The Terra-Cotta Dog (22 page)

“Must be my convalescence,” he told himself.

He would sit down in the armchair, pick up a newspaper or magazine, and halfway through an article just a little longer than the rest, he would get fed up, his eyes would start to droop, and he would sink into a sweaty sleep.

 
The housekeeper's note was on the kitchen table. Montalbano rushed to the fridge to see exactly what she meant by “lite.” There were two fresh hakes to be served with oil and lemon. He unplugged the phone; he wanted to reaccustom himself at an easy pace to living at home. There was a lot of mail, but he didn't open a single letter or read a single postcard. He ate and went to bed.

Before falling asleep, he asked himself a question: If the doctors reassured him that he would recover all his strength, why did he have that lump of sadness in his throat?

For the first ten minutes he drove apprehensively, paying closer attention to the reactions of his side than to the road. Then, seeing that he was weathering the bumps without difficulty, he accelerated, passed through Vigàta, took the road to Montelusa, turned left at the Montaperto crossroads, drove another few miles, turned onto an unpaved trail, and pulled up at a small clearing in front of a farmhouse. He got out of the car. Mariannina, Gegè's sister, who had been his teacher at school, was sitting in a wicker chair beside the front door, fixing a basket. The moment she saw the inspector, she ran up to meet him.

“Salvù! I knew you'd come.”

“You're the first person I'm visiting since leaving the hospital,” said Montalbano, embracing her.

Mariannina began weeping very softly, without a sound, only tears, and Montalbano's eyes welled up.

“Pull up a chair,” said Mariannina.

Montalbano sat down beside her. She took his hand and began to stroke it.

“Did he suffer?”

“No. I realized while they were still shooting that they'd snuffed out Gegè on the spot. This was later confirmed. I don't even think he ever realized what was happening.”

“Is it true you killed the one who killed Gegè?”

“Yeah.”

“Gegè will be happy, wherever he is.”

Mariannina sighed and squeezed the inspector's hand a little harder.

“Gegè loved you with all his soul.”

Meu amigo de alma
, the title of a book, came to Montalbano's mind.

“I loved him, too,” he said.

“Do you remember how naughty he was?”

And a naughty boy he was, mischievous, bad. Clearly Mariannina was not referring to recent years, when Gegè had his run-ins with the law, but to a distant time when her younger brother was a restless little scamp. Montalbano smiled.

“Do you remember the time he threw a firecracker into a copper cauldron that someone was repairing, and the blast made the poor guy faint?”

“And the time he emptied his inkwell into Mrs. Longo's purse?”

They talked about Gegè and his exploits for nearly two hours, recounting episodes that never went beyond his adolescence.

“It's getting late,” said Montalbano. “I should go.”

“I'd like to tell you to stay for dinner, but what I made is probably too heavy for you.”

“What did you make?”

“
Attuppateddri
in tomato sauce.”

Attuppateddri
were small light-brown snails which, when they went into hibernation, would secrete a fluid that solidified into a white sheet, which served to close—
attuppari
in Sicilian—the entrance to the shell. Montalbano's first impulse was to decline in disgust. How long would this obsession continue to torment him? In the end, he coolly decided to accept, as a twofold challenge to his stomach and his psyche. With the plate in front of him giving off an exquisite, ochre-colored scent, he had to steel himself, but after extracting the first
attuppateddru
with a pin and tasting it, he suddenly felt liberated: with the obsession gone and the melancholy banished, there was no doubt the belly, too, would adjust.

 
 
At headquarters he was smothered by embraces. Tortorella even wiped away a tear.

“I know what it means to come back after being shot!” said the officer.

“Where's Augello?”

“In his office, your office,” said Catarella.

He opened the door without knocking and Mimì leapt out of the chair behind the desk as if he'd been caught stealing. He blushed.

“I haven't touched anything. It's just that from here, the phone calls—”

“Mimì, you did absolutely the right thing,” Montalbano cut him short, repressing the urge to kick him in the ass for having dared to sit in his place.

