Montalbano ordered everyone out of the cars. The air was cool, the morning bright.
'What do you want us to do? asked Fazio.
'Search the Crasticeddru, all of you, very carefully. Look everywhere, and look hard. There's supposed to be an entrance to a cave somewhere. It's been covered up, camouflaged by rocks or vegetation. Keep your eyes peeled. We have to find it. I assure you it's there.'
They fanned out.
Two hours later, discouraged, they met back up beside the cars. The sun was beating down, they were sweating, but farsighted Fazio had brought along thermoses of coffee and tea.
'Let's try again,' said Montalbano. 'But don't look only around the rock; search also along the ground, you might see something that looks fishy.'
They resumed their hunt, and half an hour later Montalbano heard Galluzzo call from afar.
'Inspector! Inspector! Come here!'
The inspector went over to the policeman, who had assigned himself the side of the spur closest to the highway that went to Fela.
'Look.'
Someone had tried to make them disappear, but at a certain point along the ground, there were clearly visible tracks left behind by a large truck.
'They lead over there,' said Galluzzo, pointing to the rock face. As he was saying this, he suddenly stopped, mouth agape.
'Jesus God!' said Montalbano.
How had they managed not to see it before? There was a huge boulder placed in an odd position, with shoots of withered grass sticking out from behind. As Galluzzo was calling to his mates, the inspector ran towards the boulder, grabbed a tuft of sword grass and tugged hard. He almost fell backward: the clump had no roots. It had merely been stuck there with bunches of sorghum to camouflage the entrance to the cave.
9
The boulder was a great stone slab, roughly rectangular in shape, that appeared to be of a piece with the rock around it and rested on a sort of giant step, also rock. At a glance Montalbano determined that it was roughly six feet tall and about four and a half feet wide: moving it by hand was out of the question. And yet there had to be a way. Halfway up its right side, about four inches from the edge, was a perfectly natural- looking hole.
If this was an actual wooden door, the inspector reasoned, that opening would be at the right height for inserting a doorknob.
He took a pen out of his pocket and stuck it in the hole. The pen fit all the way inside, but when Montalbano was about to put it back in his pocket, he noticed that the pen had soiled his hand. He looked at his fingers, then smelled them.
'That's grease,' he said to Fazio, the only person remaining beside him.
The other policemen had taken shelter in the shade.
Gallo had found a clump of sheeps sorrel and offered some to the others.
'Suck the stalk,' he said, 'it's delicious and quenches your thirst.'
Montalbano thought of the only possible solution.
'Do we have a steel cable?'
'Sure do, inside the Jeep.'
'All right, then pull the car up here as close as you can.'
As Fazio was walking away, the inspector, now convinced he'd found the proper expedient for moving the big slab, looked at the surrounding landscape with different eyes. If this was indeed the place that Tano the Greek had revealed to him on his deathbed, there must be some spot nearby from which one could keep it under surveillance. The area seemed deserted and remote; one would never have imagined that right behind the bluff, a few hundred yards away, was the highway with all its traffic. Not far from there, on a rise of dry, rocky terrain, was a minuscule cottage, a cube consisting of a single room. He called for some binoculars. The little structures wooden door, which was closed, looked solid. Next to the door, at the height of a man's head, was a small window without shutters, protected by two crisscrossing iron bars. The cottage appeared uninhabited, and it was the only possible observation point in the vicinity. All the other houses were too far away. Still doubtful, he called to Galluzzo.
'Go have a look at that little house. Do what you can to open the door, but don't break it in. Be careful, we may need to use it. See if there are any recent signs of life inside, if anyone's been living there in the last few days. But leave everything exactly as it was, as if youd never been there.'
The Jeep had meanwhile backed almost all the way up to the base of the boulder. The inspector took the end of the steel cable, inserted it easily into the hole and started pushing it inside. This required little effort, for the cable slid into the boulder as if following a well-greased, unobstructed groove. In fact, a few seconds later, the cable end popped out on the other side of the slab, looking like the head of a snake.
'Take this end,' Montalbano told Fazio, 'affix it to the Jeep, put the car in gear and pull away, but very, very gently.'
As the Jeep began to move, so did the boulder, its right side starting to come detached from the rock face as if turning on invisible hinges.
'Open sesame . . .' Germanurmured in amazement, recalling the childrens formula that magically served to open all doors.
