Meanwhile they showed images of drowned corpses, arms dangling inert, heads thrown back, children wrapped in pointless blankets that could never warm their dead bodies again, relief workers with contorted faces, people running wildly to waiting ambulances, a kneeling priest praying. Upsetting stuff. But for whom? the inspector asked himself. The more one saw those kinds of images—so different yet so similar—the more one got used to them. One looked at them, said “poor things,” and continued eating one’s spaghetti with clam sauce.
After these images, the purse-lipped face of Pippo Ragonese appeared.
“In cases such as these,” said the channel’s chief editorialist, “it is absolutely imperative to appeal to cold reason and not let oneself be carried away by instinct and sentiment. We must consider a simple fact: Our Christian civilization cannot allow itself to be altered at its very foundations by the uncontrollable hordes of desperate, lawless people who daily land on our shores. These people represent a genuine threat to us, to Italy, and to the entire Western world. The Cozzi-Pini law recently passed by our government is the only real bulwark we have against this invasion, no matter what the opposition says. But let’s turn to a knowledgeable voice from Parliament, the honorable Cenzo Falpala, and hear what he has to say on this pressing question.”
Falpala was a man whose face expressed above all an effort to let the world know that nobody would ever pull a fast one on him.
“I have only a brief statement to make. The Cozzi-Pini law is proving that it works quite well. If immigrants are dying, this is precisely because the law provides us with the tools to prosecute the human traffickers who, at the first sign of trouble, have no qualms about throwing those desperate people overboard to avoid arrest. I would like, moreover, to say that—”
Montalbano suddenly got up and changed the channel, not so much enraged as disheartened by so much presumptuous stupidity. They were deluded to think they could stop an historic migration with police measures and laws. He remembered the time he noticed that the hinges on the main door of a church in a Tuscan town had been bent backwards by a force so strong as to push them in the opposite direction from the one in which they’d been designed to go. When he asked a man from the town to explain this, he was told that, during the war, the Nazis had put all the town’s men inside the church, locked the door, and started throwing in hand grenades from above. The people inside, in their desperation, had forced the door to open in the opposite direction, and many had managed to escape.
Well, those people flooding in from all the poorest, most devastated parts of the world were strong enough and desperate enough to turn history’s hinges back on themselves. And tough shit for Cozzi, Pini, Falpala, and company, who were both the cause and the effect of a world filled with terrorists who could kill three thousand Americans in a single blow, with Americans who considered the thousands of civilians killed by their bombs “collateral damage,” with motorists who squashed pedestrians with their cars and never stopped to help them, with mothers who killed infants in their cradles for no reason at all, with children who slit the throats of mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters for money, with fraudulent balance sheets that according to new rules were no longer considered fraudulent, with people who should have been thrown in jail years ago but who were not only free but rewriting the rules and dictating the law.
To distract himself and calm his nerves a little, he channel-surfed for a while until he came to a station showing two very swift sailboats racing neck-and-neck in a regatta.
“This long-awaited, fierce, but highly sporting contest between the
There was a panning shot from a helicopter above. A dozen other boats straggled behind the two in the lead.
“We’re at the buoy!” the announcer yelled.
The first boat went into its maneuver, elegantly putting about and rounding the mark as closely as possible before heading back the same way it had come.
“But what’s happening to the
Strangely, the
“Unbelievable! She just rammed the officials’ boat broadside! The two vessels are starting to sink! Here comes help! Unbelievable! It looks like nobody’s hurt. Believe me, friends, in all my years covering sailing competitions, I have never seen anything like it!”
Here the commentator started laughing. And Montalbano laughed, too, as he turned off the TV.
He slept poorly, drifting off into short dreams from which he woke up in a daze every time. One of these dreams struck him in particular. He was with Dr. Pasquano, who had to perform an autopsy on an octopus.
Nobody seemed surprised by this. Pasquano and his assistants treated the matter like business as usual. Only Montalbano found the situation odd.
“Excuse me, Doctor,” he said, “but since when have we been doing autopsies on octopi?”
“Don’t you know? It’s a new directive from the minister of justice.”
“Oh. And, afterwards, what are you going to do with the remains?”
“They’re going to be distributed to the poor, for them to eat.”
The inspector wasn’t convinced.
“I don’t understand the reasoning behind this directive.”
Pasquano gave him a long stare and then said:
“It’s because things are not what they seem.”
Montalbano remembered that this was the same thing the doctor had said to him about the corpse he’d found in the water.
