The Dance of the Seagull

16

He stopped and got out. The road seemed even more deserted than before, if that was possible. No one would notice him. And even if, in passing by, somebody saw some movement, they would have no reason to become suspicious, since the local television stations hadn’t announced that the corpse found in the well had been identified as Manzella.

The inspector didn’t immediately go through the gate, but stopped outside the house, establishing the exact location of the windows and memorizing the path he would have to take to reach them from the living room.

Then he made up his mind. He went down the little lane, opened the door with his false key, went in, closed it behind him, and without turning on the lights, without breathing, he proceeded, hand in front of him in the pitch darkness, straight to the first window and threw open the shutters. He stuck his head out and breathed deeply and long. The air was humid, the sky overcast. He was panting hard, as if after a long swim. Then he closed his eyes, turned around, and again holding his breath, went and opened the second window. Sticking his head out, he caught his breath again.

A light wind had started blowing, and the weather had suddenly changed, though it had been in a variable mood since morning. At any rate the wind helped. It would help the air flow between the two windows and get rid of the smell of blood. Still at the window, he fired up a cigarette and smoked it calmly to the end. When he’d finished, he put the butt in his pocket. One never knew. The gentlemen of Forensics might find it, and might even have it tested for DNA. And Arquà would have to reach the logical and inevitable conclusion that the person who’d killed Manzella was none other than him, in a fit of jealousy over a transvestite.

At last he felt ready to turn around and look into the living room.

But since he immediately saw, on the right, a staircase leading to the second floor, he decided to go and check out the rooms upstairs.

He went up and reached a tiny landing with three rooms with their doors wide open. He turned on the light on the landing. It was enough to allow him to see, without moving, but only turning his head, that the first door, the one right in front of him, gave onto a master bedroom, the second to a bathroom, and the third to another, smaller bedroom with a single bed, clearly for guests.

He started with the latter, going in and turning the light on. There was only a mattress and pillow on the bed, no sheets or blankets. A nightstand with lamp, two chairs, a small wardrobe. He opened it. There were sheets, a pillowcase, and two woollen blankets, all folded up, and nothing else. On the night he was murdered, Manzella must not have had any guests sleeping in that room.

The bathroom, on the other hand, was a shambles. Four bloodstained towels thrown helter-skelter on the floor, traces of blood on the sink, and even a bloody handprint on the wall of the shower stall. It was clear: Carmona and Sorrentino, to work Manzella over with the blades and tips of their knives, had taken their clothes off and then, after getting all covered with blood, had taken a shower and put their clothes back on. To cleanse themselves for human society as humans and not as the beasts they were.

He moved on to the master bedroom. And it became immediately clear to the inspector that Pasquano had been right when he said that the poor man had been surprised by the two killers while sleeping naked in bed. In fact, on a chair were a pair of trousers, folded up, a jacket, a shirt, and even a tie. Under the chair were a pair of shoes with the socks rolled up inside.

Manzella did not, however, spend the last night of his life alone, or at least not all of it. The pillows were both still indented from where the heads had lain, and the top sheet was dangling, half on the floor, all twisted up, while the bottom sheet had come partly off, exposing the mattress. Poor old Manzella was a man of fiery passion, as the porter’s wife had said.

There was no sign of the clothes of the person who had slept with him, and there was no blanket, either. It must have been the one they’d used to roll up the body and throw it into the well.

Montalbano approached the chair with the clothes on it and took a wallet out of the inside pocket of the jacket. Five hundred euros in bills of fifty, ID card, debit card issued by the Banca dell’Isola, credit card from the same bank, which must have been the one where Manzella kept his money. And nothing else. The inspector opened the drawer in the bedside table: empty. There wasn’t a single sheet of paper in that bedroom. The killers had taken everything, just to be safe.

But what had actually happened in there?

Montalbano didn’t have any trouble imagining it.

So, after writing the letter that Manzella never received because he’d moved out, G managed in one way or another to meet with him again and renew the relationship that Manzella had tried to break off.

G had to do this, because, having confessed that he’d spoken to his lover about the smuggling, and that the latter intended to inform the police, the smugglers let him live, on the condition that he assist them in the murder of Manzella. If he wouldn’t or couldn’t lead them to him, they would kill him.

