The Terra-Cotta Dog (27 page)

 
 
They decided to leave for the island of Pantelleria. They stayed there for six days, finally without quarrels or arguments. It was the right place for Livia to ask one night:

“Why don't we get married?”

“Why not?”

They wisely decided to think it over calmly. The one who stood to lose the most was Livia, since she would have to move far from her home in Boccadasse and adapt to a new rhythm of life.

 
 
As soon as the airplane took off, carrying Livia away with it, Montalbano rushed to the nearest public telephone and called his friend Zito in Montelusa. He asked him for a name and got his answer, along with a Palermo phone number, which he dialed at once.

“Professor Riccardo Lovecchio?”

“That's me.”

“A mutual friend, Nicolò Zito, gave me your name.”

“How is the old carrottop? I haven't heard from him for a long time.”

The loudspeaker requested that passengers for the Rome flight go to the gate. This gave him an idea as to how he might see the man immediately.

“Nicolò's doing well and sends his regards. Listen, Professor, my name's Montalbano. I'm here at Punta Ràisi airport and have roughly four hours before I have to catch another flight. I need to speak with you.” The loudspeaker repeated the request on cue, as if in cahoots with the inspector, who needed answers, and fast.

“Listen, are you Inspector Montalbano of Vigàta, the one who found the two young murder victims in the cave? Yes? What a coincidence! You know, I was going to look you up one of these days! Come see me at home, I'll wait for you. Here's the address.”

 
 
“I, for example, once slept for four days and four nights in a row, without eating or drinking. Of course, contributing to my sleep were some twenty-odd joints, five rounds of sex, and a billy club to the head from the police. It was 1968. My mother got very worried and wanted to call a doctor. She thought I was in a deep coma.”

Professor Lovecchio had the look of a bank clerk. He didn't show his age of forty-five; a faint glint of madness sparkled in his eye. He was fueling himself on straight whisky at eleven in the morning.

“There was nothing miraculous about my sleep,” Lovecchio went on. “To achieve a miracle you have to be out for at least twenty years. In the Koran, again—I think it's in the second sura—it's written that a man, whom the commentators identify as Ezra, slept for a hundred years. The prophet Salih, on the other hand, slept for twenty years, he, too, in a cave, which isn't the most comfortable place for getting a good sleep. Not to be outdone, the Jews, in the Jerusalem Talmud, boast of a certain Hammaagel, who, in the inevitable cave, slept for seventy years. And let's not forget the Greeks. Epimenides woke up after fifty years—in a cave. In those days, in short, all you needed was a cave and somebody who was dead tired, and you had a miracle. The two youngsters you found had been sleeping for how long?”

“From '43 to '94. Fifty years.”

“The perfect time to be woken up. Would it complicate your deductions if I told you that in Arabic one uses the same verb for sleeping and dying? And that a single verb is also used for waking up and coming back to life?”

“What you're saying is absolutely spellbinding, but I've got an airplane to catch and have very little time. Why were you thinking of contacting me?”

“To tell you not to be fooled by the dog. And that the dog seems to contradict the jug and vice versa. Do you understand why?”

“Not a bit.”

“You see, the legend of the sleepers is not Oriental in origin, but Christian. In Europe, it was Gregory of Tours who first introduced it. It tells of seven youths of Ephesus who, to escape the anti-Christian persecutions of Decius, took refuge in a cave, where the Lord put them to sleep. The cave of Ephesus exists; you can even find it in the
Italian Encyclopedia
. They built a sanctuary over it, which was later destroyed. The Christian legend says there's a spring inside the cave. Thus the sleepers, as soon as they awoke, drank first, then sent one of their own in search of food. But at no time in the Christian legend, or in any of its endless European variants, is there any mention of a dog. The dog, whose name is Kytmyr, is purely and simply the poetic invention of Mohammed, who loved animals so much he once cut off a sleeve so as not to wake up the cat that was sleeping on it.”

“You're losing me.”

