Montalbano felt a little sorry for her.
Then Gallo arrived.
“The road’s still out,” he said, “but the firemen and road crews are at the site. It’s gonna take hours.”
Vanna stood up.
“I’m going to go change.”
When they went outside, the downpour had actually intensified. Gallo took the Montereale road and at the crossroads turned towards Montelusa. A good half hour later, they arrived in Vigàta.
“Let’s take the young lady to the Harbor Office,” the inspector said.
When Gallo pulled up, Montalbano said to Vanna:
“Go and see if they have any news. We’ll wait for you here.”
Vanna returned about ten minutes later.
“They said my aunt’s boat sent word that they’re proceeding slowly but are all right, and they expect to pull into port around four o’clock this afternoon.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“What am I supposed to do? I’ll wait.”
“Where?”
“Oh, I dunno, I’m unfamiliar with this town. I guess I’ll go and sit in a café.”
“Why don’t you come with us to the police station? You’ll be a lot more comfortable than in a café.”
There was a small waiting room at the station. Montalbano sat her down there, and since he had bought a novel just the day before titled The Solitude of Prime Numbers [1], he brought the book to her.
“Fantastic!” said Vanna. I’ve been wanting to buy this. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it.”
“If you need anything, ask Catarella, the switchboard operator.”
“Thanks. You’re a real-”
“What’s the name of your aunt’s boat?”
“Same as mine. The Vanna.”
Before leaving the room, he eyed the girl. She looked like a wet dog. The clothes she had put back on hadn’t completely dried and were all wrinkled. Her bun of black hair had come apart and covered half her face. And she had a strange way of sitting that the inspector had noticed in certain refugees, who always look ready to leave the chair in which they are sitting, or to stay seated in that chair for eternity.
He stopped at Catarella’s post.
“Call up the Harbor Office and tell them that if the Vanna contacts them again, I want to know what they said.”
Catarella looked flummoxed.
“What’s wrong?” the inspector asked.
“How’s Havana gonna contact the Harbor Office?”
Montalbano’s heart sank.
“Never mind. I’ll handle it myself.”
2
His office was unusable. Water was pouring down from the ceiling as if there were ten broken pipes overhead. Since Mimì Augello wouldn’t be coming in that morning, the inspector took over his deputy’s room.
Around one o’clock, as he was getting up to go out for lunch, the phone rang.
“Chief, ’at’d be the Harbor Office onna phone, but I don’ tink the man’s a officer ’cause ’e says ’e’s Lieutinnint wha’ss ’is name… damn, I forgot!”
“Cat, a lieutenant is an officer, even though you don’t have to be an officer to work at the Harbor Office.”
“Oh, rilly? So wha’ss it mean?”
“What’s what mean? Never mind, I’ll explain later. Put him on.”
“Good afternoon, Inspector. This is Lieutenant Garrufo from the Harbor Office.”
“Good afternoon. What can I do for you?”
“We’ve just now got some news from the Vanna. They’re not far offshore, in the waters just a short ways beyond the port. But as the weather’s not letting up, they figure they won’t be able to dock until about five P.M., since they’ll have to sail a bit farther out to sea and take a different tack, which-”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“They said something else, too.”
“And what was that?”
“Well, there was a lot of static on the line and I’m not sure we heard correctly, but there seems to be a dead man on board.”
“One of the crew?”
“No, no. They’d just picked him up when they hailed us. He was in a dinghy that by some miracle hadn’t capsized.”
“Maybe from a shipwreck.”
“Apparently not, as far as we could gather… But we’d better all wait till they come into port, don’t you think?”
He certainly did think they should wait.
He was almost certain, however, and would have bet his life on it, that the dead body belonged to some luckless, hungry, thirsty wretch who’d been waiting for weeks of hopeless agony to see the smoke of a steamship or even the simple profile of a fishing boat.
Better not think about such things, as the stories the fishermen told were horrific. The nets they cast into the water often came back up with corpses and body parts which they would throw back into the sea. The remains of hundreds and hundreds of men, women, and children who, after a ghastly journey through godforsaken deserts and wastelands that had decimated their numbers, had hoped to come ashore in a country where they might be able to earn a crust of bread.
And for that journey they had given up everything, sold their bodies and souls, to pay in advance the slave traders who trafficked in human bodies and often did not hesitate to let them die, throwing them into the sea at the slightest sign of danger.
And then, for those survivors who made it to dry land, what a fine welcome they received in our country!
“Reception camps” they were called, though most often they were veritable concentration camps.
And there were even people-known, curiously, as “honorables” [2] -who still weren’t satisfied and wanted to see them dead. They said our sailors should shell their boats, since their human cargo were all disease-carrying criminals who had no desire to work.
Pretty much the same thing that had happened to our own folk, way back when they left for America.
Except that now everyone had forgotten this.
When he thought about it, Montalbano was more than certain that, with the Cozzi-Pini law [3] and similar bullshit, the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph themselves would have never even made it to their cave.
He went to tell the girl about the Harbor Office’s communication with the boat.
“Listen, the Vanna called the Harbor Office and said they’ll be entering port around five o’clock.”
“Oh, well. I guess I’ll have to sit tight. Can I stay here?”
She had accompanied her request with a hopeful hand gesture, like someone begging for alms.
“Of course you can,” said the inspector. He couldn’t very well kick a wet dog out of a temporary shelter.
Her smile of thanks made him feel so sorry for her that he asked without thinking:
“Actually, would you like to join me for lunch?”
Vanna immediately accepted. Gallo drove them to the restaurant, since it was still raining, though not quite as hard as before.
It was a pleasure to watch her eat. She set to her food as if she had been fasting for days. The inspector did not mention the corpse the Vanna had taken aboard. It would have ruined her appreciation of the crispy fried mullets she was wolfing down with visible delight.
When they came out of the trattoria it had stopped raining. Glancing up at the sky, the inspector became convinced it wasn’t just a momentary letup, but that the weather was changing in earnest. There was no need to phone Gallo to come and pick them up. They returned to the station on foot, even though the road was more mud and water than asphalt.
The moment they got there, they found Gallo waiting for them.
[1] La solitudine dei numeri primi, by author and mathematician Paolo Giordano, 2008 (English translation by Shaun Whiteside, Penguin, 2009).
[2] In Italy, members of parliament are called “honorables” (onorevoli).
[3] A thinly disguised reference to the Bossi-Fini law, drawn up by Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini, respective leaders of the xenophobic Northern League and the National Alliance, a right-wing party descended directly from the Neofascist MSI party founded after World War II. Enacted in 2002 by the Italian parliament, with the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and these two smaller parties holding an absolute majority, this heavy-handed law, among its many provisions, makes it illegal for individuals not belonging to E.U. member nations to enter the country without a work contract; requires all non-E.U. individuals who lose their jobs while in the country to repatriate to their country of origin; abolishes the sponsorship system that had previously enabled non-E.U. individuals to enter the country under the patronage of a sponsor already in Italy; establishes the government’s right to decree a quota of the number of non-E.U. individuals allowed to enter the country over the period of one year; makes all foreign nationals not in conformity with these new guidelines subject to criminal proceedings and/or forced repatriation.