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 Mim 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 Ingrassias 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?"
Jacomats 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 cafe"
"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.
Sex standing up and walking on sand will bring any man to a bad end.
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.
"Inspector! Inspector!"
The voice came from far away. He struggled to his feet and looked out at the sea, convinced that someone must be calling him from a boat or dinghy. But the sea was deserted all the way to the horizon.
"Inspector, over here! Inspector!"
He turned around. It was Tortorella, waving his arms from the highway that for a long stretch ran parallel to the beach.
As Montalbano quickly washed and dressed, Tortorella told him they'd received an anonymous telephone call at the station.
"Who took the call?" asked Montalbano.
If it was Catarella, who knows what hare brained idiocies he might have understood or reported?
"Don't worry," said Tortorella smiling, having guessed what his chief was thinking. "He'd gone out to the bathroom for a minute, and I was manning the switchboard for him. The voice had a Palermo accent, putting is in the place of rs, but he might have been doing it on purpose. He said we would find some bastards corpse at the Pasture, inside a green car."
"Who went to check it out?"
"Fazio and Galluzzo did, and I raced over here to get you. I'm not sure that was the right thing; maybe the phone call was only a joke."
"What a bunch of jokesters we Sicilians are!"
...
Montalbano arrived at the Pasture at five oclock, the hour of what Gege called the changing of the guard, the time of day when the unpaid couples, that is, lovers, adulterers, boyfriends and girlfriends got off (in every sense, thought Montalbano), giving way to Gege flock, bitchin blondes from Eastern Europe, Bulgarian transvestites, ebony Nigerian nymphs, Brazilian viados, Moroccan queens, and so on in procession, a veritable UN of cock, ass, and cunt. And there indeed was the green car, trunk open, surrounded by three carabinieri vehicles. Fazios car was stopped a short distance away. Montalbano got out and Galluzzo came up to him.
"We got here late."
They had an unwritten understanding with the National Police. Whoever arrived first at the scene of a crime would shout Bingo! and take the case. This prevented meddling, polemics, elbowing, and long faces. But Fazio was gloomy.
"They got here first."
"So what? What do you care? We're not paid by the corpse, on a job-by-job basis."
By strange coincidence, the green car was right next to the same bush beside which an outstanding corpse had been found a year earlier, a case in which Montalbano had become very involved. The lieutenant of the carabinieri, who was from Bergamo and went by the name of Donizetti, approached, and they shook hands.
"We were tipped off by a phone call," said the lieutenant.
Someone really wanted to make sure the body was found. The inspector studied the curled-up corpse in the trunk. The man appeared to have been shot only once, with the bullet entering his mouth, shattering his teeth and lips, and exiting through the back of the neck, opening a wound the size of a fist. Montalbano didn't recognize the face.