How could that be? He bent down, grabbed it, raised it again, and hurled it down with all his might. Nothing. And that wasn’t alclass="underline" now a floor tile was cracked. Was he going to wreck his house just to destroy that goddamned vase? He went out to his car, opened the glove compartment, took out his pistol, went back inside, grabbed the vase, went out on the veranda, onto the beach, walked down to the water’s edge, laid the vase down on the sand, took ten steps back, cocked the pistol, aimed, fired, and missed.
“Murderer!”
It was a woman’s voice. He turned around to look. From the balcony of a house in the distance, two figures were waving their arms at him.
“Murderer!”
That time it was a man’s voice. Who the hell were they? Then he remembered: Mr. and Mrs. Bausan from Treviso! The couple that had made him make an ass of himself by appearing naked on television. Telling them in his mind to fuck off, he took careful aim and fired. This time the vase exploded. Satisfied, he headed back home accompanied by an increasingly distant chorus of “Murderer! Murderer!”
He got undressed, stepped into the shower, and even shaved and put on fresh clothes as if he were going out to see people. Whereas he was only going to see himself, but he wanted to look good. He went out and sat on the veranda to think. Even if he’d not expressed it in words or in his mind, he had definitely made a promise to that pair of gaping eyes staring out at him from their refrigerated drawer. And he was reminded of a novel by Dürrenmatt, in which a police inspector’s whole life is consumed trying to find a young girl’s killer, to keep the promise he’d made to her parents . . . But the killer has died in the meantime, and the inspector doesn’t know this. He’s chasing a ghost. In the case of the little black boy, however, the victim was also a ghost; he didn’t know his name, nationality, nothing. Just as he knew nothing about the victim in the other case he was working on, the unknown forty-year-old who’d been drowned. Most importantly, these weren’t even proper investigations; no case files had been opened. The unknown man was, in bureaucratic terms, dead by drowning; the little kid was one of the countless victims of hit-and-run drivers. What, officially speaking, was there to investigate? Less than nothing. Nada de nada.
Now this is the kind of investigation that might interest me after I retire, the inspector reflected. If I work on it now, does it mean I feel as though I’m already retired?
A great wave of melancholy swept over him. The inspector had two proven methods for combating melancholy: the first was to bury himself in bed, covers pulled up over his head; the second was to stuff himself with food. He glanced at his watch. Too early to go to bed; if he fell asleep now he was liable to wake up at three in the morning, and then he would really go nuts fidgeting about the house. That left only the food. Besides, he remembered that at midday he hadn’t had time to eat. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. For whatever reason, Adelina had prepared him beef roulades. Not what he needed. He went out, got in the car, and went to the Trattoria Da Enzo. During the first course, spaghetti in squid ink, the melancholy started to recede. By the time he’d finished the second—crispy fried calamaretti—his melancholy, put to rout, disappeared behind the horizon. Back home in Marinella, the gears in his brain felt smooth and oiled, like new again. He went back out on the veranda and sat down.
First off, he had to give credit to Livia for having got it right—that is, for having understood that the boy’s behavior on the wharf had been very strange indeed. Obviously the kid was trying to take advantage of the momentary confusion so he could escape. And he hadn’t succeeded because he, the brilliant, sublime Inspector Montalbano, had prevented him. But, even assuming this whole business involved a troubled family reunion, to use Riguccio’s expression, why would anyone so brutally murder a little boy like that? Because he had the bad habit of running away no matter where he happened to be? But how many kids were there the world over, of all colors—white, black, yellow—whose greatest fantasy is to run away from home? Hundreds of thousands, surely. And are they punished by death? Surely not. And so? Maybe he was slaughtered because he was restless, talked back, didn’t obey daddy, or refused to eat his soup? Come on! In the light of that killing, Riguccio’s hypothesis became ridiculous. There had to be something else. That kid must have been carrying something big on his shoulders, from the outset, whatever his country of origin.
The best thing was to start over from the beginning, neglecting none of the details that at first glance might have seemed entirely useless. And to proceed in stages, without piling up too much information all at once. That evening, he’d been sitting in his office, waiting till it was time to go to Ciccio Albanese’s house so the captain could tell him about sea currents and also, certainly not secondarily, to gorge himself on Signora Albanese’s striped surmullet. At a certain point, Deputy Commissioner Riguccio calls the station: he’s at the port, processing a hundred and fifty illegal immigrants; he’s broken his glasses, and asks if anybody’s got a pair that might work for him. Montalbano finds a pair and decides to bring them to Riguccio himself. When he arrives at the wharf, one of the patrol boats has lowered its gangway. The first person to come out is a fat, pregnant woman who is taken directly to an ambulance. Then four men come down, and when they’re almost at the bottom of the gangway, they stumble briefly over a little boy who seems to have slipped between their legs. The boy manages to evade the policemen at the scene and starts running towards the old silo. The inspector runs after him and senses the kid’s presence in an alley full of refuse. The kid realizes there’s no way out and surrenders, literally. The inspector takes him by the hand and is bringing him back to the area near the gangway when he notices a woman, rather young, wailing in despair as two other small children hang from her skirts. As soon as she sees him with the boy, the woman runs towards them. Apparently she’s the boy’s mother. At this point the kid looks at him (better not to dwell on this detail), the mother trips and falls. The policemen try to get her back on her feet, but to no avail. Somebody calls an ambulance.
Stop. Wait a second. Let’s think about this for a minute. No, in fact he didn’t see anyone call an ambulance. Are you sure, Montalbano? Let’s review the scene again. No, he’s sure. Put it this way: Somebody must have called the ambulance. Two medics then get out of the car and one of them, the skinny guy with the mustache, touches one of the woman’s legs and says it’s probably broken. The woman and three children are put in the ambulance and it drives off in the direction of Montelusa.
Let’s go back again, just to be sure. Glasses. Wharf. Disembarkation. Pregnant woman. Little kid darts out between the legs of four refugees. Kid runs away. He follows. Kid surrenders. They go back to the wharf. Mother sees them and starts running towards them. Kid looks at him. Mother stumbles, falls, can’t get back up. Ambulance arrives. Medic with mustache says broken leg. Mother and kids get into ambulance. Ambulance leaves. End part one.
Conclusion: Almost certainly, nobody called the ambulance. It arrived on its own. Why? Because the medical workers had themselves witnessed the scene of the mother falling to the ground? Maybe. Then the medic diagnoses the broken leg. And his words authorize the ambulance to take her away. If the medic had said nothing, some policeman would have called over the doctor who, as always, was there with them. Why wasn’t the doctor consulted? He wasn’t consulted because there wasn’t time. The ambulance’s sudden arrival and the medic’s diagnosis had steered events in the direction desired by the director. Yes, director. That whole scene had been prearranged and staged with great intelligence.