The Shape of Water

game. One of the questions asked was “Will anyone who has not made it with Ingrid please stand?” All five remained seated. They all had a good laugh, especially Giacomo, who was present, though he didn’t take part in the game.There is a rumor, totally unverifiable, that even the austere Dr.

Cardamone pere has wet his whistle with his daughter-in-law. And this is the peccadillo I alluded to at the start. Nothing else comes to mind. I hope I’ve been enough of a gossip for your purposes. Vale—

nicola

Montalbano arrived at the Pasture about two. There wasn’t a living soul around. The lock on the little iron door was encrusted with salt and rust. He had expected this and had expressly brought along the oil spray used to lubricate firearms. He went back to the car and turned on the radio, waiting for the oil to do its work.

The funeral—as a local radio announcer recounted—had reached some very high peaks of emotion, so that at one point the widow had felt faint and had to be carried outside. The eulogies were given, in order, by the bishop, the national vice secretary of the party, the regional secretary, and, in a personal vein, by Minister Pellicano, who had long been a friend of the deceased. A crowd of at least two thousand people waited in front of the church for the casket to emerge, at which point they burst into warm, deeply touched applause.

“Warm” is fine, but how can applause be “deeply touched”?  Montalbano asked himself. He turned off the radio and went to try the key. It turned in the lock, but the door seemed anchored to the ground.

Pushing it with his shoulder, he finally managed to open it a crack, just wide enough to squeeze through.

The door was obstructed by plaster chips, metal scraps, and sand; obviously the custodian hadn’t been around for years. He noticed that there were actually two outer walls: the protective wall with the little entrance door and a crumbling old enclosure wall that had once surrounded the factory when it was running.

Through the breaches in this second wall he could see rusted machinery, large tubes—some twisted, some straight—gigantic alembics, iron scaffolds with big holes, trestles hanging in absurd equilibrium, steel turrets soaring at illogical angles. And everywhere gashes in the flooring, great voids once covered with iron truss beams now broken and ready to fall below, where there was nothing anymore except a layer of dilapidated cement with yellowing spikes of grass shooting up from the cracks. Montalbano stood motionless in the gap between the two walls, taking it all in, spellbound. While he liked the view of the factory from the outside, he was thrilled by the inside and regretted not having brought a camera. Then a low, continuous sound distracted his attention, a kind of sonic vibration that seemed to be coming, in fact, from inside the factory.

What machinery could be running in here? he asked himself, suspicious.

He thought it best to exit, return to his car, and get his pistol from the glove compartment. He hardly ever carried a weapon; the weight bothered him, and the gun rumpled his trousers and jackets. Going back inside the factory, where the noise continued, he began to walk carefully toward the side farthest from where he had entered. The drawing Saro had made was extremely precise and served as his guide. The noise was like the humming that certain high-tension wires sometimes make in very humid conditions, except that here the sound was more varied and musical and broke off from time to time, only to resume almost at once with a different modulation. He advanced, tense, taking care not to trip over the rocks and debris that constituted the floor in the narrow corridor between the two walls, when out of the corner of his eye, through an opening, he saw a man moving parallel to him inside the factory. He drew back, sure the other had already seen him. There was no time to lose; the man must have accomplices.

Montalbano leapt forward, weapon in hand, and shouted:

“Stop! Police!”

He realized in a fraction of a second that the other had anticipated this move and was already half bent forward, pistol in hand. Diving down, Montalbano pulled the trigger, and before he hit the ground, he managed to fire another two shots. But instead of hearing what he expected—a return shot, a cry, a shuffling of fleeing steps— he heard a deafening explosion and then a tinkling of glass breaking to pieces.

When in an instant he realized what had happened, he was overcome by laughter so violent that he couldn’t stand up. He had shot at himself, at the image that a large surviving pane of glass, tarnished and dirty, had cast back at him.

I can’t tell anyone about this, he said to himself. They would ride me out of the force on a rail.

The gun he was holding in his hand suddenly looked ridiculous to him, and he stuck it inside his belt. The shots, their long echo, the crash, and the shattering of the glass had completely covered up the sound, which presently resumed, more varied than before. Now he understood: it was the wind, which every day, even in summer, lashed that stretch of beach, then abated in the evening, as if not wanting to disturb Gege’s business. Threading through the trestles’ metal cables—some broken, some taut—and through smokestacks pocked with holes like giant fifes, the wind played its plaintive melody inside the dead factory, and the inspector paused, entranced, to listen.

It took him almost half an hour to reach the spot that Saro had indicated, having had, at various points, to climb over piles of debris. At last he figured he was exactly parallel to the spot where Saro had found the necklace on the other side of the wall, and he started looking calmly around. Magazines and scraps of paper yellowed by sun, weeds, Coca-Cola bottles (the cans being too light to be thrown over the high wall), wine bottles, a bottomless metal wheelbarrow, a few tires, some iron scraps, an unidentifiable object, a rotten wooden beam. And beside the beam a leather handbag with strap, stylish, brand-new, stamped with a designer name. It clashed visibly with the surrounding ruin.

Montalbano opened it. Inside were two rather large stones, apparently inserted as ballast to allow the purse to achieve the proper trajectory from outside the wall to inside, and nothing else. He took a closer look at the purse. The owner’s metal initials had been torn off, but the leather still bore their impressions, an I and an S : Ingrid Sjostrom.

They’re serving it up to me on a silver platter, thought Montalbano.

10

The thought of accepting the platter so kindly being offered him, along with everything that might be on it, came to mind as he was refortifying himself with a generous helping of the roast peppers that Adelina had left in the refrigerator. He looked for Giacomo Cardamone’s telephone number in the directory; his Swedish wife would probably be home at this hour.

“Who dat speakin’?”