Rounding the Mark (11 page)

“He was hit in the back, you say?”

“Yes. The boy was probably standing at the side of the road when a car came up at high speed behind him and skidded out of control,” Dr. Quarantino hypothesized.

“Do you know who brought him here?”

“Yes. One of our ambulances, which was summoned by the Road Police after they rushed to the scene.”

“The Montechiaro Road Police?”

“Yes.”

He finally made up his mind to ask the question he hadn’t had the strength to ask thus far.

“Is the boy still here?”

“Yes, in the morgue.”

“Could I . . . could I see him?”

“Of course. Please follow me.”

They went down a corridor, got in an elevator, went underground, walked down another corridor much drearier than the previous one, and at last the doctor stopped in front of a door.

“Here we are.”

A cramped, cold, dimly lit room. A small table, two chairs, a metal shelf. Also metal was one of the walls, though in reality the wall consisted of refrigerated cells that slid out like drawers. Quarantino pulled one out. The little body was covered by a sheet. The doctor began to lift the sheet gently, and Montalbano first saw the wide-open eyes, the very same eyes with which the little boy had begged him to let him run away, to let him escape, when they were on the wharf. There was no doubt about it.

“That’s enough,” he said in a voice so soft it sounded like a breath.

He could tell, from the look Quarantino gave him, that his face had drastically changed expression.

“Did you know him?”

“Yes.”

Quarantino closed the drawer.

“Can we go?”

“Yes.”

But the inspector couldn’t move. His legs refused to budge; they were like two pieces of wood. Despite the cold inside the little chamber, he felt his shirt all drenched with sweat. Then he forced himself, getting dizzy in the process, and at last began to walk.

 
 
At Road Police headquarters they explained to him where the accident had occurred. Four kilometers outside of Montechiaro, along an unauthorized, unpaved road linking an unauthorized seaside village called Spigonella with another seaside village, also unauthorized, called Tricase. The road did not proceed in a straight line, but rather made long detours inland to service other unauthorized houses inhabited by people who prefered the air of the countryside to that of the sea. One officer was so kind as to make an extremely precise drawing of the route the inspector had to take to find the place.

 
 
Not only was the road unpaved, but one could clearly tell that it actually was an old goat path whose countless holes had been poorly and only partially filled. How could a car ever have driven down it at high speed without risking a breakdown? Was it being chased by another car? Rounding a bend, Montalbano realized he’d reached the right place. At the base of a mound of gravel to the right of the path was a small bouquet of wildflowers. He stopped the car and got out to have a better look. The mound looked gouged out on one side, as if from a powerful impact. The gravel was stained with large, dark splotches of dried blood. From where he stood, he could see no houses, only cultivated fields. Off to the side, about a hundred yards down the path, a peasant was hoeing. Montalbano walked towards him, having trouble keeping his footing on the soft ground. The peasant was about sixty, thin and bent, and didn’t bother to look up.

“Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon.”

“I’m a police inspector.”

“I figgered.”

How so? Better not to dwell on it.

“Was it you who put the flowers in the gravel?”

“Yessir.”

“Did you know that little boy?”

“Never seen ’im afore.”

“So why did you put those flowers there?”

“He was a creature of God, not no animal.”

“Did you see the accident happen?”

“I both seen it and didn’t see it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come over here and follow me.”

Montalbano followed him. After about ten paces, the peasant stopped.

“At seven o’clock this morning I was here, hoeing this spot right here. All of a sudden I hear this terrible scream. I look up and see a little kid run out from behind the bend. He’s runnin like a rabbit and screamin.”

“Did you understand what he was saying?”

“No sir. When he’s over there by that carob, a car come speedin really fast around the bend. The kid turned round to look and then tried to git off the road. Maybe he was tryin a come towards me. But then I din’t see ’im no more cause he’s hid behind that mound of gravel. Then the car swerved behind ’im, but I din’t see no more. I heard a kind of thud. Then the car went into reverse, went back out on the road, an’ disappeared around the next bend.”

Though there was no chance the man was mistaken, Montalbano wanted to make especially sure.

“Was that car being followed by another?”

