time to see whether his foot would land on solid ground or merely plunge into the void, and meanwhile cursing, hesitating, staggering, slipping, grabbing onto roots sticking out from the rock face, regretting that he wasn’t an ibex, deer, or even a lizard, he finally, when the Good Lord saw fit, felt cool sand under the soles of his feet. He’d made it.
He lay down on his back, panting heavily, and watched the stars. He stayed that way for a while, until the bellows in the place of his lungs slowly disappeared. He stood up and looked through the binoculars. The dark shapes of the rocks that broke up the beach and formed the villa’s little harbor looked to be about fifty yards away. He started walking, crouching down and hugging the rock face. Every few steps he would stop, ears pricked, eyes as wide open as possible. Nothing. Total silence. All was still except the sea.
When he was almost behind the rocks, he looked up. All he could see of the villa was a kind of rectangular railing against the starry sky—in other words, the underside of the vast terrace balcony at the point where it jutted out most. From here he couldn’t advance any farther by land. He put the binoculars down on the sand, hooked the underwater flashlight onto his belt, took another step, and was in the water. He didn’t expect it to be as deep as it was, coming immediately up to his chest. He figured this couldn’t be a natural phenomenon; they must have dug into the sand to create a sort of moat, to add another obstacle for anyone on the beach who felt like climbing the rocks. He started swimming slowly, using a breaststroke, girl-style, to avoid even the slightest splashing, following the curve of that arm of the little harbor. The water was cold, and as he drew near the opening, the waves grew increasingly strong, threatening to send him scraping against some jagged rock. As there was now no longer any need to do the breaststroke—since any noise he might make would blend in with the sound of the sea—in four rapid crawl strokes he reached the last rock, the one marking the opening. He was leaning against it with his left hand, to catch his breath a moment, when a wave more powerful than the rest pushed him forward, knocking his feet against a very small natural platform. He climbed up on it, clinging to the rock with both hands. With each new wave he risked slipping, pulled down by the undertow. It was a dangerous spot, but before proceeding he had to get a few things straight.
According to his memory of the video, the other rock marking the entranceway should have been farther in, closer to shore, since the second arm of the little harbor described a large question mark, the upper curl of which ended with that very rock. Sticking his head out sidewise, he saw its shadow. He paused a moment to look; he wanted to make certain there was nobody keeping guard on the other side. When he was sure of this, he inched his feet ever so slowly to the edge of the natural platform, then again had to assume a precarious posture, standing and fully stretching out vertically so that his hand could blindly feel about for something metal, the small signal light he’d managed to make out in the photographic enlargement. It took him a good five minutes to find it. It was higher up than it had looked to him in the photo. As a precaution, he ran his hand over it several times. He heard no alarm go off in the distance. So it wasn’t an electric eye, but indeed a beacon turned off at that moment. He waited yet another minute for some sort of reaction, but when nothing at all happened, he dived back into the water. Halfway around the rock, his hand suddenly ran into the metal barrier preventing any surprise visits to the little harbor. Still groping, he ascertained that the barrier slid along a vertical rail that must be electronically controlled from inside the villa.
All that was left to do now was to go inside. He grabbed onto the barrier so he could hoist himself onto it and climb over it. He’d already got his left foot over when it happened. What “it” was, Montalbano couldn’t quite say. The pain in the middle of his chest was so sudden, so sharp, and so unceasing that the inspector, collapsing while straddling the barrier, was convinced someone had shot him with an underwater rifle and made a direct hit. But at the same time he was thinking this, it became clear to him that he was wrong. He bit his lips to suppress the desperate wail he so wanted to let out, which might have provided some relief. Then he realized at once that the stabbing pain did not come from the outside, as he already obscurely knew, but from the inside—from inside his body, where something had broken or was at the breaking point. It became very difficult to take a breath of air through his closed lips. Then suddenly, as quickly as it had appeared, the pain stopped, leaving him aching and numb, but not scared. Surprise had got the better of fear. He slid his buttocks along the top of the barrier until he could lean his shoulders against the rock. His sense of balance was no longer so precarious. He still had a chance and some time to recover from the malaise that the terrible bout of pain had left behind. But no, he had no chance and no time at all, as a second stab shot through his chest implacably, more ferocious than the first. He tried to control himself but couldn’t. He hunched forward and started crying, eyes closed, weeping from pain and dejection, unable to distinguish the taste of his tears when they reached his mouth from the droplets of seawater trickling down from his hair. As the pain became a kind of hot drill boring into his flesh, he chanted to himself:
“Oh father, my father, my father . . .”
He was praying to his dead father and wordlessly asking him to intercede and make someone finally spot him from the villa’s terrace and finish him off with a compassionate burst of machine-gun fire. But his father didn’t hear the prayer, and Montalbano kept on crying until, once again, the pain disappeared, though very slowly this time, as though it regretted leaving his body.
A long time passed before he was in any condition to move a hand or a foot. It was as though his limbs refused to obey his brain’s commands. Were his eyes open or closed? Was it darker than before, or had his sight grown dim?
He resigned himself. He had to accept things as they were. He’d been stupid to come alone. Something had gone wrong, and now he had to pay the price for his bravado. All he could do was take advantage of the lulls between attacks to slip back in the water and swim slowly around the rock and towards the shore. There was no point in proceeding any further. He had to go back. He needed only to get back in the water, swim just around the buoy, and . . .
Why had he thought “buoy” instead of “rock”? Then the scene he’d viewed on television came back to him—the proud refusal of that sailboat which, instead of rounding the mark and turning back, had stubbornly careered forward, finally crashing into the referees’ boat—and he realized that, being the way he was, he had no choice. He could never turn back.
He stayed there, motionless, for half an hour, leaning against the rock, listening to his body, waiting for the slightest sign of a new attack. Nothing else happened. But he couldn’t let any more time go by. He slipped back into the sea on the inside of the barrier and began swimming with a breaststroke, since the water was calm and the waves weak, having already broken against the barrier. Making for the shore, he realized he was inside a kind of canal at least twenty feet wide with cement banks. And while he still could not touch bottom, on his right he saw a whiteness of sand, at the level of his head. Placing his hands on the bank, he hoisted himself up.
Looking ahead, he was astonished to find that the canal did not end at the beach, but cut it in two and continued into a natural grotto completely invisible to anyone passing by in front of the little harbor or looking out from the cliff overhead. A grotto! A few yards from the entrance, on the right, was another staircase carved into the rock, similar to the one he’d come down, except that this one was blocked by a gate. Crouching down, he went up to the mouth of the cave and listened. No sound at all, other than the lapping of the water inside. He flopped belly- down on the ground, unhooked the flashlight, flicked it on for a second, then turned it off. He stored in his brain everything the flash of light had allowed him to see, then repeated the procedure, taking in a few more precious details. After the third flash, he knew what was inside the grotto.
Rocking in the middle of the canal was a large dinghy, probably a Zodiac, which came with a powerful motor. Along the right-hand side of the canal was a cement quay just over a yard wide. Halfway down this quay there was a huge iron door, which was shut. It probably led to a hangar where the dinghy was kept when not in use, and even
