THE TERRA-COTTA DOG
ANDREA CAMILLERI
Translated by Stephen Sartarelli
Viking
ALSO BY ANDREA CAMILLERI
The Shape of Water
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2002 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Translation copyright Stephen Sartarelli, 2002 All rights reserved
Originally published in Italian as Il cane di terracotta by Sellerio editore. 1996
Sellerio editore via Siracusa 50 Palermo
Publishers Note
This is a work of ficiton. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Camilleri,Andrea. [Cane di terracotta. English] The terra-cotta dog / by Andrea Camilleri ;
translated by Stephen Sartarelli.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4362-7198-3
I. Sartarelli, Stephen, 1954 II. Title.
PQ4863.A3894 C3613 2002 853'.914dc21 2002069172
Set in Bembo Designed by Jaye Zimet
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
THE TERRA-COTTA DOG
1
To judge from the entrance the dawn was making, it promised to be a very iffy day, that is, blasts of angry sunlight one minute, fits of freezing rain the next, all of it seasoned with sudden gusts of wind one of those days when someone who is sensitive to abrupt shifts in weather and suffers them in his blood and brain is likely to change opinion and direction continuously, like those sheets of tin, cut in the shape of banners and roosters, that spin every which way on rooftops with each new puff of wind.
Inspector Salvo Montalbano had always belonged to this unhappy category of humanity. It was something passed on to him by his mother, a sickly woman who used to shut herself up in her bedroom, in the dark, whenever she had a headache, and when this happened one could make no noise about the house and had to tread lightly. His father, on the other hand, on stormy seas and smooth, always maintained an even keel, always the same unchanging state of mind, rain or shine.
This time, too, the inspector did not fail to live up to his inborn nature. No sooner had he stopped his car at the ten-kilometer marker along the Vig-Fela highway, as he had been told to do, than he felt like putting it back in gear and returning to town, bagging the whole operation. He managed to control himself, brought the car closer to the edge of the road, opened the glove compartment, and reached for the pistol he normally did not carry on his person. His hand, however, remained poised in midair: immobile, spellbound, he stared at the weapon.
Good God! It's real! he thought.
The previous evening, a few hours before Gege Gullotta called to set up the whole mess - Gege being a small-time dealer of soft drugs and the manager of an open-air bordello known as the Pasture, the inspector had been reading a detective novel by a writer from Barcelona who greatly intrigued him and had the same surname as he, though hispanicized: Montalb. One sentence in particular had struck him: The pistol slept, looking like a cold lizard. He withdrew his hand with a slight feeling of disgust and closed the glove compartment, leaving the lizard to its slumber. After all, if the whole business that was about to unfold, turned out to be a trap, an ambush, he could carry all the pistols he wanted, and still they would fill him with holes with their Kalishnikovs however and whenever they so desired, thank you and good night. He could only hope that Gege remembering the years they'd spent together on the same bench in elementary school and the friendship they'd carried over into adulthood, had not decided, out of self-interest, to sell him like pork at the market, feeding him any old bullshit just to lead him to the slaughter. No, not just any old bullshit: this business, if for real, could be really big, make a lot of noise.
He sighed deeply and began to make his way slowly, step by step, up a narrow, rocky path between broad expanses of vineyard. The vines bore table grapes, with round, firm seeds, the kind called, who knows why, Italian grapes, the only kind that would take in this soil. As for trying to grow vines for making wine, in this soil you were better off sparing yourself the labor and expense.
The two-story cottage, one room on top of another, was at the summit of the hill, half-hidden by four large Saracen olive trees that nearly surrounded it. It was just as Gege'd described it. Faded, shuttered windows and door, a huge caper bush in front, with some smaller shrubs of touch-me-not the small, wild cucumber that squirts seeds into the air if you touch it with the tip of a stick, a collapsed wicker chair turned upside down, an old zinc bucket eaten up by rust and now useless. Grass had overgrown everything else. It all conspired to give the impression that the place had been uninhabited for years, but this appearance was deceptive, and experience had made Montalbano too savvy to be fooled. In fact he was convinced that somebody was eyeing him from inside the cottage, trying to guess his intentions from the moves he would make. He stopped three steps in front of the house, took off his jacket, and hung it from a branch of the olive tree so they could see he wasn't armed. Then he called out without raising his voice much, like a friend come to visit a friend.
"Hey! Anybody home?"
No answer, not a sound. Montalbano pulled a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket, put one in his mouth, and lit it, turning round halfway to shelter himself from the wind. That way whoever was inside the house could examine him from behind, having already examined him from the front. He took two puffs, then went to the door and knocked with his fist, hard enough to hurt his knuckles on the crusts of paint on the wood.
"Is there anyone here?" he asked again.
He was ready for anything, except the calm, ironic voice that surprised him from behind.
"Sure there is. Over here."
...
It had all started with a phone call.
"Hello? Hello? Montalbano! Salvuzzo! It's me, Gege"
"I know it's you. Calm down. How are you, my little honey-eyed orange blossom?"
"I'm fine."
"Working the mouth hard these days? Been perfecting your blow-job techniques?"
"Come on, Salvo, don't start with your usual faggot stuff. You know damn well that I don't work myself. I only make other mouths work for me."
"But aren't you the instructor? Aren't you the one who teaches your multicolored assortment of whores how to hold their lips and how hard to suck?"
"Salvo, if what you're saying was true, they'd be the ones teaching me. They come to me at age ten already well- trained, and at fifteen they're top-of-the-line professionals. I've got a little Albanian fourteen-year-old.."