The Terra-Cotta Dog (16 page)

“I get it,” said Augello. “Actually, I got it some time ago, but I wanted to hear you say it yourself. So I'm telling you now, without any hostility or hard feelings: I'm going to write to the commissioner today and request a transfer.”

Montalbano looked him over, drew near, and leaned forward, putting his hands on Augello's shoulders.

“Will you believe me if I tell you that would hurt me very deeply?”

“So fucking what!” Mimì exploded. “Do you expect everyone to give you everything? What kind of man are you? First you treat me like shit, then you try the affectionate approach? Do you realize how monstrously egotistical you are?”

“Yes, I do,” said Montalbano.

 
 
“Allow me to introduce Mr. Burruano, the accountant who so kindly consented to come here with me today,” said Headmaster Burgio with stuffed-shirt ceremoniousness.

“Please sit down,” said Montalbano, gesturing towards two small, old armchairs in a corner of the room, which were reserved for distinguished guests. For himself he pulled up one of the two straight-back chairs in front of his desk, normally reserved for people who were decidedly undistinguished.

“These last few days I feel it's been up to me to correct or at least clarify what gets said on television,” Burgio began.

“Then correct and clarify,” Montalbano said, smiling.

“Mr. Burruano and I are almost the same age. He's four years older, but we remember the same things.”

Montalbano heard a note of pride in the headmaster's voice. There was good reason for it: the twitchy Burruano, who was a bit milky-eyed to boot, looked at least ten years older than his friend.

“You see, right after the TeleVigàta News, which showed the inside of the cave in which they found th—”

“Excuse me for interrupting, but the last time we spoke you mentioned the weapons cave, but said nothing about this other cave. Why?”

“Because I simply didn't know it existed. Lillo never said anything about it to me. Anyway, right after the newscast, I called Mr. Burruano because I'd seen that statue of the dog before, and I wanted confirmation.”

The dog! That was why it appeared in his nightmare, because the headmaster had alluded to it on the phone. Montalbano felt overcome by a childish feeling of gratitude.

“Would you gentlemen like some coffee? Eh? A cup of coffee? They make it so well at the corner café.”

The two men shook their heads in unison.

“An orangeade? Coca-Cola? Beer?”

If they didn't stop him, he would soon be offering them ten thousand lire each.

“No, no, thank you, we can't drink anything. Old age, you know,” said Burgio.

“All right, then, tell me your story.”

“It's better if Mr. Burruano tells it.”

“From February 1941 to July 1943,” the accountant began, “though still very young, I was
podestà
of Vigàta. Either because Fascism claimed to like the young—in fact it liked them so much it ate them all, roasted or frozen, made no difference—or because the only people left in town were women, children, and the elderly. Everybody else was at the front. I couldn't go because I was consumptive. I really was.”

“I was too young to be sent to the front,” Burgio interjected, to avoid any misunderstanding.

“Those were terrible times. The British and Americans were bombing us every day. In one thirty-six-hour period I counted ten bombing raids. Very few people were left in town, most had been evacuated, and we were living in the shelters that had been dug into the hill of marl above the city. Actually, they were tunnels with two exits, very safe. We even brought our beds in there. Vigàta's grown a lot over the years. It's no longer the way it was back then, a handful of houses around the port and a strip of buildings between the foot of the mountain and the sea. Up on the hill, the Piano Lanterna, which today looks like New York with its high-rises and all, had just four structures along a single road, which led to the cemetery and then disappeared into the countryside. The enemy aircraft had three targets: the power station, the port with its warships and merchant ships, and the antiaircraft and naval batteries along the ridge of the hill. When it was the British overhead, things went better than with the Americans.”

Montalbano was impatient. He wanted the man to get to the point—the dog, that is—but didn't feel like interrupting his digressions.

“Went better in what sense, Mr. Burruano? It was still bombs they were dropping.”

Lost within some memory, Burruano had fallen silent, and so Headmaster Burgio spoke for him.

“The British, how shall I say, played more fairly. When they dropped their bombs they tried to hit only military targets, whereas the Americans dropped them helter-skelter, come what may.”

“Towards the end of '42,” Burruano resumed, “the situation got even worse. We had nothing: no bread, no medicine, no water, no clothing. So for Christmas I decided to make a crèche that we could all pray to. We had nothing else left. I wanted it to be a very special crèche. That way, I thought, for a few days at least, I could take people's minds off their worries—there were so many—and distract them from the terror of the bombings. There wasn't a single family that didn't have at least one man fighting far from home, in the ice of Russia or the hell of Africa. We'd all become edgy, ornery, quarrelsome—the slightest thing would set people off; our nerves were frayed. Between the antiaircraft machine guns, the exploding bombs, the roar of the low-flying planes, and the cannon-blasts from the ships at sea, we couldn't get a wink of sleep at night. And everyone would come to me or to the priest to ask one thing or another and I didn't know which way to turn. I didn't feel so young anymore. I felt then the way I feel now.”

He stopped to catch his breath. Neither Montalbano nor Burgio felt like filling that pause.

“Anyway, to make a long story short, I mentioned my idea to Ballassaro Chiarenza, who was a real artist with terracotta. He did it for pleasure, since he was a carter by trade. It was his idea to make the statues all life-size. Baby Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, the ox, the donkey, the shepherd with the lamb over his shoulders, a sheep, a dog, and the other shepherd, the one who's always portrayed with his arms raised in a gesture of wonder. So he made the whole thing, and it came out really beautiful. We even decided not to put it in the church, but to set it up under the arch of a bombed-out house, so it would look like Jesus had been born amidst the suffering of our people.”

He put a hand in his pocket and pulled out a photograph, which he passed to the inspector. The crèche really was beautiful; Mr. Burruano was right. It seemed so ephemeral, so perishable, and at the same time conveyed a comforting warmth, a superhuman serenity.

