The Potter's Field

13

Michele Tripodi also looked to be about forty but, unlike Dambrusco, who was diminutive and skinny, he was tall, athletic, and affable, a handsome specimen.

“Carlo told me Giovanni has disappeared. Is it true? Does Dolores know?”

“It was Mrs. Alfano herself who got things moving.”

“But when would he have disappeared? When she got back from Gioia Tauro, Dolores told me Giovanni had taken ship.”

“That’s what Giovanni led her to believe, or was forced to have her believe.”

Michele Tripodi’s face darkened.

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“You don’t like the sound of what?”

“What you just said. Giovanni never deceives Dolores, nor would he have any reason to make her believe something that wasn’t true.”

“Are you sure?”

“About what?”

“About both things.”

“Listen, Inspector. Giovanni is so taken by Dolores, I mean physically taken, that he’s not sure, he told me, that he could even make love to another woman.”

“Does he have any enemies?”

“I don’t know whether during the long sea voyages . . . at any rate, I think he would have mentioned it to me.”

“Listen, this is a delicate subject, but I have to ask you about it. If Giovanni has been kidnapped, couldn’t this be a sort of vendetta by proxy?”

Michele Tripodi understood at once.

“You mean a vendetta against the Sinagras?”

“Yes.”

“You see, Inspector, Giovanni felt very indebted, and grateful, to Don Balduccio, who helped him out when his father died . . . But Giovanni’s an honest man; he has no truck with the Sinagras’ business . . . And he always felt ashamed of what his father, Filippo, did in Colombia . . . It’s true, of course, that whenever he comes to Vigàta he pays a call on Don Balduccio, no doubt about it, but it’s not as if they’re so close that—”

“I understand. As far as you know, has Giovanni ever used cocaine?”

Michele Tripodi started laughing. A hearty, full-bellied laugh.

“Are you kidding? Giovanni hates drugs of any kind! He doesn’t even smoke! And he even made Dolores give it up! Remember how his father was killed? Well, that fact marked him for life, and he has behaved accordingly.”

“I’m sorry, but I have another delicate question to ask you. It’s about Dolores. It seems there are two conflicting opinions about her in town.”

“Inspector, Dolores is a beautiful woman who is forced to remain alone too often and for too long. And perhaps she’s a bit too impulsive, and a bit too expansive, and this can sometimes give rise to misunderstandings.”

“Tell me one.”

“One what?”

“Give me an example of one such misunderstanding.”

“Well, I don’t know . . . After she’d been in Vigàta for about a year, a boy, an eighteen-year-old from a good family, started serenading her, literally singing serenades to her, and then started harassing her on the phone, and one time even tried to enter her apartment . . . Dolores had to call the carabinieri . . .”

“Only eighteen-year-olds? No adults?”

“Well, about two years ago there was a more serious episode where a butcher lost his head over her . . . doing ridiculous things like sending her a bouquet of roses every day . . . Eventually he had to move to Catania, and poor Dolores’s persecutions ended there, fortunately.”

Montalbano laughed.

“Yes, I’d heard that story of the love-smitten butcher before . . . His name was Pecorella, if I’m not mistaken...”

“No, Pecorini,” Tripodi corrected him.

Was it important to know that the butcher who rented his house to Mimì for his amorous trysts had also fallen in love with Dolores Alfano two years before? At first glance, it appeared not. But there was another question that had come into the inspector’s head the moment Tripodi had told him the story of the butcher. Tripodi said that to rid herself of the boy who was bothering her, Dolores had called the carabinieri. But he didn’t say what action Dolores had taken in the butcher’s case. She certainly hadn’t asked the carabinieri for help on that occasion. The butcher, however, had resolved the problem by moving to Catania. And this was where the question arose: Why, from one day to the next, had he moved away from Vigàta if he was so in love with Dolores? What could have happened to him?

“Fazio! Into my office, quick! Fazio!”

