The Potter's Field

inevitably find he had less time to spend on his mistress. And so he could ease up on his relations with the woman, take the first steps towards a definitive break.

Ingrid was probably right on target when she said that Mimi might be falling seriously in love and wanted to prevent this, since Beba and the baby were caught in the middle.

He reread the letter a third time.

When he got to the last sentence—Whatever you should decide, my great affection and esteem for you will always remain unchanged—he immediately felt his eyes water and his chest tighten up. Mimi had written “affection” first, and “esteem” after.

The inspector buried his face in his hands, finally giving full vent to his sadness—and to his anger at not having immediately grasped, as he would have done a few years earlier, the gravity of his friend’s predicament, who was so much a friend that he named his first son after him.

At that moment he felt Ingrid’s presence on the veranda.

He hadn’t heard her approach, convinced she was still asleep. He didn’t look at her, too embarrassed at having been caught by surprise at a moment of weakness he was unable to bring to an end.

Then Ingrid turned off the light.

And it was as though at the same time she had turned on the sea, which now emitted a pale, almost phosphorescent glow, and the distant, scattered lights of the stars.

From an invisible boat, a man cried out:

“Giuva! Giuva!”

But no one replied.

Absurdly, the reply that never came was like the last painful rent in Montalbano’s chest. He started weeping without restraint.

Ingrid sat down on the bench beside him, held him tight, and made it so that Montalbano could rest his head on her shoulder.

Then, with her left hand she raised his chin and gave him a long kiss on the lips.

It was six o’clock in the morning when he drove Ingrid back to the Marinella Bar to pick up her car.

He didn’t feel like sleeping. On the contrary, he felt an overwhelming need to wash himself, to take a shower so long it would use up all the water in the tanks. When he got home, he undressed, put on his bathing suit, and went down to the beach.

It was cold. It was a little while yet before sunrise, and a light wind made of billions of tiny steel blades was blowing.

Like almost every morning, Cosimo Lauricella was easing back into the water the rowboat he had pulled ashore the previous evening. He was an elderly fisherman who every so often brought the inspector fresh-caught fish and never accepted any payment.

“Isspector, I don’ think iss such a good idea this morning.”

“Just a little dip, Cosimo.”

He stepped into the water, overcame an immediate attack of paralysis, dived under, and had taken a few arm- strokes when all at once the night’s darkness returned.

“How is that possible?” he had just enough time to think before feeling the seawater rush into his mouth.

He woke up in Cosimo’s boat with the fisherman pounding him with his fist.

“Shit, Isspector, you sure gave me a scare! I tol’ you it wasn’t such a good idea today! Good thing I was here, or you woulda drownded!”

Once ashore, Cosimo wanted to accompany him all the way home and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“No more o’ these pranks, Isspector, I mean it. Iss one thing when you’re a kid, but iss another thing later on.”

“Thanks, Cosimo,” he said. But he was thinking: Thanks not so much for having saved my life as for not having called me an old man.

But, as the saying goes, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Mature, elderly, of a certain age, no longer young, getting on in years: all ways to soften but not change an essential fact—that he was getting unavoidably, irremediably old.

He went into the kitchen, put a six-cup espresso pot on the stove, then drank the scalding-hot coffee from a big mug.

Afterwards he got into the shower and used up all the water, imagining Adelina’s curses when she realized she couldn’t clean the house, scrub the floors, probably not even cook.

In the end he felt a little cleaner.

“Ah Chief Chief! Dacter Arca’s been lookin’ f ’yiz an’ he sez a tell yiz a call ’im at Frensix.”

“All right. I’ll tell you when I want you to ring him for me.”

First he needed to do something more urgent.

He went into his office, locked the door behind him, sat down at his desk, dug Mimi’s letter out of his pocket, and read it one more time.

The previous evening, when he had started mulling over Mimi’s words, he was struck by two things. The first was the tone, and the second . . .