The Terra-Cotta Dog (14 page)

“One of these days I'm going to give that Jacomuzzi a good dressing down . . . I'm going to skin him alive,” said the commissioner, sighing. “Now tell me the whole story, but slowly, and in chronological order.”

Montalbano told him about Misuraca and the letter the cavaliere had sent him.

“He was murdered needlessly,” he concluded. “His killers didn't know he'd already written to me and told me everything.”

“Listen, explain to me what reason Ingrassia had for being near his supermarket while the phony robbery was taking place, if we're to believe Misuraca.”

“If there were any other snags—an untimely visit, for example—he could jump out and readily explain that everything was all right and they were sending the merchandise back because the people at Brancato's had got the order wrong.”

“And what about the night watchman in the freezer?”

“He was no longer a problem. They would have bumped him off.”

“How should we proceed?” the commissioner asked after a pause.

“Tano the Greek has given us a tremendous gift, even without naming any names,” Montalbano began, “and we shouldn't waste it. If we go about this carefully, we could get our hands on a network the size of which we can't even imagine. But we've got to be cautious. If we immediately arrest Ingrassia or someone from the Brancato firm, we'll come up empty for all our effort. We need to aim for the bigger fish.”

“I agree,” said the commissioner. “I'll call Catania and tell them to put a tail on—”

He broke off with a grimace, painfully remembering the mole who'd talked in Palermo and brought about Tano's death. There might well be another in Catania.

“Let's start at the bottom,” he decided. “We'll put only Ingrassia under surveillance.”

“All right. I'll get the court order from the judge,” said the inspector.

As he was heading out the door, the commissioner called him back inside.

“By the way, my wife is feeling much better. How would Saturday evening do for you? We have a lot to discuss.”

 
 
He found Judge Lo Bianco in an unusually good mood, his eyes sparkling.

“You look well,” the inspector couldn't help saying.

“Yes, yes, I'm quite well, in fact.” He then looked around, assumed a conspiratorial air, leaned towards Montalbano, and said in a low voice: “Did you know that Rinaldo had six fingers on his right hand?”

Montalbano faltered a moment, befuddled. Then he remembered that the judge had been working devotedly for years on a ponderous book entitled
The Life and Deeds of Rinaldo and Antonio Lo Bianco, Masters of Law at the University of Girgenti at the time of King Martin the Younger (1402-1409)
. Lo Bianco had got it into his head that the two ancient barristers were his ancestors.

“Oh, really?” Montalbano asked with jovial surprise. It was best to humor him.

“Yes, indeed. Six fingers, on his right hand.”

Jerking off must have been heaven, Montalbano was about to say sacrilegiously, but managed to restrain himself.

He told the judge everything about the weapons traffic and Misuraca's murder. He even detailed the strategy he wanted to follow and asked him for a court order to tap Ingrassia's phone lines.

Normally, Lo Bianco would have raised objections, created obstacles, imagined problems. This time, delighted with his discovery of Rinaldo's six-fingered hand, he would have granted Montalbano an order to torture, impale, or burn someone at the stake.

 
 
He went home, put on his bathing suit, went for a long, long swim, came back inside, dried himself off, but did not get dressed again. There was nothing in the refrigerator, but in the oven sat, as on a throne, a casserole with four huge servings of
pasta 'ncasciata
, a dish worthy of Olympus. He ate two portions, put the casserole back in the oven, set his alarm clock, slept like a rock for one hour, got back up, took a shower, put his already dirty jeans and shirt back on, and went to the station.

Fazio, Germanà, and Galluzzo were waiting for him in their work clothes. As soon as they saw him, they grabbed their shovels, pickaxes, and mattocks and struck up the old day laborer's chorus, shaking their tools in air:

“Give land to those who work! Give land to those who work!”

“Fucking idiots,” was Montalbano's only comment.

 
 
Prestìa, Galluzzo's newsman brother-in-law, was already there, at the entrance of the Crasticeddru cave, along with a cameraman who had brought along two large battery-powered floodlights.

Montalbano gave Galluzzo a dirty look.

“Well,” the latter said, blushing, “I just thought that since you allowed him last time—”

“All right, all right,” the inspector cut him off.