“No sir. It was alone.”

“And would you say it deliberately swerved behind the boy?”

“I dunno if he did it ’liberately, but he swerved all right.”

“Did you manage to see the license plate number?”

“You kiddin? Have a look fo’ y’self an’ see if you c’n see over there.”

Indeed, it was impossible. The difference in elevation between the field and the road was too great.

“What did you do next?”

“I started runnin toward the mound. But when I got there I knew ’mmediately the kid was dead or just about. So I run back to my house, which you can’t see from here, an’ I called Montechiaro.”

“Did you tell the Road Police what you just told me?”

“No sir.”

“Why not?”

“Cause they din’t ask.”

Ironclad logic: no question, no answer.

“Well, I’m asking you straight out: do think they did it on purpose?”

The peasant must have already pondered this question a long time. He answered with a question.

“Coun’t the car swerve without wanting to, ’cause it hit a rock?”

“Maybe. But you, deep down, what do
you
think?”

“I don’t think, Mr. ’Nspecter. I don’t wanna think no more. The world’s become too evil.”

The last statement was decisive. Obviously the old peasant had a very clear idea of what happened. The kid had been deliberately run over. Butchered for some inexplicable reason. But the peasant had immediately wanted to expunge that idea from his head. The world had become too evil. Better not to think about it.

Montalbano wrote down the phone number of the Vigàta Police on a scrap of paper and handed it to the peasant.

“That’s the phone number of my office in Vigàta.”

“What’m I supposed to do with it?”

“Nothing. Just hang onto it. If by chance the boy’s mother or father or some other relative comes asking about him, find out where they live and then tell me.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“Good day.”

“Good day.”

 
 
The climb back up to the road was harder than the descent. He ran out of breath. At last he reached his car, opened the door, and got in, but instead of starting the motor he just sat there, immobile, arms on the steering wheel, head resting on his arms, eyes shut tight, trying to blot out the world. Just like the peasant, who had resumed hoeing and would continue to do so until night fell. Suddenly a thought came into his head like an ice-cold blade that, after cleaving his brain, descended and stopped in the middle of his chest, running him all the way through: the valiant, brilliant Inspector Salvo Montalbano had taken that boy by his little hand and, ever willing to help, turned him over to his executioners.

8

It was too early to hole up in Marinella, but he decided to go home anyway, without first stopping at the office. The genuine rage that was churning inside him made his blood boil and had surely given him a slight fever. He was better off trying to get the anger out of his system alone and not taking it out on his men at the station, grasping at the slightest excuse. His first victim was a flower vase someone had given him, which he had hated right from the start. Raising it high over his head with both hands, he dashed it to the floor with great satisfaction, accompanied by a vigorous curse. After the loud thud, however, Montalbano was flabbergasted to find that the vase hadn’t suffered so much as a scratch.

How could that be? He bent down, grabbed it, raised it again, and hurled it down with all his might. Nothing. And that wasn’t all: now a floor tile was cracked. Was he going to wreck his house just to destroy that goddamned vase? He went out to his car, opened the glove compartment, took out his pistol, went back inside, grabbed the vase, went out on the veranda, onto the beach, walked down to the water’s edge, laid the vase down on the sand, took ten steps back, cocked the pistol, aimed, fired, and missed.

“Murderer!”

It was a woman’s voice. He turned around to look. From the balcony of a house in the distance, two figures were waving their arms at him.

“Murderer!”

That time it was a man’s voice. Who the hell were they? Then he remembered: Mr. and Mrs. Bausan from Treviso! The couple that had made him make an ass of himself by appearing naked on television. Telling them in his mind to fuck off, he took careful aim and fired. This time the vase exploded. Satisfied, he headed back home accompanied by an increasingly distant chorus of “Murderer! Murderer!”

