“Could I see Susanna’s room?”
“Certainly.”
He opened the door, poked his head in, and turned on the light. A small bed, armoire, two chairs, a small table with books, a bookcase. All in perfect order. And almost totally anonymous, like a hotel room only temporarily inhabited.
Nothing personal, no posters, no photographs. Like the cell of a lay nun. He turned off the light and closed the door. The nurse gently opened the other door. At the same moment, the inspector’s forehead and palms broke into a heavy sweat. An uncontrollable terror always came over him whenever he found himself face to face with a dying person. He didn’t know what to do. He had to give strict orders to his legs to prevent them from running away of their own accord and dragging him along with them. A dead body didn’t frighten him. It was the imminence of death that shook him to the depths of his soul.
He managed to get hold of himself and cross the threshold. Then began his personal descent into hell. He was immediately assailed by the same unbearable odor he had smelled in the room of the legless man, the husband of the woman who sold eggs. Except that here the odor was denser. It stuck to one’s skin like a very fine film. It was, moreover, brownish-yellow in color, with streaks of fiery red. A color in motion.
This had never happened before. The colors evoked by smells had always seemed as though painted on canvas. They held still. Now, however, the red streaks were starting to form a whirlpool. By this point the sweat had drenched his shirt. The woman’s regular bed had been replaced by a hospital bed whose whiteness sliced through Montalbano’s memory and tried to pull him backwards, to the days of his recovery. Beside the bed were oxygen canisters, an I.V. stand, and some complicated paraphernalia on a small table. A small cart (also white, for Christ’s sake!) was literally covered with vials, small bottles, gauze, measuring glasses, and other containers of vary-ing size. From where he had stopped, barely two steps inside the door, the bed looked empty to him. No human contour could be seen under the taut covers. Even the two pointed mounds formed by the feet when one lies supine were missing. And that sort of strange grey ball forgotten on the pillow was too small to be a head; perhaps it was a large rubber en-ema syringe whose color had faded. He advanced another two steps and froze in horror. That thing on the pillow was indeed a human head that had nothing human about it, a hairless, dried-up tangle of wrinkles so deep they looked like they’d been carved with a drill bit. Its mouth was open, a black hole without so much as a hint of white teeth. He had once seen something similar in a magazine, the handiwork of head-hunters, practiced on their prey. As he stood there staring, unable to move and almost not believing his eyes, out of the hole that was the mouth came a sound created only by the dry, burnt-up throat: “Ghanna . . .”
“She’s calling her daughter,” said the nurse.
Montalbano backpedaled, stiff-legged, knees refusing to bend. To avoid falling, he leaned on a side table.
Then the unexpected happened.
That Thing which had marked him as the bullet penetrated his flesh was trying to tell him that it was here, too, in this very room. Lurking in a corner, ready to appear at the right moment and in the form most appropriate— bullet, tumor, flesh-burning fire, life-drowning water. It was merely a presence made manifest. It didn’t concern him. It wasn’t his turn yet.
And this sufficed to give him some strength. At that moment he noticed a photograph in a silver frame on the side table. A man, Mr. Mistretta, was holding the hand of girl of about ten, Susanna, who in turn held the hand of an attractive, healthy, smiling woman full of life, Signora Giulia. The inspector kept staring at that happy face, to cancel out the image of the other face on the pillow, if one could still call it that. Then he turned heel and went out, forgetting to say goodbye to the nurse.
o o o
He raced like a madman toward Marinella, got home, pulled up, got out of the car but did not go inside. Instead he ran down the beach to the water, took off his clothes, waited a few seconds for the cold night air to chill his skin, then began to advance slowly into the water. With each step the cold cut him with a thousand blades, but he needed to clean his skin, flesh, bones, and still further within, down to his very soul.
He started to swim. But after about ten strokes, a hand armed with a dagger must have emerged from the black waters and stabbed him in the exact same spot as his wound. At least that was how it seemed to him, so sudden and violent was the pain. It began at the wound and spread throughout his body, becoming unbearable, paralyzing. His left arm froze up, and it was all he could do to turn over on his back and do the dead man’s float.
Or was he dying in earnest? No, by this point he darkly knew that it was not his fate to die in the water.
Finally, and ever so slowly, he was able to move again.
o o o
He swam back to shore, picked up his clothes, and smelled his arm, seeming still to detect a trace of the horrendous stench of the dying woman’s chamber. The saltwater hadn’t succeeded in getting rid of it. He would have to wash every pore in his skin, one by one. Panting as he climbed the steps of the veranda, he tapped at the French doors.
“Who is it?” Livia asked from within.
“Open up, I’m freezing.”
Livia opened the door and saw him standing there naked, dripping wet and purple with cold. She started crying.
“Livia, please . . .”
“You’re insane, Salvo! You want to die! And you want to kill me, too! What did you do? Why? Why?” Despairing, she followed him into the bathroom. The inspector covered his entire body with liquid soap, and when he was all yellow he stepped into the shower stall, turned on the water, and began scraping his skin with a piece of pumice stone. Livia, who’d stopped crying, looked at him petrified.
He let the water run a long time, nearly emptying the tank on the roof.