“I was planning to come to your house today,” said Augello.

“To do what?”

“To arrange protection.”

“Protection? For whom?”

“For whom? For you, of course. There's no saying they won't try again, after coming up empty the first time.”

“You're wrong. Nothing more's going to happen to me. Because, you see, Mimì, it was you who had me shot.”

Augello turned so red, he looked as though someone had inserted a high-voltage plug up his bum. He started trembling. Then all his blood disappeared God-knows-where, leaving him pale as a corpse.

“Where do you get these ideas?” he managed to mutter awkwardly.

Montalbano reckoned he'd sufficiently avenged himself for the expropriation of his desk.

“Calm down, Mimì. That's not what I meant to say. What I meant was: it was you who set the mechanism in motion that led to my shooting.”

“Explain yourself,” said Augello, collapsing into the chair and dabbing all around his mouth and forehead with his handkerchief.

“You, my good friend, without consulting me, without asking if I agreed or not, put two officers on Ingrassia's tail. Did you really think he was so stupid he wouldn't notice? It took him maybe half a day to find out he was being shadowed. And he understandably thought it was me who gave the order. He knew he'd fucked up a couple of times and that I had him in my sights, and so, to brush up his image for Brancato, who was planning to get rid of him—it was you who related their phone conversation to me—he hired two assholes to eliminate me. Except that his scheme turned into a fiasco. By this time Brancato, or somebody else, got fed up with Ingrassia and his brilliant ideas—don't forget the pointless little murder of poor Cavaliere Misuraca—and so they took matters in hand and made him vanish from the face of the earth. If you hadn't put Ingrassia on his guard, Gegè would still be alive and I wouldn't have this pain in my side. And there you have it.”

“If that's how things went . . . I guess you're right,” said Mimì, annihilated.

“That's how things went, you can bet your ass on it.”

 
 
The plane pulled up very near to the gate, so the passengers didn't need to be shuttled by bus to the terminal. Montalbano saw Livia descend the ramp and walk towards the entrance with her head down. Hiding in the crowd, he watched Livia as she waited interminably for her baggage, collected it, loaded it onto a cart, and then headed towards the taxi stand. They had agreed the night before that she would take the train from Palermo to Montelusa and that he would limit himself to picking her up at the station. At the last minute, however, he had decided to surprise her and show up at Punta Ràisi airport.

“Are you alone? Need a lift?”

Livia, who was making her way towards the first cab in line, stopped in her tracks and shouted.

“Salvo!”

They embraced happily.

“But you look fantastic!” she commented.

“So do you,” said Montalbano. “I've been watching you for over half an hour, ever since you got off the plane.”

“Why didn't you say something sooner?”

“I like seeing how you exist without me.”

They got in the car and immediately Montalbano, instead of starting the ignition, hugged and kissed her, put a hand on her breast and lowered his head, caressing her knees and stomach with his cheek.

“Let's get out of here,” said Livia, breathing heavily, “or we'll get arrested for lewd behavior in public.”

On the road to Palermo, the inspector had an idea and made a suggestion.

“Shall we stop in town? I want to show you La Vuccirìa.”

“I've already seen it. In the Guttuso painting.”

“That's a shitty painting, believe me. We'll book a hotel room, hang out a little, walk around, go to La Vuccirìa, get some sleep, and head back to Vigàta tomorrow morning. I don't have any work to do, in any case, so I can consider myself a tourist.”

 
 
Once inside the hotel, they failed in their intention to wash up quickly and go out. They did not go out. They made love and fell asleep. Then they woke up and made love again. When they finally left the hotel it was already getting dark.

They went to La Vuccirìa. Livia was shocked and overwhelmed by the shouts, the exhortations, the cries of the merchants calling out their wares, the speech, the arguments, the sudden brawls, the colors so bright they seemed unreal, painted. The smell of fresh fish mingled with that of tangerines, boiled lamb entrails sprinkled with caciocavallo cheese, a dish called
mèusa
, and fritters, all of them fusing into a unique, almost magical whole.

