“But what’s so unusual about me, an inspector, wanting to talk to my superior?”
“Salvo, you know you can’t stand Bonetti-Alderighi. You hate his guts. If he was a priest at your deathbed wanting to give you last rites, you’d get up out of bed and kick him out of your room. I’m gonna talk to you straight, okay?”
“Talk however the fuck you like.”
“You want to leave.”
“A little vacation would do me some good.”
“You’re unbearable, Salvo. You want to resign.”
“Don’t I have the right?” Montalbano burst out, sitting up at the edge of his chair, ready to leap to his feet.
Augello wasn’t intimidated.
“You have every right. But first let me finish telling you what I have to say. Remember when you said you had a suspicion?”
“A suspicion of what?”
“That the events in Genoa had been deliberately provoked by a political faction that in one way or another had promised to protect the police. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I just want to point out to you that what happened in Naples happened when there was a Center-Left government in power, before the G8 meetings. We just didn’t find out about it till later. What do you make of that?”
“That makes it even worse. Do you think I haven’t thought about these things, Mimì? It means the whole problem is a lot more serious than we realize.”
“How’s that?”
“It means the rot is inside us.”
“Did you just find that out today? With all the books you’ve read? If you want to quit, go ahead and quit. But not right now. Quit because you’re tired, because you’ve reached the age limit, because your hemorrhoids hurt, because your brain can’t function anymore, but don’t quit now.”
“And why not?”
“Because it would be an insult.”
“An insult to whom?”
“To me, for one—and I may be a womanizer, but I’m a decent man. To Catarella, who’s an angel. To Fazio, who’s a classy guy. To everybody who works for the Vigàta Police. To Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi, who’s a pain in the ass and a formalist, but deep down is a good person. To all your colleagues who admire you and are your friends. To the great majority of people who work for the police and have nothing to do with the handful of rogues at the top and the bottom of the totem pole. You’re slamming the door in all of our faces. Think about it. See you later.”
He got up, opened the door, and went out. At eleven-thirty Montalbano had Catarella ring up the commissioner’s office. He told Dr. Lattes he wouldn’t be coming; the thing he had to tell him was of little importance, no importance at all.
After phoning, he felt the need for some sea air. Passing by the switchboard, he said to Catarella:
“Now run off and report to Inspector Augello.”
Catarella looked at him like a beaten dog.
“Why do you wanna insult me, Chief?”
Insult him. Everyone was feeling insulted by him, but he wasn’t allowed to feel insulted by anyone.
All of a sudden he couldn’t stand to lie in bed another minute, hashing and rehashing the words he’d exchanged with Mimì over the last few days. Hadn’t he communicated his decision to Livia? What was done was done. He turned towards the window. A faint light filtered in. The clock said a few minutes before six. He got up and opened the shutters. To the east, the glow of the imminent sunrise sketched arabesques of wispy, rainless clouds. The sea was a little stirred up by the morning breeze. He let the air fill his lungs, feeling a bit of his treacherous night being carried off with each exhalation. He went in the kitchen, filled the coffee pot and, while waiting for it to boil, opened the doors to the veranda.
The beach—at least as far as the eye could see through the haze—looked deserted by man and beast. He drank two cups of coffee, one right after the other, put on his swim trunks, and went down to the beach. The sand was wet and compacted; maybe it had rained during the night. At the water’s edge, he stuck his foot out. The water felt a lot less icy than he had feared. He advanced warily, cold shudders running up his spine. Why, at over fifty years of age, do I keep trying to do these stunts? he asked himself. I’ll probably end up with one of those colds that numbs my head and has me sneezing for a week.
He began swimming in slow, broad strokes. The sea smelled harsh, stinging his nostrils like champagne, and he nearly got drunk on it. Montalbano kept swimming and swimming, his head finally free of all thought, happy to have turned into a kind of mechanical doll. He was jolted back to human reality when a cramp suddenly bit into his left calf. Cursing the saints, he flipped onto his back and did the dead man’s float. The pain was so sharp that it made him grit his teeth. Sooner or later it would pass. These damned cramps had become more frequent in the last two or three years. Signs of old age lurking round the corner? The current carried him lazily along. The pain was starting to abate, and this allowed him to take two armstrokes backwards. At the end of the second stroke, his hand struck something.
In a fraction of a second, Montalbano realized he’d struck a human foot. Somebody else was floating right beside him, and he hadn’t noticed.
“Excuse me,” he said hastily, flipping back onto his belly and looking over at the other.
The person beside him didn’t answer, however, because he wasn’t doing the dead man’s float. He was actually dead. And, to judge from the way he looked, he’d been so for quite a while.
2
Flummoxed, Montalbano started swimming around the body, trying not to make waves with his arms. There was sufficient light now, and the cramp had passed. The corpse certainly wasn’t fresh. It must have been in the water for quite some time, since there wasn’t much flesh left attached to the bone. The head looked practically like a skull. A skull with seaweed for hair. The right leg was coming detached from the rest of the body. The fish and the sea had made a shambles of the poor wretch, probably a castaway or non-European who’d been driven by hunger or despair to try his luck as an illegal immigrant and been chucked overboard by some slave trader a little slimier and nastier than the rest. Yes, that corpse must have hailed from far away. Was it possible that the whole time it had been floating out there not a single trawler, or any boat at all, had noticed it? Unlikely. No doubt somebody had seen it but had promptly fallen in line with the new morality, whereby if you run over someone in your car, for example, you’re supposed to hightail it away and lend no aid. Fat chance a trawler would stop for something so useless as a corpse. Anyway, hadn’t there been some fishermen who, upon finding human remains in their nets, had promptly dumped them back in the sea to avoid bureaucratic hassles? “Pity is dead,” as some song or poem, or whatever the hell it was, once said, a long time ago. And, little by little, compassion, brotherhood, solidarity, and respect for the elderly, the sick, and little children were also dying out, along with the rules of—
Cut the moralistic crap, Montalbano said to himself, and try instead to find a way out of this pickle.
Rousing himself from his thoughts, he looked towards land. Jesus, was it far! How had he ended up so far out? And how the hell was he ever going to tow that corpse ashore? The corpse, meanwhile, had drifted a few yards away, dragged by the current. Was it challenging him to a swimming race? At that moment the solution to the problem came to him. He took off his bathing suit, which, in addition to the elastic waistband, had a long rope around the waist that was purely ornamental and served no purpose. In two strokes he was beside the corpse; after reflecting for a moment, he slipped the bathing suit over the body’s left arm, wrapped it tightly around the wrist, then bound it with one end of the rope. With the other end he tied two firm knots around his own left ankle. If the corpse’s arm didn’t fall off as he was towing it—a very distinct possibility—the whole ordeal might, he was sure, come to a peaceful, happy ending, albeit at the cost of tremendous physical effort.