The Shape of Water

2

“Again.”

“No,” said Livia, still staring at him, her eyes more luminous from the amorous tension.

“Please.”

“No, I said no.”

I always like being forced a little, he remembered her whispering once in his ear; and so, aroused, he tried slipping his knee between her closed thighs as he gripped her wrists roughly and spread her arms until she looked as though crucified.

They eyed each other a moment, panting, when suddenly she surrendered.

“Yes,” she said. “Now.”

At that exact moment the phone rang. Without even opening his eyes, Montalbano reached out with his arm to grab not the telephone so much as the fluttering shreds of the dream now inexorably vanishing.

“Hello!” he shouted angrily at the intruder.

“Inspector, we’ve got a client.” He recognized Sergeant Fazio’s voice; the other sergeant, Tortorella, was still in the hospital with the nasty bullet he’d taken in the belly from some would-be mafioso who was actually just a pathetic two-bit jerk-off. In their jargon a “client” meant a death they should look into.

“Who is it?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“How was he killed?”

“We don’t know. Actually, we don’t even know if he was killed.”

“I don’t get it, Sergeant. You woke me up to tell me you don’t know a goddamn thing?”

Montalbano breathed deeply to dispel his pointless anger, which Fazio tolerated with the patience of a saint.

“Who found him?” he continued.

“A couple of garbage collectors in the Pasture.

They found him in a car.”

“I’ll be right there. Meanwhile phone the Montelusa department, have them send someone from the lab, and inform Judge Lo Bianco.”

~

As he stood under the shower, he reached the conclusion that the dead man must have been a member of the Cuffaro gang. Eight months earlier, probably due to some territorial dispute, a ferocious war had broken out between the Vigàta Cuffaros and the Sinagra gang, who were from Fela. One victim per month, by turns, and in orderly fashion: one in Vigàta, one in Fela. The latest, a certain Mario Salino, had been shot in Fela by the Vigatese, so now it was apparently the turn of one of the Cuffaro thugs.

Before going out—he lived alone in a small house right on the beach on the opposite side of town from the Pasture—he felt like calling Livia in Genoa. She answered immediately, drowsy with sleep.

“Sorry, but I wanted to hear your voice.”

“I was dreaming of you,” she said. “You were here with me.”

Montalbano was about to say that he, too, had been dreaming of her, but an absurd prudishness held him back. Instead he asked:

“And what were we doing?”

“Something we haven’t done for too long,” she said.

~

At headquarters, aside from the sergeant, there were only three policemen. The rest had gone to the home of a clothing-shop owner who had shot his sister over a question of inheritance and then escaped. Montalbano opened the door to the interrogation room. The two garbage collectors were sitting on the bench, huddling one against the other, pale despite the heat.

“Wait here till I get back,” Montalbano said to them, and the two, resigned, didn’t even reply. They both knew well that any time one fell in with the law, whatever the reason, it was going to be a long affair.

“Have any of you called the papers?” the inspector asked his men. They shook their heads no.

“Well, I don’t want them sticking their noses in this. Make a note of that.”

Timidly, Galluzzo came forward, raising two fingers as if to ask if he could go to the bathroom.

“Not even my brother-in-law?”

Galluzzo’s brother-in-law was a newsman with TeleVigàta who covered local crime, and Montalbano imagined the family squabbles that might break out if Galluzzo weren’t to tell him anything. And Galluzzo was looking at him with pitiful, canine eyes.

“All right. But he should come only after the body’s been removed. And no photographers.”

They set out in a squad car, leaving Giallombardo behind on duty. Gallo was at the wheel. Together with Galluzzo, he was often the butt of facile jokes, such as

“Hey, Inspector, what’s new in the chicken coop?”

Knowing Gallo’s driving habits, Montalbano admonished him, “Don’t speed. We’re in no hurry.”

At the curve by the Carmelite church, Peppe Gallo could no longer restrain himself and accelerated, screeching the tires as he rounded the bend. They heard a loud crack, like a pistol shot, and the car skidded to a halt. They got out. The right rear tire hung flabbily, blown out. It had been well worked over by a sharp blade; the cuts were quite visible.

“Goddamn sons of bitches!” bellowed the sergeant.

Montalbano got angry in earnest.

“But you all know they cut our tires twice a month! Jesus! And every morning I remind you: don’t forget to check them before going out! But you assholes don’t give a shit! And you won’t until the day somebody breaks his neck!”

For one reason or another, it took a good ten minutes to change the tire, and when they got to the Pasture, the Montelusa crime lab team was already there. They were in what Montalbano called the meditative stage, that is, five or six agents circling round and round the spot where the car stood, hands usually in their pockets or behind their backs. They looked like philosophers absorbed in deep thought, but in fact their eyes were combing the ground for clues, traces, footprints. As soon as Jacomuzzi, head of the crime lab, saw Montalbano, he came running up.

“How come there aren’t any newsmen?”

“I didn’t want any.”

“Well, this time they’re going to accuse you of trying to cover up a big story.” He was clearly upset.

“Do you know who the dead man is?”

“No. Who?”

“None other than ‘the engineer,’ Silvio Luparello.”

“Shit!” was Montalbano’s only comment.

“And do you know how he died?”

“No. And I don’t want to know. I’ll have a look at him myself.”

Offended, Jacomuzzi went back to his men. The lab photographer had finished, and now it was Dr.

Pasquano’s turn. Montalbano noticed that the coroner was forced to work in an uncomfortable position, his body half inside the car, wiggling his way toward the passenger seat, where a dark silhouette could be seen.

