When he got home, Montalbano sat down on the veranda and made like a lizard in the sun.
That afternoon, before returning to the station, he phoned Catarella.
“Has Dr. Pasquano called for me?”
“Nossir, Chief.”
He hung up and dialed another number.
“Montalbano here. Is Dr. Pasquano there?”
“Well, he’s here, Inspector, as far as that goes. But I don’t know if he can come to the telephone. He’s working.”
“Try.”
While waiting, he reviewed the multiplication table for seven, which was the hardest for him.
“What a colossal pain in the ass you are, Inspector! What the hell do you want?” Pasquano began, with the gentle courtesy for which he was famous.
“Have you done the autopsy?”
“Which one? The little girl who had her throat slit? The drowned Moroccan? The peasant who was shot? The —”
“The man found chopped to pieces in a garbage bag.”
“Yes.”
“Could you—”
“No.”
“What if I came to see you in half an hour?”
“Make that an hour.”
When he arrived and asked for Pasquano, an assistant replied that the doctor was still busy and had given instructions to have the inspector wait for him in his office.
The first thing Montalbano noticed on Pasquano’s desk, between the papers and photographs of murder victims, was a cardboard pastry-shop tray full of giant cannoli and a bottle of Pantelleria raisin wine and a glass beside it. Pasquano had a notorious sweet tooth. The inspector bent down to smell the cannoli: fresh as could be. So he poured himself a bit of the sweet wine into the glass, grabbed a cannolo and started scarfing it down while contemplating the landscape through the open window.
The sun lit up the colors in the valley, making them stand out sharply against the blue sea in the distance. God, or whoever was acting in his stead, had assumed the guise of a naif painter here. On the horizon, a flock of seagulls frolicked about, pretending to squabble among themselves in a parade of nosedives, veers, and pull-ups that looked exactly like an aerobatics show. He watched their maneuvers, spellbound.
Having finished the first cannolo, he took another.
“I see you’ve helped yourself,” said Pasquano, coming in and grabbing one himself.
They ate in religious silence, the corners of their mouths smeared with ricotta cream. Which, by the rules, must be removed with a slow, circular movement of the tongue.
4
“So, what can you tell me, Doctor?” the inspector asked after they had drunk a bit of sweet wine, passing the only available glass back and forth.
“About what? The international situation? My hemorrhoids?”
“About the body in the bag.”
“Oh, that? It was a long and aggravating process. First I had to complete the puzzle.”
“The puzzle?”
“I had to piece the body back together, my friend. It had been dismembered, remember?”
“I do,” Montalbano replied, grinning.
“You find that amusing?”
“No, I find the verb you use amusing.”
“Dismember? You don’t like the rhyme with ‘remember’ ?
“Let’s just say ‘chopped up.’ Into how many pieces?”
“Quite a few. They didn’t spare any effort in their butchery. They used a hatchet and a large, very sharp cleaver. First they killed him, and then—”
“How?”
“A single gunshot at the base of the skull.”
“When?”
“Let’s say two months ago, maximum. Then, as I was saying, they burned off his fingertips. After which they got down to work. With saintly patience they cut off all his fingers and toes and both ears, then smashed up his face to where it was unrecognizable, pulled out all his teeth, which we were unable to find, chopped off his head, hands, both legs all the way up to the groin, the right arm and forearm, but only the left forearm. Strange, isn’t it?”
