and nastier than the rest. Yes, that corpse must have hailed from far away. Was it possible that the whole time it had been floating out there not a single trawler, or any boat at all, had noticed it? Unlikely. No doubt somebody had seen it but had promptly fallen in line with the new morality, whereby if you run over someone in your car, for example, you’re supposed to hightail it away and lend no aid. Fat chance a trawler would stop for something so useless as a corpse. Anyway, hadn’t there been some fishermen who, upon finding human remains in their nets, had promptly dumped them back in the sea to avoid bureaucratic hassles? “Pity is dead,” as some song or poem, or whatever the hell it was, once said, a long time ago. And, little by little, compassion, brotherhood, solidarity, and respect for the elderly, the sick, and little children were also dying out, along with the rules of—
Rousing himself from his thoughts, he looked towards land. Jesus, was it far! How had he ended up so far out? And how the hell was he ever going to tow that corpse ashore? The corpse, meanwhile, had drifted a few yards away, dragged by the current. Was it challenging him to a swimming race? At that moment the solution to the problem came to him. He took off his bathing suit, which, in addition to the elastic waistband, had a long rope around the waist that was purely ornamental and served no purpose. In two strokes he was beside the corpse; after reflecting for a moment, he slipped the bathing suit over the body’s left arm, wrapped it tightly around the wrist, then bound it with one end of the rope. With the other end he tied two firm knots around his own left ankle. If the corpse’s arm didn’t fall off as he was towing it—a very distinct possibility—the whole ordeal might, he was sure, come to a peaceful, happy ending, albeit at the cost of tremendous physical effort.
He began to swim. And for a long stretch he swam rather slowly, necessarily using only his arms, stopping from time to time to catch his breath, or to see if the corpse was still attached to him. Slightly more than halfway to shore, he had to stop for a little longer than usual; he was huffing and puffing like a bellows. When he turned onto his back to do the dead man’s float, the dead man—the real one, that is—flipped face-down from the movement conveyed to him through the rope.
“Please be patient,” Montalbano excused himself.
When his panting had subsided a little, he set off again. After a spell that seemed endless, he realized he had reached a point where he could touch bottom. Slipping the rope off of his foot but hanging onto it with one hand, he stood up. The water came up to his nose. Hopping on tiptoe, he advanced a few more yards until he could finally rest his feet flat on the sand. At this point, feeling safe at last, he tried to take a step forward.
Try as he might, he couldn’t move. He tried again. Nothing. Oh God, he’d become paralyzed! He was like a post planted in the middle of the water, a post with a corpse moored to it. On the beach there wasn’t a soul to whom he might cry for help. Was it maybe all a dream, a nightmare?
But he did not wake up. In despair, he threw his head back and let out a yell so loud that it deafened him. The yell produced two immediate results: the first was that a pair of seagulls hovering over his head and enjoying the farce took fright and flew away; the second was that his muscles and nerves—in short, his whole bodily mechanism—started moving again, though with extreme difficulty. Another thirty steps separated him from the shore, but they were like the climb up Mount Calvary. When he reached the beach, he dropped to the ground, on his ass, and stayed that way, still holding the rope in his hand. He looked like a fisherman unable to drag ashore an oversized fish he’d just caught. He consoled himself with the thought that the worst was over.
“Hands in the air!” a voice cried out behind him.
Befuddled, Montalbano turned his head to look. The person who had spoken, and who was taking aim at him with a revolver that must have dated from the Italo-Turkish War (1911-12), was a reed-thin, nervous man over seventy with wild eyes and sparse hair sticking straight up like iron wire. Next to him was a woman, also past seventy, wearing a straw hat and holding an iron rod that she kept shaking, either as a threat or because she suffered from advanced Parkinson’s Disease.
“Just a minute,” said Montalbano. “I’m—”
“You’re a murderer!” shouted the woman in a voice so shrill that the seagulls, who in the meantime had gathered to enjoy Act II of the farce, darted away, shrieking.
“But signora, I’m—”
“It’s no use denying it, you murderer, I’ve been watching you through my binoculars for the past two hours!” she shouted, even louder than before.
Montalbano felt totally at sea. Without thinking of what he was doing, he dropped the rope, turned around, and stood up.
“Oh my God! He’s naked!” the old lady screamed, taking two steps back.
“You swine! You’re a dead man!” the old man screamed, taking two steps back.
And he fired. The deafening shot passed some twenty yards away from the inspector, who was more frightened by the blast than anything else. Knocked another two steps back by the pistol’s kick, the old man stubbornly took aim again.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy? I’m—”
“Shut up and don’t move!” the old man ordered him. “We’ve called the police. They’ll be here any minute now.”
Montalbano didn’t budge. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the corpse slowly heading back out to sea. When the Lord was good and ready, two speeding cars pulled up with a screech. Seeing Fazio and Gallo, both in civilian dress, get out of the first one, Montalbano took heart. But not for long, because out of the second car stepped a photographer who immediately began shooting, rapid-fire. Recognizing the inspector at once, Fazio shouted to the old man:
“Police! Don’t shoot!”
“How do I know you’re not his accomplices?” was the man’s reply.
And he pointed his pistol at Fazio. But in so doing, he took his eye off Montalbano, who, feeling fed up by this point, sprang forward, grabbed the old man’s wrist, and disarmed him. He was not, however, able to dodge the fierce blow dealt him to the head by the old lady with her iron rod. All at once his vision fogged, his knees buckled, and he passed out.
After losing consciousness, he must have drifted into sleep, since when he awoke in his bed and looked at the clock, it was eleven-thirty. The first thing he did was sneeze, one sneeze after another after another still. He’d caught cold, and his head hurt like hell. He heard Adelina,