“But there's no reason to get lost, Inspector. I was merely trying to say that the jug was put there as a symbol of the spring that was in the Ephesian cave. So, to conclude: the jug, which thus belongs to the Christian legend, can only coexist with the dog, which is a poetic invention of the Koran, if one has an overview of all the variants that the different cultures have contributed to the story . . . In my opinion, the person who staged that scene in the cave can only be someone who, in his studies . . .”

As in comic books, Montalbano saw the lightbulb flash in his brain.

He screeched to a halt in front of the Anti-Mafia Commission offices. The guard on duty raised his submachine gun in alarm.

“I'm Inspector Montalbano!” he shouted, holding up his driver's license, the first thing he'd happened to grab. Short of breath, he ran past another officer acting as usher and yelled: “Please inform Mr. De Dominicis that Inspector Montalbano's on his way up, quick!”

In the elevator, taking advantage of being alone, Montalbano mussed up his hair, loosened his tie, and unbuttoned his top button. He thought of pulling his shirt a bit out of his trousers, but decided that would be excessive.

“De Dominicis, I've got it!” he said, panting slightly, closing the door behind him.

“You've got what?” asked De Dominicis, alarmed by the inspector's appearance and rising from his gilded armchair in his gilded office.

“If you're willing to give me a hand, I'll let you in on an investigation that—”

He stopped, putting a hand over his mouth as if to prevent himself from saying anything more.

“What's it about? Give me a hint, at least.”

“I can't, believe me, I really can't.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“By this evening at the latest, I want to know what the subject of the university thesis of someone named Calogero Rizzitano was. His academic adviser was a certain Professor Cotroneo, I think. He must have graduated in late 1942. The subject of this thesis is the key to everything. We could deal a mortal blow to—”

Again he interrupted himself, became bug-eyed, and said to himself dementedly:

“I haven't said anything, you know.”

Montalbano's agitation infected De Dominicis.

“What can we do? The students . . . at the time . . . why, there must have been thousands! Assuming the records still exist.”

“What are you saying? A few dozen, not thousands. At the time, all the young men were in the service. It should be easy to find out.”

“Then why don't you look into it yourself?”

“They would be sure to waste a great deal of my time with their red tape, whereas for you they would open every door.”

“Where can I reach you?”

“I'm heading back to Vigàta in a hurry; I don't want to lose track of certain developments. Phone me as soon as you've got any news. Call me at home, don't forget. Not at the office; there may be a mole there.”

He waited until evening for De Dominicis's call, which never came. This did not worry him, however; he was sure that De Domenicis had swallowed the bait. Apparently, even for him, the going had not been easy.

The next morning he had the pleasure of seeing Adelina the housekeeper again.

“Why haven't you been around these days?”

“Whattaya mean, why? 'Cause the young lady don't like seein' me 'bout the house when she's here, that's why.”

“How did you know Livia was gone?”

“I found out in town.”

Everybody, in Vigàta, knew everything about everyone.

“What'd you buy for me?”

“I'm gonna make you
pasta con le sarde
, and
purpi alla carrettera
for after.”

Exquisite, but deadly. Montalbano gave her a hug.

 
 
Around midday the telephone rang and Adelina, who was cleaning the house top to bottom to get rid of every trace of Livia's presence, went to answer.

“Signuri, Dr. Didumminici wants you.”

Montalbano, who'd been sitting on the veranda rereading Faulkner's
Pylon
for the fifth time, rushed inside. Before picking up the receiver, however, he quickly established a plan of action for getting De Dominicis out of his hair once he'd obtained the information.

“Yes? Hello? Who's this?” he said in a tired voice full of disappointment.

“You were right, it was easy. Calogero Rizzitano graduated on November 13, 1942. You'd better write this down, because the title is a long one.”

“Wait while I look for a pen. For what it's worth . . .”

De Dominicis noticed the flatness in Montalbano's voice.

“Are you all right?”

Complicity had made De Dominicis more concerned and personal.

