The Terra-Cotta Dog

15

When he returned home after supper with the Burgios, it wasn't even ten oclock. Too early to go to bed. On TV there was a debate on the Mafia, another on Italian foreign policy, still another on the economic situation, a roundtable on conditions in the Montelusa insane asylum, a discussion about freedom of information, a documentary on juvenile delinquency in Moscow, another documentary on seals, still another on tobacco farming, a gangster film set in Thirties Chicago, a nightly program in which a former art critic, now a parliamentary deputy and political opinion-maker, was raving against magistrates, leftist politicians, and various adversaries, making himself into a little Saint-Just when his rightful place was among the ranks of carpet salesman, wart-healers, magicians, and strippers who were appearing with increasing frequency on the small screen. Turning off the television, Montalbano switched on the outdoor light, went out on the veranda, and sat down on the little bench with a magazine to which he subscribed. It was nicely printed, with interesting articles, and edited by a group of young environmentalists in the province. Scanning the table of contents, he found nothing of interest and thus started looking at the photographs, which occasionally realized their ambition of illustrating news events in emblematic fashion.

The ring of the doorbell caught him by surprise. He wasn't expecting anyone, he said to himself, but a second later he remembered that Anna had called in the afternoon. When she had suggested coming by to see him, he couldn't say no. He felt indebted to the girl for having used her contemptibly, he had to admit in that whole story he'd concocted to save Ingrid from persecution by her father-in-law.

Anna kissed him on each cheek and handed him a package.

"I brought you a petrafula."

This was a cake now very hard to find, which Montalbano loved, but it was anyones guess why the pastry shops had stopped making it.

"I had to go to Mittica for work and saw it in a window, so I bought it for you. Careful with your teeth."

"The harder the cake was, the tastier."

"What were you doing?"

"Nothing, just reading a magazine. Why don't you come outside?"

They sat down on the bench. Montalbano went back to looking at the photographs, while Anna rested her head on her hands and gazed out at the sea.

"It's so beautiful here!"

"Yes."

"All you hear are the waves."

"Yes."

"Does it bother you if I talk?"

"No."

Anna fell silent. After a brief pause, she spoke again.

"I'm going inside to watch TV. I feel a little chilly."

"Mm-hmm."

The inspector didn't want to encourage her. Anna clearly wanted to abandon herself to a solitary pleasure, that of pretending she was his partner, imagining they were spending a quiet evening together like so many others.

On the very last page of the magazine, he saw a photo that showed the inside of a cave, the grotto of Fragapane, which was actually a necropolis, a network of Christian tombs dug out of ancient cisterns. The picture served in its way to illustrate the review of a recent book by one Alcide Maraventano entitled Funerary Rites in the Montelusa Region. The publication of this richly documented essay by Maraventano, the reviewer claimed, filled a void, giving us a work of great scholarly value that investigated, with keen intelligence, a subject spanning the period from prehistory to the Byzantine-Christian era.

He sat there a long time meditating on what he had just read. The idea that the jug, the bowl with coins, and the dog might be part of some burial rite had never even crossed his mind. And perhaps he'd been wrong not to think of this; in fact, the investigation should probably have started from this very premise. He suddenly felt uncontrollably pressed. He went inside, unplugged the phone, then picked up the whole apparatus.

"What are you doing?" asked Anna, who was watching the gangster movie.

"I'm going into the bedroom to make some phone calls. I don't want to disturb you out here."

He dialed the Free Channels number and asked for his friend Nicolto.

"Quick, Montalbano, I go on the air in a few seconds."

"Do you know someone by the name of Maraventano who wrote"

"Alcide? Sure, I know him. What do you want from him?"

"I'd like to talk to him. Do you have his phone number?"

"He hasn't got a phone. Are you at home? I'll track him down myself and let you know."

"I need to talk to him by tomorrow."

"I'll call you back in an hour at the latest and tell you what to do."

He turned off the bedside lamp. In the dark it was easier to think about the idea that had just come to him. He tried to imagine the Crasticeddrus cave the way it had looked when he first entered. If you removed the two bodies from the picture, that left the rug, a bowl, a jug, and a terra-cotta dog. If you drew lines between the three objects, they formed a perfect triangle, though upside down with respect to the caves entrance. At the center of the triangle lay the two corpses. Did it mean anything? Maybe he needed to study the triangles orientation?

Between thinking, musing, and fantasizing, he ended up dozing off. After a spell of indeterminate length, he was awakened by the ring of the telephone. He answered in a thick voice.

"Did you fall asleep?"

"Yeah, nodded off."

"And here I am putting myself out for you. So: Alcide is expecting you tomorrow afternoon at five-thirty. He lives in Gallotta."

Gallotta was a village a few miles outside of Montelusa, a handful of peasant houses once famous for being inaccessible in winter, when the rains were heavy.

"Give me the address."