Fazio and the Vigàta officers were giving a hand to their Montelusa colleagues. The inspector lit a cigarette and turned to look at the chemical factory. That ruin fascinated him. He decided he would come back one day to take a few snapshots, which he’d send to Livia to explain some things about himself and his island that she was still unable to understand.

Lo Bianco’s car pulled up and the judge stepped out, looking agitated.

“Is it really Luparello?” he asked.

Apparently Jacomuzzi had wasted no time.

“So it seems.”

The judge joined the lab group and began speaking excitedly with Jacomuzzi and Dr. Pasquano, who in the meantime had extracted a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his briefcase and was disinfecting his hands. After a good while, long enough for Montalbano to broil in the sun, the men from the lab got back in their cars and left. As he passed Montalbano, Jacomuzzi said nothing. Behind him, the inspector heard an ambulance siren wind down. It was his turn now. He’d have to do the talking and acting; there was no escape. He shook himself from the torpor in which he was stewing and walked toward the car with the dead man inside. Halfway there, the judge blocked his path.

“The body can be removed now. And considering poor Luparello’s notoriety, the quicker we do it the better. In any case, keep me posted daily as to how the investigation develops.”

He paused a moment, and then, to make the words he’d just said a little less peremptory:

“Give me a ring when you think it’s appropriate,”

he added.

Another pause. Then:

“During office hours, of course.”

He walked away. During office hours, not at home.

At home, it was well known, Judge Lo Bianco was busy penning a stuffy, puffy book, The Life and Exploits of Rinaldo and Antonio Lo Bianco, Masters of Jurisprudence at the University of Girgenti at the Time of King Martin the Younger (1402–1409). These Lo Biancos, he claimed, however nebulously, were his ancestors.

“How did he die?” he asked the doctor.

“See for yourself,” said the doctor, standing aside.

Montalbano stuck his head inside the car, which felt like an oven (more specifically, a crematorium), took his first look at the corpse, and immediately thought of the police commissioner.

He thought of the commissioner not because he was in the habit of turning his thoughts up the hierarchical ladder at the start of every investigation, but merely because some ten days earlier he had spoken with old Commissioner Burlando, who was a friend of his, about a book by Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death, which they had both read. The commissioner had argued that every death, even the most abject, was sacred. Montalbano had retorted, in all sincerity, that in no death, not even a pope’s, could he see anything sacred whatsover.

He wished the commissioner were there beside him now, to see what he saw. This Luparello had always been an elegant sort, extremely well-groomed in every physical detail. Now, however, his tie was gone, his shirt rumpled, his glasses askew, his jacket collar incongruously half turned up, his socks sagging so flaccidly that they covered his loafers. But what most struck the inspector was the sight of the trousers pulled down around the man’s knees, the white of the underwear showing inside the trousers, the shirt rolled up together with the undershirt halfway up his chest.

And the sex organ obscenely, horridly exposed, thick and hairy, in stark contrast with the meticulous care shown over the rest of his person.

“But how did he die?” he asked the doctor again, coming out of the car.

“Seems obvious, don’t you think?” Pasquano replied rudely. “You did know he’d had heart surgery,” he continued, “performed by a famous London surgeon?”

“No, I did not. I saw him on TV last Wednesday, and he looked in perfect health to me.”

“He may have looked healthy, but he wasn’t. You know, in politics they’re all like dogs: the minute they realize you can’t defend yourself, they attack. Apparently he had a double bypass in London. They say it was a difficult operation.”

“Who was his doctor in Montelusa?”

“My colleague Capuano. He was getting weekly checkups. His health was very important to him—you know, always wanted to look fit.”

“You think I should talk to Capuano?”

“Absolutely unnecessary. It’s plain as day what happened here. Poor Mr. Luparello felt like having a good lay in the Pasture, maybe with some exotic foreign slut, and he had it, all right, and left his carcass behind.”

He noticed that Montalbano had a faraway look in his eyes.

“Not convinced?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. Can you send me the results of the autopsy tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?! Are you crazy? Before Luparello I’ve got that twenty-year-old girl who was raped in a shepherd’s hut and found eaten by dogs ten days later, and then there’s Fofò Greco, who had his tongue cut out and his balls cut off before they hung him from a tree to die, and then—”

Montalbano cut this macabre list short.

“Pasquano, let’s get to the point. When can you get me the results?”

“Day after tomorrow, if in the meantime I don’t have to run all over town looking at other corpses.”

They said good-bye. Montalbano called over the sergeant and his men and told them what they had to do and when to load the body into the ambulance. He had Gallo drive him back to headquarters.

“You can go back afterward and pick up the others. And if you speed, I’ll break your neck.”

~

Pino and Saro signed the sworn statement. In it their every movement before and after they discovered the body was described. But it neglected to mention two important things, which the garbage collectors had been careful not to reveal to the law. The first was that they had almost immediately recognized the dead man, the second that they had hastened to inform the lawyer Rizzo of their discovery. They headed back home, Pino apparently with his thoughts elsewhere, Saro now and again touching the pocket that still held the necklace.

Nothing would happen for at least another twenty-four hours. In the afternoon Montalbano went back to his house, threw himself down on the bed, and fell into a three-hour sleep. When he woke, as the mid-September sea was flat as a mirror, he went for a long swim. Back inside, he made himself a dish of spaghetti with a sauce of sea urchin pulp and turned on the television. Naturally, all the local news programs were talking about Luparello’s death. They sang his praises, and from time to time a politician would appear, with a face to fit the occasion, and enumerate the merits of the deceased and the problems created by his passing. But not a single one of them, not even the news program of the opposition’s channel, dared to mention where and in what circumstances the late lamented Luparello had met his end.