maliciously.'
Montalbano looked at him, stood up, put his hands in his pockets, circled round the chair in which Augello was sitting, then stopped.
'It wasn't malicious, Mim. You really are intelligent.'
'If you seriously believe that, then why do you cut me out? I could be at least as useful to you as the others.'
'That's just it, Mim. Not as useful, but more so. I'm speaking to you quite frankly, since you're making me think seriously about my attitude towards you. And maybe this is what bothers me most.'
'So, just to please you, I ought to dumb myself down a little?'
'Listen, if you want to have it out with me, let's go. That's not what I meant. The fact is that over the course of time, I've realized I'm sort of a solitary hunter. I'm sorry if that sounds idiotic, maybe it's not the right term. Because I do like to go hunting with others, but I want to be the only one to organize the hunt. That's the one necessary precondition for making my brain function properly. An intelligent observation made by someone else merely upsets me, it throws me off, sometimes for a whole day, and can even prevent me from following my own train of thought.'
'I get it,' said Augello. 'Actually, I got it some time ago, but I wanted to hear you say it yourself. So Im telling you now, without any hostility or hard feelings: I'm going to write to the commissioner today and request a transfer.'
Montalbano looked him over, drew near, and leaned forward, putting his hands on Augellos shoulders.
'Will you believe me if I tell you that would hurt me very deeply?'
'So fucking what!' Mim exploded. 'Do you expect everyone to give you everything? What kind of man are you? First you treat me like shit, then you try the affectionate approach? Do you realize how monstrously egotistical you are?'
'Yes, I do,' said Montalbano.
...
'Allow me to introduce Mr. Burruano, the accountant who so kindly consented to come here with me today,' said Headmaster Burgio with stuffed-shirt ceremoniousness.
'Please sit down,' said Montalbano, gesturing towards two small, old armchairs in a corner of the room, which were reserved for distinguished guests. For himself he pulled up one of the two straight-back chairs in front of his desk, normally reserved for people who were decidedly undistinguished.
'These last few days I feel it's been up to me to correct or at least clarify what gets said on television,' Burgio began.
'Then correct and clarify,' Montalbano said, smiling.
'Mr. Burruano and I are almost the same age. He's four years older, but we remember the same things.'
Montalbano heard a note of pride in the headmasters voice. There was good reason for it: the twitchy Burruano, who was a bit milky-eyed to boot, looked at least ten years older than his friend.
'You see, right after the TeleVig News, which showed the inside of the cave in which they found the..'
'Excuse me for interrupting, but the last time we spoke you mentioned the weapons cave, but said nothing about this other cave. Why?'
'Because I simply didn't know it existed. Lillo never said anything about it to me. Anyway, right after the newscast, I called Mr. Burruano because I'd seen that statue of the dog before, and I wanted confirmation.'
The dog! That was why it appeared in his nightmare, because the headmaster had alluded to it on the phone. Montalbano felt overcome by a childish feeling of gratitude.
'Would you gentlemen like some coffee? Eh? A cup of coffee? They make it so well at the corner cafe'
The two men shook their heads in unison.
'An orangeade? Coca-Cola? Beer?'
If they didn't stop him, he would soon be offering them ten thousand lire each.
'No, no, thank you, we can't drink anything. Old age, you know,' said Burgio.
'All right, then, tell me your story.'
'It's better if Mr. Burruano tells it.'
'From February 1941 to July 1943,' the accountant began, 'though still very young, I was podestf Vig. Either because Fascism claimed to like the youngin fact it liked them so much it ate them all, roasted or frozen, made no differenceor because the only people left in town were women, children, and the elderly. Everybody else was at the front. I couldn't go because I was consumptive. I really was.'
'I was too young to be sent to the front,' Burgio interjected, to avoid any misunderstanding.
'Those were terrible times. The British and Americans were bombing us every day. In one thirty-six-hour period I counted ten bombing raids. Very few people were left in town, most had been evacuated, and we were living in the shelters that had been dug into the hill of marl above the city. Actually, they were tunnels with two exits, very safe. We even brought our beds in there.Vigs grown a lot over the years. It's no longer the way it was back then, a handful of houses around the port and a strip of buildings between the foot of the mountain and the sea. Up on the hill, the Piano Lanterna, which today looks like New York with its high-rises and all, had just four structures along a single road, which led to the cemetery and then disappeared into the countryside. The enemy aircraft had three targets: the power station, the port with its warships and merchant ships, and the antiaircraft and naval batteries along the ridge of the hill. When it was the British overhead, things went better than with the Americans.'
Montalbano was impatient. He wanted the man to get to the point - the dog, that is, but didn't feel like interrupting his digressions.