They entered the weapons cave, and when Montalbano gave the order, Fazio, Germanà, and Galluzzo started working on removing the stones that had fused together over the years. They labored for a good three hours, and even Prestìa, the cameraman, and the inspector joined in, periodically relieving the three men. In the end the wall came down. They could clearly see the little passageway, just as Balassone had said. The rest was lost in darkness.

“You go in first,” Montalbano said to Fazio.

The sergeant took a flashlight, started crawling on his belly, and disappeared. A few seconds later, they heard an astonished voice from the other side.

“Oh, my God! Inspector! You have to see this.”

“The rest of you come in when I call you,” said Montalbano to the others, looking especially at the newsman, who upon hearing Fazio had started forward and was about to throw himself to the ground and start crawling.

The little tunnel was roughly the same length as the inspector's body. An instant later he was on the other side, and he turned on his flashlight. The second cave was smaller than the first and immediately gave the impression of being perfectly dry. In the very middle was a rug still in good condition. In the far left corner of the rug, a bowl. To the right, in the symmetrically corresponding position, a jug. Forming the vertex of this upside-down triangle, at the near end of the rug, was a life-size shepherd dog, made of terra-cotta. And on the rug were two dead bodies, all shriveled up as in a horror film, embracing.

Montalbano felt short of breath; he couldn't open his mouth. He remembered the two youngsters he had surprised in the act of making love in the other cave. The men took advantage of his silence and, unable to resist, came in one after the other. The cameraman turned on his floods and began frantically filming. Nobody spoke. The first to recover was Montalbano.

“Call the crime lab, the judge, and Dr. Pasquano,” he said.

He didn't even turn around toward Fazio to give the order. He just stood there, in a trance, staring at that scene, afraid that his slightest gesture might wake him from the dream he was living.

12

Rousing himself from the spell that had paralyzed him, Montalbano started shouting to everyone to stand with their backs to the wall and not to move, not to tread on the floor of the cave, which was covered with a very fine, reddish sand. Where it had filtered in from was anyone's guess. Maybe it was on the walls. There was no trace of this sand whatsoever in the other cave; perhaps it had somehow halted the decomposition of the corpses. These were a man and a woman, their ages impossible to determine by sight. That they were of different sex the inspector could tell by the shapes of their bodies and not, of course, by any sexual attributes, which had been obliterated by natural process. The man was lying on his side, arm extended across the breast of the woman, who was supine. They were therefore embracing, and would remain in that embrace forever. In fact, what had once been the flesh of the man's arm had sort of stuck to and fused with the flesh of the woman's breast. No, they would be separated soon enough, by the hand of Dr. Pasquano. Standing out under the wizened, shriveled flesh was the white of their bones. The lovers had been dried out, reduced to pure form. They looked as if they were laughing, the lips pulled back, stretched about the mouth and showing the teeth. Next to the dead man's head was the bowl, with some round objects inside; next to the woman was the earthenware jug, the kind in which peasants used to carry cool water around with them as they worked. At the couple's feet, the terra-cotta dog. It was about three feet long, its colors, gray and white, still intact. The craftsman who made it had portrayed it with front legs extended, hind legs folded, mouth half-open with the pink tongue hanging out, eyes watchful. Lying down, in short, but on guard. The rug had a few holes through which one could see the sand of the cave floor, but these may well have been already there when the rug was put in the cave.

“Everybody out!” Montalbano ordered. Then, turning to Prestìa and the cameraman: “And turn off those lamps. Now.”

He had suddenly realized how much damage the heat of the floodlights and their own mere presence must be causing. He was left alone in the cave. By the beam of the flashlight, he carefully examined the contents of the bowl: those round objects were metal coins, oxydized and covered with verdigris. Gently, with two fingers, he picked one up, seemingly the best preserved: it was a twenty-centesimo piece, minted in 1941, with a portrait of King Victor Emmanuel on one side and a female profile with the Roman fasces on the other. When he aimed the light at the dead man's head, he noticed a hole in his temple. He was too well versed in such matters not to realize that it had been made by a firearm. The man had either committed suicide or been killed. But if it had been a suicide, where was the weapon? The woman's body, on the other hand, bore no trace of violent, induced death. Montalbano remained pensive. The two were naked, yet there was no clothing in the cave. What did it mean? Without growing first yellow and dim, the flashlight suddenly went out. The battery had died. He was momentarily blinded and couldn't get his bearings. To avoid damaging anything, he crouched down on the sand, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark; in a minute he would surely start to glimpse the faint glow of the passageway. Yet those few seconds of total darkness and silence were enough for him to notice an unusual odor that he was certain he had smelled before. He tried to remember where, even if it was of no importance. Ever since childhood he had always associated a color with every smell that caught his attention; this smell, he decided, was dark green. From this association he was able to remember where he had first noticed it. It was in Cairo, inside the pyramid of Cheops, in a corridor off-limits to tourists which he had been able to visit courtesy of an Egyptian friend. And all at once he felt like a
quaquaraquà
, a worthless man, with no respect for anything. That morning, by surprising the two kids making love, he had desecrated life; and now, by exposing the two bodies that should have remained forever unknown to the world in their embrace, he had desecrated death.