“What is it, Chief?”

“You remember Pecorini?”

“The butcher? Yes.”

“I want to know, by tomorrow morning at the latest, why he left Vigàta two years ago and opened a butcher shop in Catania.”

“All right, Chief. But what did this Pecorini do, sell meat with mad cow disease or something?”

It was now late, and the inspector felt mighty hungry. Just as he was standing up, the telephone decided to ring. He hesitated a moment, wondering whether or not he should answer, but a goddamned sense of duty got the better of him.

“Chief ! Ahh Chief! That’d be Mr. Giacchetta.”

The inspector remembered that Giacchetti had asked for him.

“Show him in.”

“I can’t, Chief, seeing as how he’s in telephonic communication.”

“Then put him through.”

“Inspector Montalbano? This is Fabio Giacchetti, the bank manager who . . . Do you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you. How are your wife and child?”

“Very well, thanks.”

And Giacchetti stopped talking.

“So?” the inspector prodded him.

“Well, now that I’m on the phone and talking to you, I’m not sure if I really ought to...”

Geez, what a pain! The inspector also remembered that the bank manager was someone who was always taking one step forward, two steps back, a ditherer born and bred, an expert in the art of shilly-shallying. He didn’t feel like wasting any more time.

“Let me be the judge of whether you ought to or not. What did you want to tell me?”

“But it may be something of no importance...”

“Listen, Mr. Giacchetta—”

“Giacchetti. All right, I’ll tell you, even though it’s not . . . Well, I saw the car again, I’m sure of it.”

“What car?”

“The one that tried to run the woman over... Remember?”

“Yes. You’ve seen it again?”

“Yes, yesterday. It was right in front of me at a stoplight. This time I took down the license number.”

“Now, are you quite sure that it was the same car, Mr. Giacchetti?”

A careless question, in which Giacchetti got lost and drowned.

“Quite sure, you ask? How could I possibly be one hundred percent sure? Sometimes I’m sure, and other times no. At certain moments I could swear to it, and at others I feel I really can’t. How could I? . . .”

“Let’s pretend this is one of the moments when you feel absolutely certain.”

“Well, all right . . . On top of everything else, I have to tell you that the car from the other night had a broken left taillight, and this one did, too.”

“You should know, Mr. Giacchetti, that nothing else has come of the episode you witnessed the other night.”

“Oh, really?” Giacchetti asked, disappointed.

“Yes. So, if you want, you can go ahead and give me the license plate number, but I don’t think it will serve any purpose.”

“So, what should I do? Give you the number or not?”

“Please do.”

“BG 329 ZY,” Mr. Giacchetti said rather listlessly.

“A kiss for the baby.”

Had everyone finally finished breaking his balls? Could he now go home and think quietly about everything he had just learned, sitting on the veranda as the hissing surf slowly untied the knot of thoughts in his brain?

He closed the door to his office.

“I’ll be seeing you, Cat.”

“ ’Ave a g’night, Chief.”

He went outside and headed to his car. Mimì Augello must have come back to the office, since his car was parked so close to the inspector’s that Montalbano had to turn sideways to squeeze between them. He got in the car, turned on the ignition, and drove off. He had gone barely ten yards down the street when he slammed on the brakes, eliciting a riot of curses and horn blasts behind him.

He had seen something. And half of his brain wanted to bring what he had seen into focus, while the other half refused, not wanting to believe the information his eyes had transmitted to it.

“Get out of the way, asshole!” yelled an angry motorist, passing close by.

Montalbano threw the car into reverse though he couldn’t see a thing, a sudden deluge of sweat pouring down from his brow and forcing him to keep his eyes half shut. At last he was back in the police station’s parking lot. He stopped, ran his arm over his face to wipe away the sweat, opened the car window, and looked. And there was the broken taillight, there the license plate BG 329 ZY.

The car belonged to Mimì Augello.

