The Terra-Cotta Dog

'No, don't worry about your balls, we won't break them. It's your ass we're after.'

'Who is this?'

'It's your death, that's who. You're not gonna wiggle out of this one so easy, you lousy fucking actor. Who'd you think you were fooling with that little song and dance you put on with your pal Tano? You're gonna pay for trying to fuck with us.'

'Hello? Hello?'

The line had gone dead. But Montalbano didnt have a chance to take in those threatening words and mull them over, because he realized that the insistent noise he'd been hearing for some time amid the flurry of phone calls was the doorbell ringing. For some reason he was convinced it must be a journalist more clever than the rest who'd decided to show up at his house. Exasperated, he ran to the entrance and without opening, yelled:

'Who the hell is it?'

'It's the commissioner.'

What could he want from him, at home, at that hour, without even having called to alert him? He released the bolt with a swat of the hand and yanked the door wide open.

'Hello, come on in, make yourself comfortable,' he said, standing aside to let him in.

'We haven't got any time. Get yourself in order, I'll wait for you in the car.'

He turned around and walked away. Passing in front of the large mirror on the armoire, Montalbano realized what the commissioner had meant by Get yourself in order. He was completely naked.

The car had none of the usual police markings; it looked, rather, like a rental car. At the wheel, in civilian clothing, was an officer from the Montelusa station whom he knew. As soon as he sat down, the commissioner began to speak.

'I apologize for not calling beforehand, but your phone was always busy.'

'I know.'

The commissioner could have cut into the line, of course, but that wasn't in keeping with his polite, gentlemanly way of doing things. Montalbano didn't explain why the telephone had given him no peace. It didn't matter. His boss was gloomier than hed ever seen him before, face drawn, mouth half-twisted in a kind of grimace.

After they'd been driving on the highway to Palermo for some forty-five minutes with the driver going full tilt, Montalbano started looking out on that part of his islands landscape which charmed him most.

'You like it? Really?' an astonished Livia had asked him once, a few years earlier, when he brought her to this area.

Arid hills like giant tumuli, covered only by a yellow stubble of dry grass and abandoned by the hand of man after sudden failures owing to drought, extreme heat, or more simply to the weariness of a battle lost from the outset, were interrupted here and there by a gray of rocky peaks rising absurdly out of nothing or perhaps fallen from above, stalactites or stalagmites of the deep, open-air cave that is Sicily. The few houses one saw, all single- story, domed structures, cubes of dry stone, stood askew, as if by chance alone they'd survived the violent bucking of an earth that didn't want them on its back. Still there was the rare spot of green, not of trees or cultivation, but of agaves, sword grass, buckthorn, and sorghum, beleaguered and dusty, they too on the verge of surrender.

As if he had been waiting for the appropriate scenery, the commissioner finally began to speak, though Montalbano realized the words were addressed not to him but to the commissioner himself, in a kind of painful, furious monologue.

'Why did they do it? Who decided to decide? If an investigation were held an impossibile conjecture it would turn out that either nobody took the first step, or they were acting on orders from above. So let's see who these superiors who gave the orders are. The head of the Anti-Mafia Commission would deny all knowledge, as would the minister of the interior and the prime minister, the head of state. Which leaves the pope, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and God the Father, in that order. All would cry in outrage: How could anyone think it was they who gave the order? That leaves only the Devil, notorious for being the cause of all evil. He's the guilty one! Satan!...Anyway, to make a long story short, they decided to transfer him to another prison.'

'Tano?' Montalbano ventured to ask. The commissioner didn't even answer.

'Why?'

'We'll never know, that much is certain. And while we were holding our press conference, they were putting him in an ordinary car with two plainclothesmen as escort, ah! how clever! so as not to attract attention, of course! And so, when the requisite high-powered motorcycle appeared from an alley with two men aboard, rendered utterly unrecognizable by their helmets ...Final tally: two policemen dead, Tano in the hospital, on deaths doorstep. And there you have it.'

Montalbano absorbed it all, thinking cynically that if only they'd killed Tano a few hours earlier, he would have been spared the torture of the press conference. He started asking questions only because he sensed that the commissioner had calmed down a little after his outburst.

'But how did they know..'

The commissioner slammed the seat in front of him, making the driver start and the car veer slightly.

'What do you think, Montalbano? A mole, no? That's what's driving me so crazy!'

The inspector let a minute or two pass before asking another question.

'Where do we come in?'

'He wants to talk to you. He knows he's dying, and wants to tell you something.'

'I see. So why did you go to all this trouble? I could have gone by myself.'

'I came along to prevent any snags or delays. In their sublime intelligence, these guys are capable of denying