The Terra-Cotta Dog (10 page)

“How's it going with your father-in-law?”

“Fine!” Ingrid said cheerfully. “I'm sorry, I should have mentioned it sooner. Things are fine with my father-in-law. He's left me in peace for two months now. He's no longer after me.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know. He hasn't told me anything. The last time was on our way back from Fela, where we'd been to a wedding. My husband couldn't make it and my mother-in-law wasn't feeling well, so the two of us were left alone again. At some point he turned off onto a side road, continued for a mile or two, then stopped in a wooded area. He made me get out of the car, tore off my clothes, threw me to the ground, and fucked me with his usual brutality. The next day I left for Palermo with my husband, and when I got back a week later, my father-in-law seemed like he'd aged. He was trembling. Since then, he's sort of been avoiding me. Now when I find myself face-to-face with him in some corridor of the house, I'm no longer afraid he's going to push me up against the wall with one hand on my tits and the other on my cunt.”

“It's better this way, isn't it?”

 
 
The story Ingrid had just told him Montalbano knew better than she did. The inspector had learned of Ingrid's relations with her father-in-law the very first time he met her. Then one night, as they were talking, without warning, Ingrid had burst into convulsive sobs; she could no longer bear the situation with her husband's father. An absolutely liberated woman, she felt soiled, demeaned by this quasi-incestuous relationship that was being forced on her. She thought of leaving her husband and returning to Sweden. Being an excellent mechanic, she would manage to earn a living.

That was when Montalbano had made up his mind to help get her out of that mess. The following day, he'd invited Corporal Anna Ferrara to his house for dinner. Young Anna was in love with him and convinced that he and Ingrid were lovers.

“I'm desperate,” he had told her, opening the evening with a face worthy of a great tragic actor.

“Oh my God, what's wrong?” asked Anna, squeezing one of his hands in hers.

“Ingrid is cheating on me.”

He let his head fall to her breast and by some miracle managed to make his eyes grow moist.

Anna suppressed an exclamation of triumph. She'd been right all along! Meanwhile the inspector was hiding his face in his hands, and the girl felt overwhelmed by this exhibition of despair.

“You know, I never told you anything because I didn't want to upset you, but I did a little investigation about Ingrid. You're not the only man.”

“But I knew that!” said the inspector, his hands still over his face.

“What is it, then?”

“It's different this time! It's not some little fling like all the rest, which I could even forgive. She's in love, and he feels the same way!”

“Do you know who she's in love with?”

“Yes: her father-in-law.”

“Oh, Christ!” said Anna, giving a start. “She told you herself?”

“No, I found out on my own. Actually, she denies it. She denies everything. I need some kind of irrefutable proof, something to throw in her face. Do you know what I mean?”

Anna had offered to provide him with this irrefutable proof. And she'd gone to such lengths that she even managed to take some pictures of that rustic episode in the woods. She'd had them enlarged by a trusted girlfriend of hers in the crime lab and then turned them over to the inspector. Ingrid's father-in-law, aside from being chief physician at Montelusa Hospital, was also a prominent local politician. And so Montalbano sent the man some eloquent initial documentation at his provincial party office, the hospital, and home. On the back of each photo were only the words:
We've got you now
. The barrage of images had apparently scared him to death: in a flash he'd seen his career and family jeopardized. In case of need, the inspector had another twenty or so photographs. He'd said nothing about this to Ingrid. The woman might throw a fit if she knew her Swedish sense of privacy had been violated.

Montalbano accelerated, now satisfied that the complex machinations he'd set in motion had achieved their desired goal.

“You bring the car inside,” said Montalbano, getting out and starting to raise the metal grating of the police garage. Once she'd pulled in, he turned on the lights and lowered the grate.

“What do you want me to do?” Ingrid asked.

“See that wrecked Fiat 500 over there? I want to know if its brakes have been tampered with.”

“I don't know if I'll be able to tell.”

“Try.”

“There goes my blouse.”