A violent cramp like the stab of a knife seized his entrails and twisted them, triggering a gush of acidic, sickly sweet liquid that rose up into his throat. He got out of the car in a hurry and, leaning on the trunk, started vomiting, throwing up his very soul.

Back home in Marinella, he realized that not only had his appetite completely vanished, but he also no longer felt like thinking. He opened the French door to the veranda. The evening was too cold for a swim. He grabbed a bottle of whisky and two glasses, unplugged the telephone, went into the bathroom, took off his clothes, filled up the tub, and got in.

It was a good remedy. Two hours later, he had nearly emptied the bottle, the water had turned cold, but he had closed his eyes and was sleeping.

He woke up around four in the morning, freezing to death in the tub. So he took a scalding hot shower and drank a big mugful of espresso coffee.

Now he was ready to do some thinking, even though he could still feel a bit of nausea lurking at the back of his throat. He took a sheet of paper and pen, sat down at the diningroom table, and started writing a letter to himself to put his thoughts in order.

Dear Salvo,

While you were vomiting in the parking lot, two words were hammering away at your brain: cahoots and conspiracy.

Two words you let float around inside you, not wanting to clarify their relationship to each other. Because, if you did, you wouldn’t at all like what you saw. Namely, that Mimì Augello and Dolores Alfano are in cahoots, and conspiring to do something.

Let me try to clarify. There is no doubt that Mimì and Dolores are lovers and that they meet at the house of Pecorini the butcher. Taking a rough guess, their relationship must have begun in September, a few days after Giovanni Alfano was supposed to have boarded his ship.

Who initiated the love affair? Mimì? Or was it Dolores? This is an important point, even if it doesn’t make much substantive difference. I’ll try to explain a little better by backtracking.

From the moment the stranger’s body was found at

’u critaru,

Mimì started insisting that I assign the investigation to him.

Why that particular investigation? The answer might be: because it’s the only important case we have on our hands at the moment.

This explanation holds up until I discover, with near certainty, that the

critaru

corpse has a first and last name: Giovanni Alfano. Who happens to be Dolores’s missing husband. This changes things radically, and raises some unfortunately inevitable questions, which I shall now submit to you, spacing them sufficiently apart to put each into proper relief.

–Did Mimì know that sooner or later I would identify the body as belonging to his mistress’s husband?

–If so, how did Mimì know the body was Giovanni Alfano’s before we connected the

critaru

corpse with Dolores?

–Is Mimì being pressured or sexually blackmailed by Dolores to have the investigation assigned to him?

–Is it possible Mimì is pressuring me against his own will, because he can’t or doesn’t know how to say no to Dolores?

–Have the two been having terrible quarrels because of this? It would appear they have, based on the scene that Fabio Giacchetti witnessed.

–Who could have told Mimì that the corpse in the

critaru

was his mistress’s husband? It could only have been Dolores.

–Did Dolores therefore know that her husband not only didn’t take ship, but had been murdered?

–Why, after the body was discovered, did Dolores come to the police station? There can only be one answer: Because she wants to lead me, through skillful, intelligent manipulation, to the conclusion that the murder victim is her husband.

–She also wants to lead me to another inevitable conclusion: that the person who murdered Giovanni is Balduccio Sinagra.

–Several questions, therefore, arise here. Did Dolores latch on to Mimì because he was my second-in-command and she thus hoped to control the course of the investigation through him? Or did Dolores only discover afterwards that Mimì was my second-in-command and then decide to take advantage of the situation? In either case, Dolores’s purpose remains the same.

–Are Mimì and Dolores therefore plotting together to force me to turn the case over to Mimì?

–Does Mimì want it publicly known that he has insistently asked me to assign him the case so as to avoid conflict with Dolores?

–And if this is how things stand, how would you define Mimì’s behavior toward you?

