“Yes.”
“It took him only an hour, he said, to be absolutely certain that this kind of bridge was commonly used in South America until a few years ago. Happy?”
The inspector said nothing. What the hell was the little shit getting at?
“I made a point of letting you know at once,” Arqua continued, shooting the venom from his tail. “I hope you’re able, with your usual acumen, to find the right dentist among the million or more practicing in that part of the world. Bye.”
Fucker. Actually, no: motherfucking son of a bitch. Actually, no: motherfucking son of a stinking whore.
If that goddamned bridge might actually be of any use to the case, never in a million years would the guy have called him. He only wanted the satisfaction of telling him that the bridge would never help him to cross the great sea of shit this case was.
Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to turn it over to Mimi.
It was time to go eat, but he didn’t have even a hint of appetite.
His thoughts felt a bit muddled, as if a few drops of glue had oozed into his brain. He felt his forehead. It was hot. Apparently the result of the morning’s bravado.
He decided to go straight home to Marinella and told Catarella he wouldn’t be back at the office in the afternoon.
When he got home, he started looking for the thermometer. It wasn’t in the medicine chest, where he usually kept it. It wasn’t in the drawer of his nightstand either. After searching for twenty minutes he finally found it between the pages of a book. Ninety-nine point five. He took an aspirin from the medicine chest, went into the kitchen, and turned on the faucet, but not a single drop of water came out. He cursed the saints. But why curse the saints when it was his own fault? There was a bottle of mineral water in the refrigerator, and he poured himself a glass. But then he remembered that aspirin shouldn’t be taken on an empty stomach. He needed to eat something. He reopened the refrigerator. Lacking water, Adelina had used her brains. Caponatina, caciocavallo di Ragusa, and sardines in onion sauce.
Without knowing how or why, he suddenly felt ravenous. He brought everything out onto the veranda, along with a bottle of cold white wine. He spent an hour savoring it all. And thus, afterwards, he could take the aspirin without worry.
When he woke up it was almost five in the afternoon. He took his temperature. Ninety-eight. The aspirin had brought it down. But perhaps it was best to stay in bed. Reading a book, for example.
He got up, went to the bookcase in the living room, and started scanning the titles. His eye fell upon a book by Andrea Camilleri from a few years back, which he hadn’t yet read. He brought it back to bed with him and started reading it.
Taking off from a passage in a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, the book was about a man named Pato, a serious, upstanding bank manager who amused himself by playing the role of Judas in the annual production of the Mortorio, a popular version of the Passion of Christ.
As is well known, Judas repented after betraying Jesus Christ, throwing the thirty pieces of silver he had received for his treachery into the temple, and then running off to hang himself. And the Mortorio play followed the Gospel story every step of the way. There was, however, one variant in the stage production: As Pato-Judas tightened the noose around his neck, a trapdoor opened under his feet, symbolizing the mouth of Hell, and the betrayer would plummet into this hole, ending up in the understage.
In Camilleri’s novel, everything went as it had always done, as if according to script, except for the fact that, once the performance was over, Pato never reappeared. Everyone set about looking for him, to no avail. He had vanished forever after being swallowed up by the trapdoor.
The book continued with conjectures, some quite farfetched, by common people and experts, and an investigation was conducted by a police detective and a marshal of the carabinieri in hopes of resolving the mystery of the disappearance.
After three hours of reading, the inspector’s vision started to blur.
Wasn’t it perhaps time to have his eyes examined? No, he answered himself, it was not time. He well knew his eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, but even if he were to turn blind, he would never give in and wear glasses.
He set the book down on the nightstand, got out of bed, went into the living room, and sat down in the armchair in front of the television. Turning it on, he was greeted by none other than the chicken-ass face of Pippo Ragonese.
“. . . owning up to our mistakes, on those fortunately rare occasions when we do make mistakes, is the indisputable mark of fairness and good faith on our part. Indeed fairness and good faith are the shining beacons that have always lighted the way during our thirty years of delivering the news. Well, we did recently make one such mistake. We accused Chief Inspector Salvo Montalbano of the Vigata Police of not pursuing a possible lead in the case of the unknown and dismembered murder victim found in an arid stretch of land called
Montalbano turned it off. So the commissioner had kept his word.
He stood up, feeling restless. He started fidgeting about the house.
There was something in Camilleri’s novel that kept buzzing in his brain.
What was it? Was it possible his memory, too, was beginning to fail?
Was this already the start of arteriosclerosis?
He tried hard to remember.
It was definitely something to do with the death of Judas but wasn’t actually written in the book.
It was a sort of parallel thought that appeared and vanished like a flash. But if it was a parallel thought, there was no point in rereading the novel from the start. It was unlikely the flash would repeat itself.