Montalbano stopped in front of a used-clothing shop.

“In my university days, when I used to come here to eat
mèusa
and bread, which today would only make my liver burst, this shop was the only one of its kind in the world. Now they sell used clothing, but back then the shelves were empty, all of them. The owner, Don Cesarino, used to sit there behind the counter—which was also completely bare—and receive clients.”

“Clients? But the shelves were all empty.”

“They weren't exactly empty. They were, well, full of purpose, full of requests. The man sold stolen goods to order. You'd go to Don Cesarino and say: I need a certain kind of watch; or, I want a painting, say, a nineteenth-century dock scene; or, I need this or that sort of ring. He'd take your order, write it down on a piece of pasta paper, the rough, yellow kind we used to have, he'd negotiate the price and then tell you when to come back. On the appointed date, and not one day later, he would pull the requested merchandise out from under the counter and hand it over to you. All sales were final.”

“But what need was there for him to have a shop? I mean, he could have done that sort of business anywhere, in a café, on a street corner . . .”

“You know what his friends in La Vuccirìa used to call him? Don Cesarino
u putiàru
, ‘the shop-owner.' Because Don Cesarino didn't see himself as a front man, as they might call him today, nor as a ‘receiver of stolen goods.' He was a shopkeeper like any other, and his shop—for which he paid rent and electricity—was proof of this. It wasn't a façade.”

“You're all insane.”

 
 
“Like a son! Let me hug you like a son!” said the headmaster's wife, squeezing him to her breast and holding him there.

“You have no idea how worried you had us!” said the husband, echoing her sentiments.

Headmaster Burgio had phoned him that morning to invite him to dinner. Montalbano had declined, suggesting he drop by in the afternoon instead. They showed him into the living room.

“Let's get right to the point,” Burgio began, “we don't want to take up too much of your time.”

“I have all the time in the world, being unemployed for the moment.”

“My wife told you, when you were here that time for dinner, that I call her a woman of fantasy. Well, right after you left, she started fantasizing again. We had wanted to call you sooner, but then what happened happened.”

“Suppose we let the inspector decide whether or not they're fantasies?” the signora said, slightly piqued, before continuing in a polemical tone: “Shall you speak, or shall I?”

“Fantasies are your domain.”

“I don't know if you still remember, but when you asked my husband where you could find Lillo Rizzitano, he answered that he hadn't had any news of him since July 1943. Then something came back to me: that a girlfriend of mine also disappeared during that period. Except that I actually heard from her a while later, but in the strangest way . . .”

Montalbano felt a chill run down his spine. The two lovers of the Crasticeddru had been murdered very young.

“How old was this friend of yours?”

“Seventeen. But she was a lot more mature than me. I was still a little girl. We went to school together.”

She opened an envelope that was on the coffee table, took out a photograph, and showed it to Montalbano.

“This was taken on our last day of school, our final year. She's the first one on the left in the back row, and that's me next to her.”

All smiling and wearing the Fascist uniforms of the Giovani Italiane. The teacher was giving the Roman salute.

“Since the situation in Sicily was becoming too dangerous with all the bombing, schools closed on the last day in April, and we were spared the dreaded final exam. We passed or failed solely on the basis of our grades. Lisetta—that was my friend's name, Lisetta Moscato—moved to a little inland village with her family. She wrote to me every other day, and I still have all her letters, at least the ones that arrived. The mail in those days, you know . . . My family also moved out; we went all the way to the mainland, to live with one of my father's brothers. When the war was over, I wrote to my friend at both addresses, the one in the inland village and the one in Vigàta. But she never wrote back, and this worried me. Finally, in late '46, we returned to Vigàta, and I looked up Lisetta's parents. Her mother had died, and at first her father didn't want to see me. Then he was rude to me and said Lisetta had fallen in love with an American soldier and gone away with him, against her family's wishes. And he added that as far as he was concerned, his daughter might as well be dead.”