“No, wait. I brought something.”

He reached into the backseat of his car and pulled out a shirt and pair of jeans that belonged to him.

“Here. Put these on.”

While Ingrid was changing, he went to look for a portable mechanic's lamp, found one on the counter, and plugged it in. Without saying a word, Ingrid took the lamp, a monkey wrench, and a screwdriver and slid under the little Fiat's twisted chassis. It took her only about ten minutes. She came out from under the car covered with dust and grease.

“I was lucky. The brake cable was partly cut, I'm sure of it.”

“What do you mean ‘partly'?”

“I mean, it wasn't cut all the way through. They left just enough so the car wouldn't crash right away. But with the first hard pull, the cable would certainly have snapped.”

“Are you positive it didn't break all by itself? It was a very old car.”

“The cut is too clean. There's no shredding. Or very little.”

“Now listen closely,” said Montalbano. “The man who was at the wheel drove from Vigàta to Montelusa, stopped there a little while, then headed back to Vigàta. The accident occurred on the steep descent right before you come into town, the Catena hillside. He slammed straight into a truck, and that was that. Clear so far?”

“Yes.”

“What I want to know is this: in your opinion, was this slick little job done in Vigàta or in Montelusa?”

“In Montelusa,” said Ingrid. “If they'd done it in Vigàta, he would definitely have crashed much sooner. Anything else?”

“No. Thanks.”

Ingrid didn't change her clothes, and didn't even wash her hands.

“I'll do it at your house.”

 
 
Ingrid got out in the bar's parking lot, took her car, and followed the inspector. It was a warm evening, not yet midnight.

“You want to take a shower?” he asked her when they got to his place.

“No, I'd rather go for a swim. I'll shower later, if I feel like it.”

She took off the grease-stained clothes of Montalbano's that she was wearing and slipped out of her panties. The inspector meanwhile had to make some effort to reassume his much-suffered guise as spiritual adviser.

“Come on. Take your clothes off and join me,” she said.

“No. I like watching you from the veranda.”

The full moon was actually too bright. Montalbano remained in his deck chair, enjoying the sight of Ingrid's silhouette as she reached the water's edge and began a dance of little hops in the water, arms extended. He saw her dive in, following awhile the small black dot that was her head, and then, suddenly, he fell asleep.

 
 
When he awoke, day was already dawning. He got up, slightly chilled, made coffee and drank three cups in a row. Before leaving, Ingrid had cleaned the house: there was no trace of her having been there. Ingrid was worth her weight in gold: she'd done everything he'd asked of her and hadn't even wanted an explanation. As far as curiosity was concerned, she was certainly not female. But only as far as curiosity was concerned.

Feeling a pang of hunger, he opened the refrigerator. The eggplant Parmesan he hadn't eaten at lunchtime was gone, dispatched by Ingrid. He had to content himself with a piece of bread and some processed cheese. Better than nothing. He took a shower and put on the clothes he had lent to Ingrid. They still bore a trace of her scent.

As was his habit, he arrived at headquarters about ten minutes late. His men were all ready with one squad car and the Jeep on loan from Vinti's, which was loaded up with shovels, mattocks, pickaxes, and spades. They looked like laborers on their way to earn a day's pay working the land.

 
 
The Crasto mountain, which for its part would never have dreamed of calling itself a mountain, was a rather bald little hill that rose up west of Vigàta barely five hundred yards from the sea. It had been carefully pierced by a tunnel, now boarded up, that was supposed to have been an integral part of a road that started nowhere and led nowhere, a very useful bypass route for diverting funds into bottomless pockets. It was, in fact, called “the bypass.” Legend had it that deep in the mountain's bowels was a
crasto,
a ram, made of solid gold. The tunnel-diggers never found it, but those who won the bid for the government contract certainly did. Attached to the mountain, on the landward side, was a kind of stronghold of rock called the Crasticeddru, the “little Crasto.” The earthmovers and trucks had never reached this area, and it preserved an untamed beauty.