Perhaps because of this feeling of guilt, Montalbano did not wish to take part in the evidence-gathering, which Jacomuzzi and his crime lab team, along with Dr. Pasquano, began at once. He had already smoked five cigarettes, seated atop the boulder that served as a door to the weapons cave, when he heard Pasquano call to him in an agitated, irritated voice.

“Where the hell is the judge?”

“You're asking me?”

“If he doesn't get here soon, things are going to turn nasty. I've got to get these corpses to Montelusa and put them in the fridge. They're practically decomposing before our eyes. What am I supposed to do?”

“Have a cigarette with me,” Montalbano said, trying to pacify him.

Judge Lo Bianco arrived fifteen minutes later, after the inspector had smoked another two cigarettes.

Lo Bianco glanced distractedly at the scene and, since the dead were not from the time of King Martin the Younger, said hastily to the coroner:

“Do whatever you want with them. It's ancient history, in any case.”

 
 
TeleVigàta had immediately discovered the proper angle from which to present the story. The first thing one saw on the evening news at 8:30 was Prestìa's excited face announcing an extraordinary scoop for which, he said, they were indebted to “one of those ingenious intuitions that make Inspector Salvo Montalbano of Vigàta a figure perhaps unique among crime investigators across the island of Sicily and—why not?—in all of Italy.” He went on to recount the inspector's dramatic arrest of the fugitive Tano the Greek, the bloodthirsty Mafia boss, and his discovery of the weapons cache inside the Crasticeddru cave. Then they played some footage of the press conference held after Tano's arrest, in which an insane-looking, stammering man who answered to the name and title of Inspector Montalbano was having trouble putting together four consecutive words. Prestìa resumed his account of how this exceptional detective had become convinced that behind the cave of weapons there must be another cave connected to it.

“Trusting in the inspector's intuition,” said Prestìa, “I followed him, assisted by my cameraman, Gerlando Schirirò.”

At this point Prestìa, adopting a tone of mystery, raised a few questions:What sort of secret, paranormal powers did the inspector possess? What was it made him think that an ancient tragedy lay hidden behind a few rocks blackened by time? Did the inspector have X-ray vision, like Superman?

Upon hearing this last question, Montalbano—who was watching the broadcast from his home and for the last half hour had been unsuccessfully searching for a clean pair of underpants, which he knew must be around somewhere—told the newsman to go fuck himself.

As the chilling images of the bodies in the cave started rolling, Prestìa expounded his thesis with conviction. Since he didn't know about the hole in the man's head, he spoke of two people who had died for love. In his opinion, the lovers, their passion opposed by their families, had shut themselves up in the cave, sealing off the passageway and letting themselves starve to death. They had furnished their final refuge with an old rug and a jug full of water, and had waited for death in each other's arms. Of the bowl full of coins he said nothing: it would have clashed with the scene he was painting. The two—Prestìa went on—had not been identified; their story had taken place at least fifty years ago. Then another newscaster started talking about the day's events: a six-year-old girl raped and bludgeoned to death with a stone by a paternal uncle; a corpse discovered in a well; a shoot-out at Merfi resulting in three dead and four injured; a laborer killed in an industrial accident; the disappearance of a dentist; the suicide of a businessman who had been squeezed by loan sharks; the arrest of a town councillor in Montevergine for graft and corruption; the suicide of the provincial president, who had been indicted for receiving stolen goods; a dead body washed ashore . . .