“Am I all right? Need you ask? I told you I needed an answer by last night! I'm no longer interested! You're too late. Everything's fucked now, fizzled out.”

“I couldn't have done it any sooner, believe me.”

“All right, all right. Let's have the title.”

“
The Use of Macaronic Latin in the Mystery Play of the Seven Sleepers by an Anonymous Sixteenth-Century Author
. Now you tell me what the Mafia could have to do with a title—”

“It has a lot to do with it! It has everything to do with it! Except that now, because of you, I don't need it anymore and I certainly can't thank you for it.”

He hung up and burst into a high-pitched whinny of joy. Immediately a sound of breaking glass could be heard in the kitchen: in terror, Adelina must have dropped something. Taking a running start, he leapt from the veranda onto the sand, executed a somersault, then a cartwheel, then a second somersault and a second cartwheel. The third somersault failed, and he collapsed on the sand, out of breath. Adelina ran towards him from the veranda screaming:

“
Madunnuzza beddra!
He's gone crazy! He's broke 'is neck!” To set his own mind at rest, Montalbano got in his car and drove to the Montelusa public library.

“I'm looking for a mystery play,” he said to the chief librarian.

The chief librarian, who knew him as a police inspector, was mildly astonished but said nothing.

“All we've got,” she said, “are the two volumes of D'Ancona and two more by De Bartholomaeis. But these books can't be taken out. You'll have to consult them here.”

He found the
Mystery Play of the Seven Sleepers
in the second tome of the D'Ancona anthology. It was a short, very naïf text. Lillo's thesis must have centered around the dialogue between two heretical scholars who expressed themselves in an amusing macaronic Latin. But what most interested the inspector was the long preface by D'Ancona. It contained everything: the quotation from the Koranic sura, the legend's itinerary through various European and African countries, in all its different variants and mutations. Professor Lovecchio had been correct: sura number eighteen of the Koran, taken by itself, would have proved a very tough nut to crack. It had to be complemented with the contributions of other cultures.

 
 
“I'm going to venture a hypothesis, and I'd like to have your approval,” said Montalbano, who had brought the Burgios up-to-date on his latest discoveries. “You both told me, with a great deal of conviction, that Lillo saw Lisetta as a little sister and was crazy about her. Right?”

“Yes,” the two said in chorus.

“Good. Now, let me ask you a question. Do you think Lillo would have been capable of killing Lisetta and her young lover?”

“No,” said the old couple without a moment's hesitation.

“I'm of the same opinion,” said Montalbano, “precisely because it was Lillo who put the two bodies in a position—so to speak—to be hypothetically resurrected. No killer wants his victims to come back to life.”

“And so?” asked the headmaster.

“If, in an emergency, Lisetta had asked him to put them up, she and her boyfriend, at the Rizzitano house on the Crasto, how do you think Lillo would have responded?”

Signora Angelina didn't pause to think twice.

“He would have done whatever Lisetta asked of him.”

“Let's try, then, to imagine what happened during those days in July. Lisetta runs away from Serradifalco, with luck she makes it to Vigàta, meets up with Mario Cunich, and the boyfriend deserts his post—or strays from his ship, let's say. The two now have nowhere to hide. Going to Lisetta's house would be like walking into the wolf's den; it's the first place her father would look. So she asks Lillo Rizzitano for help; she knows he won't say no. Lillo puts the couple up at his house at the foot of the Crasto, where he's been living alone since the rest of his family was evacuated. Who killed the two lovers, and why, we don't know, and perhaps we never will. But there can be no doubt that it was Lillo who buried them in the cave, because he followed, step by step, both the Christian and the Koranic versions of the story. In both cases, the sleepers will one day awake. But what did he mean, what was he trying to say by staging that scene? Was he trying to tell us that the two lovers are asleep and will one day awake or be awakened? Or was he hoping, in fact, that someone in the future would find them and wake them up? Purely by chance, it was I who found them and woke them up. But, believe me, I really wish I had never discovered that cave.”