The Terra-Cotta Dog

'Salvo? Are you alone in your office? Can I speak openly?'

'Yes. Where are you calling from?'

'From home. I'm in bed with a bit of fever.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Well, you shouldn't be. It's one of those growing fevers.'

'I don't understand. What do you mean?'

'It's one of those fevers little children get. They last two or three days, around one hundred one or one hundred two degrees, no cause for alarm. It's natural, it's a growing fever. When it passes, the child has grown an inch or so. And I'm sure that when my fever is over, I too will have grown. In my head, not my body. What I mean is, never, as a woman, have I been so offended as with you.'

'Anna'

'Let me finish. You really did offend me. You're mean, Salvo, wicked. I didn't deserve that kind of treatment.'

'Be reasonable, Anna. What happened last night was for your own good'

Anna hung up. Even though he had made her understand a hundred different ways that what she wanted was out of the question, Montalbano, realizing that the girl at that moment was suffering terribly, felt like considerably less than a pig, since pork, at least, can be eaten.

...

Montalbano easily found the villa upon entering Gallotta, but it did not seem possible to him that anyone could live in that ruin. Half the roof was visibly caved in, which must surely have let in the rain on the third floor. The faint wind in the air was enough to rattle a shutter that remained attached by means not immediately apparent. The outer wall on the upper part of the fae had cracks the width of a fist. The second, first, and ground floors looked in better shape. The surface plaster had long disappeared; the shutters were all broken and flaking, but at least they closed, however askew. There was a wrought-iron gate, half-open and leaning outward, apparently in this position since time immemorial, amid weeds and peaty soil. The yard was an amorphous mass of contorted trees and dense shrubbery, a thick, closely knit tangle. He proceeded up the path of disconnected stones and stopped when he reached the peeling front door.

Darkness was already falling. The switch from daylight time to standard time really did shorten the days. There was a doorbell, and he rang it. Or, rather, he pushed it, since he heard no sound whatsoever, not even far away. He tried again before realizing that the doorbell hadn't worked since the discovery of electricity. He rapped on the door with the horse-head knocker, and finally, after the third rap, he heard some shuffling footsteps. The door opened, without any noise from a lock or bolt, only a long wail as of a soul in purgatory.

'It was open. You needed only to push, come inside, and call me.'

It was a skeleton speaking to him. Never in his life had Montalbano seen anyone so thin. Or, rather, he had seen a few such people, on their deathbeds, dried up, shriveled by illness. This man, however, was standing, though bent over in two, and appeared to be alive. He was wearing a priests cassock whose original black now tended towards green, the once-stiff white collar now a dense gray. On his feet, two hobnailed peasant boots of the kind you couldn't buy anymore. He was completely bald, and his face looked like a deaths-head on which somebody, as a joke, had placed a pair of gold eyeglasses with extremely thick lenses, behind which the eyes foundered. Montalbano thought the couple in the cave, who'd been dead for fifty years, had more flesh on their bones than this priest. Needless to say, he was very old.

In ceremonious fashion, the man invited him inside and led him into an enormous room literally crammed with books, not only on the shelves but stacked on the floor in piles that stretched nearly to the lofty ceiling and remained standing by means of some impossible equilibrium. No light entered through the windows; the books amassed on their ledges covered them completely. The furniture consisted of a desk, a chair, and an armchair. The lamp on the desk looked to Montalbano like an authentic oil lantern. The old priest cleared the armchair of books and told the inspector to sit down.

'I cannot imagine how I could be of any use to you, but go ahead and talk.'

'As you were probably told, I'm a police inspector and I..'

'No, nobody told me anything, and I did'nt ask. Late last night somebody from the village came and said a man from Vig wanted to see me, and I said to have him come at five-thirty. If you're an inspector, you've come to the wrong place. You're wasting your time.'

'Why am I wasting my time?'

'Because I haven't set foot outside this house for at least thirty years. What would I go out for? The old faces have all disappeared and I don't care much for the new ones. Somebody does my shopping every day, and in any case I only drink milk, and chicken broth once a week.'

'You probably heard on television'

He had barely started the sentence when he interrupted himself; the word television had sounded incongruous to him.

'Theres no electricity in this house.'

'Well, you've probably read in the papers'

'I don't read newspapers.'

Why did he keep setting off on the wrong foot? Taking a deep breath, he got a kind of running start and told him everything, from the arms traffic to the discovery of the dead couple in the Crasticeddru.

'Let me light the lamp,' said the old man, 'w'ell talk better that way.'

He rummaged through some papers on the desktop, found a box of kitchen matches, and lit one with a trembling hand. Montalbano felt a chill come over him.