Barely five minutes later, the telephone rang again.
“Ahh, Chief! ’At’d be Dr. Pisquano.”
“On the line?”
“Yissir.”
“Put ’im on.”
“How is it you haven’t busted my balls yet today?” Pasquano began, with the courtesy for which he was famous.
“Why should I have done that?”
“To find out the results of the autopsy.”
“Whose?”
“Montalbano, this is a clear sign of old age. A sign that your brain cells are disintegrating with increasing speed. The first symptom is memory loss. Did you know that? For example, does it sometimes happen that you’ll do something one minute, and the next minute you’ll forget that you did it?”
“No. But aren’t you, Doctor, five years older than me?”
“Yes, but the actual age doesn’t mean anything. There are people who are already old at twenty. In any case, I think it’s clear to all concerned that you’re the more doddering of the two of us.”
“Thanks.You want to tell me what autopsy you’re talking about?”
“This morning’s corpse.”
“Oh, no, you don’t, Doctor! The last thing I might imagine was that you would perform that autopsy so soon! What, were you good friends with the dead man or something? Normally you let days and days go by before—”
“This time I happened to have two free hours before lunchtime, and so I got him out of my hair. It turns out there are two minor new developments, with respect to what I told you this morning. The first is that I’ve recovered the bullet and sent it at once to Forensics, who, naturally, won’t have any news on it until after the next presidential election.”
“But the last one was barely three months ago!”
“Precisely.”
It was true. He recalled that he’d sent them the iron clubs used to kill the horse for fingerprints, but still hadn’t heard back from them.
“And what’s the second development?”
“I found some traces of cotton wool inside the wound.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the one who shot him is not the same person as the one who dumped him by the roadside.”
“Care to elaborate on that a little?”
“Gladly, especially considering the age of the person involved.”
“Whose age?”
“Yours, of course. That’s another product of aging: increasingly slow to comprehend.”
“Doctor, why don’t you go get—”
“I wish! It might improve my luck at poker! Anyway, I was explaining that, in my opinion, someone shot the soon-to-be dead man, gravely injuring him. Then a friend, or an accomplice, or somebody, took him home and tried in one way or another to stanch the blood flowing out of the wound. But the victim must have died shortly thereafter. So the helper waited until dark and then loaded the body into his car and dumped it in the open countryside, as far as possible from his house.”
“It’s a plausible hypothesis.”
“Thanks for understanding without need of further explanation.”
“Listen, Doctor. Any distinguishing marks?”
“Appendectomy scar.”
“That should help in the identification.”
“The identification of whom?”
“The dead man, who else?”
“The dead man never had an appendectomy!”
“But you just said he did!”
“You see, my friend? That’s another sign of aging.You asked me the question in such a confused way that I thought you were asking me if I had any distinguishing marks.”
Pasquano was just pulling his leg. He amused himself trying to get on Montalbano’s nerves.
“All right, Doctor, now that we’ve cleared up that misunderstanding, I will repeat my question, as straightforwardly as possible, so that it won’t require too much mental effort on your part, which could be fatal: Did the dead body on which you performed the autopsy today have any distinguishing marks?”
“I’d say it most certainly did.”
“Could you please tell me what those are?”
“No. It’s something I’d rather put in writing.”
“But when will I get your report?”
“When I have the time and the desire to write it.”
And there was no way to persuade him otherwise.
The inspector stayed a little while longer at the office, and then, as there was still no sign or word from either Fazio or Augello, he went home.
Shortly before he was about to go to bed, Livia phoned. This time, too, things did not go well.The conversation did not end in a squabble, but barely missed.
Words were no longer enough to help them get along and understand each other. It was as if their words, if you looked them up in the dictionary, had different and opposite definitions depending on whether he or Livia was using them.And these double meanings were a continual cause of confusion, misunderstandings, and quarrels.
But if they got together and were able to remain silent, one beside the other, things completely changed. It was as if their bodies started first to sniff each other, to pick up the other’s scent from a distance, then to speak to one another, with complete understanding, in a wordless language made up of small signs such as a leg moving an inch or two to get closer to the other, or a head leaning ever so slightly towards the other head. And, inevitably, the two bodies, still silent, would end up in a desperate embrace.
He slept poorly and was even startled awake by a nightmare in the middle of the night. How was it possible that he had gone years and years without even the slightest thought about horses and horse racing, and now he was actually dreaming about them?
He found himself in a hippodrome with three tracks running parallel to one another. With him was Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi, impeccably dressed in riding clothes. For his part, Montalbano was unshaven and disheveled, in a shabby suit with one torn sleeve. He looked like a panhandler on the street.The grandstand was packed with people shouting and gesticulating.
“Augello, put on your glasses before mounting!” Bonetti-Alderighi commanded him.
“I’m not Augello. I’m Montalbano.”
“It makes no difference, put them on just the same! Can’t you see you’re blind as a bat?”
“I can’t put ’em on, I lost ’em onna way ’ere, I got holes in m’ pockets,” he replied, feeling ashamed.
“Penalty! You spoke in dialect!” shouted a voice, as if from a loudspeaker.