“It's astonishing,” Montalbano complimented him, his emotions welling up. But only for an instant, as the cop in him got the upper hand and began carefully examining the dog. There was no doubt about it: that was the same dog he had found in the cave. Burruano put the photo back in his pocket.

“The crèche performed a miracle, you know. For a few days we were considerate towards one another.”

“What became of the statues?”

This was where Montalbano's real interest lay. The old man smiled.

“I sold them at auction, all of them. I made enough to pay Chiarenza, who wanted only to be reimbursed for his expenses, and to give alms to those who needed them most. And there were many.”

“Who bought the statues?”

“Well, that's the problem. I don't remember. I had the receipts and all, but they were lost when city hall caught fire during the American invasion.”

“During the period you're talking about, had you heard any news about a young couple disappearing?”

Burruano smiled, but Headmaster Burgio actually laughed out loud.

“Was that a stupid question?”

“I'm sorry, Inspector, but it really was,” remarked the headmaster.

“You see, in 1939, the population of Vigàta was fourteen thousand,” Burruano explained. “I know my numbers. By 1942, we were down to eight thousand. The people who could leave, did, finding temporary refuge in the inland towns, the tiny little villages of no importance to the Americans. Then, between May and July of '43, our numbers dropped, give or take a few, to four thousand, without counting the Italian and German soldiers, and the sailors. Everyone else had scattered across the countryside, living in caves, in barns, in any hole they could find. How could we have known about one disappearance or another? Everybody disappeared!”

They laughed again. Montalbano thanked them for the information.

 
 
Good, at least he'd managed to find a few things out. The moment the headmaster and accountant left, the surge of gratitude the inspector had felt towards them turned into an uncontrollable attack of generosity which he knew he would sooner or later regret. He called Mimì Augello into his office, made a full apology for his misdeeds towards his friend and collaborator, put his arm around the young man's shoulders, walked around the room with him, expressed his “unconditional faith” in him, spoke at great length of the investigation he was conducting in weapons trafficking, told him about the murder of Misuraca, and informed him he'd requested a court order to tap Ingrassia's telephone lines.

“So what do you want me to do?” asked Augello, overcome with enthusiasm.

“Nothing. You must only listen to me,” said Montalbano, suddenly himself again. “Because if you do the slightest thing on your own initiative, I'll break your neck.”

 
 
The telephone rang. Picking up the receiver, Montalbano heard the voice of Catarella, who served as phone operator.

“Hullo, Chief? There's—what's he called?—Chief Jacomuzzi to talk to you.”

“Put him on the line.”

“Talk with the chief, Chief, over the phone,” he heard Catarella say.

“Montalbano? Since I was passing by here on the way back from the Crasticeddru—”

“But where are you?”

“What do you mean where am I? I'm in the room next to yours.”

Montalbano cursed the saints. Was it possible to be stupider than Catarella?

“Come on in.”

The door opened and Jacomuzzi entered, covered with red sand and dust, disheveled and rumpled.

“Why would your officer only let me talk to you by phone?”

“Jacomù, what's more idiotic, Carnival or the people who celebrate it? Don't you know what Catarella's like? You should have just given him a kick in the pants and come in.”

“I've finished my examination of the cave. I had the sand sifted. Worse than the gold-seekers in American movies! We found absolutely nothing. And that can mean only one thing, since Pasquano told me they both had entrance and exit wounds.”

“That the two were shot somewhere else.”

“Right. If they'd been killed in the cave, we would have found the bullets. Oh, and another thing, rather odd. The sand inside the cave was mixed together with very tiny fragments of snail shells. There must have been thousands of the creatures in there.”

“Jesus!” Montalbano muttered. The dream, the nightmare, Livia's naked body with the slimy things crawling over her . . . What could it mean? He brought a hand to his forehead and found it drenched in sweat.

“Are you ill?” asked Jacomuzzi, concerned.

“It's nothing, a little dizziness. I'm tired, that's all.”

“Call Catarella and have him bring you a cordial from the café.”

“Catarella? Are you joking? Once, when I asked him to bring me an espresso, he brought me a postal envelope.”

Jacomuzzi put three coins on the desk.

“These were from the bowl. I sent the rest to the lab. They won't be of any use to you. You can keep 'em as souvenirs.”

14

With Adelina, it was possible for an entire season to go by without the two of them ever seeing each other. Every week Montalbano would leave shopping money for her on the kitchen table, and every thirty days her monthly wages. Between them, however, a tacit system of communication had developed: when Adelina needed more shopping money, she would leave the
caruso
—the little clay money box he had bought at a fair and kept because it looked nice—on the table for him to see; when new supplies of socks or underwear were needed, she would leave a pair on the bed. Naturally the system did not work in one direction only; Montalbano, too, would tell her things by the strangest means, which she, however, understood. For some time now, the inspector had noticed that, when he was tense, troubled, and nervous, Adelina would somehow know it from the way he left the house in the morning, and in these instances she would make special dishes for him to find on his return, to lift his spirits. That day, Adelina had been back in action: in the fridge Montalbano found a squid sauce, dense and black, just the way he liked it. Was there or wasn't there a hint of oregano? He inhaled the aroma deeply before putting it on the heat, but this investigation, too, came to nothing. Once he'd finished eating, he donned his bathing suit with the intention of taking a brief stroll on the beach. After walking only a little while, he felt tired, the balls of his feet sore.

 
He'd once had sex standing up and afterward did not feel so destroyed as the proverb implied; whereas it was true that if you walked on sand, even the firm sand nearest the sea, you tired quickly. He glanced at his watch and was amazed: some little while! He'd been walking for two hours. He collapsed on the beach.