And so G does and says what he has to do and say, and succeeds in getting invited a first time to the house in Via Bixio. As they say in novels about love—the kind that book reviewers like so much—the old flame was rekindled. The two made love, and G promised to come back the following night.

Which he does, and when Manzella falls asleep, exhausted, G picks up his clothes, goes downstairs very quietly, opens the door, lets in Carmona and Sorrentino, whom he’d alerted beforehand, and leaves. He’s done what he was supposed to do, and so they let him go free.

Could I make a parenthetical comment here? the inspector asked himself.

Permission granted, he commented:

There are two possibilities: either G is a fool, believes the promise, and remains in Vigàta—and in this case we’ll soon find his bullet-riddled body abandoned somewhere—or else he’s shrewd and by now has already flown to northern Greenland, an area that, as everybody knows, has not yet been penetrated by the Sicilian Mafia, since it’s too cold up there.

End of parenthesis.

Carmona and Sorrentino go upstairs, wake Manzella up, and force him downstairs, naked as the day he was born. They don’t even let him put on his slippers, which were, in fact, still on the floor beside the bed.

And this meant that the moment had come, willy-nilly, for Montalbano, too, to go into the living room.

He stopped on the landing at the top of the stairs, counting the steps. There were sixteen.

He wished he had his pistol in his hand. Even though he knew it would have been useless, since there was nothing to shoot at. He felt the hair on his arms stand on end, as when one brushes past a television set that has just been turned off, no matter how hard he tried to control himself and kept repeating in his mind that there was nobody waiting for him in the living room . . .

Of course there was nobody! Nobody in flesh and blood, that is. What was this bullshit, anyway? What was he afraid of, a ghost? A shade? So he was starting to believe in ghosts at age fifty-seven and counting?

He descended two stairs.

A window shutter slammed hard, and he jumped in the air like a startled cat, so spooked he nearly lost his grip of the banister.

The wind had picked up.

With eyes closed, he dashed down the next four stairs. But then he suddenly lost heart and descended two more stairs, gripping the banister tightly and sliding his foot until it found emptiness, then slowly raising his leg and setting the sole of his shoe down lightly on the step below, exactly like someone partly or totally blind.

But what the hell was all this tension? He’d never felt this way before. Was it some sort of nasty joke of old age?

This time the shutters of the living-room windows slammed with a loud boom and closed simultaneously. Now the room downstairs was in darkness again.

How was that possible? the inspector wondered. If the wind was blowing from one direction, how could both windows slam shut at the same time?

He suddenly understood that there actually was someone waiting for him in the living room.

Someone who had the same body and face as him, and who had the same name: Salvo Montalbano. He himself was the invisible enemy he would have to face. The enemy who would force him to relive what had happened in that room, down to the smallest details . . .

Relive? Wrong word. He hadn’t witnessed Manzella’s slow, painful death. How, then, could he relive it? And, anyway, after all the murders of which he’d seen so many vestiges that it was sometimes more upsetting than if he’d witnessed the murders themselves, why did this one have such a strong effect on him?

He would never get out of this situation unless he saw it through to the end, of that he was immediately certain.

And for this reason, he began descending the remaining stairs with as decisive a step as he could muster.

He stopped again at the bottom of the staircase.

The room was not completely in darkness. The shutters were closed, but through the slats filtered blades of gray light that cast the trembling shadows of the windblown leaves on the trees outside. He wanted neither to reopen the shutters nor to light the lamps, but only to stand still for a moment until his eyes slowly adjusted.

To make space for the show they were about to direct, Carmona and Sorrentino had pushed all the furniture up against the wall. A buffet that had once had a small ceramic fruit bowl on it, which was now on the floor, shattered to pieces. Three chairs. A sofa. A small dining table, a sideboard with dishes and glasses. A television set.

There were two milky white things on the floor, near the table, which he couldn’t quite identify.

It couldn’t be. He realized immediately what they were but refused to believe it. He looked at them more closely, needing to convince himself that he’d seen correctly, as the disorder in the pit of his stomach, a knot of dense liquid, bitter and burning, began to rise into his throat, bringing tears to his eyes.

He started looking around the chair in the middle of the room and the dark circle of blood surrounding it.

