”

“Nothing . . . There was no trace of anything . . . It must have contained only water.”

The old man sat there sucking a good while, engrossed in thought. Montalbano sat back down.

“It makes no sense,” said the priest, setting the photos down on the desk.

16

Montalbano was at the end of his rope. Bombarded with questions by the priest, he felt his thoughts growing confused and, what was worse, every time he was unable to answer, Alcide Maraventano made a kind of whining sound and in protest began sucking louder than usual. He was already working on his second baby bottle.

In what directions were the heads of the dead pointed? Was the jug made of absolutely normal clay or some other material?

How many coins were there inside the bowl?

Exactly how far from the two bodies were the jug, bowl, and terra-cotta dog?

At last the third degree ended.

“It makes no sense.”

The interrogation's conclusion confirmed precisely what the priest had immediately surmised at the start. The inspector, with a certain, not very well-concealed relief, thought he could now get up, take his leave, and go.

“Wait. What's the hurry?”

Montalbano sat back down, resigned.

“It's not a funerary rite, but maybe it's something else.”

All at once, the inspector roused himself from his lethargy and regained full possession of his mental faculties. This Maraventano was a thinking mind.

“Tell me, I'd much appreciate your opinion.”

“Have you read Umberto Eco?”

Montalbano began to sweat.

Jesus, now he's giving me a literature exam
, he thought, but he managed to say: “I've read his first novel and the two small diaries, which seemed to me—”

“Well, I haven't. I don't know the novels. I was referring to the
Treatise of General Semiotics
, a few of whose passages might be of use to us.”

“I'm embarrassed to say, I haven't read it.”

“And I suppose you haven't read Kristeva's
Semeiotiké
either?”

“No, and I have no desire to,” said Montalbano, starting to feel angry. He was beginning to suspect that the old man was pulling his leg.

“All right, then,” said Alcide Maraventano, sighing, “I'll give you a down-to-earth example.”

“Something on my level,” Montalbano muttered to himself.

“If you, then, are a police inspector, and you find a man who's been shot and killed, and in whose mouth the killers have placed a stone, what conclusion might you draw?”

“That's old stuff, you know,” said Montalbano, bent on regaining the upper hand. “Nowadays they murder without giving any explanations.”

“I see. So for you that stone in the mouth is a kind of explanation.”

“Of course.”

“And what does it mean?”

“It means the dead man talked too much, said things he wasn't supposed to say, or was an informer.”

“Exactly. You, therefore, understood the explanation because you possessed the code of that language, which in this case was a metaphorical language. But if you'd been ignorant of the code, what would you have understood? Nothing. To you, that man would have been a murder victim in whose mouth the killers had in-ex-pli-ca-bly placed a stone.”

“I'm beginning to understand.”

“Now, to return to our discussion: somebody kills two young people for reasons we don't know. He could make the bodies disappear in many different ways, in the sea, underground, under the sand. But, no, he puts them in a cave instead. Not only, but he arranges a bowl, a jug, and a terracotta dog around them. What, therefore, has he done?”

“He's made a statement, sent a message,” said Montalbano in a soft voice.

“That's right, a message, which you, however, can't read because you don't possess the code,” concluded the priest.

“Let me think,” said Montalbano. “But the message must have been directed at someone, just not at us, fifty years after the fact.”

“And why not?”

Montalbano thought about this a moment, then stood up.

“I'm going to go, I don't want to take up any more of your time. What you've told me has been very valuable to me.”

“I'd like to be even more useful to you.”

“How so?”

“You just said that nowadays they kill without providing any explanations. There is always an explanation and it is always provided, otherwise you wouldn't be in the line of work you're in. It's just that the codes have multiplied and diversified.”

“Thank you,” said Montalbano.

 
 
For dinner they'd eaten fresh anchovies
all'agretto
, which Signora Elisa, the commissioner's wife, had cooked with art and skill, the secret of success lying in correctly determining the infinitesimal length of time to keep the pan in the oven. Then, after the meal, the signora had retired to the living room to watch television, but not before having arranged, on the desk in her husband's study, a bottle of Chivas, another of bitters, and two glasses.

While they were eating, Montalbano had spoken enthusiastically of Alcide Maraventano and his peculiar way of life, his erudition, his intelligence. The commissioner, however, had shown only lukewarm curiosity, more out of politeness to his guest than out of real interest.

“Listen, Montalbano,” he broke in as soon as they were alone, “I can easily understand the sense of urgency you might feel about the two murder victims you found in the cave. I daresay I've known you too long not to expect you to become fascinated by a case like this, because it defies explanation, but also—and I think this is the real reason—because even if you were to find the solution, it would prove utterly useless. Just the sort of uselessness that you would find amusing and—excuse me for saying so—almost congenial.”

“Useless in what way?”

“Useless, useless, don't play innocent. To be generous—since fifty or more years have since passed—the murderer, or murderers, are either dead or, in the best of cases, little old men at least seventy years old. Right?”

“Right,” Montalbano reluctantly agreed.

“Therefore—forgive me, because what I'm about to say is not normally part of my vocabulary—but what you're engaged in is not an investigation, but an act of mental masturbation.”

Montalbano, lacking the strength or arguments to rebut him, took it all in.

“Now, I could allow you this little exercise,” the commissioner continued, “if I wasn't afraid you'd end up devoting the best of your brainpower to it, and neglecting other investigations of greater significance and reach.”

“No! That's not true!” the inspector bridled.

“But it is. Look, none of this is intended, in any way, as a reproach. We're here talking, at my home, between friends. Why, for example, did you assign the weapons-trafficking case—an extremely delicate case—to your deputy, who is a very capable officer but certainly not on your level?”

“But I haven't assigned him anything! It's he who—”

“Don't be childish, Montalbano. You've been throwing the better part of the investigation on his shoulders. Because you're well aware that you can't devote all your energies to it, since three-fourths of your brain is tied up with the other case. Tell me, quite honestly, if you think I'm wrong.”

“You're right,” Montalbano honestly admitted, after a pause.

“So let's leave it at that, and move on to other matters. Why the hell don't you want me to recommend you for a promotion?”

“You really want to keep crucifying me.”