“You see the trouble you’re getting me in?” the commissioner reproached him.
“I’m sorry.”
“Get the horse!”
He turned to grab the horse, but realized it was made of bronze and half collapsed, sitting on its haunches, exactly like the RAI horse[14].
“How can I?”
“Grab it by the mane!”
The instant his hand touched the mane, the horse thrust its head between the inspector’s legs, hoisted him up on its neck, and raised its head, making him slide down the neck, so that he ended up mounted, but backwards, facing the animal’s haunches.
He heard laughing from the grandstand. Feeling insulted, with great effort he turned around, grabbing the mane as hard as he could, because the horse, having now become flesh and blood, was not saddled and had no reins.
Someone fired some sort of cannon, and the horse set off at a gallop towards the middle track between the other two.
“No! No!” Bonetti-Alderighi yelled.
“No! No!” the people in the grandstand repeated.
“You’re on the wrong track,” Bonetti-Alderighi yelled.
Everyone was gesticulating, but he couldn’t make out the gestures and saw only blurry splotches of color, since he had lost his glasses. He realized the horse was doing something wrong, but how do you tell a horse it’s doing something wrong? And why wasn’t it the right track?
He understood why a moment later, when the animal began to walk with great effort.The track was made of sand, the same kind of sand as a beach. But very fine and deep, so that the horse’s hooves sank further into it with each step until they were completely submerged. A track of sand. Why was this happening to him, of all people? He tried to turn the animal’s head to the left, so that it would take the other track. But he suddenly realized that the other, parallel tracks were gone; the hippodrome with its fences and grandstand had vanished, and even the track he was on was no longer there, because it had all become an ocean of sand.
Now, with each labored step it took, the animal sank further and further, first with its legs, then its belly, then even its chest submerged in sand.At some point he no longer felt the horse moving beneath him. It had suffocated to death in the sand.
He tried to climb down from the animal, but the sand kept him imprisoned there. He realized he was going to die in that desert. As he started to cry, a man materialized a few steps away from him, but he couldn’t make out the man’s face, again because he didn’t have his glasses.
“You know the way out of this situation,” the man said to him.
He wanted to answer him, but as soon as he opened his mouth, the sand came pouring in, threatening to suffocate him.
In a desperate attempt to draw a breath, he woke up.
He had dreamt a sort of mishmash of fantasy and things that had actually happened to him. But what did it mean that he was racing on the wrong track?
He got to the office later than usual, because he’d had to stop at the bank after finding a letter in his mailbox threatening to cut off his electricity for failure to pay the last bill. But he had arranged for the bank to pay the bills! He stood in line for almost an hour, showed the letter to a clerk, who began looking things up. It turned out that the bill had been paid on time.
“There must have been a mistake, sir.”
“And what am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t worry, sir, we’ll take care of it.”
For a long time he had been thinking about rewriting the Constitution. Since everybody and his dog was doing it, why couldn’t he? Article One would begin as follows:“Italy is a precarious republic founded on mistakes.”
“Ahh Chief, Chief ! F’rensics jist now sint us this invilope!”
The inspector opened it on his way to his office.
It contained a few photographs of the man found dead in Spinoccia, with related information as to age, height, color of eyes, etc....There was no mention of distinguishing marks.
There was no point in passing the photos on to Catarella and asking him to search the missing persons files for faces that might match. He was putting them back into the envelope when Mimì Augello came in. He took them back out and handed them to his second-in-command.
“You ever seen this guy?”
“Is that the dead man from Spinoccia?”
“Yes.”
Mimì put on his glasses. Montalbano squirmed uneasily in his chair.
“Never seen him before,” said Augello, laying the photos and envelope on the desk and putting the glasses back in his shirt pocket.
“Could I try them?”
“Try what?”
“The glasses.”
Augello handed them to him. Montalbano put them on, and everything suddenly looked like a blurry photograph. He took them off and gave them back to Mimì.
“I can see better with my father’s pair.”
“But you can’t ask everyone you meet with glasses if you can try them on! You simply have to go see an eye doctor! He’ll examine you and prescribe—”
“Okay, okay. I’ll go one of these days.Tell me, how is it I didn’t see you all day yesterday?”
“I spent the whole morning and afternoon looking into the business of that little boy, Angelo Verruso. Remember?”
A little boy not six years old, returning home from school, had started crying and refused to eat. Finally, after much insistence, his mother had succeeded in getting the child to tell her that his teacher had forced him into a closet and made him do “dirty things.” When the mother asked him for details, the kid said the teacher had taken his thingy out and made him touch it. A sensible woman, Signora Verruso did not believe that the teacher, a family man of about fifty, was capable of such behavior; on the other hand, neither did she want to disbelieve her son.
Since she was a friend of Beba, she spoke to her about it.And Beba, in turn, had talked to her husband, Mimì, about it.Who had then related the whole matter to Montalbano.
“How’d it go?”
“Listen, we’re better off dealing with criminals than with these little kids. It’s impossible to tell when they’re telling the truth and when they’re fibbing. And I also have to proceed with caution; I don’t want to destroy the teacher. All it takes is for a rumor to start circulating, and he’s ruined . . .”