He got undressed, stepped into the shower, and even shaved and put on fresh clothes as if he were going out to see people. Whereas he was only going to see himself, but he wanted to look good. He went out and sat on the veranda to think. Even if he’d not expressed it in words or in his mind, he had definitely made a promise to that pair of gaping eyes staring out at him from their refrigerated drawer. And he was reminded of a novel by Dürrenmatt, in which a police inspector’s whole life is consumed trying to find a young girl’s killer, to keep the promise he’d made to her parents . . . But the killer has died in the meantime, and the inspector doesn’t know this. He’s chasing a ghost. In the case of the little black boy, however, the victim was also a ghost; he didn’t know his name, nationality, nothing. Just as he knew nothing about the victim in the other case he was working on, the unknown forty-year-old who’d been drowned. Most importantly, these weren’t even proper investigations; no case files had been opened. The unknown man was, in bureaucratic terms, dead by drowning; the little kid was one of the countless victims of hit-and-run drivers. What, officially speaking, was there to investigate? Less than nothing.
Nada de nada
.

Now this is the kind of investigation that might interest me after I retire
, the inspector reflected.
If I work on it now, does it mean I feel as though I’m already retired?

A great wave of melancholy swept over him. The inspector had two proven methods for combating melancholy: the first was to bury himself in bed, covers pulled up over his head; the second was to stuff himself with food. He glanced at his watch. Too early to go to bed; if he fell asleep now he was liable to wake up at three in the morning, and then he would really go nuts fidgeting about the house. That left only the food. Besides, he remembered that at midday he hadn’t had time to eat. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. For whatever reason, Adelina had prepared him beef roulades. Not what he needed. He went out, got in the car, and went to the Trattoria Da Enzo. During the first course, spaghetti in squid ink, the melancholy started to recede. By the time he’d finished the second—crispy fried calamaretti—his melancholy, put to rout, disappeared behind the horizon. Back home in Marinella, the gears in his brain felt smooth and oiled, like new again. He went back out on the veranda and sat down.

First off, he had to give credit to Livia for having got it right—that is, for having understood that the boy’s behavior on the wharf had been very strange indeed. Obviously the kid was trying to take advantage of the momentary confusion so he could escape. And he hadn’t succeeded because he, the brilliant, sublime Inspector Montalbano, had prevented him. But, even assuming this whole business involved a troubled family reunion, to use Riguccio’s expression, why would anyone so brutally murder a little boy like that? Because he had the bad habit of running away no matter where he happened to be? But how many kids were there the world over, of all colors—white, black, yellow—whose greatest fantasy is to run away from home? Hundreds of thousands, surely. And are they punished by death? Surely not. And so? Maybe he was slaughtered because he was restless, talked back, didn’t obey daddy, or refused to eat his soup? Come on! In the light of that killing, Riguccio’s hypothesis became ridiculous. There had to be something else. That kid must have been carrying something big on his shoulders, from the outset, whatever his country of origin.

The best thing was to start over from the beginning, neglecting none of the details that at first glance might have seemed entirely useless. And to proceed in stages, without piling up too much information all at once. That evening, he’d been sitting in his office, waiting till it was time to go to Ciccio Albanese’s house so the captain could tell him about sea currents and also, certainly not secondarily, to gorge himself on Signora Albanese’s striped surmullet. At a certain point, Deputy Commissioner Riguccio calls the station: he’s at the port, processing a hundred and fifty illegal immigrants; he’s broken his glasses, and asks if anybody’s got a pair that might work for him. Montalbano finds a pair and decides to bring them to Riguccio himself. When he arrives at the wharf, one of the patrol boats has lowered its gangway. The first person to come out is a fat, pregnant woman who is taken directly to an ambulance. Then four men come down, and when they’re almost at the bottom of the gangway, they stumble briefly over a little boy who seems to have slipped between their legs. The boy manages to evade the policemen at the scene and starts running towards the old silo. The inspector runs after him and senses the kid’s presence in an alley full of refuse. The kid realizes there’s no way out and surrenders, literally. The inspector takes him by the hand and is bringing him back to the area near the gangway when he notices a woman, rather young, wailing in despair as two other small children hang from her skirts. As soon as she sees him with the boy, the woman runs towards them. Apparently she’s the boy’s mother. At this point the kid looks at him (better not to dwell on this detail), the mother trips and falls. The policemen try to get her back on her feet, but to no avail. Somebody calls an ambulance.