“Did you manage to see the license plate number?”
“You kiddin? Have a look fo’ y’self an’ see if you c’n see over there.”
Indeed, it was impossible. The difference in elevation between the field and the road was too great.
“What did you do next?”
“I started runnin toward the mound. But when I got there I knew ’mmediately the kid was dead or just about. So I run back to my house, which you can’t see from here, an’ I called Montechiaro.”
“Did you tell the Road Police what you just told me?”
“No sir.”
“Why not?”
“Cause they din’t ask.”
Ironclad logic: no question, no answer.
“Well, I’m asking you straight out: do think they did it on purpose?”
The peasant must have already pondered this question a long time. He answered with a question.
“Coun’t the car swerve without wanting to, ’cause it hit a rock?”
“Maybe. But you, deep down, what do
“I don’t think, Mr. ’Nspecter. I don’t wanna think no more. The world’s become too evil.”
The last statement was decisive. Obviously the old peasant had a very clear idea of what happened. The kid had been deliberately run over. Butchered for some inexplicable reason. But the peasant had immediately wanted to expunge that idea from his head. The world had become too evil. Better not to think about it.
Montalbano wrote down the phone number of the Vigata Police on a scrap of paper and handed it to the peasant.
“That’s the phone number of my office in Vigata.”
“What’m I supposed to do with it?”
“Nothing. Just hang onto it. If by chance the boy’s mother or father or some other relative comes asking about him, find out where they live and then tell me.”
“As you wish, sir.”
“Good day.”
“Good day.”
The climb back up to the road was harder than the descent. He ran out of breath. At last he reached his car, opened the door, and got in, but instead of starting the motor he just sat there, immobile, arms on the steering wheel, head resting on his arms, eyes shut tight, trying to blot out the world. Just like the peasant, who had resumed hoeing and would continue to do so until night fell. Suddenly a thought came into his head like an ice-cold blade that, after cleaving his brain, descended and stopped in the middle of his chest, running him all the way through: the valiant, brilliant Inspector Salvo Montalbano had taken that boy by his little hand and, ever willing to help, turned him over to his executioners.
8
It was too early to hole up in Marinella, but he decided to go home anyway, without first stopping at the office. The genuine rage that was churning inside him made his blood boil and had surely given him a slight fever. He was better off trying to get the anger out of his system alone and not taking it out on his men at the station, grasping at the slightest excuse. His first victim was a flower vase someone had given him, which he had hated right from the start. Raising it high over his head with both hands, he dashed it to the floor with great satisfaction, accompanied by a vigorous curse. After the loud thud, however, Montalbano was flabbergasted to find that the vase hadn’t suffered so much as a scratch.
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 all: 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 Durrenmatt, 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.