Having come down some impassable roads to avoid attracting attention, the two cars headed straight for the Crasticeddru. In the absence of any further path or trail, it was very hard to go on, but the inspector insisted that the cars pull right up to the foot of the rocky spur.

Montalbano ordered everyone out of the cars. The air was cool, the morning bright.

“What do you want us to do?” asked Fazio.

“Search the Crasticeddru, all of you, very carefully. Look everywhere, and look hard. There's supposed to be an entrance to a cave somewhere. It's been covered up, camouflaged by rocks or vegetation. Keep your eyes peeled. We have to find it. I assure you it's there.”

They fanned out.

 
 
Two hours later, discouraged, they met back up beside the cars. The sun was beating down, they were sweating, but farsighted Fazio had brought along thermoses of coffee and tea.

“Let's try again,” said Montalbano. “But don't look only around the rock; search also along the ground, you might see something that looks fishy.”

They resumed their hunt, and half an hour later Montalbano heard Galluzzo call from afar.

“Inspector! Inspector! Come here!”

The inspector went over to the policeman, who had assigned himself the side of the spur closest to the highway that went to Fela.

“Look.”

Someone had tried to make them disappear, but at a certain point along the ground, there were clearly visible tracks left behind by a large truck.

“They lead over there,” said Galluzzo, pointing to the rock face. As he was saying this, he suddenly stopped, mouth agape.

“Jesus God!” said Montalbano.

How had they managed not to see it before? There was a huge boulder placed in an odd position, with shoots of withered grass sticking out from behind. As Galluzzo was calling to his mates, the inspector ran towards the boulder, grabbed a tuft of sword grass and tugged hard. He almost fell backward: the clump had no roots. It had merely been stuck there with bunches of sorghum to camouflage the entrance to the cave.

9

The boulder was a great stone slab, roughly rectangular in shape, that appeared to be of a piece with the rock around it and rested on a sort of giant step, also rock. At a glance Montalbano determined that it was roughly six feet tall and about four and a half feet wide: moving it by hand was out of the question. And yet there had to be a way. Halfway up its right side, about four inches from the edge, was a perfectly natural-looking hole.

“If this was an actual wooden door,” the inspector reasoned, “that opening would be at the right height for inserting a doorknob.”

He took a pen out of his pocket and stuck it in the hole. The pen fit all the way inside, but when Montalbano was about to put it back in his pocket, he noticed that the pen had soiled his hand. He looked at his fingers, then smelled them.

“That's grease,” he said to Fazio, the only person remaining beside him.

The other policemen had taken shelter in the shade. Gallo had found a clump of sheep's sorrel and offered some to the others.

“Suck the stalk,” he said, “it's delicious and quenches your thirst.”

Montalbano thought of the only possible solution.

“Do we have a steel cable?”

“Sure do, inside the Jeep.”

“All right, then pull the car up here as close as you can.”

As Fazio was walking away, the inspector, now convinced he'd found the proper expedient for moving the big slab, looked at the surrounding landscape with different eyes. If this was indeed the place that Tano the Greek had revealed to him on his deathbed, there must be some spot nearby from which one could keep it under surveillance. The area seemed deserted and remote; one would never have imagined that right behind the bluff, a few hundred yards away, was the highway with all its traffic. Not far from there, on a rise of dry, rocky terrain, was a minuscule cottage, a cube consisting of a single room. He called for some binoculars. The little structure's wooden door, which was closed, looked solid. Next to the door, at the height of a man's head, was a small window without shutters, protected by two crisscrossing iron bars. The cottage appeared uninhabited, and it was the only possible observation point in the vicinity. All the other houses were too far away. Still doubtful, he called to Galluzzo.

“Go have a look at that little house. Do what you can to open the door, but don't break it in. Be careful, we may need to use it. See if there are any recent signs of life inside, if anyone's been living there in the last few days. But leave everything exactly as it was, as if you'd never been there.”