The floor was made of terracotta, and he noticed that one tile, right in front of the chair, had been freshly splintered. If he’d had a knife handy, he could easily have extracted the bullet that, after passing through Manzella’s foot, had shattered the tile and buried itself in the ground.

Mimì was right.

They’d taken him out of bed and down the stairs, moved the furniture out of the way except for the chair in the middle of the room, sat him down . . . No, first they . . . Go on, get it out, it’s better that way.

They started asking him—surely slapping him around, and kicking and punching—what he’d told Fazio . . .

But he could only give them one answer: that he’d only hinted at the matter with Fazio, and hadn’t named any names . . . And those guys didn’t believe him, and at some point decided to get more serious.

“You used to be a ballet dancer, right?”

“Yes.”

“So dance, then.”

And one of them shot him in the foot. Then they forced him to stand up on one leg, the one with the uninjured foot, and made him dance around the chair.

“C’mon, dance, dance, an’ don’ make any noise.”

And so Manzella hopped around the chair on one foot, naked, at once comical and terrifying, emitting desperate cries that no one could hear . . .

And the inspector saw him dancing as if he were in the room with the others. The danse macabre looked like a scene in a black-and-white film, in the quivering light filtering through the shutters . . .

At that moment, what Montalbano was fearing would happen, happened.

As he was imagining the scene in his head, little by little Manzella’s naked, bloodied body began to transform itself, becoming slowly more hairy, and the floor was no longer tiled but made of sand, exactly like the beach at Marinella . . .

In a sort of burst of light, a blinding flash, he found himself as on that morning, watching the seagull perform its dance of death.

The bird, however, was not emitting the heartrending cry he’d heard that day. It now had a human voice, that of Manzella begging for mercy and weeping . . .

And he heard, quite clearly, the laughter of the other two having a good time, as they had done before . . .

The seagull by this point was on the threshold of death.

Manzella had fallen to the floor, unable to remain standing any longer, writhing as he tried to raise his head.

The seagull was now waving its beak back and forth, as if wanting to put something in a spot too high to reach.

The two men then went up to Manzella, lifted him off the ground, and started dragging him about the room, working him over with the knife as the blood spattered all over the walls and furniture . . .

But before doing this, they’d granted themselves another amusement . . .

Suddenly it all ended, perhaps because a gust of wind opened the windows again.

He found himself sitting on the stairs, eyes shut tight, face in his hands.

It was over. This was what he had so feared from the first moment he’d entered that room: that one reality would ineluctably superimpose itself on another. It wasn’t like a dream that comes back to you when you’re awake. No, it wasn’t something he’d already seen before, it was something entirely different, an aberration of reason, a momentary swerve, a short circuit that flung you into a world utterly foreign to you, as time scrambled the past, mixing events that happened on different days together into a single present . . .

Now he felt much calmer.

He opened his eyes and looked at the spot the seagull had pointed to with its beak.

There was a picture hanging on the wall, but he couldn’t quite tell what it depicted. It was too far away.

He stood up and went up to it. Four red roses. Painted as though photographed, horrendous. The kind one used to see on boxes of chocolates.

His right arm moved as if by itself, independent of his will. The hand took the picture off the wall and turned the frame around. There was nothing on the back, just the brown paper covering the reverse of the canvas. His hand spread its fingers, the painting fell to the floor, the glass shattered, the bottom part of the frame came off, and a white envelope popped out halfway. The inspector was not surprised. It seemed perfectly natural, like something he’d known all along. He bent down, picked it up, and put it in his pocket.

Now there was only one thing left for him to do: get the hell out of that house as fast as possible. He headed for the door and then stopped dead in his tracks.

Fingerprints!

He must have left hundreds in every room he entered!

Then immediately he almost started laughing. He didn’t give a flying fuck whether the fingerprints were found. They weren’t registered anywhere, whereas those of Carmona and Sorrentino were.

Before leaving the room, he couldn’t resist and went back and looked at the two used condoms on the floor near the table.

As soon as he got into the car, he happened to glance at his watch. And for a second, he thought it had broken.

Could it possibly be four o’clock? Was it possible he’d spent nearly three hours in that house without having the slightest sense of it?

The position of the sun, which was ducking in and out of the clouds, confirmed that the watch was running fine. What was the explanation?

What is this? What the hell is he thinking? So now he’s trying to convince himself that another weird thing happened inside Manzella’s house? Montalbano Two suddenly and rather angrily asked.

