Rounding the Mark

was thank him and accompany him to the door. After the captain left, the inspector called Fazio.

“Have you got a map of the province?”

“I’ll find one.”

After Fazio brought him one, he looked at it a moment and said:

“By way of consolation, I can tell you that, based on the information given me by Ciccio Albanese, the dead man you need to identify definitely hung out somewhere between Bianconara and Marinella.”

Fazio gave him a confused look.

“So?”

The inspector took offense.

“What do you mean, ‘So’? That greatly reduces the area we need to investigate!”

“Chief, everybody and his dog knows that the current starts at Bianconara! You don’t think I was gonna go all the way to Fela to start asking questions!”

“Okay, okay. The fact remains that we now know there are only five towns you have to visit.”

“Five?”

“Yes, five! You can look at the map and count them yourself.”

“Chief, there’s eight towns in all. On top of the five, you have to add Spigonella, Tricase, and Bellavista.”

Montalbano looked down at the map, then looked up again.

“This map’s from last year. How come they’re not on it?”

“They’re unauthorized towns.”

“Unauthorized towns? There probably are no more than four houses—”

Fazio interrupted him, shaking his head.

“No, Chief. They’re towns, really and truly. The owners of those houses pay property tax to the nearest municipality. They’ve got sewers, running water, electricity, and phone service. And every year they get a little bigger. Everybody knows those houses are never going to be torn down, because no politician wants to lose their votes. You know what I mean? So in the end they’re granted amnesty and authorization and everybody ends up happy. And that’s to say nothing of all the houses and cottages built on the beach! Four or five of them even have a kind of private entrance gate.”

“Get out of here!” Montalbano ordered, upset.

“Hey, Chief, it’s not my fault,” said Fazio, going out.

Late that morning, the inspector received two phone calls that aggravated his bad mood. The first was from Livia, who said she hadn’t been able to get an advance on her vacation time. The second was from Jacopello, Pasquano’s assistant.

“Is that you, Inspector?” he said straight off.

“Yes, it’s me,” said Montalbano, instinctively lowering his voice.

They were like two conspirators.

“Excuse me for talking this way, but I don’t want any of my colleagues to hear. I wanted to let you know that Dr. Mistretta moved the autopsy up to this morning, and he’s convinced that it was an accidental drowning. Which means that he won’t request those tests that Dr. Pasquano wanted done. I tried to persuade him to change his mind, but there was no way. If you’d made that bet with me, you’d have won.”

What now? How was he ever going to proceed officially? By ruling out homicide, that dickhead Mistretta’s report slammed the door on any possibility of investigation. And the inspector didn’t even have a missing persons report in hand. No cover at all. For the moment, that corpse was a nuddru ammiscatu cu nenti—a combination of nothing and naught. But, like the reader exhorted by Eliot in his lines on Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician in “Death by Water”—“Gentile or Jew / O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas . . .”—Montalbano would keep on thinking of that nameless corpse. It was a matter of honor, for it was the dead man himself who, one cold morning, had come looking for him.

It was now time to eat. Okay, but where? The confirmation that the inspector’s world was starting to go to the dogs had come barely a month after the G8 meetings, when, after a meal of considerable magnitude, Calogero, the owner-cook-waiter of the Trattoria San Calogero, had announced he was retiring, however reluctantly.

“You shitting me, Calo?”

“No, Inspector. As you know, I’ve had two bypasses and am seventy-three years old and counting. Doctor don’t want me to work anymore.”

“And what about me?” Montalbano had blurted out.

He had suddenly felt as unhappy as a character in a pulp novel, like the girl seduced and abandoned and kicked out of her home with the child of sin in her womb, or the young woman selling matches in the snow, or the orphan rummaging through garbage for something to eat . . .

By way of reply, Calogero had thrown his hands up in despair. The terrible day had come when Calogero whispered:

“Don’t come by tomorrow. I’m closed.”

They had embraced, practically weeping. And his Via Crucis had begun. Between restaurants, trattorias, and osterias, he’d tried half a dozen new places in the days that followed, but they were no great shakes. Not that you could say, in all honesty, that their food was bad. The fact was that they all lacked that indefinable touch that Calogero’s dishes had. For a while he had opted to eat at home instead of going out. Adelina made him one meal a day, but this created a problem: If he ate that meal at midday, then in the evening he would have to make do with a little cheese and olives and salted sardines or salami; if, on the other hand, he ate it in the evening, that would mean that at midday he had made do with cheese, olives, salted sardines, or salami. In the long run, the situation