"What address? If you're coming from Montelusa, it's the first house on the left, a big tumbledown villa that would delight any horror-film director. You cant miss it."

He fell back asleep as soon as he put down the receiver. Then he woke with a start, feeling something moving on his chest. It was Anna, whom he'd completely forgotten about, lying down beside him on the bed and unbuttoning his shirt. On every piece of skin she uncovered, she planted her lips and held them there a long time. When she reached his navel, the girl raised her head, slipped one hand under his shirt to caress his nipple, then plastered her mouth against Montalbano's. Since he made no sign of reacting to her passionate kiss, Anna let her hand slide farther down his body. She caressed him there as well.

Montalbano decided to speak.

"See, Anna? It's hopeless. Nothing happens."

In a single bound Anna sprang out of bed and locked herself in the bathroom. Montalbano didn't move, not even when he heard her sobbing a childish wail, like that of a little girl denied a toy or some sweets. Against the light of the bathroom, whose door she left open on her way out, Montalbano saw her fully dressed.

"A wild animal has more feelings than you," she said, leaving.

Sleep then abandoned Montalbano. At four in the morning, he was still up, trying to finish even one a game of solitaire, though it was clear he would never succeed.

...

He arrived at work grumpy and troubled, the encounter with Anna weighing on his mind. He felt remorseful for treating her the way he did. On top of this, that morning he'd started wondering: had it been Ingrid instead of Anna, would he have behaved the same way?

"I urgently need to speak to you," said Mim Augello, standing in his doorway looking agitated.

"What do you want?"

"To bring you up to date on the investigation."

"What investigation?"

"Okay, I get the message. I'll come by later."

"No, you stay right here and tell me what fucking investigation you're talking about."

"What do you mean? The one into the weapons traffic!"

"And I, in your opinion, put you in charge?"

"In my opinion? We talked about it! Remember? It seemed implicit to me."

"Mim, the only implicit thing around here is that you're a goddamned son of a bitch, no offense to your mother, of course."

"Let's do this: I'll tell you what I've done, and you can decide if I should continue."

"All right, let's hear what you've done."

"First of all, I thought Ingrassia should be kept on a leash, so I assigned two of our men to tail him day and night. He can't even take a piss without me knowing about it."

"Two of our men? You put two of ours on his tail? Don't you know that that guy knows everything about our men down to the hairs on their ass?"

"I'm not stupid. They're not actually ours, not from the Vig force, I mean. They're two officers from Rag that the commissioner transferred to my service after I spoke to him."

Montalbano looked at him in admiration.

"Ah, so you spoke to the commissioner. Well done, Mim, you really do know how to get around!"

Augello did not respond in kind, preferring to continue his exposition.

"We also listened in on a phone conversation that might mean something. I've got the transcript in my room, I'll go get it."

"Do you know it by heart?"

"Yes, but if you hear it, you might be able to discover"

"Mim, at this point I think you've discovered everything there was to discover. Don't make me waste time. Now tell me what they said."

"Well, from his supermarket, Ingrassia phones the Brancato company in Catania. He asks for Brancato himself, who comes to the phone. Ingrassia complains about the snags that occurred during the last delivery, he says you cant send the truck so far ahead of schedule, that this caused him a lot of problems. He wants them to meet so they can study different, safer means of delivery. Here Brancato's answer is shocking, to say the least. He raises his voice in anger and asks Ingrassia, How dare you call me here? Ingrassia, now stammering, asks for an explanation. Which Brancato provides, saying that Ingrassia is insolvent, and that the banks have advised him to cease doing business with him."

"And how did Ingrassia react?"

"He didn't. He didn't even make a peep. He just hung up."

"Do you realize what that phone call means?"

"Of course. Ingrassia was asking for help, and they cut him loose."

"Stay on top of Ingrassia."

"I already am, as I told you."

There was a pause.

"What should I do?" continued Mim, "Continue the investigation?"

Montalbano wouldn't answer.

"You're such a fucking jerk!" commented Augello.

...

"Salvo? Are you alone in your office? Can I speak openly?"

"Yes. Where are you calling from?"

"From home. I'm in bed with a bit of fever."

"I'm sorry."

"Well, you shouldn't be. It's one of those growing fevers."

"I don't understand. What do you mean?"

"It's one of those fevers little children get. They last two or three days, around one hundred one or one hundred two degrees, no cause for alarm. It's natural, it's a growing fever. When it passes, the child has grown an inch or so. And I'm sure that when my fever is over, I too will have grown. In my head, not my body. What I mean is, never, as a woman, have I been so offended as with you."

"Anna"

"Let me finish. You really did offend me. You're mean, Salvo, wicked. I didn't deserve that kind of treatment."

"Be reasonable, Anna. What happened last night was for your own good"

Anna hung up. Even though he had made her understand a hundred different ways that what she wanted was out of the question, Montalbano, realizing that the girl at that moment was suffering terribly, felt like considerably less than a pig, since pork, at least, can be eaten.