What other thing? Montalbano One immediately reacted, as if stung by a wasp.

This business about time. Absolutely nothing paranormal happened, nothing magical, nothing mysterious, no presences, time did not stop or stand still or similar bullshit. He simply stayed in there for three hours without noticing the time passing. So let’s drop this stuff about weird and uncanny events, because nothing unusual whatsoever happened inside that house.

Oh, no? Then how do you explain—

You want an explanation? Plain and brutal? He was already upset when he entered the house, his heart was pounding because he can’t tolerate violence anymore, or at least the image of violence he has in his own mind. Men become rather more sensitive to certain things when going through andropause.

You could have spared us the mention of andropause.

No, I can’t not talk about it, because it’s the reason for everything! Look, he practically saw what happened in there. Simple as that. It’s not the first time that’s happened to him. And he grafted the death of the seagull onto what he saw. Which spooked him just as much. That’s all. The only thing different is the way he reacted. Like an old man, with his emotions on his sleeve and tears always ready to spill. Which is not a good sign.

Everything you say is so damned trite! And how do you explain the fact that he found the envelope immediately?

Why, I suppose you think the seagull’s beak pointed to where the envelope was hidden? Come on! Give me a break! It was his policing instincts that led him there! If Catarella had searched the room, he might have taken a little longer, but he would have found it in the end, too!

Would you guys please quit bugging me? the inspector cut in. I have to drive, for Chrissakes! You practically made me run over that little kid there!

But he felt that, in the end, the discussion had done him good, put things into perspective. Since he didn’t feel the least bit hungry, he stopped at the first bar he came upon and downed a double espresso.

“Have Augello and the others left?”

“Yessir, Chief. Already a ’alf ’our ago already. An’ Signura Fazio brought the gun.”

“Go and put it in my car.”

He went into his office, took the envelope out of his pocket, and without even looking at it, slipped it into a drawer, which he then locked.

He didn’t want to be distracted by any new information. The most important thing for now was for Fazio to get to Palermo safe and sound.

The first call came in around five-thirty, from Mimì.

“Totò Monzillo sends greetings,” said Augello.

Monzillo was a colleague from Montelusa Central, a good cop.

“What does that mean?”

“What’s it supposed to mean, Salvo? It means Monzillo’s here with me in Fiacca. We ran into each other in the parking lot. He’s got four men with him.”

“And what’s he doing there?”

“He’s waiting for the ambulance with Fazio, so he can escort them to Palermo. Direct orders from Bonetti-Alderighi. So I think that means we can—”

“Return to Vigàta? Forget about it!”

“But what’s the use of us going along with them? To form a procession?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little ridiculous?”

“Not in the least. You know about the metallic blue car, you know about Carmona, and you know why they want to kill Fazio, whereas Monzillo doesn’t know a goddamn thing.”

“You’re right,” said Augello.

The inspector had been counting on that very thing: that the commissioner, as was logical, would send an escort. That way, Carmona and his pal would realize almost at once that there were two police cars accompanying the ambulance and would almost certainly drop their plans. They were killers, not kamikazes, and were fond of their stinking lives. Montalbano felt a little less worried. And so he started signing papers.

“We’re heading off now. It’s exactly six o’clock,” said Mimì.

“Thanks. Have a good trip.”

“We’re halfway there, and everything’s going smoothly. Except that it’s raining a little.”

The fifth call, however, was late in coming. After twenty-five minutes of waiting, Montalbano started squirming nervously in his chair, and at one point his signature came out as an impenetrable scrawl. He got up, went over to the window, fired up a cigarette, and at that moment Mimì called.

“What’s the holdup?”

“Listen, something crazy happened, a false alarm.”

“Are you sure it was false?”

“Absolutely. A car with two men inside passed the ambulance and then swerved and blocked the lane. It was the wet road surface. But we immediately thought it was an ambush and surrounded the vehicle. Can you imagine? The poor bastards saw eight guns pointed at them, some of them machine guns. They were forced out of the car with their hands up and searched, and then the older of the two, who’s got heart trouble, had a mild attack.”

“Who were they?”

“The bishop of Patti and his secretary.”

“Holy shit!”

“I don’t think that’s the last we’re gonna hear of this.”