At this point he had to stop, as his nausea had suddenly returned, stirring up a nasty, bitter sort of spittle in his mouth. He got up and went out onto the veranda. It was still dark outside. Not wanting to remain standing, he sat down on the bench.

What to call Mimì’s behavior?

He knew the answer. It had come to him at once, but he hadn’t wanted to say it or write it down.

Mimì had been disloyal to him; there could no longer be any doubt about this.

It wasn’t because he had a lover. That sort of thing, and Mimì’s private life in general, was of no concern to him. Even this time, it would have been of no concern to him—though Mimì was married with a young son—had Livia not dragged him into it.

No, the disloyalty had begun the moment Mimì realized that Dolores wanted something from him not as a lover but as a police officer. Although his vanity as a lady-killer must have taken quite a blow, he hadn’t been able or willing to break with Dolores. Maybe he was too taken with her. Dolores was, after all, the kind of woman who could reduce a man to the state of a postage stamp stuck to her skin. So, at that point, Mimì should have come to him and said, with an open heart: “Look, Salvo, I got involved in this affair, but then this and this happened, and now I need your help to get me out of these straits.” They were friends, weren’t they? But there was more.

Not only had Mimì told him nothing about the predicament he was in, but, faced with a choice between him and Dolores, he had chosen Dolores. He had teamed up with her to force him, Montalbano, to take certain steps. Mimì had thus acted in the woman’s interest. And a friend who acts not in your interest but in the interest of another without telling you, what has he done, if not betrayed your friendship?

At last the inspector was able to say it. Mimì was a traitor.

That word, traitor, once it had formed in his mind, blocked his thought process. For a brief moment the inspector’s brain was a total void. And the void became silence—not only an absence of words, but of even the slightest sound. The bright line barely visible in the darkness, formed by the surf at the edge of the beach, moved ever so gently back and forth, as always, except that now it no longer made its usual breathlike hiss. Now there was nothing. And the throbbing of the diesel of a fishing boat whose wan lights shone in the distance should have been audible from the veranda. But there was nothing. It was as though someone had turned off the soundtrack.

Then, within that silence of the world, perhaps of the universe, Montalbano heard a brief sound arise, unpleasant and strange, followed by another just the same, and still another, also the same. What was it?

It took him a while to realize that the sound was coming from him. He was crying inconsolably.

He made an effort to squelch the desire to let the whole thing slide all the way to hell, and bail out in any way he could. Because that’s the way he was. He was a man capable of understanding many things that others couldn’t or wouldn’t understand, moments of weakness, failures of courage, insolent disregard, lapses of attention, lies, ugly acts with ugly motives, things done out of laziness, boredom, self-interest, and so on. But he could never understand or forgive bad faith and betrayal.

Oh, yeah? My valiant knight, peerless and fearless, says he can never forgive betrayal?

Yes, it’s something I can’t even conceive of. And you, who are me, know this well.

So how is it, then, that you’ve forgiven yourself?

Me? There’s nothing I have to forgive myself for!

Are you really so sure? Would you please be so kind as to backtrack a few evenings in your memory?

Why, what happened?

Have you forgotten? Have we repressed this little fact? What happened is that you felt every bit as dejected as you do tonight, and for the same reason, except that then you had Ingrid beside you. Who comforted you. And, boy, did she ever comfort you.

Well, that happened because—

Montalbà, the whys and wherefores for such an act are all well and good, but the act remains the same: It’s called betrayal.

You know what I say? I say that all this is happening because of that damned critaru, because of the potter’s field.

Explain what you mean.

I think that place, which is the place of the ultimate betrayal, where the betrayer betrays his own life, is cursed. Whoever passes near it, in one way or another, becomes contaminated with betrayal. I betray Livia, Dolores betrays Mimì, Mimì betrays me . . .

All right, then, if that’s the way it is, then get Mimì the hell out of that place. You are all—indeed we are all—in the same boat.

He got up, went inside, sat down, and resumed writing to himself.