“Laura, I’m so sorry,” he said aloud.
And he promised himself he would call her in the morning.
After smoking another cigarette, he stood up and started walking back. Halfway down the jetty he heard the sound of a patrol boat crossing the harbor. He turned around to look.
A Coast Guard patrol was shining a floodlight on a barge lingering on the water.
He could see a dark mass inside the barge. There were about thirty illegal immigrants clinging to one another, frozen and hungry.
He also saw that two powerful searchlights had been lit on the western wharf, the one where the refugees usually disembark. His colleagues from the police force must already be there with buses, ambulances, cars, and a crowd of rubberneckers.
He’d once happened, by bad luck, to get caught right in the middle of a landing of the poor wretches and since then had decided never to be present for another. Luckily his own police department was not part of the force assigned to the problem; Montelusa dealt with it directly.
Seeing them, he could tolerate those eyes bulging in fear over what they had been through and what uncertainties awaited them; he could tolerate the sight of gaunt bodies that couldn’t stand up straight, of trembling hands and silent tears, of little children whose faces became wizened and old in an instant…
What he could not tolerate was the smell. But maybe there was no smell at all; maybe it was just his imagination. But, real or not, he smelled it just the same, and it made his knees buckle and pierced his heart.
It wasn’t the smell of filth. No, it was something completely different. It arose directly from their skin, an ancient yet present, strong smell of despair, of resignation, of misfortunes and violence suffered with heads bowed.
Yes, what that heartrending smell communicated was the sorrows of the injured world, as Elio Vittorini had put it in a book he’d once read.
And yet this time, too, his footsteps, disobeying his brain, headed towards the western wharf.
When he arrived, the patrol boat had just docked. He kept a distance, however, sitting down on a bollard.
It looked like a half-silent movie. By now the people in charge knew what they had to do; there was no need to give or receive orders. One heard only sounds: car doors slamming, footsteps, ambulance sirens, vehicles driving away.
And there were the usual TV cameramen, even though there was no point in refilming a scene already too familiar. They could have easily rebroadcast the material they’d shot a month before, since it was exactly the same, and nobody would have noticed.
He waited until the spotlights suddenly went out and the darkness seemed to thicken. Then he stood up, turned his back on the three or four shadows that remained talking to each other, and headed towards his car.
All of a sudden he clearly heard some footsteps running up to him from behind.
He stopped and turned around.
It was Laura.
Without knowing how, they ended up in each other’s arms. She buried her face in his chest, and Montalbano could feel her trembling all over. They were unable to speak.
Then Laura broke free of his embrace, turned her back to him, and started running until she disappeared into the darkness.
12
The first thing he did when he got back home was to unplug the telephone. God forbid Livia should call. No way he could carry on a conversation with her. Every syllable of his would be a burning twist of the knife of remorse and shame for being forced to lie.
And he would go from one whopper to the next, each one bigger than the last. And then the hesitations, the half-spoken words… No, at his age, it really wasn’t right.
He had to reflect calmly, and as lucidly as possible, on the miracle that had happened to him, and then make a decision that was clear and definitive. And if he decided to submit to the miracle, to a grace that both thrilled him and filled him with dread, he owed it to Livia to tell her at once, face-to-face.
But at that moment he wasn’t in any condition to think rationally. The excitement turned his thoughts into one big jumble. If, earlier, he’d heard bells and violins, now, after what had happened on the wharf, the music had disappeared, and all he heard was his blood coursing swift and limpid as an alpine stream, his heart beating fast and strong. He needed to release all this energy, which continued to build up almost unbearably with each minute that passed.
He took off his clothes, put on a bathing suit, went down to the beach as far as the line where the sand was dense and compacted with moisture, and started running.
When he got back home, his watch said twelve-thirty and some.
He’d run for two hours straight without stopping for even a minute, and his legs ached.
He slipped into the shower and stayed there a long time, then went to bed.
Exhausted from the run. And from happiness.
Which, when it is truly great, can cut your legs out from under you, just like severe pain.
He woke up with the impression that the shutter outside the bedroom window was banging as usual. Where had all this strong wind suddenly come from?
He opened his eyes, turned on the light, and saw that the shutter was closed.
So what was banging? Then he heard the doorbell ring. Somebody was ringing and kicking the door. He looked at his watch. Ten past three. He got up and went to the door.
It was Fazio who’d been making all the racket.
“Forgive me, Chief, but I tried to ring you and there was no answer. Your phone must be unplugged.”
“Has something happened?”
“Shaikiri was found dead.”
In a way, he’d been expecting something like this.
“Wait while I go and get dressed.”
He did it in the twinkling of an eye, and five minutes later he was sitting beside Fazio, who was at the wheel of