“But what was your impression?”
“That the teacher didn’t do anything. I didn’t hear a single bad thing about him.Anyway, the closet the kid mentions is barely big enough to hold a bucket and two brooms.”
“So why, then, would the kid make up a story like that?”
“In my opinion, to get back at the teacher, who he thinks is mean to him.”
“Deliberately?”
“Are you kidding? Want to know what Angelo’s latest exploit was? He shat on a newspaper, folded it up into a little package, and slipped it into one of the drawers in the teacher’s desk.”
“So why did they name him Angelo?”
“When he was born, the parents obviously had no idea how the little imp would turn out.”
“Is he still going to school?”
“No, I advised the mother to report him sick.”
“Good idea.”
“Good morning, Inspectors,” said Fazio, coming in.
He saw the photos of the dead man.
“Can I take one of these?” he asked.“I’d like to show it around.”
“Go ahead.What did you do yesterday afternoon?”
“I kept asking around about Gurreri.”
“Did you go talk to his wife?”
“Not yet. I’ll be going later today.”
“What did you find out?”
“Chief, what Lo Duca told you is true, at least in part.”
“What part?”
“That Gurreri left his home over three months ago. All the neighbors heard him.”
“Heard what?”
“Heard him yelling at his wife, calling her a whore and a slut, and saying he was never coming back.”
“Did he say he wanted to take revenge on Lo Duca?”
“No, they didn’t hear him say that. But they also can’t swear he didn’t say it.”
“Did the neighbor lady tell you anything else?”
“No, the neighbor lady didn’t, but Don Minicuzzu did.”
“And who is Don Minicuzzu?”
“A guy who sells fruits and vegetables directly in front of where Gurreri lives and can see who goes in and out of the building.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“Chief, according to Minicuzzu, Licco has never set foot in that building. So how could he be Gurreri’s wife’s lover?”
“But does he know Licco well?”
“Does he know him well? Licco’s the one he used to pay the racket money to! And he told me something important, too. One night he was worried he hadn’t properly locked the metal shutter. So he got out of bed and went outside to check.When he was in front of his shop, the door to Gurreri’s building opens, and out comes Ciccio Bellavia, whom he knows well.”
Imagine Ciccio Bellavia not crawling out of the sewer in this affair!
“And when was this?”
“Over three months ago.”
“So our hypothesis is correct. Bellavia goes to Gurreri and offers him a deal. If his wife provides Licco with an alibi, saying she’s his mistress, Gurreri gets taken on as a permanent member of the Cuffaros. Gurreri thinks it over a bit and then accepts, putting on the show about leaving home forever because his wife is cheating on him.”
“You gotta admit, it’s a pretty good scheme,” Mimì commented. “But is Minicuzzu willing to testify?”
“Not on your life,” said Fazio.
“So we’re left with nothing,” said Augello.
“There is one thing, however, that we should explore further,” said Montalbano.
“What’s that?”
“We know nothing about Gurreri’s wife. Did she immediately go along because they offered her money? Or was she threatened? And how would she react to the possibility of ending up in jail for perjury? Does she know she’s running that risk?”
“Chief,” said Fazio,“if you ask me, Concetta Siragusa is an honest woman who had the bad luck to marry a crook. I haven’t heard any malicious gossip about her conduct. I am sure they forced her to play along. Between her husband’s slaps, punches, and kicks and whatever Ciccio Bellavia told her, the poor thing probably had no choice but to accept.”
“You know what I say, Fazio? Maybe we’re lucky you haven’t talked to her yet.”
“Why?”
“Because we need to think of a way to trip her up.”
“I could go talk to her,” said Mimì.
“And what would you say to her?”
“That I’m a lawyer sent by the Cuffaros to instruct her as to what she should say at the trial. That way, as we’re talking . . .”
“Mimì, what if they’ve already sent their lawyer, and she gets suspicious?”
“Yeah, you’re right. Well then let’s send her an anonymous letter.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t know how to read or write,” said Fazio.
“I’ve got it!” Mimì persisted. “I’ll dress up as a priest and—”
“You wanna cut the shit, Mimì? For the moment, nobody is going to go talk to Concetta Siragusa.We’ll think it over a bit, and when one of us has a good idea . . . We’re not in such a hurry.”
“I thought priest was a good idea,” said Mimì.
The telephone rang.
“Ahh Chief, Chief! Ahh Chief, Chief!”
Four chiefs? It must be the commissioner.
“Is it the commissioner?”
“Yessir, Chief.”
“Put him on,” he said, turning on the speakerphone.
“Montalbano?”
“Good morning, Mr. Commissioner, what can I do for you?”
“Could you come to my office right now? I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s something very serious, and I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”
The tone of the commissioner’s voice made him consent at once.
He hung up, and they all looked at one another.
“If he’s talking like that, it really must be something serious,” said Mimì.
the horse . . . was made of bronze and half collapsed, sitting on its haunches, exactly like the RAI horse: The symbol of the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana, the national, state-owned radio and television network) is as described, and there is a bronze statue of it outside the network offices.The author worked for many years directing television and stage productions for the network.