...

Montalbano easily found the villa upon entering Gallotta, but it did not seem possible to him that anyone could live in that ruin. Half the roof was visibly caved in, which must surely have let in the rain on the third floor. The faint wind in the air was enough to rattle a shutter that remained attached by means not immediately apparent. The outer wall on the upper part of the fae had cracks the width of a fist. The second, first, and ground floors looked in better shape. The surface plaster had long disappeared; the shutters were all broken and flaking, but at least they closed, however askew. There was a wrought-iron gate, half-open and leaning outward, apparently in this position since time immemorial, amid weeds and peaty soil. The yard was an amorphous mass of contorted trees and dense shrubbery, a thick, closely knit tangle. He proceeded up the path of disconnected stones and stopped when he reached the peeling front door.

Darkness was already falling. The switch from daylight time to standard time really did shorten the days. There was a doorbell, and he rang it. Or, rather, he pushed it, since he heard no sound whatsoever, not even far away. He tried again before realizing that the doorbell hadn't worked since the discovery of electricity. He rapped on the door with the horse-head knocker, and finally, after the third rap, he heard some shuffling footsteps. The door opened, without any noise from a lock or bolt, only a long wail as of a soul in purgatory.

"It was open. You needed only to push, come inside, and call me."

It was a skeleton speaking to him. Never in his life had Montalbano seen anyone so thin. Or, rather, he had seen a few such people, on their deathbeds, dried up, shriveled by illness. This man, however, was standing, though bent over in two, and appeared to be alive. He was wearing a priests cassock whose original black now tended towards green, the once-stiff white collar now a dense gray. On his feet, two hobnailed peasant boots of the kind you couldn't buy anymore. He was completely bald, and his face looked like a deaths-head on which somebody, as a joke, had placed a pair of gold eyeglasses with extremely thick lenses, behind which the eyes foundered. Montalbano thought the couple in the cave, who'd been dead for fifty years, had more flesh on their bones than this priest. Needless to say, he was very old.

In ceremonious fashion, the man invited him inside and led him into an enormous room literally crammed with books, not only on the shelves but stacked on the floor in piles that stretched nearly to the lofty ceiling and remained standing by means of some impossible equilibrium. No light entered through the windows; the books amassed on their ledges covered them completely. The furniture consisted of a desk, a chair, and an armchair. The lamp on the desk looked to Montalbano like an authentic oil lantern. The old priest cleared the armchair of books and told the inspector to sit down.

"I cannot imagine how I could be of any use to you, but go ahead and talk."

"As you were probably told, I'm a police inspector and I.."

"No, nobody told me anything, and I did'nt ask. Late last night somebody from the village came and said a man from Vig wanted to see me, and I said to have him come at five-thirty. If you're an inspector, you've come to the wrong place. You're wasting your time."

"Why am I wasting my time?"

"Because I haven't set foot outside this house for at least thirty years. What would I go out for? The old faces have all disappeared and I don't care much for the new ones. Somebody does my shopping every day, and in any case I only drink milk, and chicken broth once a week."

"You probably heard on television"

He had barely started the sentence when he interrupted himself; the word television had sounded incongruous to him.

"Theres no electricity in this house."

"Well, you've probably read in the papers"

"I don't read newspapers."

Why did he keep setting off on the wrong foot? Taking a deep breath, he got a kind of running start and told him everything, from the arms traffic to the discovery of the dead couple in the Crasticeddru.

"Let me light the lamp," said the old man, "w'ell talk better that way."

He rummaged through some papers on the desktop, found a box of kitchen matches, and lit one with a trembling hand. Montalbano felt a chill come over him.

If he drops it, he thought, we'll be roasted alive in three seconds.

The operation, however, was a success, except that it made matters worse, in that the lamp shed a feeble light over half of the desktop and plunged the side on which the old man sat into total darkness. In amazement Montalbano saw the old man reach out with one hand and seize a small bottle with an odd sort of cork. There were three other such bottles on the desk, two empty and the other full of a white liquid. They weren't regular bottles, actually, but baby bottles, each furnished with a nipple. The inspector felt himself growing stupidly irritated as the old man started sucking.

"You'll have to forgive me. I havent any teeth."

"But why don't you drink the milk from a mug or a cup or, I don't know, a glass?"

"Because it gives me more pleasure this way. It's as if I were smoking a pipe."

Montalbano decided to leave as quickly as possible. Standing up, he took from his jacket pocket two of the photos taken by Jacomuzzi and handed them to the priest.

"Might this have been some sort of burial rite?"

The old man looked at the photos, growing animated and groaning.

"What was inside the bowl?"

"Coins from the 1940s."

"And in the jug?"

"Nothing ...There was no trace of anything ...It must have contained only water."

The old man sat there sucking a good while, engrossed in thought. Montalbano sat back down.

"It makes no sense," said the priest, setting the photos down on the desk.